Who owns England? How we lost our green and pleasant land and how to take it back
Guy Shrubsole, William Collins 2019, 376pp, £20
In compiling this book, Guy Shrubsole has completed a heroic mission. On foot, on bicycle, trespassing, searching computer databases and submitting numerous Freedom of Information requests, he has almost answered the title question: who owns England? Almost, because the Land Registry ‘remains incomplete: over 83% of land in England and Wales has now been registered but the “missing” 17% comprises millions of acres of land whose owner is unknown’. Shrubsole has built on the work of Kevin Cahill’s Who owns Britain? published in 2001 and Dan and Peter Snow’s 2006 BBC documentary, Whose Britain is it anyway? His collaborator, Anna Powell-Smith, is a data analyst on the Who Owns England blog. The map of owners of land in England and Wales is gradually coming together. The continued efforts of other determined individuals like the investigative journalist Christian Erikkson and organisations such as the Open Data Institute are making possible the publication of further detective work – for example Brett Christophers’ The New Enclosure: the appropriation of public land in neo-liberal Britain, which he describes as ‘the biggest privatisation you’ve never heard of’ (see review in FRFI 269 https://tinyurl.com/yxnk6o3d).
The land-owning facts Shrubsole uncovered ‘at times made my blood boil’, he says, and hopes that the reader will feel the same. They are indeed shocking. Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population; Shrubsole cites the journalist Roy Perrott, who in his 1967 survey, The Aristocrats, calculated that 30% of the total land area of the UK, or some 17.9 million acres, was in the hands of the titled nobility – just 0.005% of the population. Shrubsole estimates that those same interests still own about a third of the country today.
In addition to this feudal legacy the breakdown of ownership for land in England is as follows:
- UK-registered Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships, overseas and offshore companies, UK registered and overseas companies together own 18%.
- The public sector, including Ministry of Defence holdings, land for utilities, local authorities and Whitehall departments total 8.5% and the same proportion is held by the Forestry Commission.
- The Crown, notably the Queen’s Sandringham Estate, Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster hold 1.4%, the Church 0.5% and the land ‘held in trust’ by conservation charities like English Heritage, 2%.
Shrubsole documents the history of each of these categories of land ownership in fascinating detail. He starts with William the Conqueror, who declared that all land in England belongs ultimately to the Crown, a principle that still holds today: the Crown remains ‘lord paramount’ and freehold and leasehold titles to land are technically still ‘held of the Crown’. (In addition, the Crown Estate owns all the foreshore and sea bed of the UK which today has the potential to earn £100m a year in wind and wave electric power revenues for the Queen.)
Under the heading ‘Old Money’, he describes the consolidation of aristocratic rights over land, wild life, forestry, and minerals and their extension into the urban cities. Today, central London is the site of the most lucrative land properties, with the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate, Lord Portman’s Estate, the Howard de Walden Estate and the Cadogan Estate owning most of central London alongside the Church Commissioners and Crown Estate.
The ‘New Money’ accumulated by the rising capitalist class from the mid-18th century onwards takes the story forward. This industrial bourgeoisie imitated, intermingled and absorbed the lifestyle of the aristocrats – buying large estates, building or restoring huge mansions and taking up country sports, hunting, shooting and fishing. Their wealth was generated from the exploitation of the working class and there was a concomitant growth of a national state organised for the control of the proletariat and protection of industrial wealth. The powers of the modern state expanded beyond the military, police and law courts into a large public sector concerned with building infrastructures, schools and hospitals, roads and water boards, sewerage and all the utilities necessary to serve industry but also to sustain an urban proletariat, even those living in slum housing conditions. The public sector bought up land in response to a variety of political pressures ranging from local to national interests. Shrubsole details some of these and he is, quite rightly, equivocal about the virtue of state property. Indeed, there is a theme running through his commentary which poses ‘the people’ in distinction to ‘the public sector’ which could be an indicator that he recognises that the state, what we know as a capitalist state, is not neutral but a class force of the bourgeoisie.
Winston Churchill, the workers’ friend?
