TLIO Open Meeting, London, Sat 1st Dec NOW 3pm start!!!

[mark at tlio.org.uk]

OK, the start-time for Land is Ours Open Meeting next Saturday 1st 
December has been put forward a couple of hours earlier, and will 
commence at 3pm now (not 5pm)

Venue still the Cock Tavern pub (upstairs room), 23 Phoenix Road, 
Euston, Greater London NW1 1HB

Phoenix Road is down off Eversholt Street which runs down alongside 
Euston Station.
Streetmap Ref:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=529716&y=183016&z=0&sv=NW1+1HB&st=2&pc=NW1+\
1HB&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf


https://www.facebook.com/events/372332939524331/



TLIO Meeting: Relaunching The Land is Ours

On Sunday 21st October, the TLIO Core Group (basically the steering 
committee of the TLIO campaign who in effect have solely been the 
representatives of the campaign for many years in the absence of a 
wider formal membership), held a meeting in which all members in 
attendance with the exception of myself agreed to step aside. The 
motion to dispand the campaign was proposed, but was rejected, with no 
consensus. At the meeting, decisions were made about funding other
projects, primarily because the group had not met since January 2011 
(with the last TLIO Autumn gathering having been a year ago -8-9th Oct 
2011). We gave the Advisory Service for Squatters £2,250 (their work 
is much needed at this time), The Land Magazine a grand and Chapter 7 
took over the administration of £3000 on behalf of TLIO to work on a 
cadastral mapping project to pilot research work somewhere to create a 
DIY cadastral wiki for people in their own communities to create 
cadastral land ownership maps of regions/localities. Another was £2000 
earmarked for a new network in formation called the UK branch of Via 
Campesina.

As a result, TLIO are now in the process of regeneration. Chapter 7 - 
which has always been considered the planning-arm of TLIO concerned 
with low-impact planning and giving advice and lobbying for the right 
of those seeking to get planning permission to live on the land 
engaged in land-based livelihoods, which has made a huge contribution 
in getting Low Impact Development recognised in planning policy 
regionally, particularly in Wales - remains, run by Simon Fairlie. It
remains attached to TLIO.

Simon and myself believe that the mapping initiative is a clever, 
focused activity that can take forward the TLIO campaign in an 
innovative targeted way. We gave that 3 grand to Chapter 7 for that 
because Simon, who in The Land Mag started a 'Who Owns Britain 
competition' for people to write in with their summaries of land 
ownership patterns in their local areas, is best placed to work on the 
project and find a researcher to do something on it


Call Out statement:

The Land is Ours, originally founded by George Monbiot and others in 
Oxford in 1995, is a powerful name and stills holds a resonance with 
people. We are probably most synonymous with land occupations that we 
carried out in the mid to late 1990s such as Pure Genius on a piece of 
land on the banks of the Thames in Wandsworth owned by Guiness and the
occupation on a piece of land on St Georges Hill in Surrey to find a 
home for a commemorative headstone honouring the Diggers on their 
350th anniversary.

The following is an appeal for people who agree with this to give 
their support to continuing and renewing the Land is Ours campaign:

The Land is Ours Needs you!
The Land is Ours campaign has been in existence for some 17 years. It 
is a campaign that has been characterised as a direct-action campaign 
which sought to use the tactic of occupation to promote positive land 
interventions that raised issues of land inequity, environmental 
stewardship, the need for affordable housing and urban neglect.

The campaign has struggled to make an impact in recent years, with the 
exception of the work of Simon Fairlie and Jyoti Fernandez in "Chapter 
7" who have made a huge contribution in getting Low Impact Development 
recognised in planning policy regionally, particularly in Wales, and 
lobbying for the right of those seeking to get planning permission to 
live on the land engaged in land-based livelihoods.

There is a strand of opinion that believes that The Land is Ours 
should be constituted as a membership organisation with proper 
electoral accountability, not a loose affiliation characteristic of 
many anarchist groups which often fall victim to the tyranny of 
structurelessness. It has also been said that TLIO needs to canvass 
support from beyond the confines of from where it has traditionally 
sought it's support (ie. reaching out further into civil society such 
as housing tenant groups, trade union members, students ..etc, and not 
confined to an email list and an advert in The Land Magazine).

