Imho, the contents of these two books, if ever commonly known, could, by themselves, start a revolution! But, I am not interested in this kind of sudden, maybe violent change but in the democratic transformation of our primitive, divided and unhealthy world into one which is sustainable, united and more advanced!
BOOK EXCERPTS 2
CAHILL
Who Owns Britain, Canongate Books, 2001.
“Who Owns Britain is a startling and revealing examination of the nation’s most valuable asset – its land. The fruit of years of research, Kevin Cahill’s investigations reveal how the 6000 or so aristocratic names who together own about 40 million acres – more than half the country – have maintained their grip on the land of Britain right through the twentieth century.......It reveals the close ties between landownership, the aristocracy, Eton College, Oxbridge, the City of London, the House of lords and the green movement, profiling many of Britain’s important landowning families and looking at their interconnections and proximity to positions of power and influence in the UK. A vitally important record of investigative research, Who Owns Britain includes comprehensive details of who owns land in every county in Britain and Ireland. It examines the land held by the Royal Family, The Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence and the Church of England.....(and) is set to revolutionise our understanding of Britain, its history and its land.” Dust Jacket.
“Hidden deep in the history of the United Kingdom is a great and secret book (The 1872 Return of Owners of Land, in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales). It was published in four volumes and runs to over 2000 pages. Within its pages are the name and addresses of those who owned, at the time of the book’s compilation, the most valuable treasure of this country, its land. The book is now more than 120 years old, yet its pages are the only way to trace the present ownership of as much as one third of the acreage of England and Wales. In this sense, the book is more important and more valuable than the Land Registry of England and Wales, which costs more than £200 million a year to run and which cannot provide any indication of who owns vast swathes of the land in the two countries.” Page 3.
“While the ministry of agriculture pays out millions of pounds in agricultural grants each year, it refuses to identify the recipients of these public funds. The public in turn cannot check who owns agricultural land because up to 50% of it is unregistered and the rest is registered in ways that make searches difficult or impossibly expensive. Since 1925, the law has required any land transaction in England and Wales to be registered at the Land Registry......A significant number of the large estates described in the 1872 Return made no transaction in that period (1925-1990), or if they did, sold off land, leaving the core of the estate ‘untransacted’ and thus unregistered.” Page 4.
“A special interest group, the landowners, a group inextricably bound up with the Conservative Party that has been the dominant political influence in Parliament for most of the past 120 years, saw to it that information (e.g. concerning ‘untransacted’ land ownership and its extent) would never again be available to the public. It is perhaps the most astonishing calculated civic deceit ever performed on a whole country. This book is about that conspiracy and its consequences.” Page 5.
“Our Country, The United kingdom, is 60 million acres in size. Some 59 million of us live on those 60 million acres. The area taken up by the homes of these 59 million people takes up less than 10% of the land, a maximum of 6 million acres, but more probably 4.4 million acres. It is impossible to settle on a more accurate figure as the statistics for most of the UK are estimates.......despite these discrepancies this still leaves a great deal of the country ‘uncovered’ by bricks and mortar, 55.6 million acres at least. Of this between 12 million and 14.5 million acres are mountains, forest, moorland, water, roadways and industrial land. Which leaves some 40 million acres of often beautiful, sometimes productive countryside. This is owned by just 189,000 families.
Among the holdings of these 189,000 families, there are over 4778 estates over 741 acres in England alone, each averaging 1290 acres.....this is more than one quarter (27%) of the entire agricultural estate....In all, estates over 247 acres in size account for around 28 million acres of Britain, or 58% of total land owned.” Page 6.
“The vast majority of these large estates are held by just three classes of people: aristocrats, who would, until November 1999, have sat in the House of Lords, baronets, and finally the residual landed gentry, a group once defined by their appearance in Burke’s Landed Gentry. Between them these three groups packed Parliament through three centuries and provided the captains of the militia, the officers of the Army, Navy and later the Air Force, the bishops and clergy of the church and the judges for the courts, at the same time keeping everyone else out of those critical elements of the power structure.” Page 6.
“Indeed many ordinary soldiers fought in both World Wars in the hope that one day their heirs would become owners of the land they had fought to keep free. After World War Two those who survived the conflict voted in a Labour government to do just that – share out the land between all the people of the country and not just the privileged few. In 1945 redistribution of land was a manifesto commitment of the party......they were betrayed, as they so often have been, by the inner elite who have maintained their influence at the heart of government no matter the agenda of the party elected at the ballot box. Today that inner elite still owns the country...” Page 8.
