OUR last answer — to the question “Is this land our land?” was No. “Our” land is owned by a ruling class of landowning, industrial and (increasingly) financial capitalists. And the relatively small amount (between 8 to 10 per cent which is publicly owned is, like our rivers, streams and atmosphere, being privatised and polluted in the interests of profit.

Land presents a paradox. It is a privatisation which dwarfs all others in value, yet today receives relatively little attention. It is less a focus of activism today than it was in 1867 when Karl Marx (or rather his translators) coined the term “land-grabbing” or in 1881 when Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, became president of the newly formed Land Nationalisation Society.

In 1909 Winston Churchill (certainly no Marxist) — declared: “Land is by far the greatest of the monopolies… the land monopolist has only to sit and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part; and that is justice!”

Churchill continued: “It is not the individual I attack, it is the system.” The 1909 “People’s Budget” argued for a 20 per cent land tax to be levied on unearned increases in land values. Nothing since has got close.

Land grabbing continues today in Britain with the privatisation of what was publicly owned land. It continues apace in Africa, Latin America and south-east Asia in a “land rush” fuelled since 2007 by the rise in food and commodity prices.

In 2015 George Osborne sold £2 billion of government shares in RBS — valued in mid-2015 at £32bn, a price itself the result of a £45bn injection of public bailout money at the height of the 2008 crisis.

The best estimate of the value of land sold is some £400bn at today’s prices — equivalent to 12 RBSs. Much of it, when sold, continues to be traded, increasing constantly in exchange value. As with all forms of fictitious capital, this speculative carousel will continue as long as the prospects for capital accumulation are maintained.

This fact presents perhaps the left’s major problem — that “the public,” the British public, is no longer significantly moved by public ownership — the one exception being the outcry over the sale of Forestry Commission land in 2010.

This presents the left in Britain with a challenge: what to do about it?

The only related policies in Labour’s 2019 election manifesto were: halting the fire-sale of NHS assets, investment in local authority-owned county farms, and creating a new English sovereign land trust to enable compulsory purchase of land at a price that excludes potential development value and reduces the attraction of “land hoarding” by developers and finance companies.

Following Labour’s defeat, Keir Starmer’s takeover, and the party’s lurch to the right, even these limited measures seem further off than ever. Ironically, however, a Labour Party pamphlet, Land For The Many (subtitled “Changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed”) can still be found on the party’s website.

Some of the recommendations for a Labour land and housing policy include:

• Transparency — all information about land ownership, control, subsidies and planning should be published as freely available data including the identities of beneficial owners.
• Land price stabilisation and tax reform, including policies to discourage land and housing from being treated as financial assets, such as a land value tax, calculated on the basis of the rental value of land, and a review of tax exemptions given to landowners.
• Community ownership and control including the creation of community land trusts and community-led housing.
• A community right to buy based on the Scottish model, in the other three UK nations.
• Compulsory sale orders, granting public authorities the power to require vacant or derelict land to be sold by public auction.

 
Other proposals relate to public open space, Green Belts, allotments, land-worker dwellings, and an extension of the planning system to cover major farming and forestry decisions.

These are accompanied by proposals for an “offshore company property tax” payable by companies based or beneficially owned in secrecy jurisdictions, to ensure that land is not used for financial speculation, tax avoidance or money laundering.

All of these in particular the demand for a land value tax promoted by the Labour Land Campaign are essentially social-democratic demands: they do not challenge the huge concentration of landed property and its use as capital — the ability to make a profit from the labour of others and they have been criticised in this paper for their “cultural timidity,” for limiting themselves to a “modernising and tweaking” of the system of property relations.

But they could make life better for the mass of Britain’s population and they give a glimpse of what might be possible in a socialist Britain.

Incidentally Marxists today are not against private property as such; Marx and Engels stated, in the Communist Manifesto: “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally but the abolition of bourgeois property.”

They continue: “Communism deprives no-one of the ability to appropriate the fruits of their labour. The only thing it deprives them of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.”

In the meantime, we need to celebrate what has been achieved to date, not least by direct action. Land has always been the focus of struggle. A great article by the Manchester Young Communist League in the Morning Star earlier this year celebrated the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout in England’s Peak District.

Led by Benny Rothman, a communist and rambler, that action is as relevant today as it was then. It led indirectly to the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which created our national parks. Fittingly the first was the Peak District in 1951.

The 1949 Act “compensated” (ie paid) landowners for the designation of their land as “access land.” It was followed by others — all the result of popular campaigns such as the 1968 Countryside Act and the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act.

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 in England and Wales gives partial public “right to roam” over land mapped as open country (mountain, moor, heath and down) or registered common land, without fear of trespassing.

Those rights are still hugely limited. For example, they apply to only about 8 per cent of England, mainly the more remote areas. This means access to land remains a postcode lottery, available to those who live near to it or can afford the cost of travel and overnight stays. Local campaigns for their extension such as Landcapes of Freedom in the South Downs and Sussex Weald continue the tradition of direct action.

Like the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act, such advances do not significantly challenge the unearned property rights of large landholders, nor the use of land as speculative financial capital which in the interests of a small but wealthy and powerful minority has deprived many citizens of secure, decent accommodation and access to open countryside and the benefits of nature. That remains a battle to be won.  
 
Much of the most recent “detective work” referred to in part one of this answer can be found in Brett Christopher's The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso) and Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land and How to Take It Back (William Collins); there’s a review in the Marx Memorial Library’s journal Theory and Struggle 121: 156-158, which is free online to Library members — see www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk where you can find details of the library’s rich ongoing programme of events including an onsite and online panel Lessons of the 2022-23 Trade Union Offensive on November 30 and the following week December 7 an onsite film screening of The Brigaders Return to mark the 85th anniversary of the return from Spain of the British International Brigade. Shrubsole’s website whoownsengland.org is well worth a visit.