the new enclosure intro

What has been Britain’s biggest privatization to date? In 2015, at least two different answers were given to this deceptively simple question. In the Financial Times, journalists Emma Dunkley and Martin Arnold suggested that the answer was the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which had been rescued by a £45 billion state bailout in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis. They reported that the then Chancellor, George Osborne, had sold £2 billion of the government’s RBS shares – shares valued in total in mid 2015 at £32 billion, and hence likely crystallizing an eye-watering loss to the taxpayer – and that in doing so he had ‘kicked off Britain’s biggest privatisation’. The sale, they said, ‘forms part of a privatisation programme that Mr Osborne hopes will eclipse the Thatcherite boom of the 1980s and 1990s’. 1 Meanwhile, in Private Island, his lacerating critique of privatization in Britain, James Meek gave a different answer: the sale of council houses. Worth ‘some £40 billion in its first twenty-five years’, the sale of social housing had been, Meek claimed, ‘Britain’s biggest privatisation by far’. 2 But both were wrong. And not just slightly wrong, but spectacularly, orders-of-magnitude wrong. Britain’s biggest privatization has not been of housing or a bank. It has been of land. Since Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979, and continuing all the way to the present day, the state has been selling public land to the private sector. It has sold vast quantities – some 2 million hectares, or about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass. Some of this land, to be sure, has disappeared with Britain’s council housing: much of the value of the housing that has been sold, and which Meek discusses, is in fact the value of the land on which that housing sits. But housing land accounts for only a small proportion of the overall land mass that has been privatized. How much has this privatization, in total, been worth? We cannot say for sure, for reasons that will become clear in due course. But my best estimate, explained in Chapter 5, is that, at today’s prices, the land that has been sold is likely to be worth something in the order of £400 billion, or the equivalent of more than twelve RBSs. We have, then, a puzzle. On the one hand, a massive, decadeslong British privatization, dwarfing all others in value. On the other, a lack of recognition, in recent discussions of privatization in Britain, of this most significant of all transfers of public assets to the private sector. For it is not just Meek, Dunkley and Arnold who overlook the privatization of British land. Consult any inventory of Britain’s most notable privatizations, from the political Left or Right, and you will find the same thing. Richard Seymour’s 2012 ‘short history of privatisation in the UK’ in the Guardian? No land. 1 Chris Edwards’s 2017 tabulation of ‘major British privatizations’ in the libertarian Cato Journal? No land. 2 Indeed, the neglect of land privatization in Britain runs considerably deeper. There is, to all intents and purposes, no scholarly literature on the subject; it is the one exception I know of to the second of US economist Tyler Cowen’s ‘three laws’: viz., ‘There is a literature on everything.’ 3 And as well as not having been studied, British land privatization has, for the most part, also not been substantively contested or protested. Why this lack of engagement, recognition and attention? One of the aims of this book is to try to account for it, but the question is essentially parked until the Conclusion. It is not possible to understand why so little is known about Britain’s land privatization – and, relatedly, why it has proceeded as comfortably as it has – without first exploring that privatization in depth. But during the five chapters that precede the Conclusion, I would recommend that the reader, and especially the British-based reader, always keep this puzzle at the back of their mind: Why did I not know about this before? The body of the book is a detailed study of this privatization: the sale of public land – land owned by public bodies – to non-public bodies. It covers the period from Thatcher taking power in 1979 up to the present; for land is still being privatized, in volumes and at a rate arguably unmatched during previous decades. Land has during those decades been sold by all manner of public bodies, in both central and local government, across the length and breadth of Britain. But it has not been an even programme geographically, temporally or institutionally. Public land in Scotland, for instance, has been less affected than in England and Wales; land privatization has been concentrated in the periods coinciding with Tory or Tory-led administrations, albeit far from halting under New Labour; local authority landholdings have been more substantially denuded than central government holdings; the National Health Service estate has been more substantially denuded than, say, the Ministry of Defence estate; and so on. Another of the book’s aims, then, is to flesh out all of this variegation. But three other aims take centre stage. These are to identify the why, how, and with-what-consequences of land privatization. Why, firstly, has