TLIO Newsletter - Spring 2002

[The Land is Ours]

Newsletter 22 - Spring 2002




Editorial:
An Historic opportunity ..or Not?:
"Sustainable Farming, Local economy, Progressive Planning (& Land Reform?)"


This issue brings together analysis on 3 very significant events which have 
remarkably coincided at the same time. Firstly, the Curry Report on the 
Future of Farming and Food - marking a potential watershed in how we 
produce food and manage the countryside. Secondly, the DTLR's Planning 
Green Paper - a huge new chapter in planning law which will mean a radical 
overhaul of existing legislation (but which is worryingly earmarked to be 
geared in the interests of big business). Lastly, what we consider at any 
rate to be very significant, has been the release on sale of Kevin Cahill's 
new book "Who Owns Britain" - (see left).

The Curry Report's proposed phasing-out of production subsidies is long 
overdue. However, binding 'one-size-fits-all' world trade rules remain 
(though developing countries' access to our markets are overdue, their 
massive pressure to export is driven by debt and neo-colonial corporations 
like grain company Cargill; meanwhile, the UK is subject to EU/WTO 
authority on implementing local food targets on supermarkets). Supermarkets 
speak of fair-pricing, but how long will that last? Meanwhile, with 
subsidies directed to environmental targets, how can it be ensured that 
large amounts of taxpayer's money will not be siphoned off by large 
landowners? Land Reform must be the key! Related to the redistribution of 
our rightful inheritance, a genuinely progressive new planning regime could 
embrace proper criteria-based policies such as on sustainability. Then, 
more land could be freed-up to be lived and worked on (eg. land reserved 
for more self-build).

This time should be an extraordinary opportunity to harness all of these 
potentially positive new measures together. A truly successful outcome in 
each necessarily depends on them inter-relating. However, the reality is 
that New Labour's plans do not amount to anything like this kind of 
'joined-up government', being as they are both half-hearted on the one 
hand, and recklessly destructive on the other. Mark Simon Brown - 03/02


Who owns Britain?


The Land Registration Act 2002, was meant to be so dull and boring that it 
was classed as 'non contentious' and almost passed through both Houses of 
Parliament on the nod. Instead, a Lib Dem backbencher has used the act to 
persuade the Government to begin the most profound reconsideration of both 
land ownership and land registration in hundreds of years.

"The brutalité of realité" might have been a phrase coined by the late Alan 
Clark. It wasn't. But it goes a way to describe the situation within the UK 
tax system, whereby 41,000 millionaires, who pay no tax on their assets, 
receive between £1 billion and £2 billion from the public purse each year, 
to support those currently unproductive assets. That's between £24,000 and 
£48,000 per family, free and gratis, from the taxpayer. The 41,000 are that 
27% of the 147,000 families who own, as opposed to rent, about 70% of the 
UK land mass, who have assets in excess of 340 acres each. The situation of 
this group of millionaires, and of a significant number of the remaining 
147,000 land-owning families, is doubly anomalous. Most of them receive 
money from public funds by way of the Common Agricultural Programme, DEFRA 
subsidies and other tax derived sources totalling about £4 billion each year.

The first anomaly is a formal breach of the constitutional convention which 
says that if you receive public funds, then your identity is a public fact. 
Under the extraordinary arrangements for agricultural subsidy, this gravy 
train is secret. Those who receive sums of £1 million and more, and there 
are a significant number of them, have their names kept secret by the 
Government, as well as the names of all other recipients, on the grounds 
that the gravy train is "commercially confidential". Of course it is. Over 
the last ten years alone, about £40 billion has gone to this group, in 
secret. But the secrecy does not end there. The second anomaly is even more 
extraordinary than the first.

According to Michael Wills, the Lord Chancellor's Minister in the House of 
Commons, writing recently to Adrian Sanders, the Liberal Democrat MP for 
Torbay in connection with the Land Registration Act currently before 
Parliament: "The Land Registry tell me that in their estimation, about 65% 
of the acreage in England & Wales is the subject of a register of title".

The Minister goes on to say that; "This is purely an estimate because:
The Land Registry do not possess information about the total acreage of 
England & Wales;
They create titles without recording the acreage of each parcel of land 
that they register;
Their registers relate to interests in land, and there can be several 
different interests affecting some or all of the same parcel of land".

