T he issue Cot land reform is back on the public agenda after being unmentionable for 20 years. With the huge crisis of the farming industry, the debate on the Lords reform, the Scottish land reform proposals, and the international examples of the Zapatistas, the Brazilian MST, and the Indian anti-GATT farmers, a political space is being re-created for a radical countryside politics. It seems like another world -though it is well within living memory - that Lloyd George could call at a meeting of 25,000 rural workers for the state ownership of land. Only 15 years ago Frank Dobson (Right Honourable) could support, through the Labour Land Campaign, "the socialisation of all land wealth" Despite half a century of the most brutal destruction of our biological and cultural resources and the wholesale elimination of rural land-based labour, any political challenge to the structure of land ownership has until now been effectively marginalised. Indeed, there has, in the postwar period, been a considerable re-legitimisation of big land ownership. The re-birth of a socialist land politics will not be before time!
The legacy of Liberalism and Labourism A combination of the post-war. structural changes in patterns of tenure and the historical strength of anti-socialist conceptions of land reform have contributed to our defeats.
In the late nineteenth century debate between and supporters of Henry George's Land Tax, it was the Georgists who won. hands down. These "true free traders" believed that the solution lay in attacking the parasitic burden represented by land rent and site development value on the free development of the market economy.
The so-visible results of rural and urban landlordism brought them thousands of working class supporters, and the formal adoption of much of their policy by both Liberal and Labour leaderships.
Yet the progress of post-war pro-. ductivist farming has broken up the old tri-partite structure of rentier landlord, tenant tarmer and waged worker. At one end of the scale land-based labour and small farming have been largely eliminated. At the other end the landlord and tenant roles have been merged.
Huge," highly capitalised farming units, covering thousands of acres are run by a mixture of adaptive old landlords and new entrepreneurs. The Georgist distinction between the parasitic landlord and the progressive producer has proved to be entirely secondary, if not reactionary.
Thus the movement was not ideologically prepared for the definitive assault on the rural Space: the final frontier. It's time to boldly go... - landscape and farm employment which post-war productivist agriculture brought. Indeed, the Attlee government reforms, which institutionalised price guarantees and protected the business farmer against the demands of aural workers and the environment, laid the basis for this assault.
The present debate Now this ideology of the liberated market is raising its head in a new and worrying form. Opponents of the horrors of productivism, from the far right (like old Tory MP Sir It's Richard Body) to crazy that the direct action single parents and left (like George the unemployed are Monbiot) make means tested to the common cause in hilt, while barley favour of "liberbarons are paid for ating" farm markets from the every copse they distortions caused replant. by gross producer subsidies. Pundits like George ("The Killing of the Countryside") call for farmers to become entrepreneurs again, free "from the straight-jacket of subsidy and state control".
passionate and powerful polemic against agri-business is entangled in a confused attack on any state control, and an advocacy of a small farming agriculture in a liberated market which looks back to a non-existent golden age.
The new land rights organisation The Land is Ours, which seemed to offer such promise at its inception, continues to operate at the margins of the debate rather than at its centre. It does have many strengths. It understands that the issues of urban and rural land are linked, and it operates across both environments.
It uses direct action as a key weapon, and it encompasses a whole range of anti-development, access, biodiversity, and sustainable farming campaigns. But its vision seems heavily "back-to-the -landist", and too much of its energy goes into endorsing utopian and escapist initiatives whose history of incorporation and marginalisation is almost as old as capitalism.
The debate in Scotland seems to have progressed furthest, with formal proposals published by the Office provoking broadsheet headlines like "Clearing the Lairds" (Daily Telegraph), and "At Last: an End to Feudalism" (The Independent).
Yet the proposals are anything but radical. They offer the possibility of a community right to buy only at the point of sale. They offer no significant new resources. They apply only to undefined "remote fragile communities", and they do not even promise the abolition of agricultural rate relief. Furthermore, the suggestions on wildlife protection may leave Scotland with a weakened system, given the developmentalist thinking there.
For a Socialist Countryside A socialist politics of the coun tryside must be based firmly on two principles. Firstly, that the forces for progressive change lie overwhelmingly in our towns and cities, not in the countryside itself. Even the days of Joseph Arch's Agricultural Labourers Union (in the 1870's) the support of urban workers was crucial to the new union's survival. Nowadays rural working people are marginalised by middle and owning class in-migrants, and are without an independent political voice.
Secondly our socialist demands must be based on democracy and self management. The countryside needs to be managed by the collective of all its users, both urban and rural. So what should our programme include?
• Maximum size limits huge local monopolies exist. Strict ceilings should operate, related to the quality of the land - as they already do in many other bourgeois democracies.
• The socialisation of all land holdings above the maximum size limits.
Our demands for socialisation are based on a highly capitalised modern industry with a global division of labour and a highly skilled workforce, not on a peasant of hand-worked smallholdings (like Russia in the 1920's). Our problems are with over-production, not under-production (as in Stalinist Russia).
The forms of social ownership will vary considerably, with cooperatives, local authority and neighbourhood managements, and a strong central state sector. Already a significant sociallyowned sector exists in some areas, though much of it is a "sleeping giant" in terms of its progressive potential.
Democratisation of Land management The high technical and cultural level at which many user groups operate (farm and forestry staff, conservation and recreation managers and others) would enable a rapid development of good self management practice. In Brighton the Keep Our Downs Public coalition proposed such a new accountable structure for the borough's 11,000 acre estate.
Supervisory structures also need to exist for those areas not in public ownership, and only partial models exist for such bodies. User groups would automatically have the right of representation proportionate to their weight.
• Socialisation of all development rights Modern planning law has created a complex system of negative control of change of use and development which is at best ameliorative and reactive, and, at worst, a mere facilitator of private profit. It does not tackle the main antisocial dynamics of the market conomy, such as uneven regional development, the creation of mega-cities, the destruction of natural and cultural resources, the elimination of land-based labour or the development of unsustainable transport systems.
We must elevate the community and the state to the role of sole developers. Built development should be based primarily local and national development agencies, direct labour organisations, socially owned industries, or the central state.
• End all production subsidies and means test all conservation and employment subsidies.
Production subsidies are a tool for imperialist food politics, and for the destruction of the environment. Conservation subsidies without means testing merely serve to re-legitimise big land ownership. It is crazy that single parents and the unemployed are means tested to the hilt, while parasitic barley barons are paid for every copse they replant.
• Democratise access to land as an economic resource There are few farmers of working class origin, few from city areas, few women farmers, and virtually no black farmers. On the Labour-controlled 11,000 acre Brighton Downland estate one extended family controls a quarter of the farmed land.
End the hereditary ownership of land Hereditary ownership perpetuates exclusion and bolsters the cultural power of landed wealth by its constant engendering of images of continuity and tradition (as though only ruling class people had such things).
Land-based occupations need to be normalised by acquiring the character of salaried jobs - as secure and well remunerated as all useful jobs deserve to be rather than as rights to the total control of fractions of the land.
The issue of land tenure is not some sideline to the issues of healthy, sustainable food production, biodiversity, access rights. Ownership is power, and the countryside needs that power socialised and democratised.
From our towns and cities we will reclaim our countryside. • Sunday March 21 the Sussex network of The Land Is Ours is having an important trespass walk to bolster support and publicity for the vital 2nd Reading of Gordon Prentice's Right To Roam Bill on March 26. We urge all socialists to attend this event. The theme is "the aristocracy". Meet Brighton Station 10.00 am sharp. Wrap up warm. Wear good boots. bring packed lunch. Sorry no dogs. Walk up to 6 miles Contact Brighton (01273)
DON of exploitation for the many and privileges