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The Land Is Ours
a landrights campaign for Britain
LAND ESSAYS 3
"And, he gave it for his opinion; that whoever could make two Ears of Corn, or two Blades of Grass to grow upon a Spot of Ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of Mankind, and do more essential Service to his Country, than the whole Race of Politicians put together."
Advice to Gulliver from the King of Brobdingnag.
From: Gulliver's Travels, part 2, chapter 7.
Only an ungrateful nation could forget the debt we owe to the King of Brobdingnag and his timely advice to Mr Gulliver. Had he not been so kind as to remind us of our obligations to the needy, we might never had engaged upon a project which must surely rank among our most enduring sources of pride. Indeed, so diligent has England's discharge of these duties been that she now spends more money on this enterprise than she could ever hope to recoup.Malicious tongues among us have suggested that credit for this accomplishment should rest wholly with the good offices of the European Union and its Common Agricultural Policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have achieved this breakthrough only by means of centuries of patriotic endeavour and the national sacrifice. For, as our historians have now established, upon returning to England Mr Gulliver wasted no time in promulgating the monarch's wise words. Scarcely had he set foot once more on his native soil than politicians of all persuasions began to abandon the self-interested pursuit of wealth and power and devote themselves to the welfare of the people.
From approximately 1730 onwards, Members of Parliament started to display a robust interest in agricultural improvement. Neglecting the less pressing affairs of state, they passed, over the next 120 years, no fewer than 4,200 Acts of Enclosure. The Acts empowered special commissioners to divide up and enclose with hedges the commons which had provided for the wasteful subsistence of England's innumerable cottars, copyholders and small freeholders. They had the effect of sensibly dispensing with the customary rights that were such an impediment to progress, and placing absolute control of the land in the hands of certain individuals, freeing them to engage in agricultural improvements of the kind the King of Brobdingnag had envisaged.
By a happy and wholly unanticipated coincidence, most of the beneficiaries of these reforms were large landowners. As most Members of Parliament happened to be substantial proprietors themselves, their disinterested work on behalf of the poor was, by good fortune, rewarded. Sir Thomas Coke, of Holkham in Norfolk, was one of the landlords who first put his new powers to the service of the nation. Between 1778 and 1794, he raised the value of his land from £5000 a year to £20,000 a year by means of new agricultural techniques. His patriotic example was swiftly followed by other enlightened proprietors, and grain, sheep and cattle production were all enormously enhanced in order to furnish the Exchequer and feed the hungry.
It was, of course, true that some trifling number of the rural poor - a few hundred thousand at most - lost, in the course of the enclosures, the ability to feed themselves. But this petty inconvenience was more than offset by the unrivalled opportunities with which they were now presented. Many were, for example, able to enjoy the redeeming virtues of hard work through the opportunities provided by the landlords. Others were able to move to the cities, where they could render service to their country by labouring, in conditions of noble self-sacrifice, for up to eighteen hours a day in the factories, while receiving a wage which barely ensured their survival.
For reasons best known to themselves, however, the dispossessed commoners failed to demonstrate the full measure of their gratitude for these new opportunities. Far from thanking their benefactors, they rioted repeatedly, setting fire to hayricks, damaging the landlords' houses and destroying the new hedges. Fortunately, justices of the peace were conveniently placed to deal with this insurrection, for most of them were landowners. With the help of the yeomanry, they brought the full impartiality of the law to bear on these impertinent wretches - hundreds were hanged, transported, or imprisoned for life. Our representatives' concern for the moral welfare of the people was such that they begrudged no amount of patient effort in dealing with even the most inconsequential of these matters. The new capital offences they introduced allowed rogues who broke windows, pulled down fences or knocked landlords' hats off their heads to be hanged for their insolence.
Perhaps the agricultural labourers who remained so strangely ungrateful for the new prosperity introduced to the countryside failed to understand that the high price the landowners continued to receive for their grain was good for the agricultural economy, as was the reduction of the workers' negligible wages. Indeed, thousands of those who starved to death utterly failed to comprehend how beneficial these arrangements were.
