why land and landownership matters

Why should we care who owns the land? Many, perhaps most, of us go about our daily lives without paying too much attention to the question of the ownership of the land we live, work, travel and play on. Who owns the park where I play football, the road I drive on, the site of the office or shop or factory I work in? I would wager that few people know the answer to any of these questions as they apply to their daily comings-and-goings. Perhaps the only space whose ownership we consistently do pay attention to (in fact, that we obsess about) is the domestic space: Do I own or rent the home I live in and the ground it sits on? But landownership, I want to argue, really matters, and not only where housing is concerned. We need to think much more closely about who owns the land. Indeed, we need to think more closely about what it even means to ‘own’ land. The idea that land can and should be owned is not a natural or timeless one, characteristic of all human societies and cultures. When, how and why did landownership become normalized, a taken-for-granted social convention that is so thoroughly ingrained, at least in Western societies, that we seldom notice, let alone question, its particularities? In addressing the issue of why and how landownership matters, this chapter sets the stage for those that follow, where I offer a close and critical examination of the fate of public land in Britain in the neoliberal era. Why undertake that extended examination? Why spend so much time exploring what some might consider an intellectually and/or politically marginal concern? This chapter explains why, from first principles. Drawing on the work of influential thinkers and writers on land and landownership, whose insights have been gleaned from inquiry into wider histories of capitalist social formations, I show land’s theoretical significance. Political-economic theory, in particular, tell us that landownership does indeed make a difference: it is highly material to capitalist social and economic development. Hence the impetus to consider that materiality in a particular historical–geographical context. Political-economic theory not only serves as a useful provocation. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a helpful guide. This is not to say that it tells us exactly what we will find when we examine the empirical record: the case of land privatization in neoliberal Britain, as we will see, while strongly exhibiting some of the tendencies that political-economic theory associates more generally with private landownership and its increasing prevalence, exhibits other such tendencies much more weakly or not at all – it represents, like all empirical cases, a unique manifestation of wider, theorizable tendencies, expressing them in varying measures. The theory does nevertheless suggest what kinds of questions it might be most productive and important to ask of the empirical record. The theory discussed in this chapter therefore both inspires and informs the historical–empirical investigation in the rest of the book. The chapter is divided in two parts. The first, shorter section answers the chapter’s most general question – Why does landownership matter? – at a generalised level. The second, also drawing on political-economic theory, answers a more focused question: Why should we be interested in the specific development – declining levels of public landownership, and a corresponding increase in private ownership – that the rest of the book describes for neoliberal Britain? What does the theory tell us about the respective characteristics and effects of public and private landownership? What does it say about the typical implications of land privatization? And what, crucially, does it offer up in terms of solutions to any perceived negative outcomes of privatization? Why Landownership Matters Sometimes we look to great ‘thinkers’ to tell us why things matter. That is what I will mostly be doing in this chapter; you will read lots about the ideas of famous political-economic theorists like Adam Smith, Karl Polanyi, Thomas Piketty, and others. But at other times people we do not necessarily perceive as ‘thinkers’ happen to cut to the chase far more successfully. A factory worker will naturally have privileged insight into the real workings of capitalist production. Similarly, a farm or council-house tenant will know much of what is most important about the social and economic relations entailed by landownership and use under capitalism, even if she does not use those terms. And the owner of the land will clearly have insight into those property relations, too. To the extent that the privileges of landownership – and landownership, let us be very clear, is a privilege – are often exorbitant, landowners tend to be rather shy about publicly exulting in them and explaining how they arise. They tend to keep silent, preferring to remain in the shadows, quietly reaping their benefits, lest anyone threaten those benefits. But sometimes, in moments of unguardedness or hubris, they let things slip. They tell the world exactly how much landownership matters, and why. And one such moment, as Kevin Cahill has shown, occurred in 1881. Revelling in his own ownership of nearly 30,000 hectares, making him one of Britain’s largest landowners and richest men, the 15th Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley, explained the significance of landownership in terms as sharp, succinct and striking as any celebrated theorist has arguably ever managed: The object which men aim at when they become possessed of land in the British Isles may, I think, be enumerated as follows. One, political influence; two, social importance, founded on territorial possession, the most visible and unmistakable form of wealth; three, power exercised over tenantry; the pleasure of managing, directing and improving the estate itself; four, residential enjoyment, including what is called sport; five, the money return – the rent. 1 There you have it, more or less, in a nutshell. In this section, therefore, I will take my initial cues from Stanley. 1 What is the importance of landownership? It is primarily fivefold. In no particular order, it comprises: political influence; power; income; wealth; and pleasure. But it is not only those things. While I proceed from Stanley’s list, I fill in along the way some of the inevitable gaps that he left. One, for example, concerns the importance of land (and thus its ownership) as a place politically to protest. It is not surprising that the earl ignored this particular land use. As an extraordinarily privileged landowner, he had very little to protest about. Those excluded, on the other hand, by processes of enclosure, historical or contemporary, have not been so fortunate. Land and political influence In Western societies (albeit certainly not only those), political influence has often been tightly bound up with the land and its ownership. The feudal system of socioeconomic organization that preceded the transition to capitalism was in many respects a perfect fusion of landownership and politics. ‘Land, the pivotal element in the feudal order’, Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation, ‘was the basis of the military, judicial, administrative, and political system’. 2 It was the singular ‘thing’ around which politics was organized. And land’s significance to politics did not disappear with the advent of capitalism. It persisted, but in new forms. Political influence continued to be wielded disproportionately by landowners. In many places this coupling was, and has since remained, overt and intimate. The landowners and the politicians (those holding office in government) were one and the same. Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented a case in point. Dahlia Elazar describes the system then pertaining – nominally a liberal democracy – as ‘political feudalism’, in view of the ‘political hegemony of Italy’s propertied class’. The ruling Liberal Party essentially comprised a network of provincial governments dominated by landowning families. The majority of those serving in the Chamber of Deputies were thus landowners. ‘Leading members of the propertied class’, in short, ‘“composed virtually the whole body politic of the Italian nation”’, Elazar explains, citing Charles Maier. 1 A comparable tangling of landownership and political power, as we shall see in the next chapter, also obtained (and endured much longer) in Britain – although there, the landowners’ party was not the Liberals but, emphatically, the Tories. Political influence has also often been yoked to landownership at a further remove, whereby the right to vote in elections is dependent on such ownership. Britain once again represents a striking example. The extension of suffrage through the first (‘Great’), Second, Third and Fourth Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, 1884 and 1918 respectively was achieved in significant part by lowering the land and property ownership thresholds at which voting rights kicked in. Another famous example is the early United States. When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, suffrage required some form of property ownership, and typically a freehold claim, in nearly all the states. As Jacob Cogan notes, the importance of freehold was that it signified a permanent interest in the community. 2 Landownership more generally was strongly associated with independence and moral virtue; it was central to the so-called Jeffersonian Myth. 3 President John Adams, for instance, opined: ‘Such is the frailty of the human heart, that very few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own.’ 4 Only the propertied, it followed, should get a vote. And although property restrictions on suffrage were phased out across most US states early in the nineteenth century, similar restrictions lasted considerably longer elsewhere – and not only in Britain. In Italy, they were not removed until 1911. 5 Yet, even with the formal decoupling of suffrage from land or property ownership, such ownership has remained highly material to political influence. For one reason or another, in most Western societies it has continued to be the case that landowners influence elections, politicians and political decisions more than non-owners do. This disproportionate influence takes multiple forms. Landowners often represent a powerful and coordinated political lobby, with deep pockets and prominent patrons; no single event of the twentieth century, for instance, caused more concern to major Scottish landowners than the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, because, as Andy Wightman says, ‘they could no longer directly influence legislation in the way that their supporters in the House of Lords had been able to do’. 1 More generally, politicians go out of their way not to alienate property owners, doing everything in their power, for example, to prevent land prices, and thus house prices, from falling. And they do so partly because they know that owners wield particular power at the ballot box. Owners typically vote more than non-owners do: in the 2011 Canadian federal election, for example, the proportions of home-owners and renters voting were 71 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively; in the 2008 US presidential election, they were 68 per cent and 52 per cent. 2 Land and power ‘As land changes hands’, writes George Monbiot, ‘so does power.’ 