public land been sold? To the extent that one has been articulated, what has been the principal logic or rationale for privatizing it? Chapter 3 tackles this question. Chapter 4 looks in turn at how public land has been privatized. Who has been involved, and what techniques have been employed, rules and guidelines established, structures and processes rolled out? The question of consequences – what land privatization has led to, in addition to a simple quantitative shift in the balance of landownership between public and private actors – is the subject of Chapter 5. The consequences it discusses are at once economic, social and political. The book offers a forceful critique of land privatization as it has transpired in Britain. But it is not a simplistic or crude critique. My argument is not that private ownership – of, in this case, land – is per se ‘bad’ and public ownership per se ‘good’ (although, ironically, this is precisely the case, inverted of course, that many advocates and agents of land privatization in Britain and elsewhere have advanced to justify it). The critique I offer is considered and grounded, based always on the actually-existing realities of privatization. I subject to critical scrutiny the rationalization of privatization (Does it hold water?), the enactment of privatization (Has it been judicious, consistent and equitable?), and the outcomes of privatization (Have they been broadly positive or negative for key stakeholders to the process?). My conclusions, in large measure, are in the negative. The logic of privatization has been deeply flawed; the process of privatization has been deeply problematic; and its consequences have been deeply deleterious. Not only has land privatization in Britain generally not delivered the benefits that successive UK governments have said it would provide: value for public money; new jobs and homes; more efficient land allocation. It has in fact contributed substantially to three decidedly negative broader trends: a rise in private-sector land-hoarding; Britain’s growing transformation into a ‘rentier’ type economy – one increasingly dominated by rents paid by the many to the affluent, landowning few; and widespread social dislocation. Who should care about this? Everyone in Britain. That may sound like hyperbole, but it really is not. For another of the main aims of this book is to emphasize just how much land matters. It is the literal foundation of people’s lives, at all geographical scales; we need it for shelter, work, mobility, play and protest. And because land matters, so too does landownership. Whoever owns the land has the ability to determine how it is accessed and used, and by whom. Of course, this ability is sometimes circumscribed in certain ways, for example through planning measures or other government regulations. But landownership nonetheless confers real power that ultimately affects all of society, especially locally to the land in question. So it matters a great deal who owns land. And it clearly matters if the government is selling the land it owns itself. It is called ‘public land’ not because ‘the public’ necessarily has a right to access and use it, but because the public – via the state that represents it – ultimately owns it. And the public, at least in a democracy, therefore in principle has the power – again, through the apparatus of the government it elects – to shape how this land is used. If the government disposes of public land, it disposes of the public power associated with it. There surely cannot be many government decisions that matter more in a democratic society. The British experience, moreover, is potentially instructive for other national contexts. Publicly owned land is a feature, to some degree, of nearly all societies. 1 Certainly, all of the late-capitalist liberal democracies with which Britain is arguably most comparable have a mix of public and private landownership. Some of those countries, including for example Canada and France, have also ventured down the land-privatization road, although not, proportionally, to anything like the same extent as Britain. 2 So, too, and often more vigorously and comprehensively, have some of those countries in the Global South where until relatively late in the twentieth century the state remained a significant landowner. In Brazil, for instance, the proportion of northern Amazonian land under public ownership declined from 30 per cent in 1970 to just 7 per cent in 1996. 3 Another example, from a very different part of the world, is Kenya, where Jacqueline Klopp has described how, in the 1990s, public land, relatively unfettered by international scrutiny, was used by the government as a source of patronage and an instrument to maintain sociopolitical control through a process of corrupt ‘irregular privatization’. 4 But while some other countries, like Britain, have seen extensive land privatization in recent decades, others still have not – or, at least, not yet. Maybe the best-known example in the latter category is the United States, where the federal government owns in the region of a quarter of all land (much of it originally taken from Native Americans), which is a higher proportion than has ever been the case in Britain. 