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Resurgence Magazine, Issue 215, November/December 2002
Colin Ward enjoys a new book which seeks to uncover the hidden truths of landownership in the UK and the Irish Republic.
Book Review:
Who Owns Britain, Kevin Cahill, Canongate Books, 2001.
Incredibly, it is sixty years through the accidents of conscription, that I was first in Scotland; originally in Glasgow and then in the Orkney islands. When invited into a friendly home I used to notice, on the family's bookshelf, first a little red book from the previous century with the title Our Old Nobility, explaining how a bunch of brigands had established their tenure over most of that country's land. The second book I often saw was Our Noble Families by the then celebrated politician Tom Johnston, similarly seeking to expose the Scottish peerage as (in the words of the historian T C Smout) "bandits and rack-renting monsters".
The issue has dropped out of politics apart from three books in the last twenty years on the theme of Who Owns Scotland (McEwan 1977; Wightman 1996; Cramb 1996). Several have expanded the scope to England and Wales too, for example Marion Shoard's The Theft of the Countryside (1980) and Richard Norton-Taylor's Whose Land is it Anyway? (1982). This new and massive volume will certainly join them once the publishers have had the wisdom to re-issue it as a paperback that actual fits the shelves of ordinary readers.
Kevin Cahill widens the territory examined to include both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland and he explains that the last official account of Who owns Britain was a Return commissioned by Parliament in 1872 which he claims has been:
- "air-brushed out of the historic and administrative record of the UK, to the extent that it is hardly known about by anybody, including those in positions of power and influence today".
Half of his book consists of a page-by-page account of the top ten landowners in 1872 and their equivalents today, with notes on significant institutional owners such as the Church of England, Forestry Commission, Ministry of Defence and the National Trust. In the author's view this is "the most astonishing case of calculated civil deceit ever performed on a whole country". He argues that 0.28 percent of the population owns 64 percent of the UK land, but that homeowners and tenant farmers own a minuscule amount of the country and pay the bulk of the taxes - while the greater part of the vast sum paid in agricultural subsidies since the Second World War (1945) has ended up in the hands of the big landowners.
To illustrate the brutality of power in relation to land ownership, he cites the period 1990 to 1997 when over 500,000 families had their homes repossessed by mortgage-lenders, while in the same period the 157,000 wealthiest families in the UK received up to £21 billion in government subsidies. He points out that a minute fraction of this dole for the richest would have salvaged those devastated households while as he observes, "The atoms of the modern economy are its households, not its factories."
I have quoted enough to show you that Kevin Cahill's book raises issues at the heart of the discussion about the future of rural Britain.
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