Who Owns England

Notes

Introduction

• hard to find out who owns land - I’ve found this personally. Even vague info on land usage is difficult to access. Land registry only allows individual specific plots requested at a time and there’s a fee for every one
• “concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it”
• “the law of trespass exists to keep prying commoners like you and me from seeing what the lord of the manor owns”
• inherent scarcity makes land infinitely investable
• even land left alone will eventually come into the orbit of useful surroundings economies
• “land – and who owns it – lies at the heart of the housing crisis.” - yeah, there is plenty of housing and good space for housing it’s just owned by the wrong people
• “over half of the UK’s wealth is now locked up in land”
• who owns the land determines (lack of) progress in environmental conservation and is the cause of our unstable food system
• “Talking about land ownership has been taboo for far too long. Raise it in public debate, and sooner or later you’re accused of ‘the politics of envy’.” But to crave land reallocation is to crave COMMON land, not more private estates
• “It’s not a sign of envy to ask questions about how we might best use and share out our most scarce common resource”
• “Landowners like to portray themselves as wise stewards of the earth, but all too many of them abuse their property for short-term profit – despoiling habitats and wiping out wildlife in exchange for such things as coal mines, quarries and new roads.”
• “Homes have become assets” - why decommodification is a vital concept - decommodifying shelter, space, sustenance
• “Who owned those empty properties” vital
• “inundated with offers of help – from people offering snippets of information about landowners near where they lived” crowdsourcing data, local knowledge, citizen science
• “this book was only made possible thanks to a growing movement of data journalists, coders and campaigners, determined to set information free” pockets of dedicated interest, steered by projects like this
• “Is it possible to construct a progressive English identity that isn’t based on xenophobia, nostalgia and grabbing land off Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the rest of the world? I’d argue that it is, but that land reform in England is a central part of doing so. ”
• ‘It is far easier to cling to privileges if few are privy to their extent,’ - land rights campaigner Marion Shoard