“The 15th Earl’s honesty (Earl of Derby) is unusual but, especially to modern ears, brutal. We the landowners, he says (speaking in 1881), hold the land because it gives us power, status and sport, enables us to dominate the peasantry and finally, gives us money.” Page 8.
“The Irish experience (i.e. the redistribution of land to the landless peasantry beginning in the 1880s, as related on page 10, absence of Council Tax and generous pensions) reveals why the inefficiency of land registration is of such profound importance. For hidden behind the current pattern of land ownership in Britain is the fact that the 59 million people who live on just 4.4 million residential acres in this country are subject to a land tax called the Council Tax, averaging £550 per household, which totals £10.4 billion a year. The 189,000 families who live on 40 million acres, pay £130,000 million in Council Tax on their actual homes, but not their acres, and receive a direct subsidy from the Ministry of Agriculture of £2.3 billion, plus other subsidies from the EU and other bodies which probably brings the total closer to £4 billion or more. Each residential home coughs up an average of £550 in tax a year. Each landowning home gets an average handout of £12,169 per year. (Figures correct as of 2001.)” Page 12.
“The average size of a residential plot is 0.18 of an acre and on that basis the average residential space available to members of each average dwelling is 0.07 of an acre, about 340 square yards. The average density of persons on a residential acre is twelve or thirteen, allowing for rounding up. Among the small group of major landowners, on the other hand, the population density transforms into acres per person, with an average figure of well over 88 acres per person for the UK as a whole.” Page 14.
“At the very heart of the housing market is the availability of development land.......however, the market for development land in the UK is rigged.....what lies behind this statement is the existence of so much unregistered land. As indicated previously, more than 30% and maybe as much as half of the actual acreage of England and Wales is not recorded in the Land Registry for those two countries. Yet it is the unregistered portion of the Land registry which is the main source of the development land. It certainly does not come from the 4.4. million acres on which most of us live......What matters.....is that this new housing land is mostly coming out of subsidised rural estates, very often from land held in special offshore trusts and companies, and effectively untaxed. The land is priced as it is (i.e. at between half to two thirds of the cost of a new house or dwelling) because it is perceived as scarce when not only is it not scarce but it is kept from dereliction by huge public subsidy. It is perceived as scarce because neither the government, nor anyone else, has made any attempt to create a complete Land Registry, and therefore the nature of this land and its ownership in particular, is unknown. The high price of a (building) site restricts the amount of space available for each home....it also limits the amount of money which can be spent on material for actual housebuilding.” Page 16.
“To put this into perspective, history has yielded the home owners of the UK just a little more land than it has allowed for the growing of trees, and one tenth of the land deemed needed for the support of just 40,000 families in agriculture. Perhaps the most interesting large landowner of all, the Queen and her immediate family of just eight people, believe that to be comfortable they have to have, for their use one way or another, a quarter of the land needed to house 45 million people in the private sector.” Page19. (See also Table 1/7, The Largest Landowners in the UK, 2001.)
“Between the end of the seventeenth century and the end of the nineteenth century the industrial revolution, the conversion of the British economy from a mainly agricultural one, to a manufacturing one, occurred. This ‘revolution’ was paralleled by the enclosures, the legal device used to include common land into landed estates, and to exclude the peasantry who had lived off the common land from an economic existence. The peasantry were driven into the cities and towns and became the urban proletariat, leaving the rural areas of the country much as we find them today, which is more or less empty of people.” Page 25.
“It is a truism of conventional British history that the landowners were the dominant force in British politics right up to World War Two. The composition of successive British governments, particularly Conservative administrations, shows this.” Page 25.
“The results (of this history) are the distribution of land we have today, with, for example, less than 33,000 people living in 1.35 million of Devon’s 1.5 million acres, while the urban mass, all 1 million of them, live in less than 130,000 acres.......It emptied the countryside..... and by doing so created a vast surplus acreage....” Page 26.
“One of the most central concepts of maintaining power is by sustaining a creed or belief. According to Juvenal.........populations will serve power if they believe in the concept or myth propagated by power. One of the most seductive of myths sustained in this country is that of England with its ‘green and pleasant lands’......A populace which believes such a powerful vision is committed to the maintenance of it, and are persuaded to support those who consider themselves the guardians of the green and pleasant land, in other word those who own it.” Page 26.
“...there are few countries in the world where the ruling elite who own the land have been so successful in selling the concept of a ‘joint interest’ between landowners and landless, and using that common interest in the myth of England the golden to persuade the landless both to support the quest for Empire and to continue to support the landed and their associates in power for most of the twentieth century. Time may yet show that the only truly revolutionary act of the first Blair government was the ejection of the hereditaries from the House of Lords, and with it that chamber’s inbuilt Tory majority. This act was utterly profound, as it broke the umbilical cord between the landed and the heart of power at Westminster, a cord that had survived even the creation of a universal franchise in the country.” Page 27.