1 Periodically, including in 2017, the Republicans float the possibility of selling some or all of this land, almost all of which is in the west (only 4 per cent of land east of the Mississippi is publicly owned; the figure for the west is 47 per cent). 2 Knowledge of what happens when public land is privatized, as it has substantially been in Britain, might prove very valuable in such a context. Public Land in Britain, and in This Book What do I mean in this book by ‘public land’? When I write about British public land having been privatized, what is it, precisely, that has passed from public to private hands? It is important to be as exact as possible here about the nature of the thing whose privatization I examine in what follows. Public land is simply land owned by public bodies. In Britain, there are hundreds of such bodies (see Chapter 4), and the vast majority of them are landowners. Some of them own only small amounts of land. Others own vast quantities – the Forestry Commission, which is far and away the largest single public (or private) landowner, owns over 1 million hectares, much of it in Scotland (see Chapter 5). By land privatization, then, I mean the transfer of land owned by any public-sector body into private ownership. But this definition raises a number of sometimes thorny questions. One is that of how one might distinguish between land privatization and other privatizations. Many of the major British public enterprises sold to the private sector during the past four decades – for example, the electricity suppliers, the coal industry, and, most significantly, the water authorities – were themselves major landowners. Were their privatizations also land privatizations? Strictly speaking, yes they were: the land that such enterprises owned was generally privatized along with them – indeed was often one of the key assets (an essential ‘factor of production’) acquired by the new private owners. 1 My estimate of the total amount of British land privatized since the end of the 1970s – 2 million hectares – therefore includes all the land that was privatized along with the enterprises owning it. Nevertheless, these privatizations, which collectively account for less than 20 per cent of the overall amount of privatized land (approximately 350,000 hectares), fall outside the main ambit of this book. The reason for this is that the book is interested in the privatization of land qua land: that is, those transactions where land is the only or the primary thing that is sold. If land is essentially an appendage, however material, to something else that is being privatized – a regional water authority, an electricity wholesaling or retailing business, and so on – it is not in the book. 2 Still, demarcating the privatization business in this fashion necessitates some difficult judgment calls. Perhaps the hardest concerns council housing. As I have already said, a significant proportion of the value of the housing sold by British local authorities since the late 1970s is accounted for by land. And this proportion has been increasing; by some estimates (see Chapter 1), land today represents on average around 70 per cent of the sale price of residential properties in England. Such statistics – the fact that when people in Britain buy housing they are, today, principally buying land – make it very difficult to justify excluding the privatization of housing from my analysis of the privatization of land, and so I do not exclude it. The story of the privatization of council housing is part-and-parcel of the wider story of land privatization that I relate. 1 But I do not prioritize or belabour it. That story has been well told elsewhere, in stark contrast to the untold story of (other) land privatization. 2 I therefore rely heavily on those existing narrations, and frequently refer the reader to them, spending significant time myself on the housing component of the wider story only when I feel that an issue of particular importance to that story has not been adequately drawn out. The example of housing speaks, of course, to a more general ‘border’ issue, concerning the boundary between land and what we might call collectively its ‘appurtenances’. I have already said that this book does not discuss the privatization of land where land is essentially an appendage to another privatization. But what of appendages to land, rather than land-asappendage? What, for instance, of former hospitals on land sold by health authorities? Or former changing rooms on school playing fields sold by local authorities? Or mineral resources lying under land sold by other public bodies? Should we exclude these? No. The capability certainly exists for the state (like other landowners) to sell land while retaining ownership of, say, selected buildings on the land; one of the key innovations of community land trusts, discussed in the conclusion, is precisely to bifurcate ownership rights in this way. 3 But, in practice, the British state ordinarily has not done so. Where bifurcation has occurred, it is typically the buildings that have been sold while the land has been retained. 1 Thus, both explicitly (I will often refer to ‘land and property’) and implicitly, ‘land’ in this book generally means, in David Harvey’s words, ‘land and its appurtenances (the resources embedded within it, the buildings placed upon it and so on)’. 