Mammoth Landholdings: The Kleptogarchy part 23

Mammoth Landholdings

The 20 largest landowners[1] in the UK own more than 11% of the entire land area. Just the top five possess over 8%. They are the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence, the Crown Estate, the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The major private landowner in 2018 was the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, with over a quarter of a million acres, but the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen may have caught him up. Mr Povlsen, owner of clothing chain Bestseller and the largest shareholder in fashion company ASOS, is a dedicated rewilder and acquires land to return it to its natural state. There are eight individuals and family holdings in the largest 20, including five ancient dukedoms – Buccleuch and Queensberry, Atholl, Westminster, Cornwall and Beaufort.

Mammoth landholdings are built up through conquests, advantageous marriages, favourable laws, and deference among the landless classes, who are often fed the thought that if only they worked hard and achieved financial success, they too could join the landed gentry. Hard work is not inevitably the route to landed proprietorship. Financial riches accompany birth in or marriage into affluent families, luck in speculation, or genius in invention. Wealth brings land, homes, trust funds, and influence to protect ownership of these and other assets into the future. Social reformers or agitators, depending on your point of view, protested against the privatisation of the countryside, but with very little success. In the 19^th century radicals like Herbert Spencer referred to the removal of land rights as a crime:

“It may by-and-by be perceived that equity utters dictates to which we have not yet listened; and men may then learn that to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth is to commit a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.”[2]

Spencer reasoned that access to land is an inalienable right, a viewpoint that most politicians of the time disregarded. And still do. Communist revolutions in the 20^th century led to land nationalisations notably in the USSR, China and North Korea, but control lay not with the farm workers but with the government chain of command. The changes by and large did not benefit the rural proletariat. In China between 1958 and 1961 over 15 million died of starvation, perhaps up to 55 million. Stalin’s enforced collectivisation led to severe famine in Ukraine, where maybe four million died. Cuba collectivised too after the 1959 revolution, but private farmers were able to hold up to 160 acres each, and independent co-operatives involved all members in decision-making. This model would surely have achieved greater prosperity had it not been for the continuing embargo by the United States, starving the island nation of funds for investment.

While wholesale land nationalisation is unlikely to succeed because it is too dramatic, too divisive, there need to be routes into farming for newcomers whose families are not landowners. In the UK, now separated from the European Union, the exorbitant price of rural land is a steep barrier. Land is a tax shelter if it is farmed or has commercially managed woodland on it. Favourable tax treatment generally extends to the farmhouse too, and to cottages even if they are let, provided the letting business is subsidiary to the land-based activities.

The argument for exempting farmland from Inheritance Tax, particularly, is so that farmers can leave their acres and buildings to their legatees without also leaving a bill for up to 40% of everything above £325,000. While favourable to existing farmers, the policy does nothing immediate to encourage aspiring new entrants, whose problems are summarised by the Access to Land Network:

“New entrants in the UK face a range of problems in relation to land that are exacerbated by the UK’s highly priced and unregulated land market. Typically (although not always), the demand from new entrants is for smallholdings as entering on a small scale can allow an individual to test a business model and slowly build markets.

— Land prices prohibit new entrants from buying land

— The lack of a comprehensive land registry means it is difficult to identify owners

— Land in rural areas is often not advertised, so without family or community connections new entrants find it hard to access ‘word of mouth’ opportunities

— New entrants often start out on very small areas of land limiting the potential to earn a sustainable livelihood

— Smaller areas of land are often more expensive

— New entrants tend to look for land in their own locality, due to lack of funds to move, or dependency on alternative (or partner’s) incomes.

— Local authority land in rural areas is managed along very conservative lines so new entrants with alternative plans (organic, CSA, niche markets) are not taken seriously

— Lack of affordable housing in rural areas is a major issue for new entrants (indeed for farmers generally).[3]

Planning law in England, particularly, has a presumption against ‘development’ in the countryside. This presumption, combined with the chronic shortage of affordable homes, limits the creation of new farms. The restrictive regulations also work against farmers who want to retire but stay living on the land, because it is often a costly and complicated process to obtain permission to build a new home for the successor farmer. There used to be old farm buildings suitable for conversion, but few remain. They have been converted for alternative uses under official farm diversification policies.

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[1] The compilation of landholdings is from a list drawn up by abcfinance.co.uk and cross-referenced. https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/who-owns-the-uk/, accessed January 27^th 2022.

[2] ‘The Right to Use the Earth’ p.143 in Social Statics by Herbert Spencer, 1865, D Appleton & Co, New York.

[3] ‘The United Kingdom’ by Rachel Harries and Tom Carman, in Europe’s New Farmers, Access to Land Network, September 2018. https://www.accesstoland.eu/Access-to-land-for-new-entrants, accessed April 27^th 2022.

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