Land Ownership: Beyond the Book Review

Not only Henry George, but many others in our past, have pointed us to a perfectly clear way forward. Thomas Paine himself, (famous for his works on the rights of man), wrote thus plainly of it: “I never heard that the Creator opened an estate-office to issue title-deeds to men… It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds”.

Revolutionary words in his time, indeed - but surely not in ours. Here beautifully, at one stroke, by a simple and just obligation laid upon the possessing of land, landholding is at once converted from an asset to a liability, thus ensuring that none of us holds more land than we can make use of; while in the matter of getting a living on this earth, it sets before us, in firm reality at last, the much talked-about “level playing-field”.

The obstacle to such an obvious and sound reform’s becoming a reality can only be a very simple one, namely: that we are governed by an Establishment for which a “level playing-field” is just the last possible desirable thing. Such an Establishment does not wish us even to begin thinking about the land question! (Who has ever heard of its mention in a school syllabus?) Hence also that Establishment’s enthusiasm for much governing of us via an ever-expanding quagmire of quangos – all partners, naturally, in perpetuating this disgraceful dumbing-down of us, whilst carefully maintaining themselves of course, the orthodox deafening silence on The Land Question!

The television programme of January 2006 Who Owns Britain? - (based largely, it would seem, on Kevin Cahill’s earlier book so entitled) - was equally unsatisfactory in content, in equally avoiding the far more pressing question of who shall own Britain? On both of these pressing questions, therefore - of poverty and of land injustice - it is high time we reminded ourselves of that familiar saying, that a people who do not know their past are condemned to repeat it.

Let us, then, take a fuller look at that past of ours, from the pen of another of those who saw it with unblinkered eyes. The following is from the work of a nineteenth century Scot, Patrick Edward Dove. While it was still, in his time, inexpedient politically to speak of Scotland - (hence the “North British” hotels that were scattered about our land) - the history of Scotland has in any case been unfortunately bound up with England on the land question. Hence his focus here in tracing the path we have travelled to the place where we now are - (and well suppressed it has been for a century-and-a-half).

Pointing out first that “taxation can only be on land or labour” - capital consisting of either one or the other - and that while labour is essentially private property, land, on the contrary, “is the common inheritance of every generation of mankind”, he goes on:
“...The political history of landed property in England appears to have been as follows:
1st - The lands were accorded by the King to persons who were to undertake the military service of the Kingdom.
2nd - The performance of this military service was the condition on which individuals held the national land.
3rd - The lands were at first held for life, and afterwards were made hereditary.
4th - The military service was abolished by the law, and a standing army introduced.
5th - This standing army was paid by the King.
6th - The King, having abolished the military services of the individuals who held the national land, resorted to the taxation of articles of consumption for the payment of the army.
The lands of England, therefore, instead of being held on condition of performing the military service of the kingdom, became the property of the individuals who held them…

The…conversion…of the land…into private property, was the first grand step that laid the foundation of the modern system of society in England - a system that presents enormous wealth in the hands of a few aristocrats, who neither labour nor even pay taxes in proportion to those who do labour; and a vast population labouring for a bare subsistence, or reduced sometimes by millions to the condition of pauperism… So long as this system is allowed to continue it appears an absolute impossibility that pauperism should be obliterated…

The abolition of the military tenures, however, did not complete the great evolution by which the lands of England have been transformed into the property of a few thousand aristocrats. That evolution consisted of three great facts.
1st - The allocation of the Church lands to individual proprietors.
2nd - The abolition of military tenure, and the substitution of the taxation of articles of consumption, in other words, of the taxation of labour.
3rd - The enclosure of the common lands, whereby vast numbers of the peasantry were ruined, deprived of their legal rights, which were quite as valid as the entails of ‘the aristocracy’; and; being separated from the land, were sent to propagate pauperism in the towns and villages… And though the manufacturers of England, taking an expansion altogether unprecedented in the history of the world, were able to consume the redundant population, the time must come when the rate of increase will diminish, when the population shall find no maintenance either in the towns or in the country; and social changes attended with a more equitable distribution of the sources of’ wealth will result in spite of all that men can do to prevent them…”

What a remarkable prophecy! For it is at that very point in our history which Dove foresaw, that we surely now stand - when change must come.