2 This leaves just one final relevant border-related issue to be delineated: the border between public and non-public landowners, and thus between public and non-public land. Two categories of land in Britain demand particular consideration in this respect, lest confusion arise as we proceed. These are the Crown Estate and common land. Do these belong under the ‘public land’ umbrella, and hence in this book? Let us take the Crown Estate first, which contains various prized urban land assets – including, in London, the whole of Regent Street and much of St James’s – and approximately 136,000 hectares of agricultural land and forests across Britain. 3 The Crown Estate is an infuriatingly complex phenomenon, but for our purposes, at least, it is not public land, and thus I do not examine its ownership and any historic disposals made from it. The key reason is that, even though all profits from the management of the estate accrue to the state – to the UK Treasury in the case of the estate in England and Wales (and Northern Ireland), and, since early 2017, to the Scottish government in the case of the estate in Scotland – the state does not own it. 1 It is owned, rather, by ‘the reigning monarch “in right of The Crown”, that is, it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne’. 2 Properly speaking, in other words, the estate belongs to the title of the monarchy, rather than to the monarch per se. Sales of chunks of the Crown Estate do not therefore constitute privatization, because they do not extinguish public ownership; if another word for privatization is denationalization, then Crown Estate disposals can be thought of as a form of ‘demonarchization’. And nor is so-called ‘common land’ a form of public land – not all of it, anyway. Some common land is public land. But where the ‘public’ in ‘public land’ refers to the identity of the possessor of rights of ownership of land, the ‘common’ in ‘common land’ refers, in Britain, to the identity of the possessor of rights of land access and use. This is a vital distinction, and one that is often confused or misunderstood. Public land, by definition, is owned by the public, if indirectly; common land, by definition, is land to which rights of common (public) access and use apply. The term ‘common land’ says absolutely nothing about who the land’s owner is. Some such land is owned by public bodies; but some is owned by charities or community groups; and some is owned by private individuals or corporations. That common land which is (or, in the late 1970s, was) owned by public bodies falls within the scope of this book. All other common land falls outside of the book’s remit. How much common land is there in Britain? By recent estimates (see the Conclusion), around a million hectares. That may sound like a lot, but from a longue durée perspective it is a very small amount. Wind back the clock to the late seventeenth century, and half or more of Britain was common land – perhaps as much as 12 million hectares in total. The vast bulk of common land, however, became something else – land that the public, or ‘commoners’, could not legally access and use – as a result of a drawn-out process of dissolution of common rights that picked up steam from the early eighteenth century and ran at full throttle until late in the nineteenth. That process was, of course, the famous, original ‘enclosure’ movement. The New Enclosure The original enclosure movement is one of the most well-known and widely rehearsed phenomena not just in the history of modern Britain, but in the history of capitalism more generally. Marx called it the ‘primitive’ or first accumulation. It was the ‘event’ – not momentary by any means – that made the whole subsequent history of industrial capitalism and capitalist accumulation in Britain possible, insofar as it deprived commoners of their means of subsistence and compelled them to sell their labour-power to capitalists in order to survive: to become, in other words, the working proletariat, the source of surplus value to be accumulated. The fields and socalled ‘waste’ lands of pre-industrial Britain were, literally, enclosed, hedged off from communities accustomed to reproducing themselves through the common land. I discuss this history at greater length in Chapter 2. As I show, enclosure was at once profoundly social as well as spatial. I use the term ‘enclosure’ to describe land privatization in post-1970s Britain precisely to call attention to and insist upon the deep historical resonances between contemporary enclosure and Marx’s original, primitive enclosure. Some of these resonances, as I demonstrate in Chapters 2 and 3, are found in the realm of official discourse. Advocates of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure justified it by depicting common land as wasted land, needing to be put to productive (capitalist) use; today, advocates of land privatization in Britain justify it by depicting public land as ‘surplus’, as wasted by an inherently inefficient public sector, and once again needing therefore to be put to productive (private sector, profit-oriented) use. The resonances are no less clear, meanwhile, in the material, lived realm. Just like the original enclosure, land privatization in modern Britain represents an intensely consequential reordering of land’s political economy and, as a result, of the national political economy more generally. I show this in Chapter 5, where I also show that, like the original enclosure, this contemporary privatization has a distinctive, decisive spatiality – given that it is land that is being privatized, how could it not? Yes, today’s land enclosure has occurred on a smaller scale than the original enclosure. And yes, it is ‘technically’ different, inasmuch as the core transformation is of ownership rather than of access and use rights. 