Not Gingerbread Houses

What have we been saying?  That the range of demands increasingly being placed on our countryside could soon exceed the supply of rural land.

Now it’s been confirmed.  Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership has published a report – The Best Use of UK Agricultural Land – quantifying the UK-wide shortfall at up to 6 million hectares, or 15 million acres, by 2030.  (Wessex covers 3 million hectares or 7 million acres.)  You can read the headlines here and download the report here (right-hand column).

Some of the difficulty can be overcome by making multiple use of the same land – a woodland can be used for timber, biomass feedstock, water retention, carbon storage, wildlife habitats and recreation – but there are limits to this.  Our houses aren’t edible, so the land they occupy is land lost to food production.  In Wessex we have the added burdens imposed by London overspill housing, second and holiday homes and other external demands on our land area, for water-gathering, power generation or waste disposal.

As the report points out, the UK Government is failing to provide any leadership on the issue of land use in its broadest sense, not just development.  Scotland has a better grasp of the issues, but that’s just Scotland.  Many ecosystem services have no market price, so leaving things to market forces won’t deliver a sustainable solution.

The report makes interesting reading from a Wessex perspective.  It argues that the UK imports foods it could grow for itself, including foods in which it has a competitive advantage and could therefore also develop an export market.  Examples include apples – all those orchards grubbed up! – pears, plums, summer berries, pig meat, and processed products such as yoghurt and ice cream.  Wessex agriculture could have quite a future, if the policy framework is a supportive one.  But with no sign of joined-up thinking in Whitehall, it’s clear that Wessex will have to do its own planning and make its own decisions.

Sowing Bricks

The Conservatives, one-time party of the countryside, continue to plot their destructive, and self-destructive, course. Planning Minister Nick Boles told Newsnight this week that he wants to concrete-over 1,500 square miles, twice the area of Greater London, though he didn’t seem quite sure of the figures. Never mind. A million acres. Or thereabouts. Did he put his foot in his mouth himself, or was it put there on the orders of the Cameron/Osborne axis? You can already hear the Torygraph baying for his blood and they’re not the sort who pause to listen attentively when a former think-tank whizz-kid invites them to think the unthinkable.

Boles’ performance under cross-examination from Jeremy Paxman, and from Paxman’s other guests, was lamentable. Was it really the best he, or the Government he represents, could possibly have done with the material? Was it all just an act, part of some deeper, more sinister strategy? Or are Coalition Ministers every bit as thick as they sound, in Boles’ case like a twin of Michael Gove? These are the clowns giving orders to Wessex, the men and women making key decisions and directing billions of our money here, there and everywhere. We could do so much better without them.

Challenged to explain how building on farmland could be ‘sustainable development’, Boles hadn’t a clue. He acknowledged that there are ‘choices to be made’. Too right there are. Potentially between allowing your children the moral right to a house with a garden and allowing your grandchildren the means to avoid starving to death. Boles swerved by saying he’d avoid building on the better quality farmland but it was an evasive response showing just how little grasp he has of the issues inherent in his brief.

The MAFF Agricultural Land Classification (ALC) divides farmland into grades – 1, 2, 3a, 3b, 4 and 5. The top three are described as the ‘best and most versatile’ land, which it is most important to protect. These three make up about 40% of all English farmland, though with huge local variations. Does Boles think the rest is expendable? Apparently so. He just went on about being able to import our food from some ‘elsewhere’ that is magically expandable.

Even protection of the best land has nowhere near the priority it had 20 years ago, let alone in the earlier post-war decades. MAFF is now DEFRA and busy saving the whales. Where MAFF would routinely have sent expert witnesses to public inquiries, DEFRA plays no active part in the town and country planning system. It does not see its job as being to defend the national interest in the round. Councils are advised in general terms to protect the best land, where possible, but they are told in even starker terms to get those houses built. They have neither the expertise nor the incentive to make up for the lack of any long-term strategy for food security. It ought to be worrying that Whitehall’s own staff dealing with these issues have been run down or privatised to such an extent that the issues themselves have dropped below the radar. There was a similar rundown of experienced technical staff in local government who dealt with flooding and drainage. Those teams have had to be painfully rebuilt at speed over the past five years.

