Whose land is it anyway?

A paper, ‘Land for the Many’, prepared on behalf of the Labour Party by George Monbiot and a number of academics and, dare I say it, experts has just been published.

https://landforthemany.uk/

A quick Google search finds almost no references to this document in the main stream media, except for a totally misleading article in the Daily Mail under the headline ‘Labour's garden tax: Party unveils new Corbyn cash-grab on your private green space…’

There are a number of references to the paper’s proposals in what might be called professional journals, such as ‘Property 118’ – the journal of ‘The Landlords Union’ – and ‘Mortgage Introducer ‘, both well-respected and independent journals with absolutely no vested interest at all.

It also got two mentions in the Guardian but one of those was in an article by George Monbiot himself, plus Jon Trickett gave a summary in the New Stateman.

So hardly blanket coverage. This is very typical of the way Labour Party policy ideas are treated by the media, detailed policies in important areas have been released over the past months only to be largely ignored completely or sparsely covered in a manner similar to the ‘Land’ paper – a few papers and some professionally interested bodies. The worst offenders are the television and radio stations, who provide very little or no coverage, preferring celebrity nonsense instead.

This is an especially important topic because, as those two great American thinkers Mark Twain and Will Rogers, both apparently advised ‘buy land, they ain’t' (translation for Jacob Rees-Mogg, if he is reading this, ‘are not’ or ‘non sunt’) making any more’ perfectly describing its role in our lives and its consequent monetary value.

Jon Trickett’s News Statesman article

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/06/land-isn-t-your-land-how-england-privatised-its-greatest-asset

provides a pretty good summary of the report for those that don’t want to read all 76 pages of the report, but this blog concentrates on one particular aspect of the problems around land, which is the appropriation or, as I think of it, the theft of public land over the last 4 decades.

After an initial push by the IMF in 1976 resulting from the sterling crisis, the advent of the Thatcher government in 1979 brought with it an ideologically motivated drive to dispose of land owned by the state – that is, us – with no other basis than that of a political philosophy. This is, again, being polite because the so-called ‘philosophy’ of neoliberal capitalism is no more than old fashioned greed, dressed up as an economic theory.

This can be seen from the 18th century, when the term neoliberalism wasn’t current, as enclosures were justified by landowners claiming that the land, used by the poor people, could be put to more ‘efficient’ use. This rich people’s justification for daylight robbery still holds now.

The techniques used to demonstrate that public land is ‘inefficient’ or ‘surplus’ are more sophisticated and detailed than those of the past but just as dishonest. It’s easy for a government to arbitrarily change the rules about how much space is needed for a civil servant to work in, say, or for a school pupil to play in. This deceit is then used to show that the state is hoarding land which could be put to better use by, obviously, the private sector. A similar ploy was used by Dr. Beeching, claiming that railway lines were under-used by only collecting statistics during what we now call ‘off-peak’ times.

The apotheosis of this deception came with David Cameron’s commissioning of Philip Green – yes, THAT Philip Green – to carry out an efficiency review, as part of which, the completely unbiased, billionaire showed that, yes, public land use was ‘wholly inefficient’ and that the main barrier to more houses being built was regulation.

This technique is, of course, not needed when swathes of public land are sold as part of wholesale privatisations such that of the Royal Mail, which included the primest of prime sites in London.

Overall, the transfer of land from public to private hands since 1979 could amount to 2 million acres worth, today, £400 billion and approximately 10 times the amount it realised for the state. It is at once the biggest privatisation and yet the most hidden, even unknown.

Private ownership, often by mysterious companies registered overseas, of land is deliberately made hard to identify and statistics on public land disposals ‘not gathered nationally’ or otherwise concealed. This is and has been the policy of successive governments since 1979. Each of these governments can be described as being neo-liberal, this outrageous subverting of democratic process being fully part of that ideology.

Despite government claims, it’s the private sector that hoards building land with the clear intent of ‘materially disturbing the market price’, a phrase used by Oliver Letwin, of all people, in his conclusion to a 2018 inquiry into low levels of house building. He would have been clearer if he had correctly described this position as price fixing to maintain the, already excessive, profits of the house building companies, but he is, after all, a Tory and we must be grateful for the small mercy he afforded us even if he tried his best to conceal the truth.

On top of this, the disposal of public housing into the private sector has been the major cause of the massive increase in private rental business and the rise of the ‘landlord class’. Growth in rents has been a major contributor the UK economy, taking the place of actual things, part of the illusion of how well this country is doing. With 30% of Tory MPs being landlords themselves, it’s easy to see how our rentier economy helps divide the country.

There is much more to be said on this topic and a lot of it is in the following piece, which appeared in the excellent and highly recommended London Review of Books, and I acknowledge it as a source:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n10/ian-jack/why-did-we-not-know

I've got the Landlord blues, That's what I got, I got the Landlord blues. He's gone and raised my rent fifty per cent. Soon I'll be living out in a tent. I'm so sad, and when I think about it I get mad; But if you start to kick, it makes me sick, The first thing that they say is "You're a Bolshevik" I've got the Blues, Oh! Lord! I got the Landlord Blues.

Bob, your uncle.