To ensure that they persisted, the representatives who had forgone the selfish pursuit of petty politics in deference to the King of Brobdingnag's wishes, passed, from 1815 onwards, a new series of far-sighted Acts. The Corn Laws ensured that landowners would always find a good price for their grain, as they forbade the importation of foreign wheat until domestic prices had fallen below a certain level - in other words, grain could only be imported when it was least needed.
Having thus secured the viability of the agricultural sector, our reformed politicians then concentrated on stimulating the econom y still further by selflessly squandering their money. While the peasants starved for want of enterprise, the landlords sought to demonstrate to th em what the fruits of hard labour could deliver, by means of balls and banquets, fine clothes and follies, brandy, hunting and whoring.
When the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, so short-sightedly sought to restrain the enterprise economy by repealing the Corn Laws, the honourable members demonstrated their disgust at this blatant attempt to mix politics with the imperative of food production, by opposing him as best as they were able. At length however, his revolutionary tendencies, so cunningly concealed earlier in his career, prevailed. Thanks to his reckless measures, both the stick of starvation and the carrot of opulence became less compelling incentives to the improving discipline of unstinting labour. To ensure, however, that politics and food production remained wholly separate affairs, agricultural labourers were denied the vote until 1884.
Over the next one hundred years, land holding in England was gradually rationalised. Today, with one of the highest concentrations of ownership in the world, our landlords are a source of enduring pride to the nation. Their approach to agriculture combines the best of modern technology and traditional values. Sensibly, they have no truck with such ephemeral conceits as democratic accountability, landscape protection or market mechanisms, but plough on irrespective of such fads. Our politicians, meanwhil e, have remained patriotically committed to sustaining the triumphant pace of agricultural improvement.
After the Second World War, the British government decided that our vulnerable nation should never again be dependent on imports of basic foods for its sustenance. So, to free us from he necessity of buying foreign grain, it subsidised the purchase of machinery, pesticides and fertiliser, and the resulting transformation of the industry. Fortunately for international trade, nearly all of our tractors and chemicals are imported. Though we would swiftly starve in the unfortunate event of war, the degree of technological innovation on our farms should be a source of admiration. Britain is now such an advanced nation that she employs fewer people in farming as a proportion of her population than does the city state of Hong Kong.
In introducing these changes, we have dispensed with many cumbersome and unnecessary obstacles, not the least of which is soil. For centuries, farmers laboured under the misapprehension that they needed soil in order to grow crops. Thanks to felicitous introduction of deep ploughing, and the accompanying relocation of much of this vexatious dirt into the sea, we are able to demonstrate that such antediluvian practices need have no place in modern agriculture. Crops can be grown on little more than shingle, with sufficient appl ications of fertiliser.
We have disposed too of many of the unsightly lumps and ridges which one disfigured our agricultural landscape. The barrows, hill forts, field systems and ancient lanes which mired us in the past and intruded on our views of the wholesome earth, have already been erased from many parts of England, and farmers are seeking to complete the task as rapidly as possible. Modern agriculture has successfully eliminated such irritations as skylarks, song-thrushes and nightingales from many parts of their ranges, immersing the country side in a deep and lasting peace. It has relieved us of the burden of insect life, and the distraction of wild flowers.
But no measure of success in modern agriculture is as uplifting as the tremendous boost to food production these new techniques have precipitated. Indeed, so well stocked are our granaries that hundreds of millions are spent each year in storing and destroying surplus food. In raising output so markedly, we not only maintain our landowners in the noble style to which they are accustomed, but also guarantee our pre-eminence in the global marketplace, by averting the possibility of self-reliance in the developing world.
In Britain, such foresight costs the taxpayer a mere £2 billion a year - a competitive price for such selfless service to humankind. Yet we refuse to rest on our laurels. So determined are we to grow three, four, even ten ears of corn or its equivalent where but one grew before, that we are now trying to introduce parts of bacteria into plants, scorpions into caterpillars and humans into pigs. As humble citizens of a trifling land, our only regret must surely be that the King of Brobdingnag cannot be present to marvel at how assiduously we have followed his advice.
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