England and Wales together comprise about 37.3 million acres, which means 
that about 13 million acres are not registered in the Land Registry. Most 
of those 13 million acres are agricultural or rural landholdings and their 
owners are the recipients of about £2 billion out of the total £4 billion 
in subsidies. So a Government, which maintains the policy of its Tory 
predecessors by keeping secret from the public the names of those getting 
this huge largess from the public purse, does not itself know who the 
recipients of half the money are. And it gets worse. Later on in his 
letter, Wills tells the MP that;

"The Land Registry records are not kept in a manner which would enable the 
Registry to establish with any certainty what land was owned by a 
particular organisation or individual. There is a separate Index of 
Proprietors Names available for inspection to the person himself, or the 
police and other investigative agencies, the Inland Revenue and that 
person's receiver or executor. This searching mechanism is not available to 
Land Registry staff".

The current Land Registry for England & Wales came into formal existence 
via the 1925 Land Act, following a series of extraordinary failures to 
create a Land Registry beginning in 1875. But 77 years later, we have a 
Land Registry which serves to reveal the names of every domestic freeholder 
and leaseholder in the country, each of whom pays a tax called the 
community charge, while at the same time deliberately concealing the names 
of the owners of more than half the country, who pay no tax on their 
acreage, and who instead get a vast, tax free subsidy, mostly from the 
domestic home owners.

Adrian Sanders, and in fairness the Minister, have not let matters lie 
however. Sanders answered Will's letter by suggesting that all further 
public subsidy of any kind should be halted for land which is not properly 
registered in the Land Registry. Michael Wills responded by saying that:

"I have asked my officials to make contact with colleagues in some of the 
other Government Departments and agencies most likely to be most directly 
concerned to carry out an initial assessment of whether a condition of the 
kind you have suggested could be introduced into the terms and conditions 
of public funding schemes. I have also asked them to consider whether it is 
possible to estimate how much additional land might be brought onto the 
register in each case". As Adrian Sanders says "Its just a step, but a very 
positive step".

"Who Owns Britain" by Kevin Cahill, published by Canongate in Dec 2001 and 
available at a discount (£15) via the Canongate web site, was used by 
Adrian Sanders to prepare his intervention on the Land Registration Act. 
The book is the first systematic account, in 123 years, of land ownership 
in the UK. It includes details of the lost Domesday of 1872 - The Return of 
Owners of Land - and of the creation of the Land Registry and a county by 
county list of landowners then (1872) and now.

* The total number of agricultural landholdings in the UK and N. Ireland is 
237,000. In England & Wales it is 172,714, of which 57,000 are rented. 
There are no rental statistics for the 32,000 agricultural holdings in N. 
Ireland and there are here assumed to be owned, an assumption made by 
DEFRA, which originated these figures (as MAFF,) in 1999. The DEFRA figures 
are estimates and extrapolations, not an actual count. (NB: DEFRA is the 
new Government Dept. for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; and CLBA 
stands for the Country Landowners & Business Association..)


The Future of Farming
“Nice Work if You Can Get It"


With the recent release of both Don Curry's Policy Commission on Farming 
and Food and the Planning Green Paper, this flurry of paperwork is all 
rather reminiscent of the Barlow, Uthwatt and Scott reports of the 1940s, 
which paved the way for the Agriculture Act and the Town & Country Planning 
Act of 1947, and sealed the fate of the countryside for the next half century.

What do the next 50 years have in store for us then? At first glance, the 
Curry Report makes all the right noises. It wants progressively to do away 
with subsidies, which it says cause “distortions”, and it enthusiastically 
backs local foods, organic farming, farmers’ cooperatives, healthy eating, 
adding value on the farm, and so on.

But the members of the commission are labouring under one enormous 
handicap. The Cabinet Office did not allow them to question the 
government’s commitment to trade liberalisation, which means that they 
cannot scrutinize the role of the World Trade Organisation, nor question 
the right of supermarkets to scour the world for cheap produce to undercut 
UK farms.

The commission recognizes that no amount of value adding and 
niche-marketing will enable UK farmers to stand up to the pressures of the 
global market; so it advocates more subsidies, but environmental subsidies 
now, instead of production subsidies. Again, this is all very politically 
correct, but there is no attempt by the commission to examine what the 
“distortions” arising from these new environmental subsidies might be.

For example, they make no distinction between grants for carrying out 
environmental work (eg building dry-stone walls, or planting unprofitable 
woodland) and compensation for not carrying out harmful activities (eg not 
overstocking or over-fertilizing, or ploughing up meadows and downland). 
Yet the difference is huge. The first are payments for public works, likely 
to increase rural employment and help local economies; the second are 
little more than a protection racket.

