George Monbiot is a both a doyen of the anti-globalisation movement, and a radical proponent of reformed global governance.
On Mayday 2002, Peter Gibb spoke to the social justice campaigner and writer about property, natural resources and stewardship.
Peter Gibb
In your recent book Captive State (1) you chronicle "the corporate takeover of Britain". You obviously feel that this is a significant process. There is a question underlying that takeover: the question is whose is Britain?
George Monbiot 
I feel that Britain is defined no longer by any racial characteristics even if it ever was, or by a single set of national political outlooks. Britain belongs to everyone who lives here, and to a lesser extent to everyone who visits here, just as I believe every country on earth does. It's the duty of those who live here and have a vote here to use their citizenship to ensure that the wealth of the nation and the wealth of the land is used for the benefit of everyone not just a select few.
What we've seen through a number of processes, many of them embedded deep in history, is the gradual alienation of the nation's key resources, and its enclosure in the hands of an increasingly rich and powerful few. Now that few has changed as time has gone by. It has moved away from the monarchy and the aristocracy, towards a new corporate-dominated - though not exclusively corporate - aristocracy, and indeed an institutional aristocracy. But its power of enclosure is just as great as that of the old feudal lords.
The assets that this new aristocracy is taking from us in some cases are the old assets - the land and the use of the land. And it's very important not to see land just as a physical surface, but also as a set of rights which should be widely divided amongst the people who make use of it. But these assets, which have been enclosed and which continue to be enclosed, include also democracy, all manner of human freedoms, the wealth generated from productive processes of different kinds - and not forgetting intellectual property, including the genome, and increasingly the internet. Huge areas of life which we considered until very recently to belong to everyone or to belong to no-one, are coming to belong to just a few very powerful individuals.
Gibb
One powerful individual whom you and I were lucky enough to avoid was 'Hanging Judge' Lord Braxfield - the eighteenth century landlord renowned for exclaiming "Let them bring me prisoners and I'll find them law". Braxfield had something to say on the 'ownership' of the nation. At the trial of Thomas Muir - the "Political Martyr of 1793" - Braxfield said:
“A government in every country should be just like a corporation, and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye, but landed property cannot be removed.(2)
The possession of interest in the land and common resources - in the widest sense, and in the various manifestations you've just described - is surely one of the very foundations of community. How should our common interest in land be instituted?
Monbiot
Well, there are a number of ways. It's not just the very obvious issues of access to the land itself, in terms of either the right to roam, the right to farm on that land, or the right to have freehold over the land on which your house sits, for example. It's also a question of, for instance, rights of access to the decision-making processes governing the land.
One of the key areas here of course is the planning process - the process of development control. The whole purpose of the planning laws, such as they are, is to ensure that the control of development resides not just in the hands of the developers and the landlords. It's a recognition that land is a key asset which determines the quality of life of everybody - and not just the environmental quality. The idea of planning law is to say that we as citizens of the nation all have a stake in the way in which this most fundamental of assets, from which our food, our water, our physical space and all the rest of it, comes.
Unfortunately what we've seen in just the last few years, particularly under the labour government, is a gradual erosion of such communal rights that we had over the land. Those rights were always rather feeble, and they've become a great deal feebler under New Labour. Now we have a proposal for a complete removal from the hands of local people of any effective say in the decision-making process when it comes to large projects - such as airports or nuclear power stations - in which you'd imagine that local people would have a certain interest. That interest is now being disregarded.
These decisions, we're told, are to be made by parliament, and we all know what that means - they're to be made by Number Ten. And we also know what happens when Number Ten gets the whip hand on decision-making. It disregards the people, just as Lord Braxfield was describing - the people who don't have property, major property, who don't have that economic power - it disregards their voices. It listens only to those who can't "carry their property away on their backs".
Gibb
Mark Pennington has just published a book called Liberating the Land(3). The proposal it sets out is that development control can be carried out efficiently only by the private sector. He argues that the public development control system, the planning system, should be dismantled, and that power should be returned to private developers. How do you feel about that idea?
Monbiot
Well I haven't read the book, but my instant reaction would be that it's a horrifying proposal. But it's consonant with many of the proposals we've seen in other sectors over the past few decades - whereby the private sector has gradually acquired control over a whole series of decision-making processes and assets, which ensures that the process of enclosure extends into virtually every aspect of our lives.
We see, for example, how there's been a gradual deregulation of health and safety and consumer protection laws worldwide. What we really saw going on there was a privatisation of the process. And of course we saw the result that more people were killed because it was cheaper to allow workers to be killed than to install the very expensive safety measures required to protect them.
What we would see with the privatisation of development control would be an extension of that idea. The developers would simply do what was in their interests. They would build whatever they wanted where they wanted and hang the interests of the community. If you privatise development control you end up with no control at all. And that would be a profoundly anti-democratic process, because it removes development from the sphere of public, political action - from common consent: in other words it's removing development from democracy.
