So if ever his fellow Left-wing intellectuals confronted him with the “Little Englander” charge, E.P. Thompson, whose monumental 1963 work The Making of the English Working Class made him the most influential British historian of his generation, had ample ammunition with which to respond. When the Scot Tom Nairn accused him of developing a “cultural nationalism”, for example, Thompson could protest that his political consciousness “cut its teeth on the causes of Spain and of Indian independence, chewed on a World War, and has been offered an international diet ever since”. But it is true that he was driven by a deep faith in the “common sense” of the English people, distinguishing him both from many of his Left-wing contemporaries and from the endless condescension of much of today’s political elite. And this is his greatest legacy: what he saw as the distinctly English tendency towards intellectual humility, scepticism, and empiricism.

Even so, in his lifetime Thompson sometimes liked to wear his reputation for parochial Englishness as a badge of honour. In his rather formless 1973 open letter to Leszek Kołakowski, he described himself as a “great bustard”, unable to soar in the sky with the majestic eagles of the Left. Other bright minds seemed to manage: “whirr! with a rush of wind they are off to Paris, to Rome, to California”. “I had thought of trying to join them”, he sighs, “I had been practising the words ‘essence’, ‘syntagm’, ‘conjecture’, ‘problematic’, ‘sign’.” But these efforts were futile: with his “stumpy, idiomatic wings”, his English wings, he would only “fall – plop! – into the middle of the Channel”. How English, to pat himself on the back beneath layers of ironic self-deprecation ­— even in his substandard essays, Thompson was a funny writer. Unlike the cigarette-smoking French philosophes, or their pot-smoking Californian counterparts, his English feet were planted firmly on the ground.

A deep suspicion towards rival, continental strains of Marxism runs through all Thompson’s writing (even his strange 1988 sci-fi novel). All sorts of people are in for a kicking in The Making — conservative followers of Sir Lewis Namier, liberals like R.M. Hartwell — but the principal target is announced early on. Too many Marxists, he decried, are gripped by the “ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing”. This was a terrible garbling of Marx’s actual meaning. Much “Marxist” theorising — Thompson liked to hang scare-quotes around the sects he deemed heretical — was built atop false premises. The purpose of The Making was to demonstrate that his definition of class as a relationship, apparently the authentic Marxist definition, was the only one worth dealing in.

Thompson found other errors bedevilling Western Marxism, all emanating from “Theory”, or “the idiom of Paris”. In 1978 he wrote a spirited broadside against the thinker who most embodied this, and whom he seems to have hated most of all, the French philosopher Louis Althusser (this was two years before Althusser murdered his wife). The Poverty of Theory takes almost 200 pages to make an argument that can be summarised in four words: Althusser was a bullshitter. But these ideas were worse than senseless: they were popular. Althusser’s rabid dog “had bitten philosophy and sociology already”, infecting them with a slavish devotion to “structures” and smothering the individual agent in “Theory”. Althusser’s dog threatened to bite history too, or to chase it out of Marxist thinking altogether. In denying the “common ground for all Marxist practices”, historical materialism, Althusser was not really a Marxist at all by Thompson’s measure. The “rationality” of Althusserian Theory was a hoax. “We have been drawn into an illusionist’s parlour.”

It was not just that Thompson found Althusser’s writing obscure and evasive, and that he was at a loss as to why his ideas had amassed legions of disciples; it was also that Althusser’s “inverted world of absurdity” had nothing to say about practical politics. Althusser, the “rigorous Parisian philosopher”, had retired to his “secluded observatory”. Whether the point of philosophy was to interpret the world or to change it, Althusser was capable of neither. All this was a handy foil for Thompson’s image of himself both as a down-to-earth English thinker, and a determined political activist. But this conceit of English soundness versus high-minded French pretension naturally made room for certain exceptions: Thompson often feared that Parisian tentacles had penetrated the British Left. Tom Nairn was one manifestation of this, but across his work Thompson reserved his most withering sneers for Nairn’s comrade-in-crime, Perry Anderson.

