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The Land Is Ours

a landrights campaign for Britain

As a way of building in this debate I have listed below a number of tentative demands which a programme of land reform for the countryside should contain:

1. Maximum limits for all private landholdings

   There need to be strict ceilings on the ownership of land, in the interests of opposing local economic and political monopoly, and of equal opportunities for all potential users of the resource. These ceilings need, of course, to be related to the quality of the land. Thus, for instance, there could be a maximum ceiling of 400 acres on MAFF Grade 1 land, or 800 acres on Grade 4 or 5. Such a redistributive proposal already has some resonance in Scotland where demands for the reform of the huge Highland latifundia (managed largely as deer forest, grouse moor and softwood plantation) are gaining in momentum. A sub-culture of organised rural labour also supported similar demands in England, until the wholesale displacement of agricultural workers eliminated such radical energy. It is our task to re-insert such demands into the politics of the countryside using new social forces from the urban areas.

2. Socialisation of all Land Holdings Above the Maximum Limits of Ownership

   A large and dynamic public sector already exists in some areas. The combined local authority estate (the sleeping giant of countryside politics, with farms, woodlands and smallholdings) forms a significant proportion of open land in some regions. Those holdings, together with the Forestry Commission, the explicit conservation sector (RSPB, National Trust, Wildlife Trusts Partnership, and so on), the CWS, unimproved Commons (with de facto public access), and other smaller community-based landholdings, make a combined socially owned estate of considerable size. The forms of social ownership will vary considerably, with co-operatives, local authority and neighbourhood management, state ownership with private sector businesses, nationally run agriculture and so on. There will need to be extensive interplay between private sector business and other users to continually reinforce public control and accountability.

   The shibboleth of unproductive bureaucratic nationalisation raised by the right (and some sections of the land rights movement!) must be dealt with. Our demands for socialisation are not based on a peasant economy of hand worked smallholdings (like Russia in the 1920's), but on a highly capitalised modern industry with a global division of labour and a highly skilled workforce. Our problems are with over-production, not under-production (as in Stalinist Russia). Or agricultural sector has long been used to a framework of high levels of subsidy and close Ministry supervision. Provided the cultural and political power of rural landowners and farmers can be squarely confronted, the transition to more socially responsible forms of tenure and production should be unproblematic on a technical level.

3. Democratisation of Land Management

   The countryside needs to be managed by the collective of all its users. Various partial models exist for this, for instance in the management of some commons such as Ashdown Forest Sussex, of some local authority lands, and in the management representation of conservation movement-owned open spaces and nature reserves. At Brighton the Keep Our Downs Public coalition has proposed a new, accountable management structure for the Borough's 13,000 acre estate, in which representatives of all user groups would sit alongside Council representatives in an independent Trust-type body. Many representative bodies which currently have only a defensive, campaigning, or consultative role could readily provide powerful positive management input. The high technical and cultural level at which many user groups operate (farm & forestry staff, conservation and recreation managers and others) would enable a rapid development of good self management practice. Supervisory structures also need to exist for those areas of the countryside not in public ownership, and here the available models are more rudimentary. However, the quasi-representational character of the National Park Boards and the Sussex Downs Conservation Board, with various interest groups represented in a body which covers a whole landscape type, does give some kind of a pointer, despite their gross shortcomings. (They are not elected, are unaccountable to their communities, are without significant budgets, and - in the case of the Sussex Downs - are without planning powers!). We can conceive of a variety of elected bodies having management functions, was the reality in local government until recently, School Boards, Boards of Guardians, Vestries, and so on. Different user groups would automatically have the right of representation proportionate to their social weight.

4. Socialisation of All Development Rights

   Modern planning law has created a complex system of negative control of change of use and development. This sophisticated system has had major success in the containment of urban sprawl, and the protection of areas of high landscape value, particularly through such devices as the Green Belt, Structure Plans and area-based conservation designations. Its overall effects, however, are at best ameliorative and defensive in character, because they do not tackle the main anti-social dynamics of the market economy, such as:

   • the tendency to uneven regional development,
   • the creation of mega cities,
   • the destruction of natural and cultural resources,
   • the elimination of land based labour,
   • the development of unsustainable transport systems.

   The two major attempts to socialise the capital gains created by development (under the Attlee and Wilson Labour governments) were stifled at birth by the dual results of owning class opposition and the inherent inadequacy of mere negative control, which invited boycott. Positive proposals must elevate the community and the state to the role of sole developers. Built development should be based primarily on local and national development agencies either controlled by local authorities, direct labour organisations, socially owned industries, or by the central state. The majority of development capital must be in public hands if society's ability to properly plan its own development priorities is to be realised, and the state planning system is to be something more than reactive and ameliorative (at best), or a mere facilitator of private profit (at worst).

5. Democratise Access to Land as an Economic Resource

   By and large the current gateways to the use of land as an economic resource are birth and wealth. The farming and landowning community lacks mobility and recruits very weakly from other social groups. There are few farmers from city areas, few women farmers, virtually no black farmers. Special measures of positive support for equal opportunities are needed. Financial discouragement of second home ownership coupled with positive programmes for affordable housing will make rural options more viable for medium and low waged earners. Easy credit terms, training and support to urban people who wish to enter farming and forestry, together with the breaking up of large estates and farms will provide new opportunities. Such policies address the needs of potential land settlers better than demands for the relaxation of planning controls.

6. End the Hereditary Ownership of Land

   Hereditary ownership perpetuates the exclusion of most people from rural land as an economic or a recreational resource. It bolsters the cultural power of landed wealth by its constant engendering of images of continuity and tradition (as though only ruling class people had such things), and it encourages a narrow exclusivity of values and ideas. Land based occupations need to be normalised by acquiring the character of salaried jobs - as secure and as well remunerated as all useful jobs deserve to be - rather than as rights to total control over fractions of the land. Previous rural land reform movements have failed because the social weight of rural workers had decreased beyond a point where they could really bring sufficient economic and political power to bear (except, perhaps, in overwhelmingly agricultural Ireland). In part they may have failed, too, because the central issues of re-distribution and social ownership were not tackled head-on, but were dealt with only tangentially, for instance via a land tax. Furthermore, the distinctions between productive and non-productive capital were over-emphasised so that the issue of land reform (historically seen as a movement against non-productive, rentier, capital) was not integrated in a broader programme for the socialisation of productive capital.
   Thus the movement was not ideologically prepared for the definitive assault on the rural landscape and rural employment which post-war productivist agriculture brought.

From our towns and cities we will return to reclaim the countryside from which we have been dispossessed!!

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