Taxpayer as Shareholder

A guest post from Gerald Hartley, local green activist in Stroud and south-west regional elections co-ordinator

The British tax payer is a ‘shareholder’ in the state enterprise in all its many forms.  Over the decades this ‘enterprise’ accumulated assets worth billions of pounds. Coal mines, railway stations lines and rolling stock, power stations, steel works, canals, bus companies, lorry fleets, a national grid of gas pipelines and electricity lines, telephone lines, water mains and sewage pipes, pumping stations and treatment plants, council houses, hospitals, health centres and clinics, town halls, fire and police stations, roads and bridges, libraries, schools and colleges, elderly persons and children’s homes.  Why did it do so?  Because the private sector failed to provide all the things needed for the common good.

The Thatcher era began and governments ever since have continued, to sell those assets cheaply to the private sector and use the cash to make their financial performance look better than it was.  But now it is also a cover for the lack of revenue caused by the financial crash brought about by the very people that fund and support the Tory party.

Where asset sales cannot be justified, such as schools, pseudo-private organisations are constructed to eliminate democratic input and maximise elite structures. This is the very serious underlying aim of the Tory party – an elite society with everything owned and run by their friends and supporters to protect their common interests, untroubled by the rest of us.  They can see that financial crisis may come and go, but privatisation only gets reversed in a revolution.

So we the tax-paying shareholders in the UK state, have lost most of our assets, suffer reduced services, but pay the same tax and receive no dividends.  When the Tories crow that they have kept the council tax at the same level for 3 years, do you laugh or cry?  But it’s the kind of propaganda that keeps them at the helm.

In the 18th Century, there was little that the peasants could do to oppose the Enclosures of common land.  This saying, from that time, seems strangely apt all this time later.

‘The law doth punish man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose’ 

Geese are not very bright.  So maybe it’s time for the ‘have nots’ to demonstrate that they are brighter than that and stop blaming Europe, immigrants or anything else handy and take the trouble to understand just how the globalised financial system is designed to benefit a tiny minority at the expense of the planet and every species living on it.

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Suits Meet Scythers

My latest issue of The Land has arrived and is filled as usual with excellent things. Perhaps the most encouraging is the serious attempt to find out who owns our most valuable resource - the land itself.

The threatened privatisation of The Land Registry has spurred the Public and Commercial Services union into action and an interesting relationship between land-rights campaigners and anti-privatisation campaigners seems to be developing. The first evidence is a report presenting An Alternative Vision of the Land Registry.

The report in itself is fairly unoriginal - a rehearsal of arguments about the disaster that is New Public Management - but what is interesting, and rather impressive, is that way that the PCS has identified a way of keeping their members' jobs by massively increasing their workload.

The first step to introducing a Land Value Tax would have to be a cadastral survey - a massive data-gathering exercise to establish who actually owns the rolling acres we all feel to be our national heritage. The fact that this information needs to be discovered is what brings the land campaigners - who want redistribution - and the land registry civil servants - who want jobs - together.

Simon Fairlie, bless him, is leaving nothing to chance and his cynical view of politics is likely to be proved right. In typical DIY mode, Chapter 7 are launching their own 'Map Your Local Landowner' award, with prizes of £400 for 'the best cadastral maps to show how landownership is distributed within any given county, district, town, village or parish.' If they receive enough entries they'll be able to piece the map together themselves in the Flaxdrayton Potato Store. If you feel inspired you can contact them on: chapter7@tlio.org.uk Tweet

The Peasants are Revolting

Simon Fairlie wrote an excellent article in The Land a couple of issues back. His focus was the need for a rehabilitation of manual labour. Heinberg's concept of the 'energy slave' makes it clear how much harder we are all going to have to work as oil supplies dwindle. We can gain a similar sense from thinking about the horsepower of machinery that supports our decadent existence. Fairlie's argument was about the nature of the lives we will be living, which he ascertained from considering production, and particularly food production, before the countryside was overrun with machinery. This was the life of the peasant, a person who is also in need of rehabilitation.

A few concepts from our shared past can help to inform the future we are going to build together. One is the concept of the cottage economy. The label 'cottager' did not relate to the bijoux design of your Cotswold-stone residence but was rather about your rights to use common land and therefore to be able to subsist without selling your labour. Cottage industry, by extension, was work that you engaged in to generate surplus cash, not for your bare subsistence.

J. M. Neeson provides a fascinating account of the liberated existence of Britain's peasantry and how they fought to maintain it as landed interests used their political power to force through the theft of shared land via enclosure acts. She estimates that up to a third of the land of the country was either owned by commoners or was itself common which they had rights to use. The destruction of this ancient social system led to an imbalance between people's work and their needs. It led to explosive population growth, as mouths to feed needed to be outstripped by hands that could be sold to work for others rather than to produce their own food.

It also led to a changed attitude to consumption, a loss of the sense of satiety and sufficiency, and the substitution of greed and excess:

'Perhaps having "enough" was unimaginable to men who wrote about crop yields, rents, improvements, productivity, economic growth, always more, as it has been incomprehensible to twentieth-century historians living in constantly expanding market economies, albeit on a finite planet.' (p. 41)

The commons represented a system for sharing a large proportion of the land of this country, even after the advent of fedualism. Their loss was a financial disaster for commoners and the end of a sustainable socio-economic system. Their revival will be a fundamental foundation for land planning within a bioregional economy. Tweet