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Thompson bore a grudge against the Old Etonian Anderson because, in one of the internecine squabblings for which the Anglo-Left is justly famous, Anderson had booted him and his friends out of the New Left Review. Recounting these events with some bitterness and the usual irony, Thompson cast Anderson as the “veritable Dr Beeching of the socialist intelligentsia”. When Anderson took over the NLR, “all the uneconomic branch-lines of the New Left were abruptly closed down” — and after rigorous intellectual costing, Thompson’s own contributions fell foul of swingeing cuts. Thompson’s New Left had been unceremoniously supplanted by the “New New Left”: younger, cooler, and au fait with whatever was in vogue on the Left Bank.

In Anderson’s and Nairn’s adherence to the continental dogmas, Thompson detected a deep anxiety that their native land was somehow defective. For Nairn, the doyen of Scottish nationalism, things might perhaps be set onto their proper course if Britain were broken up altogether. Anderson broadly shared the view that England was a historical humiliation, a fossil of feudalism that the tide of history ought to have swept away. The 19th and 20th centuries had passed by embarrassingly revolution-less; Marxism had arrived much too late, when industrial capitalism was already entrenched. When Nairn and Anderson looked to other countries, at least according to Thompson’s parody of their position, they felt only a crushing, self-loathing inadequacy. In those other countries things seemed “in Every Respect Better”:

“Their bourgeois Revolutions have been Mature. Their Class Struggles have been Sanguinary and Unequivocal. Their Intelligentsia has been Autonomous and Integrated Vertically. Their Morphology has been Typologically Concrete. Their Proletariat has been Hegemonic.”

The jargon wasn’t much of an exaggeration of the Nairn-Anderson thesis. “One can almost hear the stretching of historical textures,” Thompson said of Anderson’s approach to history, “as the garment of English events is strained to cover the buxom model of La Revolution Française”. Like Althusser’s structural “Marxism”, this was practically impotent as well as intellectually hollow. England, after all, “is unlikely to capitulate before a Marxism which cannot at least engage in a dialogue in the English idiom”.

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What was this “English idiom”? For Thompson, it was partly a reflection of his own aesthetic tastes. His worldview, he often stressed, owed as much to William Blake and William Morris as to Marx. He was as much a Romantic as a Radical: and the tragedy of English history, The Making concludes, is that these two strains of thought came to run a “parallel but altogether separate course”. For socialism to succeed in England, the two would have to be welded together; and for this to be achieved, the teachings of Marx would have to adjust themselves to the English spirit.

Thompson’s mission in The Making was to provide a glimpse of what this would look like. The book itself is an exercise in uniting hard-nosed scientific critiques of industrial capitalism, in the manner of Marx, with a moral critique more in the vein of Blake or Morris. In his section on the children’s workhouses, for example, he concludes pages of weighty analysis with the affecting line that “the exploitation of little children, on this scale and with this intensity, was one of the most shameful events in our history”.

The Making also sketches out a type of Romantic Radicalism in the English idiom which, though now lost, once prevailed. What allowed the 19th-century polemicist William Cobbett to prevent the Radicals and Chartists from becoming the camp-followers of the bourgeois liberals of their day was precisely his fluency in this English idiom. He extolled Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the Common Law. “We want great alteration,” he declared, “but nothing new”. For Thompson, the Radical cause had proved itself strongest in England when it worked with, not against, the constitutional grain: when it harked back to the “prodigious mind of the immortal Alfred”, or looked forward to “the restoration of old English times”. Thompson was charmed by this type of historically-oriented English socialism because it placed the freedom of the individual at its heart.

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And in this respect it was diametrically opposed to the oppressive Marxism (or “Marxism”) found across the Channel. Stalinists and Althusserians — Thompson made clear that he saw no substantial difference between the two — look upon their fellow men as Pavlov’s dogs: “if an economic crisis comes, the people will salivate good ‘Marxist-Leninist’ belief”. But this was a lesson disproved, in the first instance, by English history. “Roundhead, Leveller, and Cavalier, Chartist, and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, were not dogs; they did not salivate their creeds in response to economic stimuli; they loved and hated, argued, thought, and made moral choices.” That they made such choices was what made them human.