The commission is keen on flat rate payments per hectare of land, and 
advocates, as an interim measure, paying a “grassland area payment” to 
farmers, similar to the arable area payments that already exist. If this 
happens, then virtually every landowner in the country - including 41,000 
“land millionaires” - will be receiving money from the rest of us, purely 
for the privilege of owning acres. This will put the price of land up 
making it harder for the rest of us to buy it. The grants won’t be tied to 
production, but dearer land will make our agricultural land even less 
competitive. Does this make economic sense? Is it just? Is it what the 
public wants to see? Or is it a way of rewarding influential landowners who 
have grown rich in the race to farm as unsustainably as possible? These are 
questions that the Curry Report declines to answer.

Farming & Food: A Sustainable Future, Cabinet Office, 2002; also available 
at: www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/farming

(adapted from article by Simon Fairlie)


Taking ‘Action on the Corporate Control of Agriculture’



Emerging from joint work undertaken by The Land is Ours and Corporate Watch 
on food and farming issues is a new campaign Action on the Corporate 
Control of Agriculture (ACCA).

The global crisis facing agriculture and farmers is escalating. Farmers are 
under ever increasing pressure to intensify production, squeezed by global 
grain and seed traders on the one hand and by supermarkets on the other. 
With just 155,000 farms left in the UK and predictions that over the next 5 
- 10 years there will only be around 8 - 15,000 people left farming the 
land, the need to ensure a future for people living and working on the land 
has never been more critical. This crisis in agriculture has opened a 
political space in which to build alliances between farmers and the public, 
to oppose the further corporate ownership of the food chain in the UK.

ACCA through joint work with farmers and farmers groups, aims to raise 
awareness about the negative impact of large scale, corporate food 
production, whilst also gaining public support for small scale, localised 
food production.

Central to our work is research into the UK food industry - how it works, 
who gets what, where, when and how? As well as mapping the industry looking 
at key sectors, such as the dairy industry, fruit and vegetable industry, 
organics industry and food processing industry, we are producing profiles 
on individual corporations (see below). Our first briefing - ‘What’s Wrong 
with Supermarkets?’ has just been published and this will be followed 
shortly by a briefing examining ‘The Real Causes of the Farming Crisis’. 
These briefings are aimed especially at getting people active on these issues.

Building alliances and networks can be a slow process and yet experience 
from our three pilot regional forums shows that when farmers, 
environmentalists and the wider public are given the space to listen to one 
another and explore the issues in more depth, an amazing amount of 
consensus is reached. Issues such as global trade, farm gate price v retail 
price, educating children and citizens about food production, regulation of 
supermarkets, better representation for farmers are all recurring issues. 
But it’s not just about building alliances in this country. We are working 
with radical farming movements around the world, such as Via Campesina (the 
international small farmers movement) and its European section, the 
Coordination Paysanne Européenne (CPE).

We’ve found that by breaking down stereotypes and creating spaces for 
deliberative dialogue between disparate groups, a strong network of 
resistance to corporate agribusiness amongst environmental and 
anti-globalisation campaigners, grassroots activists and farmers can be 
built in the UK, mirroring similar movements around the world. Only by 
working together and building alliances, locally, nationally and 
internationally can we hope to really tackle the root causes of the current 
crisis in food and farming and ensure sustainable food production, globally.


‘What’s Wrong with supermarkets’ Available from Corporate Watch for £1, 
ring 01865 791 391 for details.


Profiles on Tesco Plc, J. Sainsbury Plc, Asda Plc, Unilever, Nestle, 
Northern Foods Plc, Lord Haskins and Asda are available at: 
www.corporatewatch.org
Interested in organising a forum on food and farming in your area? We can 
provide financial support, resources and speakers. Please telephone 01865 
791 391.
ACCA maintains a national email discussion list called ‘Pruning hooks’, 
where subscribers can post articles and points for discussion about the 
future of farming. Discussion has ranged widely over issues such as the FMD 
crisis, sharing visions for the future of agriculture and specific 
campaigning ideas. To subscribe please contact Lucy Michaels: 
lucy at corporatewatch.org


NEW ‘Checkout Chuckout!’ DirectoryCheckout Chuckout! is a directory for 
campaigners against supermarket developments. Produced by The Land is Ours 
and Corporate Watch, this directory was first compiled in 1998 to offer 
help, contacts and details of useful publications to people fighting 
supermarket developments. With the continuing expansion of supermarkets and 
the arrival of Wal-Mart in the UK, the directory has been updated and 
includes a selection of past, present, successful and not so successful 
local campaigns. Alongside the directory of local campaigns are national 
contacts and resources and a brief overview of supermarket expansion 
policies and of the planning regulations which apply to them.