1 But the social and economic effects, I argue, are potentially no less momentous, not least given that today’s privatizers are far from done yet. Enclosure continues apace, as you read these words. In theorizing contemporary privatization as a consequential form of enclosure, I am consciously echoing the arguments of David Harvey and others. For Harvey, privatization, and the more general dispossession (by whatever means) of assets held publicly or in common, is not some marginal feature of late capitalism. It is, rather, at the very forefront of modern capitalist accumulation and growth, an essential mechanism of what Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. 1 And Harvey sees this contemporary accumulation by dispossession explicitly as a revivification of the original enclosure movement. A ‘new round of “enclosure of the commons”’ has, he says, been made into a central objective of state policies not just in the Anglo-American world but also farther afield. 2 In the context specifically of land privatization in post-1970s Britain, I am saying much the same thing. This privatization is indubitably a form of enclosure; and it epitomizes key developments in late capitalism more generally. Enclosure, as Harvey insists, is not merely a thing of the past in the Global North. (That it is current in the Global South is much more widely acknowledged, as evidenced in the voluminous literature on ‘land grabs’ and the like.) 3 Furthermore, and no less importantly, enclosure is not ‘just’ privatization. Its geography is always pivotal. Enclosure, as Stuart Hodkinson writes, is ‘the commodification of space’ as well as of society and economy. 4 It has, as Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, channelling Henri Lefebvre, has likewise observed, a particular ‘spatial valence and territorial articulation’, representing a ‘tendency to normalize space under a unitary political-economic rationale’. 5 Under enclosure, land is homogenized according to the equivalating logic and calculus of accumulation. While I echo all of these (and especially Harvey’s) arguments, however, I give them the particular twist demanded by the historical–empirical context in which I examine the more generalized late-capitalist tendency towards enclosure. My focus is squarely on land-ownership and the particular powers that it bestows. Landownership, as I argue in Chapter 1, and demonstrate in Chapter 5, bestows the power to fashion – positively or negatively – the social, economic and political development of communities, regions and nations. And enclosure, in the shape of land privatization, signifies the negative operationalization of the power vested in landownership. It entails the use of this power specifically to constrain and close down land uses actually or potentially delivering demonstrable public benefits. Enclosure not only ‘turns a collective interest into an individualized one’, as Nick Blomley puts it. It serves, as he goes on to say, to ‘compromise the very survival’ of land uses that are incongruous with individualized interest – and thus the survival, too, of social forms tied to such land uses. 1 Neoliberal Britain ‘Enclosure’ is therefore an important word in this book’s title. Another word, which also warrants some explanation, is ‘neoliberal’. It is hardly a straightforward word (it can be and has been defined in innumerable ways), and nor is it without its detractors: to many, including but not only on the Right (and including but not only those who are themselves, maybe unknowingly, neoliberals), ‘neoliberal’ is simply a catch-all pejorative used by the Left to denounce anything about capitalism they do not like. One therefore runs certain risks when using it categorically. So why do so? In the case of this book, there are two reasons. The first concerns simple labelling and historical periodization. The book is about a very particular period of British history, stretching from 1979 to the present day. I wanted to signify this era very clearly in the title – to tell prospective readers when land has been privatized. I suppose I could have used the subtitle ‘The Appropriation of Public Land in Britain since the End of the 1970s’. But that would hardly have been an elegant solution. Nor, more importantly, would it have been a meaningful solution. The fact of the matter is that in political–economic terms Britain did change, dramatically, in 1979, and, notwithstanding the odd wistful glance over the shoulder from a few of those in power, it has never looked back. Britain since 1979 is definitively not like Britain before 1979. I wanted a title that meaningfully conveyed this difference and temporal specificity, not