The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
(Verso, £20)

THE PRIVATISATION of British land has delivered nothing that the government claimed it would — value for public money, new jobs and homes and more “efficient” land allocation.

[[{"fid":"14169","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Instead, in a four-decades process that began under Margaret Thatcher, it has transformed Britain into a rentier economy, in which the vast majority of private wealth is held as land and property. Industrial Britain has become landlord Britain, with many of our barons hiding offshore.

Brett Christophers’s The New Enclosure should be required reading for politicians and activists and waved in the face of right-wing talking heads every time they try to peddle the glories of privatisation.

His estimate of the value of the housing, local authority and nationalised industry land that once belonged to us which has been sold to the wealthy, corporations and overseas buyers is £400 billion.

That dwarfs any other high-profile privatisations carried out mostly by the Tories since 1979. Even that astounding number is deceptive, since it does not include, as far as I can tell, the gains made through asset inflation after the sale of the land.

Some 10 per cent of Britain’s land has been sold, reducing the public realms to the same percentage of the total. And land values have risen from £1 trillion in 1995 to £5 trillion today, largely thanks to deliberate asset-price inflation, engineered by government and the central bank.

Land sales are mostly carried out on the quiet, with limited public notice and consultation. The record-keeping for such transactions is piecemeal and secretive and the author systematically lays out the way public assets have been undervalued and how the gains that the new owners have made are not even recorded or assessed by the government to see whether the much-vaunted “value for money” has been achieved.

Value for money, in tens of billions, has certainly been accrued. But it’s gone to the new owners, most of them very grateful supporters of the Conservative governments, who have systematically flogged off our irreplaceable playing fields, rail arches and public spaces.

Silence has been bought first through the right-to-buy scheme which, after giving tenants ownership, has ended up with buy-to-let landlords owning much of the former local-authority stock.

Coercion of councils into what are effectively forced sales of authority property and land has been engineered through austerity. The end result is billions wasted on housing benefit that could have been used to build council houses.

One of the evidence-free myths peddled by the right is that the private is always more effective in using resources than the public sector. The New Enclosure carefully and soberly exposes this myth to be the reverse of the truth. Privatised land is often hoarded by its new owners and not even built on.

Robotic Tory ministers often decry our planning system as the reason we have such a chronic shortage of affordable housing. Again, a myth.

Planners have given permission for the construction of half a million homes that are needed and private developers are not building them. If they did, horror of horrors, the house price spiral might go into reverse.

Instead, they hold onto that land, waiting for it to go up in price, and only build houses at the rate the market will support. It’s rational, if you are a capitalist. For society, it is a disaster.

The sale of the Ministry of Defence married-quarters estate to private developer Annington Homes in 1996 alone brought in a profit of £4bn to the new owners. It was a loss to the MoD and now it is forced to rent at full whack what used to be its property.

No-one is held accountable for this grand larceny. When it comes to land, democracy is nowhere to be seen.

Often, advisers on public-land sales are the very estate agents and developers who then profit from the land that is sold. Crony capitalism, done on the quiet.

A tax on land, to replace our iniquitous council tax system, could solve much of this problem. So too would the introduction of community land trusts and an end to the insistence that land must be sold at full market value.

After all, you can’t put a price on a park, allotments or long-established council estate that is lost to luxury development. Why is it sold at all? The answer invariably is to make some people very rich.

Scotland is a partial exception to the rule that Britain’s land has been treated as a commodity for the rich at the expense of everyone else. Its land reform acts and community land trusts have given communities the right to buy land back from big estate owners. It’s not perfect but it’s a start.

The demand for access to common land, secure homes for all and an end to the great estates of England was once a rallying cry for the labour movement and Christophers tries to explain why this is no longer the case.

In so doing, he systematically demolishes the neoliberal myths about the positives of land privatisation and offers a tentative way to take back the land for the many from the few.