Thompson knew that he was fighting a losing battle. In the decades since his death, the Left has sequestered itself ever more within the sociology faculties while “Theory” has proliferated in inverse correlation to its electoral fortunes. But, more than an academic culture warrior avant la lettre, Thompson’s socialist humanism also has something to offer beyond the Left. He should, I think, be embraced by liberals of all stripes — whether or not he would have approved of such an outcome — as a profound voice against excessive bureaucracy, against the “machine”, against anything that seeks to limit the scope of human possibility and reduce us to barking Pavlov’s dogs.

If Althusser was the logical end-point of Marxism, Thompson once wrote, then he would rather be a Christian than a Marxist: at least Christians value the conscience, dignity, and free-will of the individual. The word “agency” may now have surpassed “syntagm”, “conjecture”, and perhaps even “problematic” as a bromide of historical and philosophical writing. But the cliché should not be taken for granted — and we have E.P. Thompson and his “English idiom” to thank for it.

But then, at one point through our winter in this toxic swill, our bathroom ceiling caved in. The cause was wonderfully disgusting. The upstairs toilet’s “out” pipe (that’s the one bearing the shit) had been leaking into our ceiling for some interminable length of time. The waste (the shit) had then slowly seeped into the plaster and terracotta above until it became structurally unsound. One day in January, a great yawning gash opened up, and the next it fell in. It then took our landlord around two weeks to clean and repair this mess, which meant washing and bathing surrounded by the debris: shit-saturated shards of plaster and terracotta. We gave our notice in those soiled days and moved out about a month later.

It was a dispiriting exit. But even in the moment, being shat upon from a great height spoke more effectively than any mountainous graph to what is unjust about the current housing crisis. People (especially young people) live in very poor conditions, kept there by private landlords who suffer from near-criminal levels of apathy, for which we are expected to pay handsomely (my annual rent in the shit-flat was around 40% of the London Living Wage at the time — just under £10k). But the problem is, since everyone has a similar story, you’ve probably already heard it, if not lived it.

The political gravity of this situation lies not in its specifics, though, but in its generalities. Over the past week, in its house journals and attendant think tanks, the Conservative Party’s leading intellectuals have been puzzling over the fact that young people hate them. And they intimate that this has something to do with housing. They have finally listened to the housing scientists, with their heavy dossiers of facts and figures. A narrative has been acknowledged: the privatisation of state housing, followed by the transformation of property into a financial asset, has made housing and especially renting cripplingly expensive. This is far too late to redress or ameliorate — the best it can become is a historical lesson. The question that the Tories should be asking is a deeper and more threatening one. What is housing inequality doing to the political psychology of those living through it? What has it already done to us?

My answer is look to the language; look at the language we use for those we blame. Landlords — parasitic, indolent, unscrupulous landlords. In our oaths and curses, we reduce property owners to an existence of pure economic extractionism. Even landlords don’t want to be called landlords anymore. At the National Landlord Investment Show, a kind of bizarre lettings TUC, they threw around some alternatives — “Property investor”? “Accommodation provider”? — designed to help them slip back into anodyne anonymity. This cultural slander, found at all levels of output, from TikTok to acclaimed non-fiction, is the linguistic wing of something more profound. It is the first, experimental stirring of something rather anachronistic in our hyper-political age: social, tribal solidarity. Something a bit like class consciousness.

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This isn’t class understood in the cod-Marxist sense, with society sliced like a layer cake between worker, owner and aristocrat. Such arbitrary categories have long been discarded. Instead, as E.P Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class, class is something that “happens”. And it happens when “some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”. Class does not pre-exist, but is spun in the language people live and create.