one – like ‘Britain since the End of the 1970s’ – implying that all that changed after 1979 was the number of the year. Industrial Britain, after all, is called ‘industrial Britain’ for a reason. How best to capture the essential nature of that which in Britain both unifies the decades since 1979 and most meaningfully distinguishes them from those preceding them? ‘Neoliberal’ is, in my view, far and away the most persuasive answer yet provided to that question. The second reason is more important still. I use the word neoliberal not just to identify the period with which the book is concerned, but because I am trying to contribute substantively to understandings of what neoliberalism in Britain actually is. In other words, this is not just a book about the privatization of land within the historical context of neoliberalism; it is also, more provocatively, a book about neoliberalism, as evinced by land privatization. My argument, in short, is that privatization in general, and land privatization in particular, is fundamental to neoliberalism, and especially British neoliberalism; and that existing conceptualizations of neoliberalism do not pay sufficient heed to this centrality. What do other scholars claim is neoliberalism’s trademark feature? Some, such as Ben Fine, suggest it is ‘financialization’. 1 Neoliberalism, it is argued, is notable above all for the hegemony of financial institutions, practices, and modes of accumulation. Others beg to differ. Will Davies says neoliberalism is principally about competition, specifically the injection of competition not just into all sectors of the economy but also into nominally ‘non-economic’ spheres of social life. 2 Jamie Peck’s influential reading of ‘neoliberal reason’ treads similar ground, suggesting that it is the privileging of the particular sphere within which competition is assumed to flourish – the market – that distinguishes neoliberalism; neoliberalism is, he writes, ‘an open-ended and contradictory process of politically assisted market rule’. 3 Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism is also similar: she says that neoliberalism is about the ‘economization’ of everything and everyone, making all aspects of life conform to an orthodox economic calculus. 1 Harvey’s slightly earlier study, meanwhile, stands somewhat apart. For him, neoliberalism is first and foremost about the reassertion of class power. 2 Some of these understandings are problematic inasmuch as they are simply contradicted by the facts. The idea that neoliberalism is fundamentally about competition, for example, does not even get off the starting-blocks – the neoliberal era, in its Anglo-American heartlands, is in fact notable for a marked decline in levels of competition compared to the 1960s and 1970s, as a defanging of competition law and a simultaneous bolstering of intellectual property rights from the early 1980s enabled the widespread reassembly and defence of monopoly powers. 3 But the more general problem with all of the aforementioned definitions is that they fail what is perhaps the chief acid test of any such definition (beyond, of course, simply according with historical reality): distinguishing meaningfully between neoliberalism and liberalism itself. If a conceptualization of neoliberalism does not tell us how it is different from liberalism, what useful purpose does it serve? Do we even need the idea of ‘neoliberalism’ if, in our figuring of it, it is not materially different from the ‘old’ liberalism that the ‘neo’ presumably signifies a break from? Beyond merely denoting historical periodicity, it is hard to argue that we do. Yes, financialization, market rule, economization and entrenched class power are key characteristics of the past four (neoliberal) decades. But they were also key characteristics of the era of high liberalism, stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Where market rule and economization are concerned, the scholar who did most to emphasize these aspects of liberal society was Karl Polanyi (which is, of course, precisely why scholars of neoliberalism have returned so keenly to his work). ‘Neither under tribal nor under feudal nor under mercantile conditions’, Polanyi wrote of economization, ‘was there … a separate economic system in society. Nineteenth-century society, in which economic activity was isolated and imputed to a distinctive economic motive, was a singular departure’. Another, associated, departure was market rule, the endeavour – no less contradictory than under neoliberalism – to ‘allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment’. 1 Meanwhile, to appreciate just how central financial institutions, practices and modes of accumulation were in the same period, one need only read Giovanni Arrighi, or Georg Simmel, or Thorstein Veblen, or John Maynard Keynes. 2 The last of these, for example, decried the fact that late-nineteenth-century society ‘carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short “the financial results”’, such that the ‘whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant’s nightmare … The same rule of selfdestructive financial calculation governs every walk of life’ – life, in short, had been ‘financialized’. 