This week began with a spectacular collapse. Nothing new there, I hear the cynics mutter. But this collapse was deliberate, induced by 100 kilos of explosives, set in 64 charges. It demolished the huge slab-block, Glencairn Tower, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. I was born 100 yards from the site, and lived down the road from it when I was little. It had been notorious virtually from the moment it opened, in 1964. I remember hearing the adults talking in awed voices about the "jumpers" – people who couldn't adjust to "high living" and chose to defenestrate themselves instead. The jumpers were not mentioned in news reports about the operation. On the contrary, one inaugural resident, Jack Daly, told BBC Scotland: "Getting a house within Glencairn was a real prize."

What Daly says is true. Glencairn was constructed in optimism and good faith, a small part of modernism's response to the second world war. My own family was involved in that response. Our tenement flat, near Glencairn, was obtained by the local council under a compulsory purchase order, and demolished a couple of years after Glencairn was built. We were rehoused in a "scheme", which is what the Scots call housing estates, also brand new and shiny, also part of the high-living future.

Looking back, it seems like absurd cultural vandalism, the destruction of beautiful sandstone buildings, placed around courtyard-style communal "greens", to make way for buildings that would have to be put out of their misery (or that of their occupants) in a comparatively short time. A taxi driver put it this way: "Aye, Heroin Heights we called it. Good riddance." Yet, "homes fit for heroes" made sense at the time.

My memories of moving into our new flat are positive. We had our own bathroom, while in the tenement the bathroom was shared with other residents. In the living room, there was underfloor heating. That flat went some years ago, sliced off the block of which it was on the top floor. The ground-floor flats have been remodelled into terraced houses. While it was empty, awaiting conversion, my brother and I had sneaked into that old place, which we'd moved from when I was 11 and he was seven, and I'd been officially designated too old to share a bedroom with a boy. What surprised us was its decent size and its lightness. The view over the Clyde Valley from the living room was breathtaking. The floorboards in the upstairs rooms were pristine – creamy pine, utterly unmarked. They'd been covered with carpets throughout their short existence. Yet, I'd hated living there myself.

I didn't hate our home. But I hated the glass-strewn play area, where you had to check the slide in case other kids had smeared the innards of blown-up frogs – or worse – on it. I hated the instant destruction of any sapling trees that were planted. I hated the constant threat of intimidation from older, tougher kids that "playing out" entailed. I hated the way that it was the old and frail who lived on the ground floors – no stairs – and therefore were the frightened frontline against the Lord of the Flies culture that flourished around them, unseen by high-up parents. Anyway, back to Glencairn, and a particularly saddening detail. Craig Wilson, commercial director with contractor Technical Demolition Services, had this to say to local newspaper, the Wishaw Press: "I believe it's the first steel-structured building to be demolished, not only in the UK, but possibly the world." Steel-structured. Of course. That was us. Motherwell was a steel town. If you're ever in that behemoth of a tourist attraction, Tate Britain, look what's written on the black girders that hold it up: "The Lanarkshire." That was us. The Lanarkshire. That's the big old steelworks that used to dominate the town. It wasn't far from Glencairn. It had been replaced by the time the estate went up, though, by Ravenscraig, whose enormous cooling towers and gas holder were also razed in a spectacular controlled explosion in the mid-90s. Ravenscraig didn't make girders, like the Lanarkshire did. The Colville family, who owned and ran The Lanarkshire, were persuaded, against their better judgment during nationalisation, that Ravenscraig should specialise in hot strip steel to supply the British motor industry. Bad call, in retrospect. So many bad calls, in retrospect, all furnished by good intentions.

On the day the Glencairn went down, the Telegraph published a leaked preview of the Coalition's latest proposals for housing. They are extraordinary. It is as though the country is being run by crazed homeopaths (as if there were any other kind). Part of the particular detail of Britain's own version of the economic difficulties besetting the west is the legacy of government policy that would not intervene to cool galloping house-price inflation, but saw it as a good thing that should not be disturbed.

Now, much policy is directed at propping up those inflated prices. It's part of the reason interest rates cannot be allowed to rise. Yet the coalition wishes to keep that problematic market artificially stimulated, by subsidising mortgages for first-time buyers, and making private council-home purchase more attractive still. It's a policy designed to reanimate a problem that has reached its peak, and is flatlining. Why? Because without intervention, house prices in many areas would start to deflate, thus causing individual disaster, as well as stoking an already high demand for social housing. This would be a reversal of Conservative policies from last time around, of which, despite all the evidence of their failure, the Conservatives are still stubbornly proud. They never seem to learn.

However, the story of Motherwell, and of Glencairn itself, ought also to be a lesson for the left, which never seems to learn either. The myth is that all troubles started with Thatcher, who denationalised great industries, destroying the nation's industrial base, and who sold off the decent council stock, turning many a tower block into a Heroin Heights. Sure, those policies turned out to be a disaster. But they didn't come from nowhere.

Thatcher addressed existing and already vexatious problems. Postwar social housing provision was not a panacea. Ravenscraig hadn't turned a profit for years at the time of Thatcher's election. The motor industry it was designed and built to supply was already in big trouble.

The current narrative – that Britain bounced back marvelously after the war, despite all the debt, and should do it all again – is not intellectually truthful. Thatcher's remedies may have been the wrong ones. But they were responses, not ideological inventions dreamed up in a vacuum. The huge level of demand created by the war, and by rationing after it, started running out of steam within a couple of decades. The idea that it can all be done again, right now, is just sentimental nostalgia of the worst, most egregious sort. Those conditions can only be created in the wake of another huge war. And they would, once again, be temporary. A re-enactment of postwar renewal? People should be careful what they wish for.