Available at: www.corporatewatch.org.uk or www.thelandisours.org or by 
telephoning 01865 791 391.


NFU Reject Curry The NFU, the organisation that represents big farmers and 
no one else, has actually rejected the Curry Report, though it protects the 
vested interest they predominantly represent very well. A fifth of farms, 
mostly the wealthy ones in this country, receive 80% of the annual 
production subsidies. But even these big farms are being screwed by the 
supermarkets they serve. For example a litre of milk in March last year 
cost 21p to produce, yet farmers were being paid 17.6p for each litre, 
while the supermarket was selling it for 35p. That’s 17.4p profit for 
supermarkets and a bill of 4.4p to the tax payer for subsidies, which means 
that we are actually subsidising the supermarkets!

(Source: Small and Family Farm Alliance).


GM seed born-to-breed GM Weeds “The Horrible Truth Reveals Itself”The dark 
forebodings of anti-GM campaigners came true recently when English Nature 
revealed new findings which showed that ‘gene-stacking’ (the accidental 
creation of new GM plants through cross-pollination) within Canadian 
oilseed rape was becoming a serious problem. The ‘volunteers’ were 
resistant to widely used herbicides and were found on every site examined, 
forcing farmers to use even more environmentally damaging herbicides.

Dr Brian Johnson, English Nature’s biotechnology adviser, said this could 
mean GM science becoming ‘self-defeating’ and failing to deliver one of its 
main promises - the use of fewer and less dangerous chemicals. “The Scimac 
code is probably inadequate to prevent gene stacking happening in Britain, 
if these crops were commercialised”, Dr Johnson added.

The Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett also admitted that the current 
160ft separation distances may not protect neighbouring crops from 
significant levels of pollution, but refused to change them, despite 
studies showing that pollen can travel for at least 3 miles. The European 
Commission recently proposed that a threshold of up to 0.7% GM seed should 
be allowed in batches of conventional crop seed. English Nature is 
concerned that if this proposal were adopted, gene stacking might occur.

(Article courtesy of Genetic Engineering Network, taken from the Spring 
2002 issue of ‘Genetix Update’. For more info: www.togg.org.uk)


Review of the Planning Green Paper


The DTLR published a Green Paper on proposals for changing the planning 
system (published 12/12/01). Despite some genuine improvements included, 
the overall weight of the Green Paper is towards the restriction of genuine 
community/environmental safeguards and fast-tracking procedures to favour 
the commercial development lobby. The proposed departure from ‘Third Party 
Right of Appeal’ is a very worrying development.

Summary of Main Proposals in the Green Paper:
Changes in Development Plans
The new “Local Development Framework”, intended to replace site-specific 
local plans as well as structure and unitary development plans, will be 
based around a core of criteria-based policies and detailed community-based 
action plans. What will this mean in practice? It will mean that 
site-specific policies will only be formulated where necessary. Business 
planning zones (also proposed in this Green Paper) will be set up where no 
planning permission would be needed. National Planning Guidance will become 
less detailed, and PPG7 (the government guidance which lays down rules for 
allowing agricultural dwellings) will be reviewed within 2 years. But will 
this mean that rural development will be permitted over a wider area whilst 
strictly controlled by environmental impact assessment, meaning an end to 
speculation (‘land banking’) by volume builders whose actions inflate land 
prices? The fear is that the Government won’t introduce strong enough 
sustainability criteria.


Making things Easier for Big Business
The Government intends to take major infrastructure projects out of the 
public inquiry system and instead get them passed in Parliament (i.e. by a 
government majority kept in line by whips), the argument being that it 
wants to speed up planning decisions of strategic national importance. This 
proposal moves away from the system of Public Enquiry where the views of 
local people were ridden over rough-shed, (the classic example being 
Heathrow Terminal 5 which took a staggering 10 years, a delay caused more 
by the millions thrown into the process by corporate lawyers than by the 
legitimate concerns of people living in the flight path). Instead, the move 
towards this new system of approval through Parliament where democratic 
accountability is based upon the tenuous case that parliamentarians 
represent local people will mean that this “ride” over the views of local 
opinion will be much smoother. In short, this proposal views local people 
as a hindrance to democratic decision-making. A more streamlined and 
democratic alternative change would be to simply limit the amount of money 
that could be spent by lawyers within the current system of Public Enquiry 
(why, after-all, Parliament is now considering a limit on private donation 
to political parties!)