“What the history of landownership in Britain proves, and modern political economics demonstrates, is the inseparable bond between land and power.” Page 28.
“Understandably unwilling to see their power dissipated, the members of the inner landowning elite have engaged in a three-decade long programme of social dumbing down of their own members, with perhaps Eton being the best example. At that school the infamous drawl has all but vanished and been replaced either by Estuarial English, or at best received pronunciation, in order to merge, chameleon-like, with the general populace. With their background thus blurred, little history of the source of their fortunes in land available, and no way to establish it accurately in the Land Registry, they can thus blend into emerging political and power structures.” Page 28.
“In the last 120 years the parishes have not been abolished, but their land-owning records have. In the meantime, all formal tax on land has also been abolished, and the specific taxes which have been substituted have placed the larger burden of taxes on the smallest landowners, domestic homeowners, while removing it altogether on the largest landowners. In addition, the larger landowners, whose identity cannot be established, are in receipt of subsidy to the tune of 4 billion annually (2001 figures).” Page 38.
Conclusion (Chapter 16)
“This book has argued that, far from suffering a land shortage, the UK actually has a huge land surplus. If it is assumed that the bulk of the surplus land in the UK is agricultural land and the rest either unusable or already under bricks, mortar and tarmacadam, then fewer than 157,000 families, 0.28% of the population, currently owns 64% of the land area of the country.” Page 208.
“The tenant farmers and the homeowners of today own a miniscule amount of the country and they pay the bulk of its taxes. But the most invidious part of it (the country’s economic structure) is that a portion of their tax payments go to those who own most of the country, and who do so tax free. Nothing could better illustrate the meaning of the application of real power than that it should protect and subsidise the powerful and wealthy few at the expense of the relatively poor individuals who constitute the majority of the population.” Page 208.
“Power has a psychological value to individuals in that it assists them to act unaccountably and arbitrarily in relation to the lives of others. It puts them above the law to a degree and enables them to create laws which, in the modern world, protect the powerful. A powerful group will attempt to retain for its individual members, the capacity to act unaccountably and arbitrarily too. For a wider grouping around the powerful core it is wealth, not power, that they seek and can expect to obtain through control of the state or government. Nothing better illustrates this than the landownership in the UK. Absolute arbitrary power along with absolute wealth, historically associated with monarchy, now resides with the state or government. Groups seeking to exercise the ancient power of monarchs and to access the kind of patronage and wealth that flowed from the monarch, must, in the modern world, obtain control of the state or government, but for what purpose? For some the exercise of power alone is clearly adequate satisfaction for the effort of acquiring it. But for much of the wider group supporting those driven by power alone, the rewards are purely financial. The object of power is wealth, and not vice versa.” Page 208.
“Elsewhere in this book the nature of power is discussed, but there can have been few more specific examples of the brutality of power in relation to land and its ownership than the period 1990 to 1997, when a total of over 500,000 families had their homes repossessed. The probable cost of keeping all those housed in the homes they had bought was a maximum of £5 billion over those seven years, about £700 million a year, and might have been as low as £2.4 billion. During that same period the 157,00 wealthiest families in the UK received up to £21 billion in subsidies.” Page 210.
“Clearly, not every member of the landowning class......is a paid up member of the inner power elite, or even a member of the County Landowners Association, the ‘club’ of landowners." (See www.cla.org.uk ) Page 210.
“Many of the 50,000 relatives of the Debrett’s aristocracy are in fact members of the CLA, which also has about 50,000 members. (See www.debretts.com ) What Debrett’s does is identify the wider circle of influence attached directly to the core landowners. While the hereditary House of Lords existed, the formal links inside the group were buttressed by family links to both the upper House of Parliament and to the monarchy, and were actually the social mainstay of government itself when Conservative governments ruled, up to 1997. But what made this group so durable, and its power so durable too, was its shared values at the core of which lay landownership.” Page 211.
“There is social violence implicit in the continued exclusion of the general public from what was once their ancestors’ birthright, the land taken by the aristocracy during the enclosures. There is serious social violence implicit in the dumping on the side of the street of 500,000 families while the privileged get subsidies and tax breaks.” Page 211.
“There is a vast amount of economically inefficient and heavily subsidised land in the UK. The argument about what should be done about it has not even commenced because the ultimate destination of the subsidy, the landowners, has never been systematically identified.