3 Earl Stanley knew this well. And while the political influence occasioned by landownership is certainly one form of the power that ownership confers, it is not the only one. The land–power nexus is multiply constituted. Perhaps the key point is that ownership of land confers power over both resources (those found on and under the land) and, in various ways, people and institutions (those who do not own the land). As an owner, one has the right to do with one’s land and its resources as one sees fit, although this right is normally circumscribed in various ways by the state – one example being the common requirement to secure permission, typically through a planning system, to develop the land. And one also has the right to dictate the parameters of others’ access to the land. Again, this right is sometimes circumscribed; in Sweden, where I live, for example, the traditional right of allemansrätten provides the public with certain rights to private land in the countryside – to travel across it, temporarily camp on it, and pick berries, mushrooms and some other plants from it. In general, however, landownership enables the owner to exclude people – to keep them off the land. And it provides the power to set the terms and conditions of permissible access and use. This power of inclusion and exclusion is enormously consequential. The reason is obvious. We, as a society, need land for all sorts of reasons. We need it for leisure and pleasure (Stanley’s ‘residential enjoyment’ and ‘sport’), to which I return below. We need it as a place to exist politically: land provides space for collective, visible, political struggle and protest. We need land to live on – in other words, for shelter; and as I will show in this book, the availability (or otherwise) of land for housing is an issue of the utmost importance in contemporary Britain. And we need land to reproduce ourselves successfully as a society. This is not just a question of food production. It relates more broadly to the fact that land is an input, of varying degrees of significance, to almost all economic processes. Alongside labour and capital, it is what economists call a ‘factor of production’, one of the essential ingredients that makes productive economic activity – and hence social reproduction – possible in the first place. All of this means that the power invested in landownership is momentous. In mediating terms of inclusion and exclusion, of access and use, landownership confers the very power to shape and facilitate, or alternatively constrain, the social, economic and political development of communities, regions and nations. The word ‘enclosure’, so often invoked with reference to landownership, specifically evokes closure and constraint, and that is the reason I use it. My argument is that the privatization of British public land since the early 1980s has actively closed down and constrained practices and possibilities of social, economic and political development. The power embodied in landownership, that is to say, has been mobilized in increasingly negative ways as the land has progressively been privatized. ‘Enclosure’ is precisely the negative operationalization of landed power. But the word ‘enclosure’ more commonly refers to an earlier period of changes in the land-and-power nexus, especially in Britain (see Chapter 2). Concentrated in the period from the early eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries, the enclosure movement in Britain demonstrates as strikingly as any episode in Western history the wide-ranging power that comes with controlling land. It saw the extinction of the traditional rights to access and use open fields and waste land enjoyed by ‘commoners’; the fields were literally enclosed, the included masses abruptly excluded. And with those rights, Britain’s commoners lost the very ability to sustain and reproduce themselves and their families that the land had traditionally afforded. They lost, in short, one of only two factors of production they had possessed. With access to the land denied to them, Britain’s millions of commoners now had only one factor remaining to them to deploy: their labour. Land and income What did Britain’s ejected commoners do? Stripped of their common-land rights, many, perhaps most, moved to the nation’s rapidly growing industrial cities and sold their labour to industrial capitalists, working for a subsistence wage in factories. For those who remained in the countryside, however, new relations to the land had to be forged. In his magnificent book Whigs and Hunters, the late E. P. Thompson described one outcome. Some people, such as the famous ‘Blacks’, resorted to poaching game, including deer from forestland, in defiance and in defence of their traditional use-rights. ‘What was at issue’, Thompson said, ‘was not land use but who used the available land: that is, power and property-right.’ 1 Others, meanwhile, continued to work the arable land. But now they did so not equipped with common rights of access, but legitimized by a very different legal contract: a tenancy agreement. They became tenant-farmers. Here again, Earl Stanley was on the money, and in more senses than one. In a world of enclosure and private property, one of the crucial powers available to landowners is, of course, what Stanley called ‘power exercised over tenantry’. These tenants might be farming tenants, as in my example, but they need not be; they can be commercial tenants, leasing an office or factory space; they can be residential tenants, leasing a house or apartment. But the crucial consideration is that, whatever type of tenants they are, the landowner’s power over them is generally expressed, in a capitalist system, through economic dues. As Stanley himself said, this was another primary reason for owning land: ‘the money return – the rent’. Power is nice; the spoils of power arguably even nicer. And Stanley knew. His annual income, according to Cahill, was some £163,273, or in the region of £20 million in today’s prices. 1 Writing in 1844, Karl Marx recognized exactly how central incomegeneration had already become by that stage to Britain’s landowning classes (in Chapter 5, we will consider its significance to their successors today). ‘Large landed property, as we see in England, has already cast off its feudal character’, Marx observed of Stanley and his ilk, ‘and adopted an industrial character insofar as it is aiming to make as much money as possible.’ Rent is the name given to this income, the monetary manifestation of the particular capitalist relation between landlord and tenant. Marx noted, too, that this relation, and hence the rent it crystallized, was shot through with relations of power, and often contestation. Rent is not an abstract price settled in the disembodied register of mainstream economics. It is an altogether worldly, messy, negotiated outcome. ‘The rent of land is established as a result of the struggle between tenant and landlord’. 2 What gave and gives the landowner the ability and right to charge a third party rent for using her land? In the most immediate sense, the law does. But the more fundamental answer is a combination of power, geography and scarcity. Without the power to exclude, as enforced by the law and the forces thereof, rent would be inconceivable. But the power to exclude would itself be for little if land was infinitely abundant. Land is finite – or, as the famous quip variously attributed to the great American humourists Will Rogers and Mark Twain has it, ‘They’re not making any more of it’ – and this finitude buttresses rent. Yet even though it is finite, and, under capitalism, subject to excludability, not all land generates a positive rent. Why? Because of geography. Location, location, location, as real-estate agents like to say. In view of variability in the attractiveness of land to potential tenants in both absolute terms (such as soil fertility) and relative terms (such as accessibility to local services), income from landownership varies greatly, and is sometimes not achievable at all. Land and wealth In most countries, the single largest component of personal wealth is reported to be property, primarily residential property – that is, housing. 1 But what many (perhaps most) people tend not to appreciate is that, when they buy housing, not only are they usually also acquiring the land on which the property sits, but this land typically accounts for a significant and often a majority share of the purchase price. Brian Green estimates that, in England, the average proportion of the sale price of residential property accounted for by land has increased from as little as 2 per cent in the 1930s to in the region of 70 per cent today. 2 In the most sought-after locations, like central London, it can be even higher. And sometimes, of course, it is effectively more than 100 per cent: people will buy, and pay to demolish, a property, just to get their hands on the land beneath it. No wonder Colin Wiles, like many others, insists that land ‘is the single most important issue in English housing today’. 3 In the United Kingdom, the significance of land value to housing value – and thus, in turn, to total wealth – was brought home with especial clarity in late 2017, when, for the first time, the Office for National Statistics published figures for the estimated value of land (a ‘non-produced’ asset) separately from other (produced) national assets. The figures were extraordinary (see Figure 1.1). Land, valued at £5 trillion, accounts for over half of total UK net worth. Buildings on land were valued at considerably less – £3.5 trillion in total, with residential and non-residential buildings accounting for roughly equal shares. The value of all other forms of wealth collectively, meanwhile, totalled a meagre £1.26 trillion, or just 13 per cent of total national net worth. In proportional terms, in other words, aside from land and property – the object of our enquiry in this book – there really is not much of any monetary value in the contemporary United Kingdom, which is a somewhat sobering thought. Figure 1.1 UK net worth by type, 2016 (£ billion) Source: Office for National Statistics Another key reason that landownership matters, then, is simply that land is wealth; to own it is to be enriched, to one degree or another. But the question is: Why, or how? Marx, as it happens, wrestled long and hard with this question. Intuitively, it did not make sense to him. He believed that value always inheres in commodities. But, as Keith Tribe remarks, ‘the condition of existence of a commodity is’, for Marx, ‘that it be the product of human labour’ (thus Marx’s was, says Tribe, an anthropological concept of the commodity). And land is not the product of human labour; ergo, it is not a commodity, and cannot embody value. Yet it does bear price – people do pay for it. The Marxian paradox, then, was that ‘land bears a price but has no value’. 1 As we will see in due course, Polanyi wrestled with a very similar paradox where land’s commodity status was concerned. The fact that these great thinkers struggled so heroically with questions of land and value is most important for what it signifies, which is the fact that land has always been pivotal to capitalism and its signature economic dynamics. To wit, capitalism’s (and capitalists’) raison d’être is accumulation, and accumulated wealth is widely held in land. And it is actually not hard to see why land is valuable. Indeed, we have seen one explanation already: courtesy of its finitude and legal excludability (Tribe writes about the positive price of land resulting from ‘a juridic intervention’), land can generate income for its owner through the simple mechanism of selling use rights. 1 This in turn signals a broader, more generalized reason why people and institutions are prepared to pay for land. As already noted, we all need land – as individuals and as a society. And under capitalism, what we need, we must generally pay for – with certain exceptions, most notably so-called ‘public goods’ (discussed below). But there are of course other things about land that support its pricebearing role. Most materially, it is an ideal vehicle for both the storage and distribution of value. Certainly, it is finite, but it is also ubiquitous, making it fungible at essentially a universal scale; and capitalism thrives on scalable fungibility. Unlike similarly fungible assets – money, say – it is neither replicable nor susceptible to counterfeit. And this, combined with a solidity and permanence that more or less all other assets lack, means that it does not depreciate or inflate away. All of these features, moreover, underwrite the fact that land is bankers’ favoured form of collateral: collateral is security pledged for payment of a loan, and land is, in all senses of the term, secure. It endures. And through its functioning as collateral, crucially, land-as-wealth helps beget further wealth. In mobilizing land as collateral for credit, which can be used to finance the production of goods and services, ‘the West’, argues the economist Hernando de Soto, ‘injects life into assets and makes them generate capital’. This, for de Soto, constitutes the eponymous Mystery of Capital. 