3 Finally, on the immense concentration of class power at the fin de siècle, the literature is vast. Rudolf Hilferding’s account of the fusion of the interests of industrial capital, finance capital and the state is arguably paradigmatic. 4 If financialization, market rule, economization and entrenched class power were no less material to liberalism than they are to neoliberalism, then, is there in fact anything truly distinctive about the latter? And if not, why bother with the concept? My suggestion is that what is truly original about neoliberalism is perhaps the privatization of public ownership. For while privatization is central to neoliberalism, it was not a significant feature of liberalism – partly because there was, in Britain as in much of the rest of the liberal capitalist world, no substantive public sector to be privatized. In the West, large-scale government ownership of assets, including land assets, was, with notable exceptions, essentially a twentieth-century development. 1 The ‘original’ enclosure of British land – with which, I have argued, contemporary land privatization shares certain vital features – was an enclosure of rights, not of ownership, and certainly not of state ownership, which at the time was trivial. Arguably, then, privatization, much more than marketization or economization or financialization, is what genuinely sets the neoliberal era apart. The discursive and literal assault on state ownership is neoliberalism’s hallmark. 2 And this is nowhere more strikingly evident than in Britain, even if, following Britain’s example, privatization eventually became a signature feature of neoliberalism around the world, with governments in more than a hundred countries having raised more than $3.3 trillion through sales of state assets to the private sector since the early 1980s. 3 Britain was privatization’s undisputed trailblazer, and Thatcher was its chief protagonist. She is even credited with popularizing the very word ‘privatization’, and today her supporters still regard her privatization accomplishments as her ‘most important and enduring economic legacy’. 4 But, crucially, privatization in Britain did not stop when she resigned in 1990. It has continued in earnest. Many of Britain’s biggest privatizations (National Power, British Rail, British Coal, Royal Mail) have occurred under subsequent administrations, including Labour ones (for example, air traffic control, British Nuclear Fuels). By the mid 1990s, as Chris Giles and Gill Plimmer recently observed, ‘Labour had largely reconciled itself to the concept of private ownership’ of previously public services. 1 And all the time, land, land, land. Indeed, part of the reason that it does make conceptual and historical sense in the British context to describe the entire period since the late 1970s as ‘neoliberal’ is that privatization has been a constant theme. Not the only one, for sure, but the only one that is distinctive to neoliberalism. What is clear, in any event, is that one cannot meaningfully speak of neoliberalism and privatization, or of neoliberalism and enclosure (privatization’s spatial exemplar, if you like), as if they are separate or separable phenomena. Many commentators do this – Alex Vasudevan and colleagues, for example, call for analysis of the ‘figurations through which enclosure and neoliberalism are intertwined’. 2 This is misleading because, if I am right, there is no ‘neoliberalism’ without privatization/enclosure. The latter is internal and inherent to the former, not something that can externally come into contact, and then intertwine, with it. And nor, of course, can one hope to understand neoliberalism adequately in Britain unless one pays due heed – heed which to date has demonstrably not been paid – to the importance of changes in landownership. For if in Britain the period since the end of the 1970s is definitively the neoliberal period, and if privatization is indeed the cardinal feature of British neoliberalism, then the biggest privatization of them all, that of land, is arguably the country’s seminal political– economic development over the past four decades. This book provides the first study of that development. The Chapters The book contains five chapters, followed by a relatively brief conclusion. The purpose of Chapter 1 is to explain from a theoretical perspective why landownership matters, and especially why it matters if land is held in public (state) or private hands. I do not suggest that public and private ownership are respectively associated with certain timeless and immutable features; rather, I argue, drawing on thinkers ranging from Adam Smith to Polanyi and Harvey, and many others in between, that they respectively encourage certain important social and economic tendencies – and that significant transformations in patterns of public and private landownership of the type we have seen in neoliberal Britain are liable to matter accordingly. Understanding how and why landownership matters, this theoretical chapter suggests, especially requires attention to what Anne Haila refers to as ‘the special characteristics of land’. Yet, of course, theory can only get us so far; it can inform inquiry and help interpret findings, but as Haila says, land’s significance cannot ultimately be understood at the level of abstraction, but only by analysing the ‘real processes through which land is used and invested in’. 