That campaign, a few of us firmly believe, must go beyond how Marion 
Shoard once described TLIO as merely a "ginger group". Our vision for 
TLIO is of a robust lobbying campaign, that seriously takes on the 
issue of land reform, and advocates solutions to bringing it about via 
thorough policy review which may or may not include ideas such as land
value taxation or variants thereof.

That vision for a robust lobbying campaign would use the following 
analysis in it's arsenal:

In Britain, land passed into the hands of a tiny minority of owners 
and decision-makers centuries ago. The enclosures and the clearances 
were the culmination of a thousand years of land alienation. The UK 
has 60 million acres of land – 70% of this is now owned by 0.26% of 
the population. The English agricultural plot is owned by just 144,000 
people or families, and costs the taxpayer about £2.2 billion a year 
to support.

So, whilst just 6,000 or so landowners, mostly aristocrats, own about 
40 million acres, two thirds of the UK - 60 million people - live in 
24 million dwellings. These 24 million dwellings sit on approx 4.4 
million acres (7.7% of the land). Hereditary landowners have been 
adept at protecting their interests  making plentiful land look 
scarce, and being paid from the public purse to keep it that way. They 
perpetuate exclusion, while bolstering the cultural power of landed 
wealth by their constant engendering of images of continuity and 
tradition (as though only ruling class people had such things). 
Institutions such as the National Trust, whose remit and reach is 
commendable, operate in a context which further crystallises this 
notion protecting vast landed estates as museums of Britain's glorious 
past of vast land inequity and exasperating levels of wealth 
inequality, celebrated for the rest of the world to follow.

However, the increasing trend since the Second World War, particularly 
since the liberalisation of the market economy since the early 1980s, 
has been the trend towards land & wealth being increasingly swallowed 
up by faceless corporations.

As a first step, a robust UK land rights campaign would seek to 
campaign for a freely-accessible public registry of land ownership, 
leading to community ground rents. TLIO advocates doing this in words 
only so far. Secondly, the political agenda for land reform needs to 
be advanced through effective campaigning, including political 
lobbying and, ideally, public rallies.

This hegemony of land wealth in the possession of a privileged few and 
an increasingly upward trend in land values - especially in recent 
years - is leading to ever greater land concentration with land an 
increasing store of wealth. However, the trend is further crystallised 
by the aggressive machinations of free market capitalism and market 
entities with disproportionate market power, which have dealt smaller 
farmers such a harsh deal in recent years. The Common Agricultural 
Policy farm subsidy system has allowed the largest farmers to 
withstand the harsh realities of the market and the disproportionate 
power and market concentration of the supermarket and agribusiness 
sector whilst farmers in hoc to it are subject to greater vertical 
integration of the food production process.

In terms of agriculture, TLIO already robustly asserts that "a 
farmer-centred approach is the key to the attainment of sustainability 
in both developed and developing countries." ( Agenda 21 from 1990 Rio 
Summit). The solution: absoultely not delinking subsidies from food 
production, but re-orienting them towards low impact, high employment 
uses of the land, such as smallholder organic agriculture, as well as 
environmental stewardship, by way of all payments made conditional on
more exacting, rigorous standards of land management, including 
measures to protect nature, forbid harmful land management, protect 
important landscape and cultural assets, beneficial standards of 
animal welfare and sustainable food production, and for suitable land 
to be used for food and other natural resource production.

Those of us who want to grow food and tend to the land in a 
sustainable way should be enabled by central and local government 
policies. So, continuing to lobby for these demands and shape central 
and local government policy, in particular planning policy, to make 
provision for them will continue to also be a priority as it has been 
through Chapter-7's ongoing work.

If you support what has been said above, we wish you to support what 
we have said in time before the next TLIO Core Group meeting, where 
the issue of the future of TLIO campaign is to be discussed, so that a 
groundswell of support for the ideas we advance here may carry 
substantial weight. If you agree, please SIGN YOUR NAME AND AREA WHERE 
YOU LIVE AND SEND YOUR EMAIL TO: info AT tlio.org.uk

We hope you can join with us, to finally take forward this landrights 
campaign to a place where it properly deserves to be!
Yours Sincerely,
Mark Brown