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.

Joined-up Looting

Plans to sell off forestry land have been put on hold as the Coalition confesses that it misjudged the public mood. The plans will be back. All three of the main London parties are committed to continuing privatisation in order to fund big giveaways to their respective backers.

The great fire-sale is driven by five key principles.

The first principle is that if it makes money, it must be sold to the bankers. In the case of forestry, the trees come with a very helpful tax regime attached. The State, having lost the revenue and given away the capital receipt, must then raise taxes to fill the gap. Bankers know how to arrange their affairs to avoid paying those.

The second principle is that if it doesn’t make money, it must be sold to a voluntary group, under the threat that it will otherwise be shut down. These groups need to raise capital to finance the purchase and any future investment. Banks extract interest in return. If, or rather when, the voluntary groups fail to balance the books, the banks can repossess and sell the assets. The failure of the voluntary groups will provide baseline data about costs that will then enable multi-national corporations to price their bids for State funding to provide any services still deemed vital.

The third principle is that taxes must remain high, even though services are in decline, in order that the State may continue to shovel money into bankers’ pockets. Banks will continue to make profits on debts they have created out of nothing. The UK’s government debt is now £2.32 trillion, of which the cost of bailing out Lloyds Group and RBS accounts for £1.3 trillion. Smaller banks are already included in the larger figure. RBS lost £1.1 billion last year but paid out £950 million in bonuses anyway.

The fourth principle is that property rights must continue to take precedence over human rights. David Cameron recently set out his vision of a State that has withdrawn from everything except provision of the coercive power – the police, the intelligence services, the judiciary and the armed forces. The Pig Society does not extend to farming out justice to local vigilantes, nor security to foreign mercenaries. Cameron knows just enough history not to want to share the fate of Vortigern. His vision nevertheless is a starkly regressive one. The poor are to be taxed to pay for protecting the interests of the rich, not the other way around.

The fifth principle is that any opposition must be neutered, employing ever more draconian laws and sophisticated psychological manipulation to disarm any criticism of the elite consensus. The new emphasis on cyber-security is not about fighting off virus attacks on critical infrastructure but about monitoring and disrupting any organised reaction to the looting. Meanwhile, Cameron’s establishment of the Behavioural Insight Team at Number 10, building on Labour’s ‘Mindspace’ project, demonstrates the extent to which politicians from all three London parties now view voters as no better than lab rats to be subjected to ‘libertarian paternalism’.

The alternative we seek is a Big Democracy, one where the power of money to corrupt our lives is reined in and other values, like accountability, inclusiveness and stewardship, are re-asserted. It also needs to exist as of right, not as a hand-down from the PM that can be swept away at the first sign of a bad headline. This requires leaders less testicularly challenged than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, all of whom are too close by far to the City of London to take it on. Like the rest of the essentially fraudulent (but allowed-to-be-legal) globalised ‘competitive’ (reptilian) economy, the City must become a thing of the past. Its ill-gotten gains need to be redistributed to local communities to begin the work of restoring all those life-enhancing qualities that the financial class has so long despised.

The coming ecological crisis will require clear thinking about real things. Things like food, fuel, regions, resources, skills, land and clever technology. It will have no room for sociopathic bankers, and they know it. It does no harm to remind them that their crimes against humanity and against the planet will end. And will Big Bang then become Big Whimper? We shall see.

The Land is Whose?

The Forestry Commission is a big player in Wessex. Within our borders we have two of the great royal hunting forests, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and the New Forest in Hampshire, both still regulated by their mediæval Verderers’ Courts. Treasured parts of our heritage. Except that for Cameron, Clegg & Co they are just treasure. The Coalition aims to sell off much of the forestry estate in England and won’t rule out selling everything.

Locals are incensed. In the Forest of Dean a mass protest is underway, organised by HOOF – Hands Off Our Forest – which the local Tory MP, Mark Harper is pointedly snubbing. His chances of retaining his seat may now be receding faster than you can say 'timber'.

A thousand years of tradition are there to be sneered at by today’s Tories, whose promises that there’s nothing to worry about are worth precisely nothing. When the Thatcher/Major regime sold off some parts of the forestry estate, almost all of it went without any binding commitment on public access.

This time will be different, of course. The ‘Pig Society’ is all about local control. That’s if locals are willing to buy what they already own, and there are plenty of Guardian-reading muppets now running around trying to raise the money to do just that, with the wretched Woodland Trust playing the pied piper. There is a case for community ownership of forest land, but ownership by the Crown in trust for the community is not incompatible with local control, in place of centralised direction. The problem lies with breach of that trust, when politicians treat common property as a piggybank to be smashed when they run short of cash to fund a vicious foreign policy and the never-ending bankers’ banquet.

State forestry is not part of some dependency culture sprung up in the wake of an over-generous welfarism. In Wessex as in the rest of Europe it is the product of centuries of evolution. Today the forests are managed for leisure as well as commercial timber production. In the past they grew oaks for the Navy and before that housed game for the king. But ultimately, where there is no proof of purchase, they are land owned by the Crown in default of any private owner, a public resource, not simply a commercial asset.

The public estate in Wessex remains considerable, despite recent sell-offs. In 2001, Kevin Cahill published Who Owns Britain. Although errors of fact and a dubious political agenda run right through that book, it has no rival as a guide to the modern pattern of landownership in Great Britain and Ireland. Using its figures, we can work out that the Crown Estate Commissioners own 57,556 acres of land in Wessex, plus most of the foreshore and the seabed, the Duchy of Cornwall 89,380 acres, the Ministry of Defence owns or leases 153,879 acres, the Forestry Commission 131,985 acres, local authorities at least 49,239 acres. The total comes to 7% of the land area of Wessex, the equivalent of Berkshire or Oxfordshire but still far below the figures for some countries, including the supposedly 'free enterprise' USA, where the public domain covers an area larger than India. Little of our public estate is managed by those accountable locally. The main exception has been the smallholdings owned by county councils but they have been busy cashing those in. Bristol City Council is doing its best to catch up with the counties, recently publishing plans to sell off some of the city’s parks.

Land reform is off even the Labour Party’s agenda, along with all kinds of public ownership. One more reason not to vote for a party that has no idea why it exists. The result is that the land is managed not in accordance with any democratic vision but often single-mindedly for profit, with any benefits for wildlife or the landscape or the community squeezed out at needless expense by specific public subsidies instead of happening because they’re the things that ought to be happening. Psychologically, the need for public land is overwhelming. No-one, out in the country for the day, should be made to feel like a feudal vassal, welcome only as a source of revenue and deference.

In 1925, C.S. Orwin and W.R. Peel published The Tenure of Agricultural Land. They presented the case for nationalising rural land, upon the basis of a scheme which they worked out to be as decentralised as possible. “Anything”, they said, “in the nature of ‘management from Whitehall’ would be fatal”. They proposed to organise most matters on a county basis, sub-divided into districts of approximately 30,000 acres each, supplemented by a county forestry team. The figure is necessarily an average, as the need for management varies with the intensity of the agriculture in each county. But it is worth noting that in Wessex 20-30,000 acres is about the average size of a hundred, the Anglo-Saxon sub-division of a shire, and so represents some natural wisdom about the scale of economic organisation in the countryside. Other reformers have sought to take things further still, Thomas Spence’s scheme of 1775 being for inalienable parochial ownership of all land in each parish.

As we move over the course of this century ever closer to conditions of ecological emergency, so we face a choice. We can allow our land to be bought and sold, fenced off and exploited for private gain, often by those with no roots in our communities and no intention of putting down any. Or we can insist that the ‘common treasury for all’ is respected as such, managed and used accordingly.