Dr Insa Koch recently appeared on BBC Radio Four 'Thinking Allowed' (9 October 2019) to discuss her new book Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain. In the discussion she explained the history of post-war council housing and how council estates turned from being a representation of social rights in the post-war decades - and a marker of inclusion - to becoming a form of stigmatised housing for only society's most vulnerable and poor - and hence a marker of exclusion. The material affront suffered to their livelihoods is experienced by residents as a moral betrayal and a form of state failure. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic work, Koch challenged dominant narratives that have seen council estate residents as worthless, bigoted and populist.