The Lie of the Land: who really cares for the countryside? Guy Shrubsole, HarperCollins 2024, £10.99 pbk
A hero activist
The British author and researcher Guy Shrubsole is an activist dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of land ownership in Britain. His previous works include Who owns England? (2019) and The Lost Rainforests of Britain (2022). He is currently a campaigner at Friends of the Earth and the British think tank Public Interest Research Centre, and with Nick Hayes launched a ‘Right to roam’ campaign in England in 2020. Together they organised a mass trespass on the Sussex Downs to raise awareness of the failings of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. Shrubsole has acknowledged his debt to Kevin Cahill’s Who owns Britain?, a pioneering 2001 work that relaunched the investigation of land ownership in 2001.
Now, in The Lie of the Land, Shrubsole delves further into the deliberately obscured but crucial question of the role of land ownership in a capitalist country like Britain. He has collected a mass of data through Freedom of Information enquiries, searching old maps, interviewing government officials and multinational corporations’ lawyers and walking the land, pushing through barriers and fences in defiance of ‘keep out’ signs. He is a hero activist and his publications are full of information.
This book continues the scrutiny in Shrubsole’s 2019 book Who Owns England? – pointedly subtitled How we lost our green and pleasant land and how to take it back. Both books reveal and restate the raw facts about land ownership in Britain: less than one per cent of the population owns half of all England, a few thousand dukes, baronets and City boys possessing far more land than all of England’s middle classes put together: the Duke of Westminster has inherited land owned by his family since the Norman conquest in 1066; ten times more land is lavished on golf courses than allotments; over half a million acres of England is taken up by grouse shooting estates. Land ownership in Scotland remains predominantly private but community organisations are active and have purchased some small areas of land and pushed for open access in the Highlands.
The title matters
Shrubsole describes as a ‘lie’ the self-promotion of British landowners and farmers as the ‘stewards of the earth’. This biblical term played an important role in the 17th-century movement of the revolutionary True Levellers – or Diggers – in their effort to restore the land to common ownership. In the 20th century the term was revised, this time to be deceitfully appropriated by landowners whose increasingly environmentally destructive activities roused extensive criticism. The subtitle Who really cares for the countryside? is a challenge to the claim that the owners of private property are its best protectors. This book is a polemic against the assertion that landowners are ‘the stewards of the land.’ Shrubsole’s argument is that only ‘conservationists’ can really care for the land.
Money-making from shooting birds
Shrubsole describes the growth of the grouse moor business, which he calls ‘the ultimate trophy asset’, that has transformed landscapes into barren monoculture. Stoats, weasels, foxes, ‘protected’ birds of prey such as hen harriers, rooks, crows, buzzards and falcons are exterminated by poison, traps and shooting. The constant burning of heather and the draining of wetlands has turned grouse moors from carbon sinks, absorbing emissions, into a huge carbon source, emitting millions of tons of CO2 every year.
This devastation was speeded up by the introduction of ‘driven’ grouse shooting where the birds are released in front of the guns and ‘bagged’ in huge numbers. The grouse are reared in breeding pens, as are pheasants which are also shot in huge numbers for a day’s entertainment. These birds need plant coverage which is planted and protected from the public by trespassing laws. Shrubsole has estimated that there are 50 million registered pheasants released into the countryside every year. In the Exmoor region alone, there are 63 game shoots on and around Exmoor National Park covering 100,000 acres of land. Every shooting event damages woodland flora and trampling destabilises riverbanks. However, landowners are rarely called to account for environmental damage. There is a close and mutually supportive relationship with the many state authorities whose regulations are designed to protect ‘the stewards of the land’. Farm subsidies and tax relief to grouse moor owners reached £105m in ten years in environmental stewardship payments.
It has become a measure of financial and social success, not just inherited privilege to run a shooting estate business. There are owners like David Ross, multimillionaire founder of Carphone Warehouse who offered a day’s shooting on his two North Yorkshire moors at a Tory fundraiser. Customers are as likely to be wealthy overseas individuals and organisations as home grown, but all financial data on this trade is hidden in private accounts.
Money-making from growing crops
Growing crops to feed the nation is obviously an essential use of land. The Fen region of eastern England was once the largest wetland in Western Europe reaching into the Wash on the coast. It has been drained continually for 400 years and much of the rich peaty soil was found to be ripe for agriculture. Now 99% of the original swampy fen land has now been eradicated and the land is being intensively cultivated. Institutional investors and pension funds – the Wellcome Trust and the Utah-based Mormon Church among them – make over a billion pounds a year from the sale of fresh vegetables. There are now warning signs that the productive capacity of the Fens is diminishing, as well as contributing to speeding up climate change. Every year the land is prone to wind erosion, emits more carbon and sinks lower. Private owners overall are reluctant to change farming methods. At the same time government departments like the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) are evading the need to develop a horticultural plan to bring other areas of Britain into a balanced food production programme.
Shrubsole’s dead end
This very well-researched book nonetheless contains contradictions about land ownership which limit its value to the reader. Despite his commitment to change, Shrubsole’s own political limitations mean he cannot and does not condemn private ownership. He is a critic of the ruling-class hold over discussion of environmental damage. But he does not understand that land ownership is an integral part of the capitalist system of banking and investment. He therefore says that ‘investing in land means the state acquires one of the safest assets there is’. This leaves the matter entirely a question of property rights, refers to land as property and concedes that it can have a market price. This approach provides no way forward to free land from being a commodity for sale. Again, he says, ‘land is a capital asset that will increase in value over time.’ There is no way in which the value of land can increase outside of the rent that it can command or the profits made, all expressed in the monetary price put on it. In his book Shrubsole has urged many times the importance of the countryside, the land, the natural environment as a whole to the well-being of its humans, flora, and fauna. These are not capitalistic but human values which cannot but be subordinated to monetary claims under the system of private property ownership.
Shrubsole recognises this when he concludes that ‘nature conservation ultimately must confront private property rights’ and that ‘We should all have a say in how land is best used.’ But the ten suggestions for action he ends with – which include introducing laws to outlaw driven grouse shooting, and the use of public money to buy land to protect nature – are ultimately meaningless. Such reforms are not achievable under private ownership which promotes inevitable and irreversible environmental damage, self-destructive agricultural practices, polluted waterways and disastrous climate change. Only by the expropriation of land from private landowners and use of the land for the people as a whole will the challenges of the immediate future be met. This is not a task confronted by the wishful thinking of Shrubsole and his fellow reformists; this is the demand for socialism as the only way forward to save the land.
Susan Davidson
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 305 April/May 2025
