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Another England, by Caroline Lucas, proves that many national (and even Western (and global) attitudes and meaningful, long-term changes) are possible and surprisingly simple, easy and realistic.

We just need to better refine, regulate, empower and process the wit and wherewithal, in many systems – certainly government – to get on with real meaningful change. It’s only hard because of entrenched (and largely generational) attitudes and approaches to preserving a status quo that only benefits those with the skills, connections, business and or conglomerates and profits to buy and inveigle their wants and misguided responsibilities to a market that just runs with a rampant disregard for the future.

This land is our land...

Landowners are largely left to do with their land as they see fit. Whether it is the directors of major agribusinesses taking a moment off spraying their fields with a cocktail of pesticides to lecture us on how they are the ‘guardians of the countryside’, or oligarchs using their ownership not only of estates but whole villages to recreate little pockets of feudal England, the power that goes with owning land too often corrupts. Fox-hunting would have gone the way of cock-fighting and bearbaiting centuries ago if it had not been that those who controlled the land also enjoyed riding to hounds. More broadly, large landowners dominate the fundamentals of farming, and by extension of food and environmental policy, for example resisting controls on pesticides in the face of the evidence about the catastrophic impact on wildlife. The result is that poisonous emissions we would not tolerate for one moment from the waste pipe of a factory are accepted as unavoidable when they come from the spray nozzles of a tractor.

At the heart of these neo-feudal power dynamics is an issue that John Clare or Oliver Goldsmith would have recognised: the disproportionate political influence of landowners. Large landowners sprout up so frequently on government committees, in the Cabinet or on the boards of major companies, that it feels as natural as the cycle of the seasons. The whole system is held together by a lingering sense of deference towards those born to land, wealth and titles. The monarchy sits at the top of this pyramid, both symbolically and also through the very real power, wealth and influence the Crown wields. Though it is sometimes presented as a charming anachronism, the monarchy has been expanding its reach – buying new estates, becoming more effective (even ruthless) at exploiting its assets. There is a helpful fiction that distinguishes between King Charles’s personal estate (such as Balmoral) and the lands and other assets he owns as monarch, which includes the £16 billion Crown Estate.

The same applies to Prince William, who inherited the £1 billion estate of the Duchy of Cornwall. The Crown Estate claims to be focused on its financial return for the British taxpayer, not the royal family – but it is hard to imagine it would decide to sell off the 10,000-acre Windsor Estate, though it is currently one of its least profitable assets. The Crown Estate is also making massive windfall profits by charging for the use of the seabed by offshore wind farms, and 25 per cent of those profits – paid for, in the end, by electricity customers – go to the King. It was nice of him to hand some of the £111 million back to the Treasury in 2023, but it still feels peculiar for the monarchy to have this kind of tax-raising power in the first place. Worse, the more we defer to the royals, the more influence we grant to the coterie around them – the near-invisible courtiers and functionaries, the equerries and ladies of the bedchamber – and to the nobility and landed gentry from whom they are still largely drawn.

Questions of ownership are not only relevant to land, however. At the heart of our ‘common treasury’ today are the collective goods built through the twentieth century: public utilities, the welfare state, the BBC. And yet these too are facing their own version of enclosure. To take only one example, the BBC is a cultural asset built up over a century which is vital to our sense of who we are as a nation. Yet a hostile government, ideologically committed to private provision, currying favour with private media interests, has been both undermining the BBC and encouraging it to become overly commercial in its aims and working methods. This kind of commercialism – of eroding the fundamental value and culture of an organisation by making the claim that private-sector methods will make it more efficient – has become so commonplace we have become desensitised. Our universities have been turned into commercial enterprises, their leaders increasingly focused on financial targets, rather than on educating students or carrying out research. In the Civil Service, the advice and analysis provided by officials with huge expertise and a commitment to public service is marginalised in favour of superficial studies by obscurely funded think tanks or hyper-expensive management consultancies. In place of an integrated education system, we have schools competing against one another, chasing league table places to the detriment of the communities they are supposed serve. Every form of our common heritage is being assaulted by besuited twenty-first-century equivalents to the little tyrants described by John Clare.

[…]

[…] We do not just need indignation; we need policy. With the creation of a comprehensive land register that is open to all, we would know who owns what (with ‘who’ meaning actual individuals or firms, not shadowy shell companies in Jersey or the British Virgin Islands). Reform of the House of Lords would mean that landed interests are not given a privileged position in the legislature. Reform of party funding would push back against the influence of the powerful and wealthy on our democracy. Measures like these could dramatically increase the chances of securing more ambitious policies on widening access to land.

Just as we need to limit the power of private owners, we might also want to reflect on how we could increase our collective power over our common heritage. The idea of the commons has the power to transform our thinking about who owns England in its widest sense. England is a physical and social inheritance we all share in equally – not a portfolio of assets to be bought and owned by an elite. We have seen the dire consequences of selling off state assets and vital services such as water, electricity and the railways, and the case for bringing these back under public control is overwhelming. A good place to start would be to stop private-sector outsourcing in the NHS, and bring core utilities back into public hands. If these institutions are to be our ‘common heritage’ for centuries to come, they cannot be eroded by a race to the bottom, driven by a single-minded desire for profit.

Caroline Lucas Another England

I highly recommend Caroline’s book as it is well written and clear in its research, approaches and views and it isn’t a tough read, just a refreshingly honest one. It’s full of love and appreciation for life and nature and what is actually possible and that we just need that to happen from the top-down now, with the ‘management’ actually leading for reform and breaking its own barriers, admitting (more) its incompetences, attitudes and general inability to actually do anything helpful and meaningful.

If only there was a UK political party that was actually talking, framing and willing to action many of these sensible and forward-thinking things... especially if they were offering to rejoin the customs union with Europe, the NHS was remodelled for the twenty-first century, not opened to the market, a clearly defined, contemporary written constitution was made, the better policy and regulatory processes, control and enforcement happened, tougher regulation (if not reduction as well) of financial systems, the welfare state was rethought and remade and actually empowered those that need support to help build trust and responsibility to and from citizens, first-past-the-post was changed to proportional representation and the various Houses down-that-there Westminster were got rid of and democratically remodelled (and moved out of London) to allow better national engagement through real political devolvment and empowerment to regions, councils, communities and citizens... just for starters... as I’d vote for that...