Gibb
Pennington argues that the planning process has been hijacked by a group of experts - and I have some sympathy with that. I think he also argues that the common consent implied within the current planning system is not real - that in fact there is no common popular engagement with the process: but that within a privatised system, through the aggregated actions of individual developers, the common interest of the community would be arrived at. To accept that, I'd say, is perhaps asking a lot.
Monbiot
Well I'll say several things to thatwhereby the individuals who are able to extract that interest are those individuals with landed property. Those without landed property would have no engagement in that process whatsoever - they would have no say. And even those with landed property - the only thing they'd be able to do would be to seek to out-build their neighbours. You just end up with a competition to be more anti-social than the Joneses. And that way disaster lies.
There's no question at all that the system as it stands is deeply flawed, but it's deeply flawed not because there's too much public involvement, but because there's too little public involvement. And because the voices of the developers have been heeded by government, but not the voices of ordinary people who don't have a major landed interest.
Gibb
Landowners like to style themselves the 'stewards' of the land. Perhaps similarly, politicians see themselves as stewards of our rights, priests perhaps stewards of our morals, and corporations stewards of our work. What does the concept of stewardship reveal to us - and what does the use of it by partisan interests tell us?
Monbiot
It's quite interesting how the stewards are always self appointed. Nobody goes to the landowners and asks "will you steward this land for us?". That's not the case so much with the priesthood - people do go to the priests and say "will you steward our souls for us?" - but that's a slightly different matter. With the corporations nobody goes and says "will you steward our future for us?" They have appointed themselves as stewards, and the irony here is that in the case of the landowners and the corporations it is the most irresponsible people who have appointed themselves as stewards. Why are they the most irresponsible people? Simply because they are the most powerful people, and there is an inverse relationship here between power and responsibility.
Responsibility comes about through social constraint. It comes about through democratic constraint - through people and their representatives saying to the powerful "you cannot go over this line. You cannot cross this line, because if you do so you intrude on the public interest". And so you enforce responsibility by those means. The more powerful, and therefore the less regulated people become, the less responsible they are, and the less effective stewards of the public interest they become.
What we're seen in the case of the biggest landowners in this country is an appalling sixty years of devastation of what could be described as national heritage, including our democratic rights in the land, by shutting us out, physically and politically. So they are far from being the stewards of the land, they are the people against whom the land needs to be stewarded.
Gibb
You recognise stewardship as a concept, but you would also recognise that it has limits.
Monbiot
Yes, and I, to some extent, accept that argument, and accept some of the dangers of a purely anthropocentric approach to the land. There are certain very obvious and biological limits to stewardship.
Gibb
I met the environmentalist John Joplin in London a couple of days ago, and we were speaking about new forms of governance, participation and leadership. There is an interesting point about assent and appointment in the way that Scots first appointed their sovereign. In England the tradition is of kings and queens of England. Scotland has only kings and queens of Scots. No jurisdiction over land and resources is implied in the title, only leadership of people.
In constitutional terms, in England, political sovereignty rests with the Queen in Parliament. In Scotland, sovereignty lies in the people. The 1320 Declaration of Arbroath confirmed King Robert the Bruce as a king put in place by his people - by "the due consent and assent of us all"(4)- if Robert didn't fulfil his duties he would be booted out. Now that seems to me to be a more progressive constitution of leadership than we're used to today.
Monbiot
Yes, I think in some ways - and not just in the speech the queen made to parliament yesterday - we still see the concept of divine right, and of absolute inherited rights of the kind which Edmund Burke propounded, being a dominant theme in discourse, certainly in England. It is a very, very strong theme in English politics - that there remain certain people, whose god-given duty is unamenable to democratic persuasion or control. And with that duty, which is always very fuzzily defined, go rights, which are always very clearly defined, to control the nation's fundamental economic and political assets.
We as a nation, and I am talking about England here in particular, have been far too slow to recognise the implications of democracy. The first implication of democracy - the very first one - is that all such hereditary and divine rights to power and wealth, be discontinued.
Gibb
If that is so - if the implications of the arrival of democracy have not been recognised fully - I wonder whether, more than being in a 'captive state' - the title of your book - it might be that, enthralled to the landowners - we're actually in an 'enraptured state'?
Monbiot
I think that is a very good point. It actually ties in with much of what Alastair McIntosh was writing about in Soil & Soul (5) - the way in which we grant this licence to the powerful, because we are somehow transfixed by their power, and we therefore participate in their power. There's no doubt about that at all. You only have to see the crowds which came up for the queen mother's funeral to see the extent to which people willingly take the yoke upon their shoulders, and bear the oppressive weight of historical injustice.