2 Last but not least, land is readily divisible, as any locus of capitalist wealth-embodiment must be, lest wealth not be distributable, measurable, and able, in Marx’s words, ‘to fluctuate, to decrease and to increase, to fly from one hand to another’. As Marx also says, ‘private property rests altogether on partitioning’; and since capitalism’s earliest days, land, in its divisibility, has represented privatizable property par excellence. 1 Land and pleasure Lest we forget, however, land is not only about economy, and landownership is therefore also important other than for strictly economic considerations. One such – political influence – I have examined already. And I briefly mentioned another: land’s (and thus landownership’s) importance for the purposes of society’s leisure and pleasure. Those who own the land, in essence, get to enjoy the land, and to decide who does and does not get to enjoy it along with them, and under what conditions. Polanyi is one theorist of land and landownership who explicitly recognized the extra-economic dimensions to land’s significance. ‘The economic function is but one of many vital functions of land’, he noted, continuing, waxing almost lyrical: ‘It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land.’ And so what Polanyi called ‘the economic argument’ needed to be expanded to ‘the conditions of safety and security attached to the integrity of the soil and its resources – such as the vigor and stamina of the population, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of defence materials, even the climate of the country which might suffer from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dust bowls, all of which, ultimately, depend upon the factor land’. 2 One contemporary writer who argues that the capitalist institution of private landownership matters insofar as it enables the exclusion of people from land’s enjoyment is Martin Adams. Adams cites a famous line of Rousseau’s: ‘You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to all and that the Earth belongs to no one.’ 1 As in many other discussions of land as a source of pleasure, Adams tends to equate land with Nature. Polanyi arguably did the same, noting that ‘land is only another name for nature’. 2 On this way of thinking, land is national parks, the wilderness, the uninhabited environment. But this is a mistake. Land is clearly not (always) original nature. In fact it very seldom is. And even where it is not, it still allows enjoyment. Land is the great outdoors, whether built upon or not. Land is air, fresh or otherwise. Land is simply divisible space – space to walk on, run across, play or protest in. This is why landownership matters. It arbitrates access to, and enjoyment of, space, air, the outdoors. Land provides room, and to some extent freedom, such as the freedom to roam. Land encourages mobility. Still, Polanyi’s points about ‘the integrity of the soil and its resources’ and ‘the denudation of forests’ should not be gainsaid. They are important. His worry of course is that land – the environment – becomes despoiled. And clearly landownership is relevant here, too. In deciding, within the bounds of state oversight, how and by whom her land is used, the landowner shapes all of our ecological, as well as social, economic and political futures. I could have made this observation at more or less any point in this section, but this seems as good a place as any: our use of the land for enjoyment, as well as economic production, has ecological implications. Landownership always intermediates these effects. That it does so is, in fact, the central claim of one of the most famous interventions in the literature on environmental management, Garrett Hardin’s famous ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis. 3 Hardin claimed that holding land communally tends to have tragic ecological consequences because individuals lack incentives to use the land sustainably. I will say no more here about that thesis, or counter-arguments to it. It resurfaces in Chapter 3. The Privatization of Landownership For the remainder of this chapter, I move from the question of landownership and its importance generally to questions of public (state-based) and private landownership more specifically. I do so for an obvious reason: to provide a theoretical foundation from which to examine the recent historical shift in Britain away from public and towards (more) private landownership. What does the literature on land and landownership say about private and public landowners and the characteristics of their respective modalities of land stewardship? First, though, some important words of contextualization and qualification. None of what follows is intended to suggest that ‘public’ and ‘private’, as applied to landownership, are cohesive or even necessarily always meaningful categories. For one thing, a huge amount of variety is contained within each: ‘From the individual homeowner to the insurance company in one, and from nationalized industries to the Ministry of Defence in the other’, as Doreen Massey observed of the British landownership landscape before the nationalized industries were themselves largely privatized. 1 In her relation to and use of her land, an individual homeowner may have more in common with a public-sector landowner than with the insurance company of Massey’s example. ‘Private’ contains multitudes, and so does ‘public’; neither category is undifferentiated, and neither refers to styles of landownership completely foreign to the other. It is crucial, therefore, not to reify ownership status, to suggest that ‘public’ ownership always signifies one type of relation to the land and ‘private’ always another type. As Massey insisted, the question of who owns the land is perhaps less important than how and why: What does ownership mean and enable for the owner? If public land is privatized, the change may be of marginal consequence if the new owner behaves just as its predecessor did. Similarly, nationalizing private land changes little if the state simply uses the land in such a way as to attempt to maximise financial returns. What matters, in short, is the rationality of the landowner. Is this rationality what we tend to think of as a public-sector, socially oriented rationality? Or is it more akin to a stylized, profit-oriented, private-sector rationality? It is these rationalities that I am primarily interested in in this chapter, and it is these, as well as formal ownership status, that I denote with the labels ‘public’ and ‘private’. Massey’s key contribution was to show that public ownership only means something different from private ownership if it is allowed to. 1 At a time today when, as Aditya Chakrabortty recently argued, the British public appears to have largely lost faith that public ownership – of land or of anything else – really does mean anything different, one cannot repeat this truth often enough. 2 Briefly stated, the argument I make in the following pages is as follows. The political economy literature contains a wealth of insight into the common implications under capitalism of land being held publicly, or privately – by actors demonstrating, respectively, public-sector or private-sector rationalities. It shows, furthermore, that private landownership is associated with numerous significant problems. And, crucially, it also shows that, as the extent of private landownership increases – which is to say, when, in a society with a mix of public and private landownership, land is progressively privatized, as it has been in neoliberal Britain – these problems tend to deepen. I examine these questions under four interrelated subheadings: market failure; iniquity and inequality; economic disorder; and social dislocation. Market failure What role should the state have in our lives? Few questions evoke such a wide range of opinions, or the expression of those opinions in such vehement terms. It would be nice to be able to ignore the question, given the range of intractable issues – political, economic, cultural – it entails, but unfortunately we cannot. The question of public landownership clearly relates at some level, albeit not in a simplistic fashion, to the question of public-sector powers and responsibilities other than the power, or responsibility, of landownership itself. In a free-market, laissez-faire scenario, after all, why would government need to own land? It would not. Private-sector actors, pursuing their own rational self-interest through competition in markets, would be charged with ensuring society’s economic growth and welfare. Government would be (very) small; so would be its need for land. But despite the claims of political-economic libertarians such as the late Murray Rothbard, few significant theorists of capitalism would suggest that all services can be effectively provided, or should therefore be provided, by the private sector. ‘The market’, understood here as an aggregation of private-sector actors whose relations are mediated purely through the price mechanism, sometimes ‘fails’. It is ill-adapted to providing some types of services, failing to do so adequately when given the task. Those services, theorists suggest, should be provided by the state, as they often have been in the past. Adam Smith’s thinking has long been a touchstone in this regard. Widely considered the father figure of laissez-faire economics, Smith nonetheless saw a critical need for an interventionist state in certain vital areas of social and economic life – so much so, in fact, that Rothbard would later dismiss him as no less than ‘a necessary precursor of Karl Marx’. 1 (Don’t tell the Adam Smith Institute.) For Smith, two key criteria determined whether the state was better positioned than the private sector to provide a particular service. One was that the service be in the public interest – although, as David Reisman notes, Smith failed to explain how ‘public interest’ was to be defined, or by whom. 2 The other was that the service be unattractive or illsuited to the private sector, for instance because its provision necessarily took the form of a natural monopoly. Most of Smith’s examples of appropriate areas for state intervention involved market failure as a failure of supply – a matter of the private sector, for one reason or another, not being up to the task – and three were highlighted. The first was national defence. The second was justice. And the third was so-called ‘public works’, including, notably, infrastructure: ‘roads, bridges, navigable canals, harbours’ and so forth – necessary, Smith reasoned, to ‘facilitate the commerce of any country’. 1 But some of his examples entailed the market failing due to what Smith perceived as deficient demand. Education was one such example. Smith, Reisman explains, argued that the state had to take on a pedagogic function in view of ‘the failure of “the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people” to demand even a modicum of schooling’. 2 So let us assume for the sake of argument that the state should handle at least some of these functions identified by Smith. In reality, of course, the state under capitalism has in certain times and places taken on all these and more – the post–World War II Keynesian welfare-state regime being the exemplar – while in others, most notably the neoliberal period, it has shed many – including large chunks of infrastructure provision. 