| Through the 18th century enclosures, the landowning class stole an estimated eight million acres from the people. They still hide their crimes and their takings... |
Give us back our land
WORKERS, JULY 2005 ISSUE
Who Owns Britain, by Kevin Cahill, paperback, 450 pages, ISBN 1-84195-310-5, Canongate, 2002, £16.99.
This is a survey of landownership across Britain and Ireland, detailed county by county. Cahill shows how a tiny minority exploits British society. 160,000 families, 0.3% of the population, own two thirds of Britain, 37 million acres, 230 acres per family. Just 1,252 of them own 57% of Scotland. They pay no land tax. Instead the government gives them £2.3 billion a year and the EU gives them a further £2 billion. Each family gets £26,875.By contrast, all workers pay a land tax: 57.5 million of us pay £10 billion a year in council tax, £550 per household. We live in 24 million homes crammed onto just four million acres. 65% of homes are privately owned, so 16 million of us own only 2.8 million acres, an average of 0.18 acres each.
Our towns and cities are ever more overcrowded, with smaller homes being built in higher densities. Local councils no longer have any say over land use. Playing fields for our young people are still being sold off, despite government promises. Swimming pools are closed or restricted to adult use. Where are our young people supposed to go when there are no leisure facilities for them? ASBOs and dispersal orders are just forms of house arrest. Capitalism robs young people of public places, and then imprisons them in private places.
Workers who live in the countryside are robbed of their jobs, their chances of buying their own homes, their bus services, their shops and Post Offices, their pubs and their village halls.
The top landowners are the Forestry Commission with 2.6 million acres. The Ministry of Defence has 750,000, the royal family 670,000 (including the Crown Estate 400,000 and the Duchy of Cornwall 141,000), the National Trust (Britain's largest conservation charity) 550,000, insurance companies 500,000, the utility companies 500,000, the Duke of Buccleuch 270,700, the National Trust for Scotland 176,287, the Dukedom of Atholl 148,000, the Duke of Westminster 140,000 and the Church of England 135,000.
The Forestry Commission, a government department which is Britain's biggest single landowner, runs its holdings conservatively and secretively. We could expand the forest estate by a million acres a year, producing rural jobs, getting profits from the sale of wood and pulp (cutting our balance of payments deficit) and reducing the output of greenhouse gases. This would cost between £588 million and £750 million.
The National Trust owns 550,000 acres of Britain, including the Lake District National Park (above) — yet the royal family owns even more.
Enclosures
Through the 18th century enclosures, the landowning class stole an estimated eight million acres from the people. They still hide their crimes and their takings. The 1872 Return of Owners of Land was produced, but then hidden and never updated. Shares have to be registered; land doesn't. The Land Registry does not even know who owns between 30% and 50% of the land.
Cahill compares Britain with other countries where revolutions ended the feudal tenure of land. Denmark redistributed its land to the peasantry in 1800. In Ireland, in 1876, 616 landowners owned 80% of the country. By 1930, 13 million acres of Ireland's 20 million acres had been sold to owner-occupiers. Now, there are no landlords — home ownership is 82%, Ireland's 149,500 farms are 97% owner-occupied and owner-farmed, there is no poll tax, water is free and pensioners get free transport, TV and glasses.
Cahill claims that Blair's reform of the House of Lords "definitively cut the permanent link between power and the landowners." But just as in 1872, the state is defending landed capital by making it less visible. Class power does not depend on seats in the House of Lords, but on private ownership of the means of production, including land, protected and subsidised by a capitalist state.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says its mission is to shift EU subsidies from food production to land management, but the EU already does this by paying £2 billion a year to the landowners, much of it for setting aside productive land. The EU pays hardly anything to working farmers. We need to produce our own food: food production is a British national security interest that must not be decided either by the EU or by the market.
Parasites
Landowners' wealth is a parasite on Britain. It is the least productive part of the economy, with the most state support. Their wealth comes not from farming, nor even from renting, but from trickling land onto the urban housing market. They sell land to property developers, at an average price per acre of £404,000 in 1999. The clearing banks and building societies strip our industries of investment capital, and then support their landowner clients by running the rigged and overpriced land market.
Cahill proposes land reform and taxation: "Windfall gains on development land should be made subject to windfall taxes." Taxing their land and stopping the big landowners avoiding tax through offshore trusts could raise £17 billion. More land for housing would cut land prices, free more to invest in good quality, spacious homes and gardens, and revive the building industry.
But Cahill opposes nationalising the property of the big landowners. He points out that the European Convention of Human Rights says there should be no confiscation without compensation. So much the worse for the Convention, which defends property rights at the expense of people. Haven't landowners had enough compensation already?
Workers should be demanding our land back, so we can use it for the benefit of our people.
