2nd opinion: The song remains the same

"Living in the lap of inherited luxury, Labour's think-tank guru who wants to tax homeowners up to the hilt". That was a headline in last week's Mail on Sunday, next to a photo of me in front of my home. For the first time in my life I had been "doorstepped" by a reporter. They wanted to interrogate me about the value of my house.

What provoked this attack was the publication by the Institute of Public Policy Research of my pamphlet Housing Inequality and Choice. Housing inequality has widened in the past 50 years so it is now the greatest single cause of inequality in Britain. We need radical policies to tackle this, including the financial privileges of homeowners and the powerful interests that resist the provision of socially rented homes.

Writing recently in Housing Today West Kent housing association chief executive Barbara Thorndick attacked rural nimbyism – and rightly so ("Fact is worse that fiction", 15 August, page 19). Many people see this as a new issue, with the countryside at risk of destruction by the housing developments of the past 20 years; in reality, research has shown that resistance to homes for poorer people goes back a long way.

In 1927 there was an extraordinary instance of class hatred with the saga of the Downham Wall. In order to minimise everyday contact between council tenants and the "respectable residents" of Bromley, local people built a wall to keep out tenants of the new London County Council estate, built on the edge of the neighbouring borough of Lewisham. Bromley council waged a lengthy legal battle against the LCC, who sought to have the wall demolished, but it stood for many years. Still more prolonged was the long battle over the Cutteslowe Wall in Oxford: it took 20 years for tenants of a council estate to win the right to walk through the adjoining private housing development. Until then they faced a detour of almost half a mile to the shops, the local school or buses into the city centre.

The new towns faced strong protests from some local organisations when the plans were announced. There was organised opposition to the proposed new town at Hemel Hempstead, where the existing town already had a population of 20,000. Anti-new town candidates stood in local elections, and a Hemel Hempstead Protection Association was formed. In 1946, the Hemel Hempstead Gazette said the "new town will irrevocably alter the character of Hemel Hempstead from a semi-rural township to a series of ungainly urban sprawls".

In recent years the resistance to building homes on greenfield land has grown even stronger. Opponents have criticised, with some justification, the excessive building of large executive homes for long-distance commuters and the failure to build more affordable housing for low-income people. Yet often the message that has been heard most strongly has been that of the nimby.

It may sometimes be uncomfortable, but we will only achieve greater fairness in housing if we are willing to speak out strongly, and take on those who defend privilege at the expense of those who should also be able to enjoy good-quality homes, in neighbourhoods where they want to live.

As my fellow columnist David Walker said after the Mail on Sunday incident: "You could tell Chris Holmes had hit the target when the weekend tabloids ganged up on him."