The Land Is Ours Founding manifesto

[Tony Gosling]

A Land Reform Manifesto


February 22, 1995

http://www.monbiot.com/1995/02/22/a-land-reform-manifesto/

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 22nd February 1995.

The Sutton Estate, just to the west of Newbury, 
covers some of the most exalted watermeadows in 
southern England. In 1983, when I was waterkeeper 
there, the manager told me not to cut too much of 
the bankside vegetation. The estate was the 
guardian of the countryside. As such it had a 
duty to preserve its ancestral character.

In 1994 the meadows were due to be crossed by the 
four lanes of the Newbury bypass. Confident that 
I could make common cause, I was about to visit 
the estate, when the manager published his plans. 
Claiming that he was powerless to stop the road, 
he requested that he be allowed to supply the 
hardcore: he would dig out a further 100 acres of 
the meadows for gravel. Beside the road, he 
proposed building 1600 houses, a hotel and an 
18-hole golf course. As the new bypass was likely 
to fill up within a few years, he suggested that 
a second road should also pass through the estate.

Looking back, it seems that what I was told in 
1983 was prompted less by concern for the common 
heritage of humankind than by the fees the 
anglers paid to fish a tangled and difficult 
beat. As soon as a more profitable use of the 
land emerged, ancestral values were 
unceremoniously ditched. Although the manager 
claimed that his plans would answer Newbury’s 
housing needs in a coordinated fashion, it struck 
me that the estate’s guardianship of the 
countryside extended no further than the next financial opportunity.

The Sutton Estate is no worse than other 
landowners: indeed, in one respect it is 
significantly better, as it has reseeded 
watermeadows which, some years ago, were ploughed 
up. But, like all the lords of the land, its 
power to treat its property as it wishes is 
scarcely restrained. It is this that lies at the 
heart of our environmental crisis.

The roads programme, the destruction of our wild 
places and archaeological remains, the abominable 
treatment of farm animals, the persecution of 
gypsies, travellers and protestors are not the 
sources of injustice but merely its symptoms. 
Unless the environment and social justice 
movements address the control and ownership of 
land, they will for ever be playing at the margins of political change.

When William the Conqueror arrived in Britain, 
the land still belonged to its people. There were 
minor lords for whom landless peasants worked in 
return for food and protection. There were tens 
of thousands of freeholders – people farming for 
themselves and their families on small patches of 
their own land. But perhaps the majority of 
Britain was commons: land owned and used by communities.

William divided England among 180 barons who, in 
turn, handed out concessions to their followers. 
But the commons were protected: the defeated 
Saxons, though they owed both farm labour and 
military service to their new lords, were allowed 
to farm their community’s open fields and graze 
their animals on the “manorial wastes”. The king 
was canny enough to know that if he took the 
commons from the people, he could never suppress the ensuing revolution.

It was not until Henry VIII’s dissolution of the 
monasteries that large-scale dispossessions 
began. In selling their land to urban 
businessmen, he created a new, peculiarly 
rapacious landed class, which wasted no time in 
realizing the value of its assets by seizing the 
commons and evicting the commoners. The Civil War 
was essentially a battle between these new lords 
of the land and the older landed order, and the 
victory of the former accelerated the adoption of 
their methods by the latter. In the 18th and 19th 
centuries the institutionalized theft of the 
enclosures was formalized by hundreds of acts of parliament.

By the time the Parliamentary Enclosures ended, 
most of the population was living in the towns, 
many in misery and squalor, and the land was in 
the hands of a tiny number of its inhabitants. 
Today one per cent of the people own between 50 
and 75 per cent of the land. It is impossible to 
be precise, as the landlords have successfully 
resisted a census since 1875. In Scotland, the 
enclosures – or Clearances – were both more rapid 
and more complete than in England. Thousands died 
when they were dispossessed, tens of thousands 
were forcibly loaded onto ships and sent to the 
colonies. Today, half of Scotland is owned by 600 
people, and the thieves of our common inheritance 
are the undisputed lords of the land.