3 But it has always retained some, including most of defence and education. Crucially, all these areas of state responsibility require land. Indeed, some of them, like defence and infrastructure, need a large amount of land. Does this mean that the state needs to own the land required for the provision of these and other public services? Not necessarily, no. It could lease the land from private-sector owners. But competing for leasehold land in a competitive tenancy market would provide no guarantees of getting the right land in the right location, and still less of securing the land on reasonable terms or of retaining the land at the end of the agreed tenure period. It would militate against precisely the security, certainty and visibility that the public sector requires of its asset base in carrying out these indispensable functions. The market does not offer guarantees; that is not in its nature. Consider by way of analogy the market for land for purchase as opposed to lease. Does the state always get the land it needs in that market? No. That is why the legal systems of modern capitalist societies have generally included provisions for the state to acquire land – through expropriation or, in Britain, ‘compulsory purchase’ – against the will of existing landowners where compelling publicbenefit or public-use purposes can be demonstrated. If the explicit ownership of land is not strictly necessary for the state to dispense public services, then, some sort of major structural intervention in markets for land always is. In any event, market failure as an argument for public landownership is not just about land as a facilitative asset for the fulfilment of state functions. There is also the question, alluded to at the end of the previous section, of land as itself a service of sorts. Land, after Polanyi, as ‘nature’ for all, as space to take pleasure from, or indeed to protest on. Why should we expect private ownership of land to deliver the widely accepted public service of access to the land in its various forms – to forests and parkland, and to the courtyards, pavements, bicycle lanes and piazzas of the urban environment? In particular, why should we expect private landowners to offer this service to everyone – including those potentially unable to pay for it? We should not. John Krutilla and colleagues explained why in an insightful essay, written more than three decades ago, on a specific stock of public land that has itself been in the news recently as a potential object of massive privatization: US federal lands. 1 The essay makes two cogent arguments about failure in land-use markets – concerning exclusions of uses and people, respectively. In the case of the former, the authors show that landowners can make decisions that are ‘rational’ (to them) but which exclude certain uses that would provide more aggregate benefit to society. ‘Picture a case’, they say, ‘in which the attributes that lead the government to try to preserve some natural wonder can be enjoyed by viewers located outside the boundaries of the park in which it is contained. In that case, owners of the adjacent land benefit from the park’s existence without payment to the government.’ But what happens if the state is not the owner? If the park were turned over to private ownership, the private owners also would be unable recapture the full value of the resource in fees. Faced with that fact, private owners might respond by finding a different use that would increase the benefits they could appropriate, such as clear-cutting the timber on the land. While the change could conceivably increase their returns as owners, it would lower the total benefits to society because it ignores the value of the benefits that the private owners could not appropriate. 1 The journalist Anna Minton has made a similar point in worrying about the loss of vital urban land uses and concomitant public benefits that markets and market operators, in privileging financial returns (and the land uses which maximise them), fail to provide. Today’s urban developers, she says, are ‘too narrowly focused simply on creating places which generate maximum returns in terms of shopping and spending. But while economic viability is important, successful places must be about more than a balance sheet, or they will fail to connect with local communities’. 2 Similarly, it is clearly possible, perhaps even inevitable, that private landowners will sometimes ‘rationally’ exclude some of those people who could – and, moral philosophers might say, should – benefit from the ‘service’ furnished by, for example, land-as-nature. This, Krutilla and colleagues explain, is because ‘the on-site amenities provided by such unique natural environments as Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon, or the rain forests of the Olympic National Park’ (all of which are federally owned) are classic public goods, whose consumption by one individual does not in principle preclude consumption by anyone else. The same is of course true of urban public spaces. The greater the number of people that get to enjoy this ‘good’, the greater the overall benefit; but markets are simply not designed to maximize in this way. They are, in this context, an inefficient solution. Why? The contribution that markets make to efficiency rests on their ability to ration scarce resources to their highest valued uses by excluding all the bidders who were unwilling or unable to pay the market price. However, in the case of pure public goods the exclusion of anyone reduces the aggregate welfare realized from them. Thus, the market’s rationing feature tends to reduce rather than increase benefits that potentially can be derived from public goods. 1 Markets, in short, are about rationing and exclusion – and sometimes these mechanisms are simply not called for, including in the context of landownership and use. Some land, urban as well as rural, should be available to everyone to use. The more the land becomes privatized, the more problematic, ceteris paribus, become the failures in land-use markets and concomitant exclusions. Such failure would likely be relatively insignificant to society if only a fraction of the land were privately owned. But since private landownership is a pervasive feature of most contemporary capitalist societies, land-use market failure is a pervasive problem. While various manifestations of this problem have been discussed, perhaps the most notable is the frequently diagnosed ‘end of public space’ in modern cities. The geographer Don Mitchell writes, ‘The end of public space in the American city is its privatization.’ I would turn this formulation around: privatization of land heralds the end of public space, if by ‘public space’ we mean, like Mitchell, ‘a space representative of, and conducive to, the “public” that had been created in the Keynesian era’. 2 Studies have found that, where it ensures that access to urban space is genuinely open, public landownership continues to contribute materially to social well-being and to a region’s ‘liveability’. 3 Mitchell’s particular contribution, meanwhile, is to insist that public space has a pivotal role in making not just liveable but ‘more or less just’ cities. Consider one striking example: the urban homeless. The crisis of homelessness is a crisis of public space because, as Mitchell, after Jeremey Waldron, writes, ‘homeless people [can] only be – that is live as humans – to the degree they [have] access to public space’. So, if Mitchell is right that ‘the end of public space is always a tendency (though definitely a contradictory one) within capitalist urban economies’ – and insofar as the state facilitates, or refrains from inhibiting, that tendency, Mitchell is surely right – then we have every reason to worry about the justice-related and liveability outcomes. 1 Iniquity and inequality Adam Smith’s views on legitimate areas for state intervention were by no means the only beliefs of his that would prove problematic for later generations of free-marketeers. Another topic on which he held decidedly awkward views was concerned more explicitly still with land and landownership – namely, rent: the income generated by landowners from selling use-rights. For Smith, there was something deeply iniquitous about rent. A Presbyterian, he adhered to the Protestant work ethic, and saw landlords as a class that reaped rich rewards for zero graft. Their rental income, he said, ‘costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own’. Still, he did not necessarily blame landlords for their ‘indolence’. He understood it. Landlords’ indolence was logical, ‘the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation’. 2 Smith’s belief that rent was money for nothing was shared by essentially all significant nineteenth-century economic thinkers. David Ricardo agreed with him (landlords were ‘parasites’). So did Marx (‘the landlord exploits everything from which society benefits’). 3 And so too, notably, did thinkers whom we associate today with altogether different ways of understanding the economic world. Perhaps most interesting here is the late nineteenth-century French economist Léon Walras. Walras is lionized today as one of the founders of what in the twentieth century became the disciplinary mainstream – that is, neoclassical economics. He was a pioneer of both marginalist thinking and general equilibrium theory, two essential pillars of orthodoxy. But, as Keith Tribe has recently discussed, Walras was a social reformer, believing, like his father Auguste (himself an accomplished amateur economist), that private landownership and the rents it generated constituted a rigged, unjust system. Indeed, Léon ‘adopted his father’s views about landownership … from the very first’. What was the crux of those views? That, in Tribe’s words, ‘man’, being ‘ephemeral, mortal’, was not ‘capable of possessing the land’, which was ‘indestructible and eternal, permanent and perpetual’; and hence that ‘landed proprietors lived off rents that belonged not to them, but to everyone’. 1 The conviction that rent was both unfair (generated from land rightly belonging to everyone and no one) and undeserved (realized without the application of productive labour) raised two crucial sets of questions for these thinkers. The first was pondered most deeply by Marx: Why on earth was the system of private landownership allowed, specifically by industrial capitalists? This issue genuinely puzzled him. The industrial capitalist, the bourgeois, represented the ‘dominating functionary’ in industrial capitalism. Meanwhile, the landowner, ‘such an important functionary in production in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, is a useless superfetation in the industrial world’. 2 Yet despite this uselessness, the bourgeois not only tolerated the landowner’s existence but shared with her (and with bankers) the surplus value produced by workers, which was apportioned between rent, interest, and profit of enterprise. Why? Why not do what Marx thought the dominating industrial class should logically do, which was to turn privately owned, partitioned land ‘into the common property of the bourgeois class, of capital’? 3 Marx advanced a couple of possible explanations. One was that capitalists worried an attack on one form of private property (property in land) might ‘cast considerable doubts’ on the institution of private property more generally. The other was that ‘the bourgeois has himself become an owner of land’; in other words, Marx espied ‘the abolition of the distinction between capitalist and landowner, so that there remain altogether only two classes of the population – the working class and the class of capitalists’. 4 In this sense, Marx’s critique of private landownership was, and remains, much more radical than is generally allowed. It is typically seen as a critique of capitalism, specifically from a socialist perspective. But it was not that, or at least not first and foremost. Lenin later made this exact point, in attacking the ideas of a local socialist movement that had interpreted Marx in this – to Lenin, erroneous – fashion: the Russian Narodniks of the 1860s and 1870s. The Narodnik thinks that repudiation of private landownership is repudiation of capitalism. That is wrong. The repudiation of private landownership expresses the demands for the purest capitalist development. And we have to revive in the minds of Marxists the ‘forgotten words’ of Marx, who criticised private landownership from the point of view of the conditions of capitalist economy. 1 Lenin was right. If Marx thought that private landownership was inappropriate to socialism, as of course he did, he also thought that it was inappropriate to capitalism, and this was the principal thrust of his critique. ‘Pure’ capitalist development would see private property communalized by the capitalist class, thus obviating the need to pay rent. The second question provoked by the perceived unfairness and undeservedness of land rent, then, was – and is – what should be done about it. We have already hinted at Marx’s answer, which was communalization of land, ideally not by and for the capitalist class (the ‘purest’ capitalist solution) but by and for a revolutionary communist state: in other words, land nationalization. Indeed, this was his and Engels’s very first demand in The Communist Manifesto: ‘Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.’ 