There are other ambiguities in Shrubsole’s political stance, however, which come from his annoyingly indiscriminate use of sources. Right at the start of his introduction he quotes Winston Churchill from his 1909 pamphlet, The People’s Rights. ‘The land monopolist has only to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part: and that is justice!’ At a time of rising unemployment and industrial unrest this was populist rhetoric by Churchill, the ultimate opportunist. He had left the Conservative Party and joined the Liberals in 1903 after ensuring that he would be offered a Cabinet post. In 1909 Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced ‘the People’s Budget’, which included a super-tax on high incomes and the introduction of land taxes – a form of capital tax of land holdings. The ruling class was alarmed about the expansion of the German navy and its capabilities to challenge the monopoly of British trade both within the Empire and without. Taxes were raised to pay for the expansion of the British Navy in preparation for the First World War five years later. In any case land tax was repealed by the Conservative government of 1922 after Churchill re-joined the Conservatives in 1924 and was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Capitalists and landowners
Churchill, with his astute political wit, had seized the moment to promote the historic antagonism between the rights of landowners and needs of capitalists. There is an historic tension between the charge of rent for land use and the cost to the capitalist. Landed property owners gather rent from the capitalists’ surplus value as a deduction from the capitalists’ profits; the industrialist wants to pay as little as possible for renting land for production, to keep the expense of factory buildings, mines etc to a minimum. The capitalist also generally wants to keep rents low in order to keep workers’ wages low. This brings us to questions of how the price of land is determined and what makes it rise. To give him his due, Shrubsole does devote a paragraph to lament that the land question ‘has been airbrushed from modern economic theory’, saying ‘Land was different from capital and labour, however, in being of fixed supply, and in having no production costs: nature provided it for free.’ However, since Shrubsole ends his book with ‘An agenda for English land reform’, which is a programme of demands, we do, unfortunately perhaps, have to understand the issue of how land is priced and why it is capitalised.
In drawing a line from the land grab of William the Conqueror to the secretive and sometimes not so secretive buy-up of acres of land by wealthy individuals and corporations as ‘land banks’ we can lose sight of the different purposes of land ownership. In some cases, large-scale farming on inherited estates can be profitable, especially with huge farm subsidies from the British state and the EU, which the former Environment Secretary Michael Gove (another individual referenced uncritically) pledged would continue in some form and continue to favour the largest acreage. Seventeen of Britain’s dukes together received £8m in farm subsidies in 2015 and the value of agricultural land has skyrocketed since 2003, bolstered by these public subsidies. Other acres are left empty and exist merely as depositories for capital waiting for further land price rises. Fundamentally the price of land depends on two things – the amount of rent and the rate of interest. The current period of high rents and low interest rates continues, inexorably, to drive up the price of land (see our pamphlet Whose land is it anyway?[*] for a fuller discussion of this point).
No place like home?
The author recognises, as land prices rise, ‘homes have become assets’ in England, but he does not pursue the implications of this monetarisation. For example, the rise in the price of housing has led to an end of the home ownership dream for ‘generation rent’ – with 630,000 expected to become homeless when they reach pensionable age – while the 65% of the population who own their own homes (down from a peak of 73.7% in 2007) have gained a massive unearned rise in the market value of their property. Average house prices were £25,000 in 1980, rising to £175,000 by 2008 and £228,000 by 2018. Home ownership represents, far over and above its basic use value as a means of shelter, the equivalent of corporate stock entitling its owner to a portion of the surplus value produced by the world working class. Similarly, the pension funds and insurance companies that Shrubsole names as landowners invest their funds in global markets to the benefit of English pension holders. Such companies also park increasing amounts of wealth in land banks to protect shareholders. Legal and General, for example, owns 3,550 acres stretching from Luton to Cardiff and the British Steel Pension Fund holds 6,982 acres of land. Yet the whole parasitic services sector produces nothing – other than further raising the living standards of a privileged portion of the population of England. But where this money comes from – the crucial question of the super-profits plundered by British imperialism from around the world – is beyond the scope of Shrubsole’s inquiry.
The author acknowledges that there is a wider system at work here than personal ownership when he says that, fundamentally, this is not a question of individual morality but of how our land and property markets are now structured. We would add to this that British finance capital stretches across the world to suck property and profit from wherever it can.
Despite the limitations in the scope of his investigations, Shrubsole’s book is a wonderful read and a great achievement. It is a heartfelt plea for proper, equitable land use, restoration of the damaged environment and an end to the secrecy surrounding land ownership.
Susan Davidson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
[*] Whose land is it anyway? Housing, capitalism and the working class, Larkin Publications 2018, £2.95
