Guy Shrubsole explores England’s buried tradition of land reform, where less than one percent of the population owns half the land. From the radical Diggers of 1649 to today’s National Park debates, could modern proposals finally democratise how this vital resource is governed?
We live in a democracy, but how much say does the public have over how its land is used? In England today, less than one per cent of the population owns half the land, and they exert huge sway over how the countryside is governed.
Just 150 huge estates, for example, own England’s upland peat bogs – our single most important natural carbon store. You’d hope that these landowners, a mix of aristocrats and City bankers, would strive to be good stewards of this vitally important national asset. Instead, they have burned, drained and degraded them, causing the peat to leak carbon into the atmosphere and choking local communities with smoke – all in the name of that most Victorian of bloodsports, driven grouse shooting.
This landowning elite has largely avoided serious regulation, however, because grouse shooting has been a pastime shared by many of the country’s prime ministers, from Harold Macmillan to Boris Johnson. Land, wealth and power have always been deeply entwined in an old country like England: its highly unequal patterns of land ownership trace their origins back to the Norman Conquest.
Yet there’s also a submerged radicalism in English history; a buried tradition of land reform that today is often forgotten. Indeed, the earliest movements for democracy in England – during the Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century – were bound up with a determination to democratise the governance of land.
The defeat and eventual beheading of King Charles I in 1649 seemed to some to mark a millenarian moment, when the world had truly been turned upside down. In those feverish years, radical movements arose, expressing a yearning for equality, democracy, and a more equitable sharing of the earth’s riches.
One such faction was known as the Levellers, who – far ahead of their time – called for universal male suffrage. Many of the foot soldiers in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army had sympathy with the Levellers: they had, after all, just fought for their country, and now wanted a say in how it was governed. In the Putney Debates of 1647, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough made the Levellers’ case to the army generals for giving all men the vote.
But the landed officer class was horrified. The aptly named Colonel Nathaniel Rich, inheritor of a large estate, fretted that if landless men were given equal voting rights, “there may be a law enacted, that there shall be equality of goods and estate.” General Ireton, rejecting the Levellers’ demands, retorted that “no person hath a right to an interest or share in disposing of the affairs of the kingdom … that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”. In other words, you only get a say on the laws of the land if you own a chunk of it. The right to vote in Britain remained confined to men of property for over two centuries after the Putney Debates.
England’s highly unequal land ownership goes back to the Norman Conquest
Still more radical were the Diggers, who sought to overturn ideas about landed property outright. Their most vocal leader, Gerrard Winstanley, railed against the “Norman yoke” that had enslaved England since the time of William the Conqueror. “The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword,” he wrote in one of his many pamphlets.
But Winstanley did not merely fulminate against enclosure and landed wealth in print; he also took direct action. In April 1649, Winstanley and a band of land-less men and women took their spades to St George’s Hill in Surrey, an area of common land formerly owned by the Crown. They began to cultivate land that was not their own, to provide food for hungry mouths in a time of poor harvests and civil strife. The Diggers’ vision was for a world “set free from intanglements [sic] of lords and landlords”, in which the public had a say over how the land was used, believing: “the earth … shall become a common treasury for all”.
Both the Levellers and Diggers met with ignominious defeat. The Levellers were marginalised by the army generals – who, instead of instigating a democratic republic, installed Cromwell as military dictator. The Diggers were driven off St George’s Hill, their crops trashed by gangs organised by the lord of the manor; their leaders were tried in court, and other groups of Diggers across the country were similarly dispersed. And though the Levellers’ demands for political democracy were eventually met centuries later, we still have not democratised the governance of land in the way that Winstanley envisaged.
What might it look like to democratise the governance of land? One proposal, advanced by the land rights campaigner Marion Shoard back in the 1980s, was to extend the democratic planning system. Anyone can attend a council planning meeting and voice support for or object to any planning application. Yet the planning system only really applies to land used for buildings: agriculture and forestry are explicitly excluded from its remit. Given that only around nine per cent of England is built on, whereas 70 per cent is farmed and ten per cent forested, it seems odd to have a system of land use planning that excludes the main forms of land use. “It was always anomalous that most activity in the countryside should have been beyond the reach of the town and country planning system,” argued Shoard. Aghast by her proposals, landowners and farmers duly kicked back, and they have remained on the fringes of political debate.
A less radical but perhaps more achievable idea is the concept of a national Land Use Strategy or Framework. It was first articulated in the late 1970s by government scientist Norman Moore – a respected entomologist and expert in dragonflies – who saw the need for a framework that could arbitrate between competing uses for land. Moore suggested a “land use strategy that takes account of nature conservation”, alongside the dominant and destructive forces of development and industrialised agriculture. This, he wrote, “would not infer a system of detailed centralised direction and planning, but would take the form of a statement of intent.”
Once again, landed interests were not impressed by upstart ecologists meddling in their affairs, and the idea languished on the back burner. But now, nearly half a century after Moore first proposed it, the government is poised to publish a Land Use Framework (LUF) for England. That in itself is a remarkable step forward. The devil, however, will be in the detail. To be effective, the LUF has to be spatial in nature – mapping out where land is too poor-quality to grow much food, for instance, and should instead be prioritised for habitat restoration.
A third way to involve more of the public in decision-making about land is to reform our national parks. In Britain, national parks are not actually owned by the nation – only about ten per cent of the land within them is owned by public sector bodies. That makes Britain something of an outlier: from the US to Sweden, Spain to Japan, national parks tend to be owned by federal, state or municipal governments. But in Blighty, the vast majority of them lie in private hands – leaving National Park Authorities (NPAs) virtually powerless to achieve their statutory duties of protecting natural beauty and securing public access. Small wonder that wildlife in our national parks is in deep decline, and access rights are under threat: witness the recent Supreme Court challenge brought by landowner Alexander Darwall, seeking to end the right to wild camp on Dartmoor.
The visionaries who founded our national parks wouldn’t have stood for this. When Labour minister Lewis Silkin introduced the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, he declared that it was “not just a Bill. It is a people’s charter – a people’s charter for the open air.” Seventy-five years on from the creation of national parks in Britain, the new Labour government should be revamping NPAs’ powers, and giving them the resource to acquire more land. And it should take heed of a recent recommendation by an NGO, the Campaign for National Parks, who propose “embedding deliberative democracy” in each park by setting up citizens’ assemblies and giving all local residents and visitors a voice in how they’re governed.
From Winstanley and Silkin to Shoard and Moore, England has a rich history of campaigners who have sought to democratise power over land, and make it serve the interests of nature and the public. It’s time to follow in their footsteps, and make the land of England a common treasury for all.
“The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside?” by Guy Shrubsole (William Collins, £22)