So, as Alastair very compellingly points out in his book, to liberate ourselves from external tyranny we first have to liberate ourselves from our internal tyrannies. We must see the extent to which we have come to reinforce inordinate power by means of our own attitudes.
Gibb
So is the means to throwing off this yoke - in so far as we're speaking about the land, and land ownership - in the very transforming of the concept that we have of landownership? I mean, is 'landownership' a 'bad' thing or is it a 'good' thing - is it something that can be saved - must it be saved?
Monbiot
I think, perhaps, I don't have a huge problem with the concept of ownership of land - it's a question of how that ownership is exercised and how it's distributed which is key For example, I'm very keen on the idea of common property rights. Common property is a much more effective means of distributing benefit and protecting environmental assets, than either nationalisation or privatisation of land.
We can see, for instance amongst the Turkana people in northwestern Kenya, the way in which there are two aspects to common property: it's common, and it's property. It belongs to the community - it's not a free-for-all as Garrett Hardin supposed in his essay The Tragedy of the Commons (6), which is an appalling misreading of the way common property is managed.
Gibb
And presumably these community rights needn't necessarily be tied to specific exclusive territorial areas - they are overlapping rights, rather than defined parcels of ground.
Monbiot
That's absolutely correct, and what you see is that - again to use the east African example - on certain areas of land, both the dry season and the wet season grazing lands, successions of groups and people will use land at different times of the year and for different purposes, or at the same times of the year for different purposes, or collectively for the same purpose at the same time of year. But those rights are very carefully discussed, mediated and regulated by the members of those communities.
Hardin confused open access systems, such as the atmosphere or the ocean, where there is, for obvious reasons, no clearly defined community interests over any one part (7). So everyone has a greater interest - a greater self interest - in dumping their waste in the atmosphere, or in the oceans, than they have an individual self interest in making sure that waste is controlled.
In a common system, that property is defended extremely fiercely by the people who possess it. Now one of the great challenges we have, I think, is to start to look in the future at common property systems which are clearly identified with a particular community, but which do not exclude and trample on the interests of outsiders. So to tie in, in other words, the idea of group rights, with the idea of universal rights. And that's challenging, but by no means an impossible ideal.
Gibb
We have been speaking of people and peoples who are able to share overlapping rights over one territory, through the seasons. But if you think of this sequence of enjoyment of rights within a larger timescale, on a generational timescale, and then think of how our own rights in some way limit the rights of our children - on that issue, a recent study (8) estimated that in the next 18 years house prices in London are going to rise in value three-fold. Now we know that wages will not rise by anything like that degree in the same period. Our children will therefore find it increasingly difficult to afford houses. Most homes will be passed to the new generation through the privileges of inheritance.
It seems that we are in the process of establishing a new oligarchy, a new landowner class in our big cities - with a corresponding and increasing class of dispossessed, who would have no hope of ever acquiring a secure interest in 'Braxfield's Britain'. Is this not the making of a new class takeover of Britain?
Monbiot
Yes, and I think that it's very interesting the way you tie that in with issues of inter-generational justice. I hadn't thought of it in that way before, but I think that you're absolutely right. This is a very, very major problem. It could easily lead to a situation in which huge numbers of people are effectively dispossessed, not just of property itself, but of any enjoyment of property - in other words, any means of keeping a roof over their heads. We will see vast numbers of people effectively becoming homeless.
So, what do we do about this? Well, I think the first thing to do is an instant transformation of the current pattern of building, which concentrates almost entirely on what are called exclusive developments, into a pattern which concentrates on inclusive developments. In other words, where affordable housing is prioritised above expensive housing. This can only be done by very, very strict new development controls on the part of government. That means that the great majority of new developments would be largely focused - and not entirely because I think that we have to be carefully of slipping into ghettoisation - but largely focused on the cheap housing which is so desperately needed. We should look just at this issue alone, you see just how absolutely useless the idea of any privatisation of development control would be.
However it's clear that we will have to see an increased land take, of one sort or another, for housing. Not all the new homes which are required can be accommodated on brownfield land. And those of us who are environmentalists as well as being concerned with social justice, are going to have to yield some ground - literally and figuratively - and accept that there are some places which will have to be built on to accommodate these demands.
However, just because land is grade one agricultural, or grade two agricultural, doesn't mean that that is the land which we should necessarily defend most fiercely. A lot of the agriculturally marginal land is the land with the highest amenity and wildlife value. So let's not blindly preserve all the chemical deserts, while destroying all the rare and beautiful places.
Gibb
I would like to tie this back to the issue of ownership of rights - ownership of community, nation and land. The idea of resource rents - the modern reinvention of land value taxation - is attracting interest among groups around the world interested in economic and social justice. The requirement of the payment of rent to the public purse would be an instituting of a public land right.
