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This land is your land
(or maybe not)
(or maybe not)
Author Kevin Cahill is wrong. Wider landowning is
not the answer as we are excluded from ownership
of the means of production in general not just land.
So you’ve paid off your mortgage and now you own
your house and the land on which it stands. No, you
don’t — the land still belongs to the queen, who is the
sole legal owner of land in the United Kingdom. So-called
freeholds are actually leases from the Crown. This is one of
many startling facts revealed by Kevin Cahill in Who Owns
the Land (published by Mainstream at the end of last year).
In fact the queen also owns all the land in Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and a number of other
Commonwealth countries. In all, according to Cahill, she
owns well over six billion acres (one-sixth of the earth’s
land surface), making her by far the largest landowner on
the planet. She’s not the only monarch who claims ultimate
ownership of their country’s land, and various kings, sultans
and sheikhs make up the rest of the list of the largest
landowners. Countries without kings or queens may still
operate on a comparable principle: in Ireland the state is the
sole owner of land.
When there is no such system of legal ownership by a
monarch or state, there can still be massive landholdings.
The Catholic church, for instance, is the second-largest
landowner in New York, and the other big religions are pretty
wealthy too. Although they are in theory just tenants of the
queen, the British aristocracy own plenty of land — around
a billion euros’ worth in the case of the Dukes of Atholl and
Westminster. The biggest landowner in the US is Ted Turner
of CNN fame, though other individuals or families have
more valuable holdings as the land is in richer areas. Fewer
than one-fiftieth of one percent of the population of Europe
(77,000 people) own 5 percent of the farmland and receive
massive subsidies from the government.
At the same time, all this massive concentration of
landownership is largely concealed from the general public.
Few countries have comprehensive, accurate and easily available
land registries, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to
discover who owns what. A comprehensive account for the
UK (then including the whole of Ireland) was published in
87 – , as The Return of the Owners of Land. At that time,
9 percent of the population, over 7 million people, owned
no land at all, while a third of a million owned more than
an acre. Nothing of comparable scope has been published
since then. But in 00 , Cahill argues, only 30 percent
owned nothing, while 70 percent had a stake in land, i.e.
a home. This is one of the themes of his book, the way in
which private home-ownership has increased and so made
most people relatively prosperous.
If Cahill had simply compiled and organised a mass of
information about landownership throughout the world, his
book would still have been a most useful work of reference.
And there’s no doubt that that is what it is. If you want to find
out, say, the largest landowners in Estonia, this is the place
to look (it’s the Estonian state, a Finnish milk cooperative
and IKEA).
However, the book is far more than that: it is
also written in support of a particular analysis of capitalism
and a programme for change. The argument, basically,
is that enabling people to own land and a home outright,
with a proper free market in land, will lead to ‘universal
prosperity’. Further, it ‘creates the essential condition for the
universalisation and democratisation of capital.’
The claims here need to be assessed very critically.
For a start, what difference does it really make if in the
last analysis the queen owns the land your house is on,
supposedly making you and everyone else serfs rather than
free individuals? In Britain the government can no longer
legally seize land in the name of the Crown, but in theory the
queen could sell Canada (just as Russia sold Alaska to the
US in 8 7). However, converting land to be genuine private
property of its owner rather than something held on a kind
of sufferance from the monarch would have not the slightest
impact on workers’ daily lives. Those who now really owned
a bit of land would still have to work for a living, just as they
do now, and just as those in rented accommodation have to
under any system.
Furthermore, home-ownership, whether true ownership
or via Crown lease, is not all that it’s cracked up to be.
It does not in itself remove a person’s status as a wage
worker, and a mortgage is an enormous burden on most
workers (witness the number of repossessions). Cahill
asserts that increased home ownership leads to increased
prosperity, but he never considers that the causality might be
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