Every 30 years or so, the left looks at the land. Wiping the condensation from the carriage window, the radical observer peers out at a landscape that he finds both strange and shocking. How can it be that, after a century or more of socialist campaigns and Labour governments, land ownership in Britain should still be so concentrated? It is not simply that the great estates have survived to such a remarkable degree. If the Buccleuch and Norfolk and Devonshire acreages are shadows of their Edwardian selves, they are very substantial shadows. What is so notable is that the pattern of land ownership remains large all the way down. The squires have many more acres than smaller proprietors elsewhere, and the average size of farms is bigger, too. The smallholdings which are such a feature of life on the Continent and (as a result of land reform under British rule) in Ireland both north and south, are in Great Britain the exception rather than the rule.
On hauling in this disquieting data, the instinctive reaction of the left is to reach for a new tax to put matters right. Following in the footsteps of Henry George, by then already well trodden, David Lloyd George in his People’s Budget of 1909 proposed not one but two taxes: a penny in the pound on the capital value of all undeveloped urban and suburban land, and a tax of 20 per cent on any unearned increment in land values resulting from a public decision or development. Philip Snowden, in his 1931 Budget, brought in a similar tax of a penny in the pound on land values. And almost every time Labour has got in since the war, it has introduced a tax on the profits of land development, in 1947, 1967 and 1976.
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