In January 1994, Dr Nick Fiddes, a researcher 
studying the direct action movement at Edinburgh 
University, was filming hunt saboteurs in the 
Borders when, he alleges, he was knocked over and 
beaten up by a senior hunt servant of the Duke of 
Buccleuch. He kept filming, and his footage 
includes a boot slamming past the lens and into 
his face. He took the matter to the police, who 
referred it to the Procurator Fiscal’s office, 
Scotland’s equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service.

The Crown Council, the highest legal authority in 
Scotland, instructed the Procurator Fiscal to 
drop the case. Though nominally independent, he 
complied. When Dr Fiddes attempted to find out 
why the highest powers had intervened in a minor 
assault case, he found himself repeatedly stonewalled.

The Duke of Buccleuch is Britain’s largest 
landowner. He possesses 288,000 acres in Scotland 
and Northamptonshire. Like many of the lords of 
the land he remains stupendously powerful. When 
John Major sought to appoint the chiefs of his 
police authority, the Duke was one of the men he chose.

Landowners have never relinquished their grip on 
government. Mrs Thatcher made a point of 
promoting them to her Cabinet: in the first years 
of her government, one-third of her ministers 
were landlords. Their representation in the Lords 
needs no elaboration, but it is in the rural 
district and county councils that their power is 
most naked: they have both the time and the money 
to devote to local politics, and can rely upon 
the countryside’s culture of deference. 
Landowners also chair some of Britain’s most 
powerful quangos, including those – such as the 
Countryside Commission – charged with defending us from their excesses.

Large landowners today are a mixed bunch: people 
who inherited their property or made their money 
in cities as well as pension funds and insurance 
companies. But they work, both on the countryside 
and on our representatives, as a body. In the 
last few years the Country Landowners’ 
Association has campaigned against the 
application of environmental conditions to farm 
subsidies, attempts to reduce pesticide and 
nitrate use, measures to prevent hedgerows being 
grubbed up, management plans for ancient 
woodlands, public access to the Land Registry and 
new laws against badger baiters.

But their greatest victory this decade has 
undoubtably been the trespass provisions of the 
Criminal Justice Act. These were first proposed 
by the Association in 1985, and were partly 
accommodated in the Public Order Act of 1986. 
Unappeased, the CLA continued to lobby until, 
eight years later, it achieved everything it had 
been pressing for. The new Act is another act of 
enclosure, a further assertion of exclusive 
rights by those who claim to own the land.

The landlords’ power to legislate is matched only 
by their power to destroy. The argument most 
often advanced by the CLA in favour of the 
Criminal Justice Act is that travellers damage 
hedges, fields and features of historical or 
scientific value. Yet, every year throughout the 
1990s, country landowners have overseen the loss 
of 18,000 kilometres of hedgerow. Since the war, 
they have destroyed nearly 50 per cent of our 
ancient woodlands, and, this century, they have 
ploughed over 70 per cent of our downlands.

Most distressingly, across huge areas they have 
erased the historical record. The dense peppering 
of longbarrows, tumuli, dykes and hillforts in 
what are now the arable lands of southern England 
has all but disappeared since the war. In 
response to landowners’ lobbying, the government 
continues to grant special permission – the Class 
Consents – to plough out even scheduled
ancient monuments. Features that persisted for 
thousands of years, that place us in our land, 
are destroyed in a matter of moments for the sake of crops that nobody wants.

Yet throughout this, the most destructive period 
Britain has ever known, the landlords have 
continued to portray themselves as the guardians 
of the countryside. And we, confused and 
outwitted, have believed them. One rambler, 
infuriated by the destruction of a flowering 
meadow, told me, “But it’s not the landowners, 
it’s the farmers.” Like many people in Britain, 
she associated the lords of the land with stately 
parks. These are, of course, often beautifully 
maintained and teeming with wildlife; but they 
tend to be 500 acres of pleasant greenery amidst 
10,000 laid waste by the same owner’s plough. 
Indeed the money that sustains the park comes, as 
often as not, from the destruction of its surroundings.

