If the Crown Estate has now
become something of a devolutionary football, there’s a clear way out for a
Treasury that doesn’t want to see its share of the cash cut. That’s to sell anything territorial and
re-invest the cash somewhere safer, like London. If the money’s left your area, it’s no longer
your government’s to demand. That’s a
principle that can be applied in anticipation of any similar devolution of
power to the English regions. Sure
enough, the Crown Estate Commissioners have started to sell off the rural
portfolio, turfing out the tenants without a second thought.
The 4,700-acre Bryanston
Estate in north Dorset has just been offloaded
to Viscount Rothermere, non-dom owner of Blackshirt-backing rag the Daily Mail. Private
Eye reported last month that its 14 farms class it as a “working” country
estate, meaning it can be passed on entirely tax-free. No wonder “working” estates are going for
record prices, in this case a rumoured £65m.
Meanwhile, ownership of the Portman Hunt Kennels will add an open door
into rural high society.
The Crown Estate
Commissioners manage that part of Crown property held for investment purposes
but much more is held for operational purposes by Government departments. And they’re under constant pressure to
sell. The last administration made a
number of attempts to sell the Forestry Commission but failed to take public
opinion with it. The present administration
may feel it’s safe to ignore that now.
Last month it was the
Ministry of Defence’s turn in the spotlight.
There’s talk of selling surplus land for housing, especially in the
south-east of England
where housing demand outstrips supply.
(Because successive governments have put money into developing London’s economy at the expense
of everyone else’s.) There’s nothing new
about releasing land for housing though.
The MoD has huge holdings around Aldershot
that have been picked at for years.
According to the MoD, work continues to scope
opportunities to significantly reduce its estate by up to 30% over the next
10-15 years, which would seem to signal some major facility closures.
Will a series of sales at
the margin be ambitious enough for Osborne and his chums? It’s unlikely. His ‘Productivity Plan’ envisages Government
property being put on a commercial basis, handed to one or more new bodies that
will charge departments the market rate for it.
But if you’re going to ‘go commercial’, why not ‘go private’? HMRC have already sold their offices, to a
company based in a tax haven. (You
couldn’t make this up.) Osborne’s plan
recalls the former Property Services Agency – which even earlier was the Office
of Works – that used to do facilities management for central government. Since the PSA’s break-up and privatisation,
many government departments have taken back management of their own property,
presumably at higher cost than when the PSA provided an integrated service. Such is the price of ideology.
Generations of governments have
promoted owner-occupation – first of farms, then of homes – because it’s paid
for by loans that enrich the financial services industry, based in the City of London. Now Government is volunteering to return itself
to tenancy because rental income benefits, well, well, the financial services
industry. Find the pattern, spot the
inconsistency, then follow the trail and you’ll discover who really rules Britain. Paid-for freeholds are dead property – nobody
else can make money out of them and that’s why they’re under attack. And the best time to offload them is at the
start of the economic cycle, so that private owners can maximise the uplift in
value in a rising market.
Sale-and-leaseback comes at
a cost in terms of lost flexibility – it was one of the reasons given for the
collapse of the Woolworths Group, which had tied itself into a deal with its
new landlord that looked good enough at the time. And how do you – or rather, how do highly
paid consultants – value some of the land uses the Government operates, for
which there is no market equivalent?
Military activity might look like one of those but in fact not all MoD
land is freehold. Three-quarters of the
Dartmoor Training Area, much used by the Royal Marines, is held under licence from
Devon’s largest landowner, the Duchy of
Cornwall. Salisbury Plain Training Area
– one-ninth of Wiltshire and as big as the Isle of Wight
– is mostly MoD freehold but for how much longer? What might Arab or Chinese investors offer
for it?
The ground is shifting
beneath our feet. Not literally, but
certainly in the sense that Wessex
is changing hands. With cash-strapped
local authorities selling off smallholdings and other property, more and more of
Wessex is being turned into
opportunities for new money made in London
to sink itself into the countryside and settle-in to a post-democratic new
feudalism.
Osborne’s challenge to the
public is to ‘re-imagine the State’, although only imaginings in a downward
direction will be accepted. Nothing new here
though; it’s part of a process of progressive plunder that’s gone on regardless
of party colour for the past 36 years. It
comes down to whether there’s nothing left but the coercive core – armed
forces, police and judiciary – or whether anything more attractive is added,
and why. Note well that a smaller State
does NOT imply lower public spending, just the routing of more of it through the
plunderers’ hands in the form of one subsidy or another, from agriculture to housing
to railways. Taxes certainly won’t fall
if governments sell off productive assets that provide an alternative revenue
stream.
Selling assets to pay debts is
false economics if the economy itself depends on the existence of debt as its
driving force. Banks will force
governments into debt over and over again, so long as governments fail to
govern. It’s when there are no more assets
to sell that the full force of austerity comes to be applied. New Labour, the bankers’ friend, was taken for
a merry old ride over privatisation, with John Prescott quoting Aneurin Bevan – ‘the
language of priorities is the religion of socialism’ – to justify the sale of
municipal enterprises. Selling
productive assets to finance non-productive expenditure is more accurately the
language of the madhouse.
What isn’t often appreciated
is that to shrink the British
State is to shrink
Britishness itself. As fewer folk have a
stake in it, so it becomes less worth defending. The contrast with Scotland
and Wales
is striking. There the democratic sector
has been defended, innovative ways round EU rules have been found and some
privatisations have even been reversed.
While Scotland and Wales have a will to survive against the forces of
globalised plunder, the UK –
and therefore England
– has only a death-wish, a will to liquidate itself and disperse the proceeds
to the super-rich.
An example of this is the
desire to pull down the BBC, ‘because the BBC is doing too much’. (Rupert Murdoch’s empire, naturally, isn’t,
though it could hardly do a worse job of airing the views of parties critical
of the BBC’s vision of Britain.) The BBC reduces opportunities for the private
sector, which is obviously a Bad Thing.
Except that it isn’t. In a
democracy, there should be no presumption that the job of Government is to
create private money-making opportunities out of public services. That’s the issue that goes to the heart of
the demolition job. It’s not about
efficiency or inefficiency, because no investor will buy an asset and no
entrepreneur will offer to take over a public service unless the deal is
structured in such a way as to make money for them. They call the shots. We end up paying. And by the time we figure out that we didn’t
get what we were promised it’s too late to go back.
It’s not about
efficiency. It’s about democracy. That’s where the Left has let us all
down. It has failed to defend public
ownership and operation on democratic grounds, because too much of its thinking
is managerialist and so fundamentally hostile to any real democracy, political
or economic. Radical politics is
democratic politics and it’s up to radicals to make the case for more
democracy, not less. Freedom to do your
own thing is laudable; making off with the common wealth is not. We all need to be clear about the difference.
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