ALC maps are very colourful to look at but they can mislead. In most areas they represent the results of surveys carried out at quite a coarse grain. More detailed site-specific surveys often reveal large pockets of higher grade land that would otherwise be missed. In some areas, such as the Somerset Levels or the Vale of Pewsey, and around many of our market towns, so much land is high-grade that development, if it occurs, cannot go anywhere else. The old planning technique of sieve-mapping was to overlay all the constraints to development and build on the land that still showed blank through the layers. The problem today is that those easy sites are gone and councils have to decide what is least precious and can be sacrificed for the least offence caused. It is an increasingly desperate process of cannibalising our surroundings.

The Daily Fail managed to come up with some cracking answers to the problem. Build on all that derelict urban railway land we can see from the train as we arrive for work. (And how will residents get around in the post-oil future, when additional tracks need to be re-laid?) Cut public sector pay in the provinces so that ‘wealth creators’ will be attracted out of the congested South East to areas in need of regeneration. (In areas of high unemployment, labour is a buyer’s market, so wage rates in one sector have no effect on the wage rates that can be offered in the other, only on staff turnover. But cutting them in either sector deflates the regional economy. Lower wages in the private sector reflect the transport costs associated with distance from the centre of power and wealth and so would not rise even if public sector wages were cut. But it might become very difficult to find a nurse or a policeman in Devon, especially one able to afford to live there. Regional variations in pay have pros and cons but there’s something particularly backward about regionalising pay rates while NOT regionalising power over all the other things that make up the big picture, like second “homes”.) It’s a depressing fact that those with real influence over policy-making in the United Kingdom of London & the Home Counties haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about, or of the damage they can do.

Meanwhile, we still have that ‘housing shortage’. Except that it’s nothing of the kind. Quite the reverse. It’s a population excess. And who’s to blame for it? Boles pointed the finger at Labour’s thirteen-year reign of error. And quite right too. It was reckless to open the doors to all the world’s waifs and strays and allow the population to rise by millions. And Labour now admits it. But Boles is part of a government that came to power promising to put right Labour’s mistakes. What has actually been done? There’s still nothing that resembles a credible joined-up strategy on immigration, border controls and welfare. And putting right mistakes doesn’t mean accepting unsustainable population growth as if it’s something that can’t now be reversed. PAY folk to emigrate. Over the medium term, it’s the cheapest option, avoiding the need for utterly unaffordable levels of spending on new infrastructure. Over the long term, it’s the only option that staves off catastrophe as fertile families multiply and fertile land declines.

But in the short term? Nothing will happen. London politicians are too indebted, in every sense, to the City to see the noose they’ve made for themselves. The political Ponzi scheme demands a growing population to create a growing workforce and a growing tax base with which to reward favoured interest groups. Legal fictions require interest to be paid as agreed, even when the real economy has no hope of sustaining the means to do so without consuming the ‘natural capital’ of our countryside. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with creative accountancy.

The Hollow State

Privatisation is the social equivalent of selling a kidney to pay the mortgage. Except that, under current circumstances, it’s not even your mortgage you’re paying but that of some crook you’ve never met but whose well-being you’re assured is fundamental to economic stability.

It was no accident that the real start of the privatisation drive co-incided with the rejection of devolution and the first attacks on local autonomy led by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Devolution offered the possibility that many nationalised industries could ultimately have become regionalised industries, subject to the kind of effective scrutiny that an overloaded Westminster Parliament could never provide.

Nationalisation had taken public services out of the hands of local authorities, where democratic accountability knew no bounds, and placed them in the hands of quangos whose managements were accountable to no-one. This was soon made clear by a Speaker’s ruling, in 1948, that MPs could not ask questions of Ministers about ‘day-to-day’ matters because (in theory) Ministers had no formal responsibility for detail (though a great deal of influence in practice). Such ‘inquisitiveness’ was strongly resisted by the Labour government, apparently on the grounds that it risked making Ministers personally responsible for far too much. But if Ministers did not control the industries they claimed to have acquired for the nation, then who did? The managerialist black hole into which great swaths of public life disappeared was no accident either. This was the inevitable result of the Labour Party’s instinctive fear of decentralisation and democracy, of the idea that there might be decisions taken beyond its own control and of which it might not approve. Better by far to leave the decisions to technocrats than to locals of another party.