But this does not yet unfold quite the full picture for us. For this we must go to Richard Cobden (of Anti-Corn Laws fame) for an extract from his speech to the House of Commons on 14th March 1842. Pointing out that not only did the landowners sustain no special burdens which entitled them to tax the rest of the community, but that on the contrary it was notorious that they had been “employing themselves as legislators in placing the burden on others for the purpose of exempting themselves”, he went on:-
“Hon. gentlemen claimed the privilege of taxing our bread on, account of their peculiar burden in paying the highway rates and the tithes. Why, the land had borne these burdens before corn laws-were-thought… For a period of 150 years after the, Conquest, the whole of the revenue of this country was derived from the land. During the next 150 years it yielded nineteen-twentieths of the :revenue. For the next century, down to the reign of Richard III it was nine-tenths. During the next 70 years to the time of Mary it fell to about three-fourths. From this time to the end of the Commonwealth, land appeared to have yielded one-half the revenue. Down to the reign of Anne it was one-fourth. In the reign of George I it was one-fifth. In George II’s reign it was one-sixth. For the first thirty years of George III’s reign, the land yielded one-seventh of the revenue. From 1793 to 1816 land contributed one-ninth. From that time to the present one-twenty-fifth only of the revenue has ‘been derived directly from land.” [Until today, when of course no revenue is directly derived from the land at, all. SAH]

"Thus the land, which anciently paid the whole of taxation, paid now only a fraction or one-twenty-fifth, notwithstanding the immense increase that had taken place in the value of the rentals. The people had fared better under the despotic monarchs than when the powers of the state had fallen into the hands of a landed oligarchy…” *
What an account of the gradual stealing from a people of their sustenance (both the land and its rents) - and the gradual anaesthetising of their sense of it alongside! It is time we awakened ourselves from this foolishly anaesthetised state - and how better than with Henry George’s searing words:
“Near the window by which I write a great bull is tethered by a ring in his nose. Grazing round and round, he has wound his rope about the stake until now he stands a close prisoner, tantalised by rich grass he cannot reach, unable even to toss his head to rid him of the flies that cluster on his shoulders. Now and again he struggles vainly, and then, after pitiful bellowing, relapses into silent misery.

“This bull, a very type of massive strength, who, because he has not wit enough to see how he might be free, suffers want in sight of plenty, and is hopelessly preyed upon by weaker creatures, seems to me no unfit emblem of the working masses.

“In all lands, men whose toil creates abounding wealth are pinched with poverty, and, while advancing civilisation opens vistas and awakens new desires, are held down to brutish levels by animal needs. Bitterly conscious of injustice, feeling in their utmost souls that they were made for more than so narrow a life, they, too, spasmodically struggle and cry out. But until they trace effect to cause, until they see how they are fettered and how they may be freed, their struggles and outcries are as vain as those of the bull. Nay, they are vainer. I shall go out and drive the bull in a way that will untwist his rope. But who shall drive men to freedom? Until they use the reason with which they have been gifted, nothing can avail.”
(From ‘’Protection or Free Trade”, by Henry George)
We have had our fill of grim accounts of land injustice. It is full time we turned from these at last, resurrected that faculty of REASON, and started into the real task which summons us - the rebuilding of society aright.

But first - just as the rope must, circuit by circuit, be unwound to release the bull - so must we, likewise, to prepare ourselves for that task, strip back, veil by veil, the delusions in which we have been caught:

1) The rents of the land do not belong to any individual; ‘they ­belong to the community’.

2) These rents collected annually for the community, nought is left pertaining to land that can be bought or sold. Hence the false market in land is ended, and with it - land monopoly.

3) Land is freed for occupation and use, equally, to all members of society; not to own outright, but for security of possession upon the payment over to society, every year, of the full rental value of the holding. Thus is ensured the limitation of each holding to what a man can make use of himself - (or, in co-operation with others, by what arrangement each shall choose); the payment of the rental securing to each, in addition, the right (as today) freely to bequeath or inherit such land.

4) We all thus re-assume our original birthright in land; and henceforth we guard this birthright as zealously for the coming generations, as we guard it for ourselves.

If we, here in Scotland, can make a start on this, on our own home ground, the hold of land monopoly over countless wretched millions across the globe will have received its first death-blow. For in Solzhenitsyn’s inspired cry: A shout can start an avalanche!

“The only way to find the solution to our problems is (for) those who can see the mistakes of the past…to expose for all (their) worth the attitudes which have been responsible for our present predicament. A new attitude about what is important should then begin to pervade the majority of people, so that the will of the people will enforce a change that can never be reversed.”
(Viktor Schauberger)

Shirley-Anne Hardy 27 February 07

* Acknowledgements to the Quaker Land Value Group for their paper “The Land Tax Fraud”