However, the most worrying departure from the current system within this 
Green Paper is the proposal to remove the ‘Third Party Right of Appeal’, a 
measure which has traditionally put objectors with special interests to a 
proposal (such as environmental groups) on an equal footing with 
developers. Third Party Right of Appeal is supported by an unprecedented 
variety of interest groups, ranging from FOE, CPRE, the Town & Country 
Planning Association, human rights lawyers, and the Civic Trust.


Increasing Public Participation
For example, a statement of Community Involvement, written into the local 
plan - sorry, Local Development Framework - which large-scale developments 
would have to comply with. Sounds good, but 90% of applications will be 
delegated to officer level and determined within a shorter time period.


Heavier Enforcement Sanctions
The Government wants to review the law which states that development 
without planning consent is not an offence; and to apply punitive charges 
for retrospective applications. These proposals are probably not aimed at 
poor people living in shacks, caravans and benders, but may turn many such 
people into offenders. The Land is Ours is strongly opposed to them.

(NB: DTLR stands for the new Department for Transport, Local Government and 
the Regions)

Input to campaign via campaign mailing list: 
http://www.onlincam.freeserve.co.uk/planpaper.html
Planning Green Paper Link: 
http://www.planning.dtlr.gov.uk/consult/greenpap/greenind.htm

(article adapted from Chapter 7 response to Green Paper)


Scottish Executive Embraces Sustainability:The Development Department of 
the Scottish Executive have just released a draft consultation called 
“Planning for Housing”, which encouragingly makes a very serious attempt at 
incorporating high sustainability criteria. In what appears to be the 
Scottish equivalent of PPG3 (only far better), the draft lists key 
components such as ‘Ecological Housing’, where it states that low impact 
development can provide both economic and environmental benefits, and also 
‘developments using innovative energy-efficiency techniques’. It states 
that “proposals should be carefully assessed against specified sustainable 
development criteria” 
sounds like they’ve been reading TLIO’s “Defining 
Rural Sustainability”, doesn’t it!



The Diggers Trail

According to the diggers trail group there will be a walk along the now 
complete Diggers trail of 2 - 3 hours on 1st April 2002: Contact Tony on 
07961 460171 or 0117 944 6219 for details nearer the time.

Plans for a grand opening of the Diggers Trail around St. George’s Hill 
have been delayed for a few months waiting for a convenient time for Tony 
Benn to perform an opening ceremony. The idea is to have a vintage bus tour 
around the various sites marked by the trail with refreshments to mark the 
trail’s inauguration sometime this spring or summer.

The Diggers trail has boards up at the following five sites:
St. Mary’s church Walton: where the Diggers were imprisoned by landowner 
Francis Drake.
Cobbett’s Hill: site of the Diggers memorial stone unveiled in December 
2000 by stonemason Andrew Whittle.
St George’s Hill: Byfleet Road by the bus museum.
Cobham town centre: many of the diggers came from Cobham.
Little Heath: This is where the Diggers moved after having their camp on St 
Georges Hill destroyed in August 1649. They lived here for nine months to 
April 1650 and had several run-ins with Parson Platt.

Further information and copies of the Diggers Trail leaflet can be obtained 
from Elmbridge Museum - Church Street, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 8DE.


Review: Seminar on Sustainable taxationOrganised by the "progressive 
Forum", at the Town & Country Planning Association, 18/01/02

Addressing this topic were Charles Secrett (FoE), Mike Rowbotham ( monetary 
reform campaigner & author of 'Grip of Death' & 'Goodbye America'), Jean 
Lambert (Green MEP) and Tony Vickers (the Henry George Foundation). Concern 
was expressed at the nature of the present taxation regime which inhibits 
the progress of sustainability. Pollution, exploitative land use, energy 
inefficiencies continue, with no disincentives via taxation.

Charles Secrett made the point that environmental tax reforms were not just 
about the 'polluter-pays' principle, but also include carrot-incentives, 
such as credits to reward resource efficiencies, arguing that if 
environmental tax packages are modelled wrongly, they can be very 
regressive (eg: Norman Lamont's fuel tax escalator), Land value taxation 
(LVT) was cited by Tony Vickers and Jean Lambert as a potential component 
of sustainable taxation, with huge socio-economic relevance particularly as 
President Blair juggles the private-public finance conundrum.