The Thatcherite solution was to sell the family silver back to the family, who already owned it but understandably, at discounted prices, paid for it a second time and then re-sold at value when necessary to recover the cost. A generation later, the family are having to rent the silver back to be able to eat their dinner. Privatisation has now even reached the shores of the USA, that bastion of collectivism that never even realised just how pinko it actually was.

Initially, Thatcher’s privatisations had some decentralist characteristics. With real autonomy, local bus operators and regional electricity companies regained or acquired a sense of their own distinct identity. Boards were no longer appointed by Ministers in Whitehall but elected by shareholders, often with a substantial regional presence. But within the decade it was all going into reverse, small fry gobbled up by groups that soon went national, then international. The employee-owned ‘People’s Provincial’ in Fareham was hailed as a privatised bus company even a socialist might endorse, then conveniently forgotten about once stalked and devoured by the Aberdeen-based group First. Top managers who bought their companies and then sold out walked away with millions. Simply for being in the right place at the right time. Wessex had seen nothing like it since Jack Horner stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum.

The irony of Margaret Thatcher’s ideology, like that of Enoch Powell before her, was that if you support both national sovereignty and the free market the two will one day collide. And the market will win. In winning it may even boost the national sovereignty of others who refuse to play by these loser’s rules. What was once the South Western Electricity Board is now EDF Energy, a subsidiary of the French Republic. True blue? More like sacré bleu. At least we can say that France is only next door. Other infrastructure is owned by the Spaniards (Bristol Water), the Americans (Western Power Distribution) and the Australians (Bristol Airport). Wessex Water is owned by a billionaire in Malaysia. Did Maggie envisage that?

Our Party insists upon local and regional control over everything that is locally and regionally important. At a recent policy-making meeting it was agreed that land which is publicly-owned – or becomes publicly-owned in future – should be declared inalienable. Capable of being re-assigned, free, within the public sector, yes. Capable of being leased for a fixed term, yes. Capable of ever being sold again, never. Private ownership of land must be subject to limitations on acreage and a residency qualification. We are determined to face down those who believe our communities should be up for sale to the highest bidder. Property rights are our servants, not our masters, and our vision of Wessex is of a region where they are comprehensively re-written for the public good.

There is another vision. It is the vision of the big three London parties, carrying on in cackling consensus their work of eviscerating the State. Their ultimate aim is already publicly stated – a United Kingdom that has sold everything except the police and the military. The police to protect the interests of the super-rich. The military to go wherever in the world finance capital needs a helping hand. A post-democratic State without a heart. Just two hefty armoured fists, paid for by me and you. Their vision? Our vision? Your choice!

Property & Privilege

One of the more amusing, if nonetheless unpleasant aspects of the current financial meltdown is the speed with which ardent free marketeers have rounded on the regulatory authorities for not being tough enough with them. Regulation that inhibits profits is bad, lack of regulation that fails to prevent losses is equally bad. Regulation, for its beneficiaries, is shamelessly a one-way street. Like the school bully out of his depth, the City of London is now running howling to teacher.

The so-called libertarians have got it badly wrong. Of course, there will ever be the political masochists who accept whatever consequences their ideology requires of them, but without practical solutions to real world issues they have no audience. Their gods have failed us and we no longer hearken to their sermons. It was always a cheek to argue for the end of State intervention when without State intervention to uphold the sanctity of property and contract their economic model lacked its most basic footing. Without police there is no property and without courts there is no contract. These things require a State and a democratic State will not confine itself to meeting the demands of the rich alone.