To date the argument has been pre-empted by two groups of people. The first group and by far the most insidious and powerful is the landowning lobby. The second group is the Greens in the narrow sense of the ‘Save the Countryside’ lobby and in the broader sense as the Countryside Alliance.” Page 214.
“Further he (Sir Jonathan Porritt, who was brought up within the most intimate circle of palace courtiers and went to Eton) is a leading light in the attempt to persuade the public that there is a shortage of rural land when there is not, and that the rural environment is under mortal threat from urban hordes when it all too clearly is not so threatened.” Page 214.
“It seems strange that they (the environmentalists) campaign so hard for the countryside, but are unwilling that anyone should know who owns it. It also seems strange that the environmentalists do not always make clear who benefits from their fight (i.e. the landowners of the UK).....They will have a new shield against the public use of huge acreages, and a new disguise for the continued subsidy of the very rich by the average urban homeowner.” P 214.
“But it is not just the environmentalists who are playing the landowners’ tune. The heritage lobby invite us to spend our weekends, and our cash, in the countryside admiring the homes of the landowners, some vacant, most of them not. In a lie as cheeky as that of the environmentalists, though no less invidious, they are asking us to pay homage at the headquarters of those who kept our ancestors in a state where 96% of the population owned nothing at all.
The National Trust’s approach to the country estates it owns is a desecration of the memory of thousands, hundreds of thousands and possibly millions, who perished in the legalised greed of the enclosures which made so many of those mansions possible....To the heritage lobby the surviving country houses are a thing of beauty and joy forever. Never mind the pain endured to make them possible.
This narrative is not a plea for a return to some kind of peasant-occupied rural idyll, nor even less a call for the occupation of the countryside by unlimited urban housing. (Rather it is a call to analyse the economic consequences of what the landed aristocracy did to one portion of the population and to ensure that those economic effects – a rigged and overpriced land market, a farming sector maintained in existence almost wholly by public subsidy, diverted ultimately into the pockets of large landowners, and a defective Land Registry to conceal the ownership of the UK – do not persist for any further length of time.)” Page 215.
[But, of course, the proponents of the universal formation of 'A One World Transition Party' would beg to differ. This land, in this country (and elsewhere on the planet?), was stolen from us, 'The People'! Surely, therefore, now is the time for it to be returned so that we can start building ‘Self-Managed, Intentional Communities' everywhere and, therefore, introduce 'A More Advanced Society' throughout the land, including on these previously purloined acres! (See: www.ideasofchange.com )]
BOLLIER
Think Like A Commoner, New Society Publishers, 2014.
"The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose." Anon.
“In the modern industrialised countries of the world, the commons tends to be a baffling, alien idea......it has scant currency. We don’t have a language for naming commons – real commons – so they tend to be invisible and taken for granted. The commons is not a familiar cultural category. Anything of value is usually associated with the ‘free market’ or government. The idea that people could actually self-organise durable arrangements for managing their own resources, and that this paradigm of social governance could generate immense value – well, it seems either utopian or communistic, or at the very least, impractical. The idea that the commons could be a vehicle for social and political emancipation and social transformation, as some commons advocates argue, seems just plain ridiculous.” Page 2
“The Market and The State, once very separate realms of morality and politics, are now joined at the hip: a tight alliance with a shared vision of technological progress, corporate dominance and ever-expanding economic growth and consumption. Commoners realise that this is not just a morally deficient, spiritually unsatisfying vision for humanity: it is a mad utopian fantasy. It is also ecologically unsustainable, a crumbling idol that can no longer command the respect it once took for granteed.” Page 5
“As most economists will tell you, only markets have the power to meet our essential needs. The recent ‘rediscovery’ of the commons suggests otherwise. Market-obsessed industrialised societies are coming to realise that the Market and the State are not the only ways to organise society or manage resources.” Page 12
“The point is that the commons is a practical paradigm for self-governance, resource management and ‘living well.’ “ Page 14
“Enclosures convert a system of collective management and social mutuality into a market order that privileges private ownership, prices, market relationships and consumerism. The goal is to treat people as individuals and consumers, not as communities with shared, long term, non-market interests.” Page 40
“The ultimate result of so many enclosures is a desperate dependency on business outsiders whose only loyalty is to the global marketplace....... ‘The more we depend on money and markets to satisfy our needs and follow our desire,’ writes Massimo De Angelis, ‘the more we are exposed to a vicious cycle of dependency that pits livelihoods against each other.’
“Not surprisingly, enclosures – by which is meant privatisation, markets, competition and imposed government - tend to interfere with the ability of people to self-organise and control their own governance, meet their own needs and protect their culture and way of life.” Page 41
(Under Construction)