However, Mike Rowbotham went on the argue how monetary reform supersedes 
LVT, since reforming the tax base is altering the composition of 
redistruibuted revenues, whereas monetary reform is altering the 
composition of the very source of money creation (as the deby-based money 
system which exists within all economies in the world means that bank-loans 
supply virtually the entire money supply).

The explanation was given that while 97% of the money used by society is 
bank-created book-entry debt (loans), the basis of the system which is 
continuous borrowing (money created parallel to its repayment) means that 
as more always has to be found for repayment than has been loaned due to 
interest charges, so further lons have to be made by the banks for enough 
economic activity to take place in an economy to generate enough money to 
make this happen. Therefore, it is this constant scarcity of money which 
drives forward financial capitalism, making the point that if abundance 
were ever allowed to be met, then finance-capitalism would collapse in 
unredeemable debts! Rowbotham argued that through reducing banks ability to 
loan out money, governments could issue more debt-free currency which could 
be used to pay for public investments like the London Underground. He 
suggested that what he is advocating in this move away from the bank-loan 
system as the money-supply mechanism is nothing short of a fundamental 
reform of the global economy. Rowbotham advocated a "judicious approach to 
LVT", rejecting its universal applicability, arguing that tax on actual 
wealth is better than tax on 'potential wealth'.


Your Royal Piousness!

In mid-November 2001, Prince Charles publicly stated that “People should be 
buying their produce locally, and farmers should be marketing their produce 
locally”. We can exclusively reveal to readers that the very same week when 
our Heir to the Throne made these very publicly vocalised highly 
commendable pronouncements, a friend of someone in the TLIO network was 
responsible for transporting 42 lambs from the Royal Estate at Broadfield 
Farm in Tetbury, Gloucs. to Braintree in Essex. What was that about local 
marketing?

Diary:



8th - 19th April, Holland: “Resistance is Fertile” the Sixth meeting of the 
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in the Hague. After years of 
negotiations, the CBD will soon have 2 legally binding international 
protocols - the Biosafety Protocol and “The Law of the Seed” (International 
Undertaking.) Neither currently has the power to stop the spread of GMOs, 
protect farmers rights or stop finite resources being plundered for profit. 
www.resistanceisfertile.org
13th April, Brighton: Rally and March against Factory Farming. Noon at the 
level, Brighton. VIVA! 12 Queen Sq, Brighton BN1 3FD, tel: 01273 777688.
Tues 16th April, London: The Case for Council Housing, a Pre-Budget 
Briefing for MPs, Tenants and Trade Unionists. Organised by council tenants 
organisations and trade unions. Venue: House of Commons. Contributors 
include: Austin Mitchell MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Mick Graham GMB. For more 
details, e-mail: info at defendcouncilhousing.org.uk or phone: 020 7987 9989
17th April, Global Day of Action for Farmer’s Struggle: (called by Via 
Campesina: www.viacampesina.org). To find out more, email - rif at gn.apc.org 
or phone GEN on 020 7272 1586 for leaflets or info.
21st - 29th April, London - Nkrumah Week: The African Liberation Support 
Campaign with the support of the Afrika Studies Centre of the University of 
East London is running a series of eight workshops at venues across London, 
with a main event on Saturday 27 April, to commemorate the 30th anniversary 
of the death of the first president of Ghana and Pan-Africanist, Dr. Kwame 
Nkrumah, entitled “Against globalisation to reclaim the fountainhead of 
Pan-Africanism”. For details of venues and more information about the event 
P.O. Box 21266, London W9 3YR Tel 020 8223 4559.
Mon 6th May: May Day/International Workers Day. For events happening in 
North and South London: Tel 07786 716 335, festivalofalternatives at yahoo.com 
www.ourmayday.org.uk.
Sat 18th May: The 28th ANNUAL LEVELLERS DAY. Warwick Hall Garden, Burford, 
Oxon. Theme: “Space, Peace or War”. Guest Speakers: Bruce Kent (CND), 
Lindis Percy (Peace Activist and US base invader). Special Guest - Tony 
Benn. Admission £8
1st-2nd June: World Food Summit, Rome.
Sat 8th June: Strawberry Fair. Midsummer Common, Cambridge. Admission free. 
Tel: 01223 560160 E-Mail: enquiries at strawberry-fair.org.uk 
www.strawberry-fair.org.uk