2 As this statement suggested, land rents, of a kind, would continue; but they would not be private rents, and nor therefore would the fruits of these rents be privatized. Tenants would instead pay them to the state in the form of a tax. As with his position on rent, it is vital to recognize that Marx’s views on what to do about landownership were by no means extraordinary for the day, even if his views on what to do about capitalism more generally were. In the West, land nationalization has in recent times come to be seen as a radical, almost inconceivable policy idea; but in the nineteenth century, it was not. Among many others, both Walrases – father and son – agreed with Marx, although they certainly did not mention this particular congruence. Both were vocal and persistent advocates of land nationalization. Auguste, ‘not content with the weakening of landed proprietors’, called for them to be ‘completely eliminated’. 1 In place of an iniquitous system of private rents, Walras championed precisely the type of centralized landownership and tenure taxation arrangement we find in The Communist Manifesto: ‘all rental payments’, as Tribe relates of the Walrasian vision, ‘should go to the state’. 2 For Walras, such an arrangement would not only mitigate the injustices of private rents. It would also do away with the need for all other taxes, such as income or capital gains taxes, ‘providing a single yet adequate source for all government expenditure’. 3 Despite the subsequent shifting of ideational tides, comparable proposals continue to circulate today among thinkers on land and landownership. Consider Martin Adams’s proposals. Adams emphasizes that he is not against exclusive use of land, just exclusive ownership – and hence the mechanism ‘by which people unfairly profit from land’. He calls for land to be ‘owned in common, even as it is privately used’. How would his proposals work? He envisages, like Marx and Walras before him, a leasing model. But land would be owned at the local community level rather than by a central state. And rather than paying taxes, those making exclusive use of the land would make financial ‘contributions’ to the community – a kind of reimbursement for exclusion. Adams uses the term ‘community land contribution’ to signal the underlying philosophy that ‘land is a community good and that people ought to contribute to their communities if they choose to use it exclusively’. 4 I am not interested here in debating the viability of Adams’s proposals – or indeed Marx’s or Walras’s or anyone else’s. The point is simply that, in addition to the problem of market failure, another reason why it matters whether land is owned privately or publicly is that, according to a range of influential thinkers on landownership under capitalism, a fundamental injustice is represented by the rents earned by private landowners; and, as we have seen, it is not as if alternative ways of arranging the ownership and exclusive use of land are unimaginable. Furthermore, the perceived injustices of private landownership and its economic privileges run considerably deeper than the rent question alone. There is a second, no less important sense in which the financial gains realized by landowners are unearned, and thus unfair. This relates not to income (rents paid for the land’s use) but to capital gains (the increase in the value of land over time), which under capitalism are likewise generally captured entirely by the land’s owner (for some exceptions, see below). Critique of the so-called ‘unearned increment’ in land value is typically traced to John Stuart Mill, who observed that landowners become enriched simply through the ‘ordinary progress of a society … independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches?’ 1 The ‘unearned’ increment in land value, to be clear, is that increase which is owed not to improvements to the land made by the landowner, but simply to the wider development of the economy at large. This is an important distinction. In crude critiques, capital gains earned passively by landowners tend to be lumped together with those brought about instead by owners’ active property improvements. One such crude critique was Winston Churchill’s. In a celebrated parliamentary speech in 1909, Churchill raged: Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. 1 The problem with this statement – its critical lacuna – is that some landowners clearly do make some improvements to their land, thus contributing to the process from which their ‘own enrichment is derived’. Not all of them merely ‘sit still’. The tendency to lump together all increments as ‘unearned’ is in one sense understandable, because the two types – passive and active, ‘earned’ and ‘unearned’ – can in practice be very hard to disentangle. But, by any reasonable reckoning, they are not the same thing. If anything, belief in the fundamentally unearned nature of many (if not all) privatized gains in land value is even more widely shared among economic and political thinkers than the parallel belief in the iniquities of land rent. It ranges across the entire intellectual and ideological spectrum. Writing in 2010, for example, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times and famed cheerleader for globalization, had this to say: In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable. It might have been Mill himself writing. What Wolf refers to is, indeed, an economically extraordinary state of affairs: in contemporary London and south-east England more widely, owners of homes (and housing land) routinely ‘earn’ more from land and housing price appreciation than from their employment. 1 Noting that his enormous privatized capital gain was taxfree, Wolf admitted that he was therefore, despite himself, ‘a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth.’ ‘This appropriation of the rise in the value of land’ was, Wolf concluded, plainly ‘unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth?’ 2 Nothing, was the honest answer. And the private appropriation of unearned increases in the value of land is not just unfair. It has, Wolf argued, ‘dire consequences’. Where none of the capital gain accrues to the state, it is ‘necessary for the state to fund itself by taxing effort, ingenuity and foresight’. Furthermore, such a system ‘creates calamitous political incentives’, which are clear to see for all prepared to see them: ‘In a world in which people have borrowed heavily to own a location, they are desperate to enjoy land price rises and, still more, to prevent price falls. Thus we see a bizarre spectacle: newspapers hail upward moves in the price of a place to live – the most basic of all amenities.’ And, last but not least, ‘the opportunity for speculation in land both fuels – and is fuelled by – the credit cycle’. 3 People borrow to speculate in the land market (which, as we have seen, is what the housing market, at least in Britain, increasingly is). We will return to the theoretical implications of this speculative behaviour below; Wolf’s point was that the practical implications had recently struck home with particular force – namely in the shape of the 2007–09 land-andhousing-market-rooted financial crisis. Is there a solution to this iniquitous system of unearned increments? Certainly. As with the rental question, land nationalization is one obvious answer for those of the belief, in Philip Kivell’s words, ‘that it is society which creates enhanced land values, and that the economic gain should therefore rest with the whole community and not, fortuitously, with the owner alone’. 4 And nationalization (or at least state-based communalization) of landownership specifically on the grounds of socializing land value gains is not, in capitalist society, just a theoretical nicety, a whimsical fantasy of idealistic political-economic theorists. It has been done, including in the capital city of the capitalist poster-child that is Australia. All land not only in Canberra but in the Australian Capital Territory more widely is publicly owned. And the decision that the state, not private individuals, should own the land was based precisely on the Millian logic. ‘In the 1890s’, relates Max Neutze, the political leaders planning federation were anxious to avoid in the new capital the land speculation which had occurred in the established cities … Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, pointed out that the value of urban land results from the actions of the community as a whole rather than those of the individual landowner, and the increase in its value should therefore accrue to the community rather than to private owners. 1 To this day, land in Canberra is leased by the Crown, and there is thus no land (ownership) market. Neither is land nationalization the only possible solution. A tax on the ‘unimproved’ value of land – that is, the value of land minus its appurtenances – is another way to channel land-value gains to the wider society that generates them, and it has long been the recommendation of choice for tackling the unearned increment problem, especially among economists. Adam Smith thought ‘nothing [could] be more reasonable’ than such a land value tax; Milton Friedman, inimitably, considered it the ‘least bad tax’. 2 Henry George, writing in the 1870s, is especially closely associated with the idea. Today, Wolf is one high-profile advocate; another is the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The reason that economists – even, perhaps especially, those in the mainstream – are so enamoured of the idea of a land value tax is that it is, on their terms, efficient. It does not distort incentives, because the supply of land is effectively fixed. Again, a land value tax is not simply wishful thinking, a mere impractical fancy. More than thirty countries around the world, at various moments, have successfully implemented land value taxation. 1 The rent and capital-gains-related iniquities widely imputed to capitalist private landownership matter quite simply because land, like all other assets, is unequally distributed. After all, it would not much matter that land-use rents and much of the appreciation in land value are arguably ‘unearned’ if everyone benefited equally from this undeserved boon. But obviously they do not. Some people benefit greatly; many benefit not a jot. And this is true in all capitalist societies where private landownership dominates. We will learn much more in the following chapters about the nature and degree of the particular landownership inequalities found historically and today in Britain, the territory of main interest to us. But we can briefly underline those inequalities here. Writing in 1978, on the cusp of the neoliberal revolution, Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano offered a powerful and precise summary of the state of play, writing that in Britain, ‘while the least wealthy have the least access to land, at the other end of the wealth spectrum no form of wealth is as heavily concentrated in the hands of the richest individuals’. 2 The most pronounced of these inequalities, notably, have long been found in Scotland. ‘The numbers are well known’, Liam Kirkaldy commented, with an air of resignation, in 2015; ‘432 people own half of Scotland’s private land. 0.025 per cent of the population owns 67 per cent of Scotland’s rural land. Ten per cent of Scotland is owned by just 16 individuals or groups. In terms of land-ownership patterns, Scotland is one of the most unequal in the world’. 3 Or, as James Hunter and colleagues have put it: Inequality in wealth is an increasing concern internationally. Debate about the causes and consequences of inequality has focused, in the UK and elsewhere, on the divide between the ‘one per cent’ (who hold a large and growing proportion of available wealth) and the ‘ninety-nine per cent’ (whose share of total wealth has been falling). The inequality inherent in Scotland’s land ownership pattern, however, is of an entirely different order to the more general 1:99 divide. The disparity in this instance is not between one hundredth of the population and the other ninety-nine hundredths … [T]he divide is between the equivalent of one twelve-thousandth part of the population (the part owning half of Scotland’s privately-owned land) and the remainder. 1 Such inequalities in landownership under capitalism are well-known. It has long been widely understood that one cannot grasp actually-existing patterns of socioeconomic inequality without factoring in landownership. 