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Land and power have been inextricably bound up with each other throughout British history, certainly since William of Normandy claimed ownership of the entire landmass by right of conquest. We can see the attenuation of monarchical and aristocratic power writ into law in the form of successive Reform Acts, which lowered the property requirement for suffrage â see it also in the large scale acquisitions of public land that began with the first world war, then continued throughout the 20th century, up until the Thatcherite climacteric. If their justification for the big sellâoff was to invoke the âhidden handâ of the market as an agent of greater efficiency â both as an exploiter of the landâs resources, and as a means of signalling optimal investment opportunities â then the Thatcherites really didnât know their Adam Smith. Christophers, by contrast, quotes gleefully from The Wealth of Nations: âAs soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where never they sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.â https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/06/the-new-enclosure-by-brett-christophers-review
It is an oddity of political discourse in Britain that far-and-away the biggest privatisation also happens to be the one about which least is known. This is the privatisation of land. Since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street, approximately 2 million hectares of land â or 10 per cent of Britain â has disappeared from public hands, the vast bulk of which has entered private, as opposed to charity or community, ownership. Around the same amount of land remains in public ownership today, and the government currently values this estate at £420 billion. Letâs say for the sake of argument that the land that has been sold is worth a similar amount. (In reality, it is probably worth much more: the most valuable parts of the public estate, such as local authority land, have suffered the biggest proportionate reductions; individual public-sector bodies have typically sold their most marketable sites; and much of the disposed land, unlike that remaining in government ownership, had planning permission). By way of comparison, no other UK privatisation has been worth more than a tenth of that sum. https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/11/08/1541675709000/The-collapse-in-public-ownership-of-land/
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