The power of the proprietors extends to our 
exclusion from the land. Places which, before 
enclosure, belonged to the entire community, are 
closed today to all but the owner and his family. 
Four per cent of England and Wales is still 
registered as commons, but there is a right to 
roam over only one fifth of this fragmentary 
inheritance. In the rest of the countryside, 
where, from time immemorial until the 18th 
century, everyone had a right to wander, to play, 
to enjoy God’s gifts of wildness and weather, we 
are confined to a shrinking network of public 
paths, on which we are trespassing the moment we stand still or sit down.

If we wander off those paths we are conscious of 
sinning. When caught, we accept the owner’s bogus 
arguments about damage to hedges or frightening 
game, apologize and leave. Yet this land is ours. 
The man who holds the deeds to a stretch of 
countryside has no greater moral right to that 
land than the man who wishes to visit it.

Our exclusion has several disastrous 
consequences. Without a sense of belonging to the 
land, and of the land belonging to us, we are the 
citizens of nowhere, and our alienation from our 
surroundings rebounds in the apprehension that we 
no longer belong to ourselves. Without a stake in 
the land we feel, moreover, that we have no right 
to determine what happens there. Perhaps worst of 
all, the model of enclosure which has come to 
dominate the countryside now prevails in the 
towns. City farms are turned into private car 
parks, parks into office blocks, and streets into 
shopping malls from which undesirables are 
excluded. Our government is a government of 
enclosers, whose attitudes emerge from four 
centuries of ruthless privatization.

The direct action movement is the most potent 
popular force of the 1990s, yet it has one 
fundamental and potentially fatal weakness. So 
far it has been largely responsive. The 
government proposes a road or a bill and the 
movement opposes it: the Department of Transport 
and the Home Office have set the direct action agenda.

Political change does not take place until the 
opponents of government fight for what they’re 
for, rather than simply fighting what they’re 
against. Nothing of substance will alter until we 
tackle the continued enclosure of our land.

Britain and some of its ex-colonies are the only 
nations on earth where the concept of trespass is 
understood. We must overturn this notion and 
assert a right of access to all uncultivated 
land, of the sort enshrined in law in Sweden and 
taken for granted elsewhere in Europe. We must 
reassert our rights to common spaces in towns, 
and where necessary wrest them back from the 
hands of developers. We must restrain the 
destructive power of the lords of the land with 
planning laws, so that farmers have to apply to 
the community before ploughing a virgin meadow or 
building a battery chicken house.

In Brazil, the dispossessed know how to assert 
such rights. In some places 10,000 people at a 
time have invaded a stretch of land, and the 
government, unable to restrain them, has given 
them what they want. In September, our government 
will publish a Rural White Paper, which will 
determine the future development of the 
countryside. The idea was announced at the 
Conservative Party Conference: not in the main 
hall but at the fringe meeting of the Country 
Landowner’s Association. The claws were in before 
the prey was out of its hole. If this land is to 
become a place for all of its people, it is up to us to prise that grip apart.

The first major occupation will take place on 
Sunday April 23rd. If you want to take part 
please send a stamped addressed envelope or your 
email address to: Land Reform, Box E, 111 
Magdalen Road, Oxford OX4 1RQ. E-mail: eartharc at gn.apc.org

--
+44 (0)7786 952037
http://groups.google.com/group/uk-911-truth
http://www.youtube.com/user/PublicEnquiry
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Diggers350/
http://www.reinvestigate911.org/
http://www.thisweek.org.uk/
http://www.911forum.org.uk/
"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
www.abolishwar.org.uk
www.globalresearch.ca
www.public-interest.co.uk
www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/Bristol+Broadband+Co-operative
www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1407615751783.2051663.1274106225&l=90330c0ba5&type=1
<http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf>http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf 

"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic 
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
<https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/>https://217.72.179.7/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/

Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered 
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that 
shall not be made known. What I tell you in 
darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye 
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. Matthew 10:26-27

Die Pride and Envie; Flesh, take the poor's advice.
Covetousnesse be gon: Come, Truth and Love arise.
Patience take the Crown; throw Anger out of dores:
Cast out Hypocrisie and Lust, which follows whores:
Then England sit in rest; Thy sorrows will have end;
Thy Sons will live in peace, and each will be a friend.
http://tinyurl.com/6ct7zh6  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20120824/dadfa906/attachment.html>