2 But what is much less obvious, though no less important, is that land rents and land value gains appear to be critical to rapidly growing levels of inequality, in terms of both income and wealth, during the neoliberal era – a trend that is, of course, one of the key issues of the moment in Western societies. The centrality of land to this troubling ongoing development has been a principal theme of emerging critiques of the book that has done so much to put inequality in the intellectual and political spotlight – Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the TwentyFirst Century. 3 The first line of critique concerns income inequalities. One of Piketty’s main contributions has been to show that stability in the respective shares of national income accruing to wage earners and capital owners, for so long considered a ‘stylized fact’ of macroeconomics, did not survive beyond the 1950s. In most advanced capitalist countries, labour’s share of income consistently rose through to the end of the 1970s. But from the beginning of the neoliberal period, Piketty demonstrates, it has fallen, while capital’s share of income has risen inexorably. The critique of Piketty is that he does not show which capital owners have primarily benefited. The answer, Gianni La Cava and others argue, is not owners of financial assets – it is landowners. More and more income, in short, has been realized in the form of rent: ‘This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.’ 1 The growth in income share accruing to landowners tends in turn to exacerbate overall income inequality. Why? Because landowners are already typically high-income earners. This is especially true of landownership in the form of housing ownership. ‘People who have the greatest incomes’, reports Beverley Searle of the English case, ‘also have most housing wealth.’ 2 The other line of critique is similar, but instead concerns increasing inequalities of wealth. Here the most vocal and high-profile critic has been Stiglitz. Piketty charted robust growth of accumulated wealth in the advanced capitalist countries under neoliberalism. But, just as he failed to show which type of capital has been achieving increasing returns, so too, says Stiglitz, did he fail to show where the concomitant gains in wealth have been concentrated. The answer once again, perhaps unsurprisingly, is land – Figure 1.2 illustrates the prototypical UK case, where, since the mid 1990s, effectively all of the increase in wealth has been concentrated in land and property, with land value gains accounting for the lion’s share (approximately 60 per cent). Overall wealth has grown largely because the price of land has increased. This matters, Stiglitz argues, for two reasons. The first is that the increase in wealth therefore does not imply growth in society’s productive economic capacity; as Peter Orszag notes, ‘an increase in the value of land and housing – unlike an increase in other forms of capital, such as computers and equipment – doesn’t necessarily increase our capacity to produce goods and services. It doesn’t imply that we have any more land to use.’ 1 The second reason it matters is that increases in the value of land, which Stiglitz says are today driven substantially by growth in credit, serve to increase wealth inequalities. ‘An increase in credit increases wealth through an increase in land prices’, Stiglitz writes. But: ‘Since it is only the wealthy who own the land and that get access to credit, all of the increase in wealth (capital gain) goes to the wealthy.’ 2 Figure 1.2 UK net worth by type, 1995–2016 Source: Office for National Statistics Patterns of private landownership, in other words, seem to be at the heart of growing inequalities in both income and wealth under capitalism. 1 This is what the latest, cutting-edge research in economic theory suggests. And this is clearly one reason to pay close attention to whether, in practice – in Britain or elsewhere – land is held privately or publicly. Yet, in concluding our discussion of landownership, iniquity and inequality, it bears emphasising that neither the unfairnesses imputed to private landownership nor related calls to find ways of reducing such unfairnesses are only about the economies of owners versus non-owners. Yes, ownership of land provides enormous power for owners themselves to profit financially, while non-owners do not. But, as we saw in the first section of this chapter, it also confers a set of powers of much more far-reaching scope: namely, to play a meaningful part in shaping the economic, social and ecological development of communities, regions, and even nations. This is not just a question of power, but also of privilege. Why should this privilege be so unequally distributed? Why, given the implications of its exercise, should it be given to those – private individuals or corporations – who are not democratically accountable for the decisions they take? The point here is that the institution of private landownership deprives non-owners of influence over what is clearly a significant locus of power not just to make money, but to shape our collective societies, economies and environments. This deprivation matters in all times and places, but it matters especially when, as in contemporary Britain, any common rights to access and use privately owned land – such as existed before the original enclosure – have for the most part long since been extinguished (see Chapter 2). Now, public ownership of land may not always in reality provide the population at large with the meaningful influence over land use (and thus wider social, economic and ecological development) that private ownership by its nature forecloses. I am not for one moment being starry-eyed about this. As the political theorist C. B. Macpherson persuasively argued, state property, in its essence, is a ‘corporate right to exclude others’ just like (corporate) private property is: it ‘does not give the individual citizen a direct right to use, nor a right not to be excluded from, the assets held by the state’ inasmuch as ‘the state, in any modern society, is not the whole body of citizens but a smaller body of persons who have been authorized (whether by the whole body of citizens or not) to command the citizens’, and it is this smaller body ‘that holds the rights called state property’. 1 Nevertheless, in a democratic system, where the state is electorally accountable, public landownership does at least preserve the possibility of the public having some kind of say over land use. If public land is sold off to the private sector, that possibility is gone. Those concerned by the disposal of public land often warn that it is an ‘irreplaceable asset’ with which we would do well to be much more careful. 2 And they are right to do so. But the land itself is not the only such asset. Also irreplaceable, and arguably more significant, is the particular capacity for public self-determination conferred by state ownership and control of the land – even if only ‘potentially’. Economic disorder There is a widely cited passage from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that reads as follows: As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land. 1 The passage is justly famous. And it is typically marshalled as an example of the particular Smithian position on land rent that I outlined earlier – that rent is unjust, unearned income. This is an entirely reasonable way of reading the passage: Smith says landowners reap where they never sowed. Nothing could be clearer. Yet what generally gets lost in the hurry to identify Smith with a wider critique of rent is the very first clause of the passage: As soon as the land of any country has all become private property …’. This, I suggest, is important. Smith seems to be saying that there is something significant about the extent of private ownership of the land; that it matters not just that there is privately owned land, but that ‘all’ the land is private property. It is when all the land has become private property, Smith says, that morbid economic symptoms arise. This issue of the degree of privatization of land in any country – an issue of obvious relevance for us – is one that those who cite Smith’s passage usually overlook. In what follows, I want to think a little more closely about it. What happens, according to political-economic theory, when more and more of the land (and potentially all of the land) in a country becomes private property? The work of the geographer David Harvey in extending Marxian rent theory is an indispensable resource here. Harvey begins with one of the questions about private landownership under capitalism that Marx, as we saw earlier, had himself pondered: Why, with the rise of industrial capitalism, did the bourgeoisie leave landed property intact, and thus permit the ongoing appropriation (in the form of rent) of ‘a part of the surplus value that would otherwise accrue to capital’? 2 Harvey rehearses Marx’s own answers to this question, but, crucially, he adds another. Harvey argues that private landownership, and in particular privatized land’s circulation as a commodity in competitive land markets, performs a vital coordinating function for capitalism. That is to say, the legal–economic arrangement that generates rent plays a positive systemic role, even if, pace Smith, Marx and others, rent per se is unearned income for the individuals fortunate enough to receive it. Landed property, in Harvey’s own words, can and often does play a ‘positive role in co-ordinating the flow of capital on to and through the land in ways broadly supportive of further accumulation’. Is this just an abstract claim? Or does Harvey provide more substance – some examples of how, at least in principle, this coordinating role works? He does. It works, as in theory it does in all capitalist markets, through allocative efficiency; rent, like other market prices, sends ‘signals’ to market actors that help coordinate their respective movements and investments. Consider a situation, Harvey says, in which, thanks to the locational advantages of the land she leases, one capitalist producer is able to generate ‘excess’ profits. What does the rational landlord do? Increase the rent at that location, of course. By thus ‘taxing away’ the excess, ‘the landlord operates to equalize rates of profit between competing producers’. She facilitates the process of inter-capitalist competition. Is this good for capitalism, in the sense of good for ‘further accumulation’? Absolutely it is. ‘When the unfair advantages are eliminated, competition forces producers into further development of the productive forces and further rationalization of production.’ 1 Markets, price signals, efficiency, coordination, rationalization – Harvey, it would appear, is something of a neoclassical economist. And yet of course he is not – and the reason, at least where land privatization and land markets are concerned, is that, as Harvey goes on to say, capitalism does not only get the ‘good’, the positive elements of rentfacilitated coordination and rationalization. Capitalism, for Harvey as for Marx, is always about contradiction, and thus with the ‘good’ it gets the associated ‘bad’ – it necessarily gets elements of disorder into the bargain. Rent, and the system of land privatization and commodification underlying it, is a source not only of coordination but also, Harvey writes, of ‘contradiction, confusion and irrationality’. 2 Or, as Allen Scott says, in another brilliant disquisition on capitalism and land control, ‘the atomized pattern of private land-ownership in capitalism tends … to restrict the smooth accumulation of capital’. 1 Why? And how? This is where Harvey’s argument becomes dense – but bear with me, because it repays close consideration. It emerges out of two vital insights. The first is that capitalist land markets (and landowners) can only properly fulfil their coordinating role if market actors are free to invest in land solely with a view to maximizing rental yield – which is to say, if exchange value is wholly divorced from use value. This insight is the foundation of Harvey’s now-famous claim that under capitalism land is increasingly treated like a financial asset (in other words, as an asset with only exchange value) – rent representing the effective ‘interest’ on the money used to purchase land, and the land market therefore becoming part of the wider arena for the circulation of interest-bearing capital. The freer interestbearing capital is to ‘roam the land looking for titles to future ground-rents to appropriate’, Harvey argues, ‘the better it can fulfil its co-ordinating role’. 