The libertarians’ greatest lie has been to link personal liberty and property, arguing unfettered property rights to be the true guarantee of democracy. History shows this to be false. Victorian Britain – before the secret ballot – saw countless cases of tenants evicted for voting against their landlord’s wishes. That was his right as landlord, but what was his right to be landlord at all? Libertarians stop the clock at now, entrenching all past gains, however made. Justice can go hang.

As a general rule, human rights begin at birth and end at death. Property rights have no such mortality. They pass onwards from generation to generation, but the origins of the chain of transmission are often deliberately obscured. Title ultimately derives from an act of conquest. Saxon dispossessed Celt, Norman dispossessed Saxon. And every honest transaction today rests on that tainted foundation. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s much-abused quip that property is theft is not far from the truth.

If property is not to be theft then it must be found a rightful possessor. And in that judgement, use value has always outweighed exchange value. Those who wish to use the land take precedence over those who wish to hoard it. That is the basis of the common law doctrine of adverse possession. A squatter’s rights have long trumped those of the paper owner who made no effort to enforce his claim. Sadly, the onward march of statutory land registration is biting deep into this ancient wisdom, so that more and more we are ‘bound in with shame, with inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds’. A fresh approach is due.

To prefer the claim of the homeless to that of the idle land speculator is not to condone the destruction of Wessex by endless population growth. Development should be controlled by the community through planning laws, because in our over-crowded region the days of putting up a shack on the common are long gone. But when farmland is sacrificed because existing homes lie empty, for no other reason than that the owner wants to keep them that way, we have a society with very warped priorities indeed. Perhaps the way forward is to give parish and town councils the right to oversee vacant land and buildings on their patch, and the power to force a sale by auction wherever they are not satisfied with the owner’s explanation. Public bodies should be as subject to this power of scrutiny as anyone else. In truth, land is never ‘owned’; all land is held as an estate under the Crown. Property is a privilege, not a right, and it should not be permissible to abuse that privilege.

The re-deification of private rights in land is one aspect of a wider loss of reality by society at large. Because our economy no longer depends on gathering, growing or making things, business has created class after class of virtual assets, which it then insists that the law should protect against anyone else wishing to do the same. Only with the State’s connivance can profit be made out of denying access to what was once free. ‘Intellectual property rights’ are the new enclosures. They do not belong in this world but in that of Alice in Wonderland. How else can one begin to characterise attempts by the U.S. Government to patent the DNA of indigenous peoples?

Copyright is the privatisation of censorship. It restricts the flow of information in a free society, slowing down cultural development. It outlaws the labour of those who do the copying, while rewarding those who have done nothing since the initial publication of their work. Nothing has been stolen but a figment of the imagination. The record company still has the master recording. The publisher still has the author’s manuscript. These are the only true assets in the industry of make-believe. There will always be a market for the genuine article, endorsed by its creator, but those who don’t want their work copied shouldn’t publish. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, no-one should expect to be paid for being flattered. The law should protect the buyer from fake goods they don’t want, not from fake goods they do want.

Copyright is a paradise for lawyers. How much copying is too much copying? Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code would have been inconceivable without the work of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln in The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail. Yet he was cleared of plagiarism because they had claimed their own, equally imaginative work as fact. Wessex-born author J.K. Rowling is estimated to be the 12th richest woman in Britain, worth £560 million. Could Harry Potter have been created without the use of the English language in which the books are written? Or without reference to the Western magical tradition? No? So can society sue JKR for its share? Apparently not. If we want continuing creativity we should remove the cotton wool from our writers, musicians, film-makers and software engineers. Why do more work if you can live off past royalties for ever and a day? Of course, their fortunes would be considerably smaller. But a world with fewer millionaire celebrities would be a world with a more balanced sense of values. Not to mention a more realistic view of the contribution any individual or corporation can actually make to the culture with which they work.

The world of money is a house of (plastic) cards. The State, while taking all the poison thrown at it, is happy to sanction the whole range of legal fictions out of which money is ‘made’ at the public’s expense. Fractional reserve banking. Limited liability. And guaranteed property rights, even in things that don’t otherwise exist. Isn’t it time we got real and left Wonderland behind?