Sunday, August 09, 2020

Owning the country

England, he would go on to discover, is still owned by a relatively small number of wealthy individuals and institutions.

By the law of trespass, we are excluded from 92% of the land and 97% of its waterways. 

Nick Hayes, the author of The Book of Trespass, a powerful new book about the issue of land rights hopes it will both refocus the ongoing campaign to reform the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act by encouraging more people to walk on privately owned land, and to help build protest against the Conservative party’s plan – a manifesto commitment – to make trespass a criminal offence. His book begins with the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, an act of civil disobedience that may be one of the most successful in British history  as it led to the creation of national parks.

Nationalism, he believes, suits the landowning classes because it gives people a sense of ownership without them actually owning anything at all.

Half of England is owned by 25,000 landowners – less than 1% of its population

 A third of Britain is still owned by the aristocracy; 24 non-royal dukes alone own almost 4m acres of it (in 2016, 17 of these men together received farm subsidies worth £8.4m). 

Then there is the new aristocracy, the self-made millionaires who can afford to buy up the land: men like Richard Bannister, the retail tycoon who bought Walshaw Moor in Calderdale in 2002, and whose “management” of this rare habitat brought him into conflict with Natural England – until, that is, the agency dropped its claim, settling out of court (Bannister now owns some 16,000 acres of the valley). 

There are the off-shore companies, which in 2015 owned 490,000 acres of England and Wales, meaning that an area larger than Greater London can legally avoid stamp duty and inheritance tax 

The largest swathe of English land registered to offshore companies is the Gunnerside estate, whose 27,258 acres of North Yorkshire moorland are registered in the British Virgin Islands and which, over the last decade or so, received some €430,000 of taxpayer handouts in the form of agricultural subsidies.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/09/forgive-us-our-trespasses-forbidden-rambles-with-a-right-to-roam-campaigner

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