2 What he is saying, in short, is that capitalism requires land speculation. For land markets and rental yields to coordinate productive allocations of land according to the mainstream economic model, it has to be possible to buy and sell land strictly according to expected rents – to speculate on it. The other key insight is that, while under capitalism land can be traded like any other commodity, it is in fact not like any other commodity. We have touched on this point already – Marx thought that land was not a commodity at all, since it was not the product of human labour – and we will come back to it shortly, when discussing Polanyi. But Harvey emphasizes a different aspect of land’s specialness as (or as not) a commodity: specifically, monopoly inheres in it. All land is non-replicable; and every piece of land is unique. ‘Monopoly power over the use of land’, Harvey notes, ‘can never be entirely stripped of its monopolistic aspects, because land is variegated in terms of its qualities of fertility, location, etc.’. 3 Or, as Churchill famously put it: ‘Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies – it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.’ 1 Combine these two qualities – the necessity of speculation in land and the endemic nature of monopoly control over it – and you have, Harvey concludes, a recipe for trouble. As we have seen, effective coordination of capitalist production through the land market requires landowners to charge market-clearing rents: those that discipline producers to be competitive, and that therefore help keep productive forces in balance. As Harvey says, however, ‘there is no way to ensure that the appropriators of rent take their due and only their due’. The way in which markets typically ensure that market participants only take ‘their due’ – the amount designed to keep the system as a whole in balance – is through competition. But competition, as I have noted, is always circumscribed in land markets because monopoly control is, in Harvey’s words, ‘chronic and unavoidable’. This monopoly power, he continues, ‘creates all kinds of opportunities for the appropriation of rent which do not arise in the case of other kinds of financial asset except under special circumstances’. There is, in other words, nothing to stop landowners from price (rent) gouging – which is anything but systemstabilizing behaviour: ‘[I]ndividual landholders, acting in their own immediate self-interest and seeking to maximize the ground-rent they can appropriate, may force allocations of capital to land in ways that make no sense from the standpoint of the overall requirements of accumulation’. 2 Furthermore, if the system, as it must, allows speculation in future ground rents, then it also by extension allows speculation in something else: future capital gains. One of the most notable features of land investment in earlytwenty-first-century capitalism is individuals and institutions widely investing in property not for proprietary occupation or productive use – and not for letting to tenants either – but rather in the hope and expectation of value appreciation and the possibility of resale at a higher price. We see this, for example, in the form of empty, high-end housing in London (see Chapter 4). We see it also in the speculative real-estate investment occurring around special economic zones in rural India. 1 If, with speculation in future ground rents, we get, pace Harvey, ‘good’ (coordination) and ‘bad’ (disorder), with speculation in future capital gains we arguably get only the latter. It does not contribute in any way to allocative efficiency. We know only too well today, just as Marx himself always knew, that financial markets are fertile fields of speculative excess; in volume 3 of Capital, Marx envisioned such markets as a kind of warped doppelgänger of ‘real’ capitalism, representing its ‘height of distortion’ and the locus of its most ‘insane forms’. But where speculative frenzies are concerned, financial markets, Harvey would later suggest, are almost as nothing compared to land markets. And the allure of monopoly rents, undisciplined by competitive pressures, is a big part of the reason for this: ‘The “insane forms” of speculation and the “height of distortion” achieved within the credit system stand’ – precisely in view of monopoly control in land – ‘to be greatly magnified in the case of speculation in future rents.’ 2 Of course, the very openness of the land market, the free play of speculation within it, only serves to exacerbate all of this. So, while interestbearing capital must be free to speculate on rental yield in order to perform a positive coordinating role, the same conditions contain within them the very seeds of disorder, for ‘the more open the land market is, the more recklessly can surplus money capital build pyramids of debt claims and seek to realize its excessive hopes through the pillaging and destruction of production on the land itself’. This is capitalist contradiction writ large: ‘the land market necessarily internalizes all the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production’ insofar as the positive ‘co-ordinating functions’ of rental appropriation ‘are bought at the cost of permitting insane forms of land speculation … Speculation in land may be necessary to capitalism’, Harvey writes, ‘but speculative orgies periodically become a quagmire of destruction for capital itself.’ 3 And if ever this phenomenon was in evidence, it was in 2007–09, in the global financial crisis – which, as we know by now, was triggered precisely by insane forms of speculation in markets for housing – read: land – and out of which a quagmire of destruction for capital itself was averted only by massive state intervention and the socialization of losses. That this is the case is recognized, furthermore, by economic commentators with vastly different understandings of capitalism than Harvey’s. As we saw earlier, the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf decries the fact that ‘the opportunity for speculation in land both fuels – and is fuelled by – the credit cycle’. In fact, his post-crisis critique of land markets, finance capital, speculation and economic destruction is strikingly comparable to Harvey-the-Marxist’s. Where Harvey writes of pyramids of debt claims on land, Wolf says that the existing nexus of housing, land and finance capital is ‘no more than a giant pyramid selling scheme and one whose dire consequences we have seen again and again’; where Harvey writes of insane forms of speculation on rents destroying value, Wolf castigates the ‘fever of land speculation’ and laments that such ‘insane speculative fevers have ended up destabilising the entire global economy’. 1 If any market indubitably refutes the neoclassical conceit that private markets produce efficient and stable outcomes, then it is surely the land market (see also Chapter 5). The significance of these disruptive and destructive tendencies, furthermore, is not limited to the economic instability, and potentially havoc, wrought by the growing privatization of land and its allocation through markets. Harvey, as a geographer, is only too aware that economies do not exist on the proverbial head of a pin; they exist in real places and spaces, and their contradictions are always real-world, lived and experienced contradictions. In internalizing the contradictions of capitalism, Harvey therefore points out, the land market ‘thereby imposes those contradictions upon the very physical landscape of capitalism itself’. 2 The economic disorder generated by speculative land markets is at once, and necessarily, a disorder that is geographical and developmental, playing out in the built environment and in the area of land use. It is overbuilding booms. It is home foreclosures. It is potentially also, as we shall shortly see, an increase in generalized social disorder. And, of course, the more widely speculative land markets spread as more and more land is privatized, and as actors accordingly are more and more incentivized to chase monopoly rents and capital gains speculatively, the greater the potential for disorder in economies – and geographies, and so forth – and the greater the potential scale of this disorder. None of this, needless to say, is much of an advertisement for privatizing land. If the kinds of deleterious outcomes theorized by Harvey are to be avoided, some form of state intervention in land markets is clearly necessary – just as it is, I have argued, to counteract market failure and to dampen, if not eradicate, the iniquities and inequalities associated with private landownership. Some might argue that an effective planning system is the answer to the disorder unleashed by land-market speculation. But this is hopelessly naive, if only because the planning system and the decisions it issues are liable themselves to become just a further locus of speculation. If monopoly rents are generated by locational specialness, then nothing generates such specialness and rents quite like planning permission. If most or all of the land in a country is privatized and commodified, and a planning system is introduced in an attempt to impart order to development patterns, it is inevitable that private-sector attempts to second-guess – and, wouldn’t you know it, capture – the planning system will substantially mitigate this attempt to moderate speculative disorder. Thus, while acknowledging planning as ‘an instrument in the attempt to control and rationalize the overall pattern of urban development’, Scott insists that planning responses are always no more than ‘eclectic, partial, and stopgap measures that temper but do not abolish the self-constricting logic’ of private landownership. 1 Ultimately, the only credible answer to this problematic is a substantial stock of publicly owned land, especially in those densely populated urban areas where some degree of joined-up and balanced land-use development is surely beneficial to the economy and society at large. As Kivell argues, ‘where governments or local authorities own the land required for development they can promote efficient and desirable land use patterns and channel growth in a rational and well co-ordinated manner’. 1 Sometimes, as Scott says, ‘breaking the power of private landownership … is essential’. We should not be naive about the typical motivations for such state intervention, however. Just as Marx saw the theoretical abolition of landed property as advantageous for capital, so minimizing the economic disorder ineluctably associated with private landownership is also primarily in capital’s interest. In this respect, the public ownership of urban land is, pace Scott, ‘a collectively rational and necessary response within capitalism to the prevailing pattern of fragmented, dispersed and privatized landownership … to ensure the achievement of the overriding capitalistic goal of unhindered expansion of the bases of commodity production’. Yet, although for Scott this type of state intervention is ordinarily about smoothing capital accumulation, it ‘has not been entirely lacking in progressive elements’. 2 Theoretically speaking, this, at least, is something to cling to. Social dislocation I have already hinted at a theoretical argument that will now take centre stage in this final part of the chapter – namely, that extending private ownership and market-based allocation of land is injurious not only for economic stability – Harvey’s argument – but also for social well-being, which of course is connected to economic stability but by no means reducible to it. The thinker who has developed this argument most fully is Karl Polanyi, most notably in The Great Transformation, published in 1944. In the rest of this chapter I will be focusing largely on Polanyi’s ideas. His work is directly relevant to the empirical case study considered in this book because it suggests that the privatization and commodification of public land would be likely to elicit a range of nefarious social consequences. Polanyi’s explanation for the negative ramifications of turning land into private property and trading it in markets rests on his concept of a ‘fictitious commodity’. A commodity, Polanyi says, is something produced specifically for sale on the market; in this sense his definition of a commodity is narrower than Marx’s, which, as we have seen, requires only that something be the product of human labour. For Polanyi, therefore, land, which has existed since time immemorial, is not a commodity, and neither is labour or money. Yet under capitalism, land, labour and money are all widely commodified – so how should we conceptualize them, if not as (real) commodities? ‘Fictitious commodities’ was Polanyi’s answer. Commodities were fictional if, like land, they were treated by society as commodities by being bought and sold in markets, but had not been created with such commodification in mind. Land, labour and money, Polanyi submitted, were ‘obviously not commodities’. This was not to say that their commodification was a fiction. What was ‘entirely fictitious’, rather, was the ‘commodity description of labor, land, and money’. 