Who Owns England?
How We Lost Our Land and How to Take It Back
Guy Shrubsole
Having read it
★★★★★
An important book that is insightful and revealing of and about the many outdated practices and conceits that are used and perpetuated that essentially mean (still), approximately, 7% of the English public own the land that is essentially everyone’s right to own anyway.
Great ideas are put forward and workable approaches talked about and explored that have sort of been and are being, albeit somewhat timidly in contemporary times, pursued to garner and enforce meaningful and long-lasting change through land reform.
As Thomas Paine wrote: ‘The man who is in the receipt of a million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in the event, it should reach to himself.’
Given the many vested interests and greedy characters (including the aristocracy) in and around the many bureaucratic layers and tax avoidance whims, scams and gaining of subsidies that make up a lot of bad habits and practices that continue to abuse and decimate land predominately just for monetary profit, it’s a wonder that land reform can happen at all; it tends to be treated as an afterthought, if at all, but when taken, explored and attempted, real and genuine, long-term land reform in England (with some suggestions being informed and inspired by Scotland’s own ground-breaking changes to its land and the use of it, from 2003 onwards, including the cadastral and approaches of France, Denmark and Sweden) can happen.
We have all the ingredients (like for many a civic need and approach) and many willing and devoted people with a decent and collaborative mix of skills, perspectives and adaptable and forward-thinking motives and that brings hope for legitimate, sensible, responsible and long-term change to land in England. If only it (and many other politic and societal issues) were actually and properly seen, approached and tackled by politicians and political parties more so, it would actually help tackle and even fix many another societal problem without the need to (endlessly) offer a sticking-plaster approach to ‘selling’ solutions as if they?ll solve things if the individual can do it.
In my opinion, effective land reform can happen (as well as many an associated UK civic predicament) and be even more likely to happen with the ending of neoliberalism and abolishing Britain’s monarchy.
We need the state to take more effective responsibility (and abolish the monarchy, or at least have a referendum on it for starters but, at the very least, definitely get rid of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall anyway) and make Britain a union that can work (better and more) constructively and collaboratively through empowered and meaningful national Parliaments.
The Duchy is an unreformed anachronism, which owes its survival to the accretions of royal privilege over the centuries. But this archaic body continues to benefit from the modern surge in land and property prices. In 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster posted a £20 million profit – three and a half times larger than what it generated back in the year 2000, and on top of the €76 million received by the royal household thanks to the Sovereign Grant. It seems crazy that we continue to tolerate this set-up, meekly allowing the monarchy to keep a medieval cash cow with minimal oversight and exempt from the tax levied on other businesses. ‘Why are we throwing millions of pounds at the Queen,’ asks Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, ‘when that money could be spent on schools, hospitals and local communities?’ Why indeed?
The United Kingdom needs to lessen political competitiveness and short-termism and ultimately bring an end to hegemonic interests and first-past-the-post voting and England needs its own Parliament to help better balance and bolster each nation in our union through more equal and fairer decentralisation and responsibility to massively lessen the South-East-, London- and Westminster-centric political and electoral shitshow(s).
All that should be complemented by strong regional governance where necessary that can help and guide cities and town councils that themselves can engage and involve communities and people across issues so all can learn, get involved, adapt, understand, grow and feel a worthwhile contribution gets made to their lives, their community, their nation and the United Kingdom’s story. One that’s being made collectively and fit for the twenty-first century and future generations.
Anyway, after all that, this book is definitely worth your reading time.
A good passage
Old institutions die hard, especially in a conservative country like England. Long after the Crown and Church lost most of their formal powers, they continue to hold sway – kept alive, in part, by their landed wealth. Understanding how these archaic, quasi-feudal pillars of the Establishment operate is crucial to grasping the nature of power in modern Britain, and critical to comprehending why land ownership in England remains so unequal.
The efforts of the Duchies and the Church to evade full scrutiny by Parliament and the public tell us something profound about how privilege tries to perpetuate itself. And the way that both Crown and Church have avoided trying to disclose their landholdings is telling, too: because the concealment of wealth from prying eyes is also critical to preserving it.
These ancient organisations have survived into the modern world by transforming their landed estates from medieval baronies into capitalist property portfolios while still trying to avoid public accountability and wider social responsibility. Some would like to see the Anglican Church disestablished, and the monarchy abolished outright. Personally, I’m [says the author] ambivalent about that. But on the question of the land they own, it’s clear that the estates of the Crown and Church ought to be made to better serve the public interest.
Most of all, the Crown and Church still matter because of the wider Establishment they helped to create. Without William the Conqueror’s division of conquered lands to his loyal barons, and without the Church’s tacit moral blessing for this unequal hierarchy, England would have no landed elite.
A second good passage
Class runs deep in English society. Many of the aristocratic families who continue to thrive, prosper and own great swathes of the British Isles can date their bloodlines all the way back to the Norman Conquest. Indeed, 1066 was the making of them: some of the largest landowners in England today owe their territorial empires to the patronage of William the Conqueror a thousand years ago.
The Dukes of Westminster are a case in point. Their family name, Grosvenor, derives from Hugh Le Grand Veneur, the ‘great huntsman’ of King William’s court. Disgruntled commoners took to calling the portly Hugh the ‘fat huntsman’, or ‘gros veneur’, and the nickname stuck. A statue of the first Marquess of Westminster in Belgrave Square, one of the London estates now owned by the family, bears the proud declaration: ‘The Grosvenor family came to England with William the Conqueror and have held land in Cheshire since that time.’ Today, the Duke of Westminster is consistently found towards the top of the annual Sunday Times Rich List, the inheritor of a fo bilion fortune made from owning a vast, 130,000-acre estate in land and property, built up over centuries.
A third good passage
The idea of council housing was born out of the same ferment of utopian ideals and radical ideas that gave us allotments and county farms. Working-class activism had pushed housing to the top of the political agenda: the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike, led by Govan resident Mary Barbour, saw 20,000 households refuse to pay rent to their money-grabbing private sector landlords. The Labour Party became the official opposition in 1918. Panicking Tory and Liberal politicians, chasing workers’ votes, began to accept the need for the state to provide affordable housing outside the free market. ‘In this context,’ writes historian John Boughton, ‘the public housing programme was seen as a quite deliberate and knowing means of placating an insurgent working class.’
Back then, with the promise of ‘homes fit for heroes’, council housing was aspirational. ‘It was unthinkable then that people “sank” in council estates,’ writes Boughton. Rather, they were part of a ‘programme of “mass upliftment”’. The 1919 Housing Act, championed by interventionist Liberal minister Christopher Addison, stipulated that council housing should be built at a density of no more than twelve an acre, and be ‘of cottage appearance’. ‘Municipal socialists’ on the London County Council and in Progressive-controlled Battersea built public housing that was spacious, well-designed and affordable. The Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, Britain’s first council estate, set a high standard. Now Grade II listed, with Arts and Crafts features, glazed tiling and quirky, colourful, streaky bacon-style banded brick-work, it’s a world away from 1960s tower blocks and the inhumane designs of Modernist planners obsessed with creating ‘machines for living in’.