Safe as Houses: An Examination of Home Ownership and Mortgage Tax Relief

Chatto CounterBlasts #16

by Margaret Drabble

Part of the "Counterblasts" series, a series of polemical broadsides, this is an examination of home ownership and mortgage tax relief. The author examines the ascendancy which property and property-ownership has gained through the policy of the government over the last ten years - a policy which has transfered public housing to private hands, which has allowed those taking our mortgages to make use of special tax dispensations, which has rewarded home owners and then penalized them through high interest rates, and which has created tens of thousands of homeless.

44 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 1990

About the author

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

Drabble famously has a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A.S. Byatt. The pair seldom see each other, and each does not read the books of the other.