Book Review: The New Enclosure By Brett Christophers – The Sale Of Public Land

[Tony Gosling]

Book Review: The New Enclosure By Brett 
Christophers – The Sale Of Public Land In Neoliberal Britain

<http://tlio.org.uk/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review-the-sale-of-public-land-in-neoliberal-britain/>13Feb2019 
<http://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>TONY GOSLING 
<http://tlio.org.uk/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review-the-sale-of-public-land-in-neoliberal-britain/#respond>LEAVE 
A COMMENT

Since the 1979 dawn of Thatcherism, the state has 
sold 10% of Britain’s land, and 50% of its public 
land. Why is no one scandalised?
http://tlio.org.uk/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review-the-sale-of-public-land-in-neoliberal-britain/

Will Self – Thu 6 Dec 2018

<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/06/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review>
[]


If you’re someone who’s interested in Britain – 
and I mean Britain tout court: the whole 80,823 
square miles of its physical existence – then 
this is a book you must read. If, further, you’re 
any kind of student of the nation (its politics, 
its social forms, its economic particularities) 
then Brett Christophers’ painstaking survey of 
land privatisation since the Thatcher era will 
tell you many things you already know. But it 
will also reveal how all these things you already 
know are, in fact, underpinned by a single terra 
incognita – in this case a literal one. For, 
after painstakingly scrutinising the evidence, 
and crunching the numbers, Christophers arrives 
at this extraordinary estimate: since 1979, no 
less than 10% of the land area of Britain has 
been sold by the state – in all its various 
guises and incarnations – to the private sector.

What land exactly are we talking about here? 
There’s certainly been a great deal of Forestry 
Commission land shed (at its peak, in 1981, it’s 
estimated that some 10% of Scotland was owned by 
the commission), although not as much as you 
might expect. And there is the land associated 
with the formerly nationalised industries – 
railways, coal, steel, water etc. Local 
authorities have notably allowed schools to build 
on their playing fields, and allotments to be 
concreted over, while the NHS, since the 
establishment of the so-called internal market, 
has disbursed itself of great swatches of the 
green and pleasant stuff, together with assorted 
buildings. As a result, some trusts now find 
themselves in the invidious position of having to 
buy back land to build hospitals on. As do some 
of those councils with the temerity to start 
building social housing again, because, of 
course, the land beneath the properties Margaret 
Thatcher gave their tenants the “right to buy” 
has been flogged off as well. So has a lot of the 
Ministry of Defence’s estate – old aerodromes and 
redundant firing ranges – but Christophers 
devotes considerable space to the utter fiasco 
attending the sell-off by the MoD of its 
residential properties. I could go on: suffice to 
say we’re talking billions of pounds here, 
approximately 400 of them. Christophers estimates 
total land privatisation sales to exceed the 
government’s bail out of RBS by a factor of 12.

This is the “new enclosure” of Christophers’ 
title: a transfer of rights to land comparable to 
the great centuries-long alienation of the 
so-called “commons” that constituted – for Marx 
at least – the “primary accumulation” of 
capitalism. We’re all familiar with the 
narratives associated with these original 
enclosures. For boosters, civilisation as we know 
it was born out of putting up the fences and 
stopping the peasantry from grazing their 
livestock. Christophers is at pains to 
distinguish between the alienation of rights 
involved in these historical enclosures (which 
didn’t necessarily entail transfer of title), and 
the new ones, where ownership is of the essence. 
In both instances, however, the rationale has 
been increased efficiency of resource exploitation.

The grand narrative of liberal progress, from 
improved agriculture, to investment in new 
industrial processes, to the giddy elevation of 
the City’s glassy epitomes of purely financial 
capitalism, arguably rests on this very prosaic 
footprint: land. As for neoliberalism, 
Christophers, after considering the available 
options, plumps for privatisation itself as its 
defining element. If privatisation, he writes, 
“is indeed the cardinal feature of British 
neoliberalism, then the biggest privatisation of 
them all, that of land, is arguably the country’s 
seminal political-economic development over the 
past four decades”. Why then, do we know so 
little about it – especially given we Britons are 
currently going through such a grand public 
convulsion regarding our sovereignty?

Christophers acknowledges the pioneering work of 
the late Doreen Massey (to whom his book is 
dedicated), whose analysis of land tenure in the 
period immediately preceding Thatcher’s 
privatisation drive sets the scene for what 
ensued. Massey was quick to understand that land 
was becoming “financialised” before the term was 
even coined – quick, also, to grasp its 
implications for both the commonwealth and individual rights.

That her initial work wasn’t taken further – or 
was developed only sporadically – is in large 
part, Christophers suggests, due to secrecy. The 
parties involved in the land privatisations have 
made no effort to publicise them. What’s more, 
while a vast array of state organisations have 
been charged with selling off their land to the 
private sector few have kept comprehensive 
records. This, perhaps, shouldn’t surprise us. 
The underlying pattern of land ownership in 
Britain has always been weirdly opaque, with no 
mandatory and centralised registration of title 
as there is in other countries. You don’t have to 
be a conspiracy theorist to see something 
sinister in this: Britain’s landlords are 
blatantly accorded more political power than the 
dispossessed. Christophers estimates that a 
quarter of currently sitting MPs are landlords of 
one sort or another, and avers that the most 
radical measure introduced by the Blair 
government was undoubtedly the abolition of the 
hereditary peers’ right to sit in the House of 
Lords, because this represented the last overt 
linkage between ownership and suffrage. But then 
casting a vote isn’t the only way of making the 
political weather – Christophers tellingly 
observes: “There is a clear symmetry or alignment 
between input (lobbying) and output (land 
privatisation and its beneficiaries) that is impossible to ignore or dispute.”