Thinking of your interest in the corporate responsibility agenda, the idea of resource rents seems to provide a solution to some of the problems of the global corporate grabbing of resources from developing and southern countries. If the oil multinationals which funded the Bush administration's arrival-to-power were required to pay proper rent for the use of the resources they are seeking to carry away West, would the US be so keen on the oil fields beyond Afghanistan - would there be war in Afghanistan now?
Closer to home, how do you think land value taxation might help sort out the problems of housing provision in Britain in the next few years?
Monbiot
Well I've been slightly confused about land value taxation. To begin with I was a great enthusiast for it. And then I began to get slightly worried about the possibility of creating perverse incentives. In other words, if you say "we are going to charge higher rates for land on which superstores or executive housing gets built" then the bodies which benefit from that extra money - be it central government or local government - will say, "well, perhaps we should allow more superstores and executive homes to be built in order to reap those higher rates".
But I think I might have swung back to the idea now. It ensures that there are wider public benefits from corporate and private land use. One of the other great advantages of land value taxation, and indeed of fixed resource taxation of all kinds, is that it is a potential solution to this constant trend of tax flight, whereby corporations and rich individuals can effectively extract themselves from the tax system, by one ruse or another, by claiming that their assets were earned abroad - or indeed by moving those assets abroad or whatever...
Gibb
And again that was Braxfield's point.
Monbiot
Yes that's right. The point he makes about representation, I would make about taxation. While he's saying that only those with major property should have a voice in society, I was saying that those with major property should be the main ones who fund society - because that property is property which would otherwise be in wider public ownership.
But it is not just a question of, what could be argued is, a case of natural justice. It's also a pragmatic question of saying "how do we maintain the tax base in the face of globalisation? - when people now, for instance, are trading in internet currencies, which have no fixed abode, which are effectively untraceable and untaxable?" I think the way forward is the way which many people, such as James Robertson for example, have discussed in great detail, which is a gradual shift from the taxation of employment to the taxation of resources.
Gibb
We've seen a number of authors with books published recently that ask who own things: we've had Andy Wightman asking Who Owns Scotland? (9); Peter Barnes asking Who Owns the Sky? (10); and now we've got Kevin Cahill and Who Owns Britain? (11). It seems to me that to a greater or lesser extent these books dance around the underlying philosophical and moral issues. It seems to me those issues are exposed clearly when we ask the question "Who Owns the World?". Who does own the world?
Monbiot
Well, the short answer is no-one, and the second short answer is everyone! And this, in a way, takes us back to the issue of stewardship and ecological justice. One thing we have to recognise - and that humankind has always been extremely slow to recognise if it ever recognises it at all - is that, as far as the world is concerned, we are the froth on the surface. We are of extremely little consequence in the wider scheme of things. So our starting point has to be that one of humility - that we're just a collection of extremely complex chemicals which are subject to the same entropic forces as every other collection of chemicals on earth - and that from dust we came and to dust we shall return.
Having said that, our collection of complex chemicals has achieved such complexity - that we are able to feel a huge range of emotions, pain as well as pleasure - that we are able to inflict appalling suffering on other people - that we are able to deprive other people of an ability to keep themselves alive, and to ensure that their lives are enjoyable: so whilst our duty to the world is perhaps up for debate, simply because we are such puny fragments of cosmic matter, our duty to each other is very clear indeed. That is to ensure that all the six billion or so people on earth can live decent and comfortable lives.
And that means that we have to restrain those who have seized a disproportionate share of the world's resources. We have to remove some of the resources from their hands, and redistribute them to other people. We have to ensure that this becomes a world for all of its people, not just a fortunate few.
References
1 George Monbiot Captive State, the Corporate Takeover of Britain, London: Macmillan, 2000
2 A H Miller The Martyrs of Reform in Scotland, cited in William Ogilvie's Birthright in Land, London: Othila Press, 1997. p.92
3 Mark Pennington Liberating the Land - the case for private land-use planning, London: The Institute of Economic Affairs with Profile Books Ltd, 2002
4 The Declaration of Arbroath, English Translation , Edinburgh University www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/arbroath_english.html
5 Alastair McIntosh Soil & Soul, London: Aurum Press, 2001.
6 Garrett Hardin The Tragedy of the Commons, Science 162 (1968), 1243-1248 http://dieoff.org/page95.htm
7 Editor's note: for further discussion of this matter, see 'New Social Institutions' and the review of Barnes' Who Owns the Sky in the Summer 2002 edition of Land&Liberty
8 The Centre for Economics and Business Research Ltd., www.cebr.co.uk, cited in 'Access denied', The Scotsman, 3rd May 2002
9 Andy Wightman Who Owns Scotland? Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996
10 Peter Barnes Who Owns the Sky? Our common assets and the future of capitalisation, Washington: Island Press, 2001
11 Kevin Cahill Who Owns Britain? Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001.
|