1 Analysing these processes is what the rest of the book does. Where Chapter 1 provides the requisite conceptual anchoring, Chapter 2 provides historical context. Privatization of public land in Britain under neoliberalism clearly did not proceed from, as it were, a blank slate. Britain has a long and complicated history of changes in patterns of landownership preceding those of the past four decades. Chapter 2 focuses on the most notable and salient of these, including the steady accretion, during the decades prior to Thatcher taking power, of much of the stock of publicly owned land that would subsequently be targeted for disposal. Knowing something about the history of the landownership question in Britain – its laws, its politics, its economics – is absolutely vital to coming to terms with the contemporary privatization story. After all, it created the literal raw material on which privatization’s executors would, from the late 1970s, go to work. And, just as importantly, that history has shaped all aspects of post1970s land privatization in practice: many of the ideas, regulations and customs that have been most material to this privatization predated the neoliberal era, even if some of them have mutated during it. Chapter 3 then examines the abovementioned ‘why’ question. Why, according to those who have most vociferously and consequentially championed the process, has it been deemed advisable or essential to privatize public land? What is ‘wrong’ with the state owning land? What is it that the private sector does with land that is considered positive, and that the state cannot or will not do? What benefits will land privatization putatively deliver? Throughout the neoliberal period, the impetus for privatization has come, as we will see, primarily from Whitehall – a metonym for the United Kingdom’s central government administration – and thus it is on the arguments emanating from Whitehall, and shaping government policy on public landownership, that I chiefly focus. Just as it is necessary, where landownership in Britain is concerned, to understand what came before 1979 in order to understand what has happened thereafter, so too is it necessary to understand how those latter developments have been legitimated. The government’s stated logics and rationales have not only discursively ‘prepared’ the land for sale; they have deeply coloured actual privatization patterns and practices. Practices are the focus of Chapter 4. How has the land been sold? I mean this not just in terms of immediate practicalities – who has done the selling, how buyers have been identified, how prices have been set, and so on – but structural conditions of possibility. What new laws or regulations have been put in place to facilitate or require land privatization? What existing obstacles have had to be removed in order to smooth the process? How has land to be disposed of been distinguished from land to be retained? What guidelines or rules have individual public bodies disposing of land been expected to observe? As we will see, effecting land privatization has required of the government enormous concrete as well as discursive work. Land privatization, remember, is not one privatization, like the privatization of a state-owned telephony or electricity provider; it is, in Britain at least, innumerable individual privatizations by innumerable individual publicsector landowners, and its complexity and practical challenges are compounded accordingly. Finally, in Chapter 5, I consider outcomes – what land privatization has led to. The chapter answers this question in four parts. The first considers the sheer scale of the programme. To the extent that we can reliably measure it (a not insignificant caveat), how much land has actually been privatized, where, when and from whose (which public bodies’) holdings? The second part of the answer looks at what is currently left of the public estate in Britain that has not (yet) been sold – again, to the best of our ability to estimate these remaining holdings given available information on the matter. Thirdly, I weigh the actual effects of privatization against the promises that the government has long imputed to it: in short, to what extent has land privatization delivered the benefits that successive administrations have said it would deliver? Finally, the chapter considers other outcomes. What, socially and economically, have been the principal consequences of land privatization, if not (only) those originally pledged by its proponents? In addition to distilling the book’s key themes and arguments, the Conclusion also does two other things. One is to return to the questions I asked at the outset of this Introduction: Why is so little known about this colossal privatization? Why has so little been done to contest or protest it? Armed with the book’s findings, I attempt to provide an answer. The other is to challenge the reader to think: Where now? Land privatization in Britain is, or at least should be, a political issue of acute contemporary significance. For public land, as I emphasize throughout the book, is still being sold in vast quantities. Is this a ‘good’ thing? And if not, what, if anything, might now be done about it?