Since the turn of the millennium, the number of private renters has doubled to 11 million people. And this growth has been driven by the young. A third of those aged between 35 and 45 rent privately, as opposed to a tenth in 1997, a proportion which rises the younger you are. And many of those not renting are living with parents, which would make private renting their direct alternative. In other words, across income levels, private renting has become as near to an economic universality as one can find in our atomised society. But most important: under present trends, this is never going to change. High marginal tax rates, low wages and rising house prices mean that those who do not receive a large windfall from generous or dead family members will never buy a house. They will retire with a landlord, paying the bulk of their salary and perhaps their pension to a people they have spent their adult life despising. They who “love to reap where they never sowed” as Marx had it.

So much writing about our housing situation is self-pityingly childish, whinging over intrusive mezzanines and landlords’ disastrous DIY. It curries little favour with the older generation it is directed towards. But, left unchecked, the weight of sentiment is symptomatic of a more powerful force — the sense of existing in an unfair productive relationship. Like all great political vibes, it has the benefit of being both felt and true. And most transformative processes in British history have been the product of such a concoction, a wrong that can be mathematically proven and then communicably sketched.

Because the popular timeline of our past is one of political nightmares, stalked by political ghouls and monsters who provide a horror mask for our deeper concerns. Recently, our darkest dreams have been peopled by crooked Luxembourgian Eurocrats. Before that, we relocked our doors and windows, woken by the march of donkey-jacketed trade unionists. But reach back into the distant interwar period and a dynamic more like our own emerges. Between the pause of one world war and resumption of the next, Britain was learning to think of itself as a “democracy” for the first time. And in this age of new and nervous egalitarianism, two of the most repellent economic caricatures in popular culture were socially-useless mountebanks: the profiteer and the rentier. Like landlords in our housing crisis, both were linked to moments of social distress which they had somehow turned to their advantage.

John Maynard Keynes was obsessed with this plutocratic individual who in his conception lived off the national debt, furnishing his Depression with public money. And the cheater, the social swindler, was the constant villain of the era’s more politicised fiction. He crops up in the otherwise sunny books of J.B Priestley, but particularly in the works of A.J. Cronin, the novelist who was most representative of the Thirties mood. (His 1937 novel The Citadel is credited by some with establishing the emotional need for an NHS.) But in his earlier book The Stars Look Down, a contest is established between an autodidactic Labour MP and his double, a profiteer-chancer who avoids war service and cheats his way into arms-trading and factory-ownership through underhand business dealings.

It was not long before such evocations reached the lips of politicians themselves. In Clement Atlee’s 1945 election broadcast, he established his opposition to those who benefitted from “private enterprise, private profit and private interests”, and who demanded “more rent, interest and profit”. The dichotomy was clearly intended to appeal to a public already aware of the difference between its productive many and its exploitative few. That Labour government was the most ambitious reforming government of the century, and brought about the greatest programme of house-building and home-improvement the country had ever seen. The Conservative government that followed only imitated and expanded upon it.

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Language tracks the governing ideology of its day. After Thatcherism brought a halt to anything like the forward march of labour, Britain developed converse cultural neuroses. We gnashed at scroungers and skivers; we valorised the entrepreneur. As William Davies recently described, the working-class hero devolved from the punk, the disruptor or the organiser (Arthur Scargill), towards something more like the tamed yob, the capitalist-enthusiast (Chris Evans, Keith Allen). Britain, though, is more than capable of producing a culture that punches up. Think how harshly the word “banker” was hissed in the immediate post-2008 reconciliation. But despite the best efforts of the Occupy movement, bankers were fortified in their City towers, too lofty to organise against. Landlords, by contrast, inhabit a space much closer to home — our homes.

Today, millennials are approaching a sort of maturity. But in an arc that frustrates analysts of such matters, they stubbornly refuse to mature politically and shift Right-wards. Not only this — they are leaning markedly to the Left, especially on economic issues. Reared on a lifetime of economic vulnerability, of course they find redistribution appealing and resent the predatory potential of private ownership. Over the grim interwar, it took decades for this yearning to consummate itself. At the next election, millennials will predominate in the majority of constituencies. All those years of removal vans and disconcerting stains, of lost deposits and scratching mice, may finally find their voice.