Chapter 1: This Land Is Not My Land

• “44 per cent of the county is owned by just thirty individuals and organisations. And the ways in which those landowners have chosen to use their land have impacted profoundly on the lives of everyone else living nearby”
• “Something about that childhood experience of being close to the earth, of having a patch of ground to which I feel a sense of belonging, has stayed with me all my life.”
• (CW: Thatcher)(/hj) “In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had spoken of her admiration for the ‘great car economy’ and boasted of delivering ‘the largest road-building programme since the Romans’. In pursuit of this goal, the government gouged a motorway cutting through the ancient chalk […]” — a goal being ambitious can cover the fact it’s not necessarily a desirable goal
• “To shave a few minutes off motorists’ journeys, it was deemed necessary to put a bypass through four Sites of Special Scientific Interest. ” - minor efficiency gains not worth the social/environmental/scientific/welfare/etc costs
• “‘The land to be lost to the road was meant to be compensated by the gift of other land elsewhere.’” - not comparable, the distinct features of a place and a habitat.
• common ‘plant other trees’ argument, incomparable to ancient woodlands
• “A previous plan to put a motorway through Otmoor in Oxfordshire had been thwarted by the cunning of local Friends of the Earth members. They had bought a field along the route of the road called ‘Alice’s Meadow’ […] Dividing the field into 3,500 separate parcels, they had sold each one to a different person” - reproducible method if the plots are cheap enough and use an org with a pot for initial purchase
• “The unseen influence of other landowning interests may also have been at play in helping determine the route of the road.”
• “When the Highways Agency and their private contractor Costain came to my school to tell us what a great job they were making of the bypass, I remember putting my hand up to ask a question. ‘Why are you building the bypass through all the nature reserves on one side of Newbury,’ I asked, ‘when you could just build it through the racecourse on the other side of town?’ ” indoctrination always easier (and more sinister) when you start with children, but children are also curious and intelligent and opinionated
• ”[…] most of the racing studs and surrounding fields were owned offshore, in tax havens, and that many of them also receive generous taxpayer-funded farm subsidies”
• ”[…] Single Area Payment, a subsidy calculated on the basis of how much land you own, with few additional strings attached. But when I tried to find who was the ultimate beneficiary of such public largesse, it proved impossible to do so.”
• “Seventy per cent of England is given over to farming, and the rolling downland and river valley of the Kennet is a patchwork of pasture and crops. When we think of pressures on the English countryside, we tend to think of encroaching towns and fields being buried under concrete. But it’s industrialised farming practices that pose by far the biggest threat to England’s green and pleasant land.”
• “The UK has seen a 56 per cent decline in farm birds since 1970, with industrialised farming and agrichemicals the key culprits”
• “Neonicotinoid pesticides, in particular, have been shown to pose a major risk not just to insect ‘pests’ but to many other pollinating insects, including honeybees.” yet “It’s taken much campaigning by environmental groups to eventually achieve an EU-wide ban on bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides, in the face of considerable opposition from the National Farmers’ Union and other landowners’ groups. ”
• “Greenham Common had been used as a military training ground for centuries, but was only enclosed when it was requisitioned for an airfield during The Second World War.”
• “Then in 1980, with Cold War tensions reaching a new peak, Margaret Thatcher agreed to station ninety-six US nuclear Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, making my hometown nuclear strike target number one. ” - almost arbitrary decisions on the govs part having a profound impact on people and places
• “‘The sign at the gate maintained the pretence of RAF ownership, hence British control,’ notes historian George McKay. But ‘there is no obligation for the US Government to obtain Britain’s consent before firing missiles from Greenham Common.’” - and not even UK decisions but US decisions!?
• on trespass as protest - “A court later found the protesters to be in the right: since Greenham was indeed a common, they couldn’t be stopped from walking on it – but damaging the fence in order to actually get in was still a criminal offence.”
• “It was sold to the local council and a charitable trust, who decided to finally open up the common again.” - that tends to be the only way land gets re-commoned
• “nature is now slowly doing the job once performed by the protesters. In one place, a silver birch had grown through and around the fence, and was tearing it apart. ”
• “The Berkshire countryside, beautiful though it is, is also stuffed full of PRIVATE – KEEP OUT signs, letting errant commoners know that the real owners of the landscape would rather you weren’t in it. ”
• “village. Everything looked the same. All the doors, gates and windowsills in Yattendon were painted in the estate’s official dark green,” nice as an art piece but not as forcible decisions threatened by loss of housing - those neighbourhood housing groups whatever they’re called are more common in America and are so unnecessarily undemocratic, like, what!?
• “A ‘Right to Roam’ was established by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000, but open-access land still only makes up around 10 per cent of England and Wales – a far cry from the situation in Scotland, where the right to roam is now established as the default”
• “The efforts of large landowners to keep people off their estates have, however, proved their undoing when it comes to uncovering what they own.”
• “Under an obscure clause, Section 31(6), of the otherwise extremely boring Highways Act 1980, landowners can prevent new public rights of way from being established across their land by lodging a statement with the local authority. The deposited statements usually last for twenty years, meaning that any public use of the land during this period will not then count towards determining new rights of way. But to protect their interests in this fashion, landowners also have to submit a map delineating the boundaries of their estates. This is then usually published by the council online, or is accessible under the Freedom of Information Act.”
• “As the poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1770, in protest at widespread enclosure: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
• “what does it say about prospects for meritocracy and democracy in England today when constituencies can still end up being represented by the local lords of the manor?”
• “Many MPs nowadays, too, are landlords with rental property portfolios, as the parliamentary register of interests attests. ”
• “Just 36,000 landowners – a mere 0.06 per cent of the population – own half of the rural land of England and Wales, according to the Country Land & Business Association, who represent the land lobby in Westminster.”
• “To see the world through the lens of land ownership is to survey a landscape of power.” - I feel this when I walk/bike around the country - why can’t I go over there? something reasonable like a dangerous electric thing, someone’s small home, or a lake? more often than not it is something far more arbitrary than that, a big scary wall or a big scary sign
• “Many of England’s largest landowners have acquired their land through inheritance; an inheritance that has often been built on the back of conquest and enclosure”
• “the vast majority of people living in England today remain as landless as they have always been. I belong to England; I love its countryside and history. But does any of it really belong to me?”
  • It should ALL belong to you. Outside of the reasonably sized small patch of home each person needs for personal shelter/comfort/stability. EVERYTHING else should be owned publicly, commonly, democratically.

Chapter 2: England’s Darkest Secret

• hh