In a famous sitting of the House of Lords, Charles Wood, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, decried the “statements made in certain newspapers, and at some public meetings, respecting the wonderfully small number of landed proprietors in this country”.
The year was 1872, but one imagines that a century-and-a-half later many Lords and other major landowners are of a similar mind. Revelations based on research by author Guy Shrubsole, published yesterday in the Guardian, show that half of English land is still owned by a wonderfully small number (25,000) of proprietors.
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