Land and power have been inextricably bound up 
with each other throughout British history, 
certainly since William of Normandy claimed 
ownership of the entire landmass by right of 
conquest. We can see the attenuation of 
monarchical and aristocratic power writ into law 
in the form of successive Reform Acts, which 
lowered the property requirement for suffrage – 
see it also in the large scale acquisitions of 
public land that began with the first world war, 
then continued throughout the 20th century, up 
until the Thatcherite climacteric.

If their justification for the big sell off was 
to invoke the “hidden hand” of the market as an 
agent of greater efficiency – both as an 
exploiter of the land’s resources, and as a means 
of signalling optimal investment opportunities – 
then the Thatcherites really didn’t know their 
Adam Smith. Christopher’s, by contrast, quotes 
gleefully from The Wealth of Nations: “As soon as 
the land of any country has all become private 
property, the landlords, like all other men, love 
to reap where never they sowed, and demand a rent 
even for its natural produce.”

An arch-liberal of the 19th century, John Stuart 
Mill, was yet more pointed: the landlords “grow 
richer, as it were, in their sleep, without 
working, risking or economising. What claim have 
they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches?”

So acute was Smith’s diagnosis of the problems 
associated with a market in land – namely, 
monopoly practices, followed inevitability by 
price volatility – that Christophers observes 
there could have been no Marx without him. (And 
it’s worth recalling that the first demand made 
in The Communist Manifesto is for the 
nationalisation of all land.) Far from private 
landowners utilising land more efficiently, and 
thereby boosting the overall economy, 
Christophers demonstrates that privatisation 
leads to the inversion of the so-called “tragedy 
of the commons” (the idea that if a community 
shares the ownership of something, nobody bothers 
to maintain it), because in their pursuit of the 
highest possible rents they restrict everyone 
else’s opportunity to enjoy social amenities. 
Taking the long view, it’s easy to see that the 
privatisation of public land since 1979 has 
heralded the beginning of the end of public space 
itself – if by that is meant the civic and rural 
spaces enjoyed by a notional “public”.

Christophers isn’t the only one to have addressed 
these troubling developments – more than a decade 
ago, Anna Minton’s Ground Control offered a 
prescient view of the impact of neoliberalism on 
urban space; and the sell-off of Britain’s once 
enviable stock of public housing has been well 
catalogued by James Meek in Private Island. 
Christophers points out that the most valuable 
element of a council property is usually the 
ground it stands on – as it is with many other 
properties: and this is because permission to 
build remains extant. There were measures in the 
past to ensure that the increased value of land 
zoned for construction would be shared by all – 
the so-called “betterment” levy, enshrined in the 
1947 Planning Act – but the landlord interest 
soon saw to its abolition. In its place we have 
instead the land-banking practised by the 
so-called “big six” British house builders, as 
they drip-feed the market with a view to 
maximising their shareholders’ profits.

A rentier economy (Christophers uses the term 
unapologetically) is driven by profits, which 
have increased in real terms as the poor have 
been denied social housing and instead compelled 
to pay increased rates for ageing private stock. 
Setting to one side the scandal involved in quite 
so much land being shed – and often at prices 
well below market rates, given that if a seller 
is compelled, they’re hardly in a position to 
haggle – this transformation of the national 
wealth struck me as at once utterly bizarre, and 
strangely predictable. It’s a rule of 
contemporary economics that the sort of annual 
growth rates historically required to make 
Britain great were in the region of 6-7%; in the 
past we managed these mostly by ripping off stuff 
belonging to poorer people in other parts of the 
world, or by selling them stuff we’d made using 
equipment they didn’t have. But nowadays such 
comparative “advantages” no longer obtain, while 
the stock market has continued to decline, as 
have the bond yields of chronically indebted 
western nations. So it seems that in order to 
maintain the necessary returns on capital, we’ve 
resorted to a weird form of auto-cannibalisation: 
forcing our least advantaged to pay rents that, 
serendipitously, have increased by 6-7% per annum 
since 1979. Meanwhile, the rentier class keep 
right on reaping where never they sowed.

<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/06/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review>• 
The New Enclosure is published by Verso. To order 
a copy for £17.60 (RRP £20) go to 
guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free 
UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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'From South America, where payment must be made with subtlety, the 
Bormann organization has made a substantial contribution. It has 
drawn many of the brightest Jewish businessmen into a participatory 
role in the development of many of its corporations, and many of 
these Jews share their prosperity most generously with Israel. If 
their proposals are sound, they are even provided with a specially 
dispensed venture capital fund. I spoke with one Jewish businessmen 
in Hartford, Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown several 
years before our conversation, but with Bormann money as his 
leverage. Today he is more than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the 
community with a certain share of his profits earmarked as always for 
his venture capital benefactors. This has taken place in many other 
instances across America and demonstrates how Bormann's people 
operate in the contemporary commercial world, in contrast to the 
fanciful nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much "literature."

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish participation in Bormann 
companies that when Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the Jewish and German 
communities of Buenos Aires. Jewish leaders informed the Israeli 
authorities in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again 
because a repetition would permanently rupture relations with the 
Germans of Latin America, as well as with the Bormann organization, 
and cut off the flow of Jewish money to Israel. It never happened 
again, and the pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an Argentinian safe haven, 
protected by the most efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.'
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