1 Prior to the birth and spread of market-based capitalism, Polanyi argued, land had historically been embedded in various types of non-market social relations. It constituted ‘the natural surroundings in which [society] exists’; it was ‘an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions’. It defied, in short, dualisms to which we have subsequently become accustomed, most notably that of nature/society. What the privatization and commodification of land – or, as Polanyi liked to put it, the advancement of the commodity fiction in respect of it – therefore represented was nothing less than an attempt to dis-embed land from that with which it had historically been enmeshed. This, Polanyi suggested, was – as it remains – a monumental, game-changing endeavour. Given land’s inherent entanglement with ‘society’, to include it ‘in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market’. And this disembedding of land, Polanyi repeatedly reminded readers, was no mere sideshow to the main capitalist drama of the nineteenth century; on the contrary, it was fundamental to that drama: ‘to separate land from man and to organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the Utopian concept of a market economy’. 1 Insofar as marketizing land means wrenching it away from its ‘natural’ social habitat, Polanyi saw it as a wholly unnatural project: ‘To isolate [land] and form a market for it’, Polanyi went so far as to say, ‘was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.’ It was weird because, of course, land is not a commodity in Polanyi’s sense of the term, and thus there is no reason to believe that treating it as a commodity will ‘work’ in the way the marketization of things that are indeed produced for sale on the market does. Land had conventionally been embedded in society. Under this order of things, Polanyi saw land as fundamentally buttressing ‘the vigor and stamina of the population, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of defence materials, even the climate of the country’. Yet none of these things, he went on to say, ‘respond to the supply-and-demand mechanism of the market’. Thus, subjecting land to the ‘logic’ of the market necessarily meant putting at risk all such things that depend intimately upon it. ‘To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment’, Polanyi thus concluded, would inevitably result in ‘the demolition of society’. Dis-embedding land would despoil that which socially embedded land sustained: ‘Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.’ 2 He was a cheerful fellow, Polanyi. This, according to Polanyi, was to some extent precisely what had happened in nineteenth-century Britain, which was his prime example of a place where, with profoundly negative consequences, land and the other fictitious commodities had been relentlessly separated from their pre-existing social stratum under the march of industrial, market-based capitalism. Invoking the ravages of the industrialized social landscape depicted by Marx in Capital, and even more vividly, exactly a century before Polanyi was himself writing, by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Polanyi opined that ‘nothing saved the common people of England from the impact of the Industrial Revolution. A blind faith in spontaneous progress had taken hold of people’s minds, and with the fanaticism of sectarians the most enlightened pressed forward for boundless and unregulated change in society. The effects on the lives of the people were awful beyond description.’ 1 There is thus an important lesson to be learned from Polanyi when we turn, presently, to the history of privatization of public land in latter-day Britain. The lesson is simply this: the importance of looking to the social, as well as economic, realm for the potential effects of this privatization. But we are actually only halfway done with Polanyi and his theory of land and fictitious commodification. It turns out that this theory, and indeed Polanyi’s reading of it through the lens of European history, is not an entirely dystopian one after all. The more positive aspect of his argument is that neither in theory nor in practice does the dis-embedding of land – its isolation and marketization – go uncontested. This dis-embedding is unnatural; and so, perhaps naturally, it is resisted. Markets for land (and labour and money) always need to be made – or, as Polanyi himself famously put it, ‘Laissezfaire was planned’ – and hence, in principle, they can always be unmade, too. 2 Attempts at this ‘unmaking’, whereby land and the other fictitious commodities would be re-embedded in the social milieux from which they had been rent asunder, were described by Polanyi as ‘counter-moves’. They represented the second component of another of his signature concepts, the so-called ‘double movement’. The first component was the generalized capitalist ‘move’ to marketize, to dis-embed; the second movement was resistance to this, specifically where the fictitious commodities were concerned. Because markets in labour, land and money threaten to ‘destroy society’, society invests in ‘self-preserving action’, either by preventing such markets from being established or by ‘[interfering] with their free functioning, once established’. What, in theory, do these counter-moves look like? ‘To remove land from the market’, Polanyi says, ‘is synonymous with the incorporation of land with definite institutions such as the homestead, the cooperative, the factory, the township, the school, the church, parks, wild life preserves, and so on.’ And Polanyi claimed that, but for such ‘protective counter-moves’, society ‘would have been annihilated’: Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable dimensions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money. 1 To add some colour to Polanyi’s theorization and historicization of the double movement, particularly in relation to land, let us briefly consider some examples. On Neutze’s telling, Sweden’s land experienced precisely the type of move and counter-move envisioned by Polanyi, although Neutze does not invoke Polanyi by name. In Sweden, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, no private person had the right to own land in the towns; all of it belonged either to the town or the Crown. The rise of economic liberalism during the nineteenth century resulted in much urban land becoming the property of individuals and companies who had the right to determine its use. From around the turn of the century there was a gradual reversal of the trend towards privatization of land for a number of reasons. One important reason was that rapid urbanization was leading to overcrowded housing and rapidly rising rents bringing fears of unrest among the urban proletariat. 2 Privatization and commodification of the land had precipitated elements of social dislocation; society then kicked forcefully back against this trend. A notable part of Polanyi’s genius was to recognize that, in places like Sweden, the double movement entailed a complicated and often seemingly improbable politics of land, and that this politics was absolutely central to the political currents of the age. ‘Opposition to mobilization of the land’, he wrote – meaning here by ‘mobilization’, marketization – ‘was the sociological background of that struggle between liberalism and reaction that made up the political history of Continental Europe in the nineteenth century.’ Liberals were for laissez-faire; those ‘reacting’ were against it, and in the countryside they typically included, in an odd constellation of interests, not only farm workers but also the landed classes. The stupendous industrial achievements of market economy had been bought at the price of great harm to the substance of society. The feudal classes found therein an occasion of retrieving some of their lost prestige by turning advocates of the virtues of the land and its cultivators. In literary romanticism nature had made its alliance with the past; in the agrarian movement of the nineteenth-century feudalism was trying not unsuccessfully to recover its past by presenting itself as the guardian of man’s natural habitat, the soil. Had the danger not been genuine, the stratagem could not have worked. 1 In a curious twist, the most traditional of classes posited itself as protector not just of its own but of wider society’s interests. If in our analysis of latter-day land commodification in Britain we are on the lookout for undetected social consequences, then, we should also be on the lookout for unlikely political ones. In any event, Polanyi reported comparable counter-moves against land’s marketization in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Britain to those Neutze later related for Sweden. On the one hand, ‘land laws and agrarian tariffs were called into being by the necessity of protecting natural resources and the culture of the countryside against the implications of the commodity fiction in respect to them’. This was the rural reaction. On the other hand, Britain’s growing cities saw a similar backlash against the perceived tyranny of the land market: A comprehensive effort was launched to ensure some degree of health and salubrity in the housing of the poor, providing them with allotments, giving them a chance to escape from the slums and to breathe the fresh air of nature, the ‘gentleman’s park’. Wretched Irish tenants and London slum-dwellers were rescued from the grip of the laws of the market by legislative acts designed to protect their habitation against the juggernaut, improvement. 1 In all of this, the state, in its various forms, clearly played a pivotal role. The counter-movement against fictitious commodification was, in significant measure, a state-led one; as Fred Block writes in his introduction to The Great Transformation in regard to the more generalized implications of Polanyi’s theory, ‘the role of managing fictitious commodities places the state inside three of the most important markets’ – that is, those for land, labour and money.2 The state must always be there. And while public landownership is clearly not the only possible means of socially ‘protective’ state intervention in land markets, it has, since the days of the particular historical double movement examined by Polanyi, been a crucial one. Again, Sweden represents a prime example. As Neutze notes, ‘The city of Stockholm began an active purchasing policy in the 1880s and made its first large purchase of nearly 2,000 hectares, more than the entire built-up area of the city. Most of this land was used for the construction of single family housing on leasehold sites. Over the next 70 years this expanded to 40,000 hectares’.3 And so too, as Polanyi himself noted, does Britain – the urban allotments for the poor that he mentioned, for example, were provided on land that local authorities were granted the power to compulsorily acquire under the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act. Indeed, an expansion of public landownership to mitigate the negative social effects of the nineteenthcentury advancement of the commodity fiction in respect of land was a much more broadly based feature of British society from the 1870s onwards, lasting for at least half a century. It is, in fact, one of the critical dimensions of the ‘prehistory’ of neoliberal land privatization in Britain that I examine in Chapter 2