In 1746, the Abbe Larudan, a critic of Freemasonry, published his Les Franc-Macons Ecrasses [see key extract translated into English below], apparently the child of the author’s imagination, in which he asserted that Cromwell, in 1648, at a dinner attended by Parliamentarians, Presbyterians, and Independents, first indicated his intentions to form such a society.

The development of this scheme was related by the Abbe with particularity and in detail. Cromwell, he tells us, held his confidants in suspense for four days, after which, he consummated the enterprise in dramatic fashion. Conducting his guests into a dark room, he prepared their minds for what was to follow by a long prayer in which he pretended to be in communion with the spirits of the blessed. After this, he explained his purpose to found a society to encourage the worship of God and to restore peace. Informing the company that they must all pass through a certain ceremony, and, gaining their consent, he appointed a Master, two Wardens, a Secretary, and an Orator. The visitors were then removed to another room in which was a picture of the ruins of Solomon’s Temple. They were next blindfolded, removed to another apartment and invested with the secrets, after which, Cromwell delivered a discourse on religion and politics, so impressing the novices that all sects united with Cromwell’s army in forming a secret association to promote the principles of the love of God and liberty and equality among men, but the real objective of which was the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the Commonwealth.

The Temple of Solomon, said the Abbe, was used as the symbol of glory or the primitive state of man, which, after some years, was destroyed by an army representing pride and ambition, the people being led away captive. Finally, the Freemasons were privileged to rebuild the Temple. The Order was divided into three degrees, the Master’s degree having a Hiramic legend differing somewhat from that later adopted. The death of Hiram represented the loss of liberty, and the confusion among the workmen represented the state of the people who were reduced to slavery by the tyrants. Cromwell is then said to have spread the Society over England, Scotland, and Ireland, the members being first called Freemasons, then Levelers, then Independents, next Fifth Monarchy Men, and, finally Freemasons.

The Abbe Larudan, like other fabricators, fell into the trap of his own ignorance. He did not know that Elias Ashmole had been made a Mason two years before Cromwell’s supposed theatrical performance, or that lodges had existed in most of the principal cities of Scotland before Cromwell was born, or that the Master’s degree was unheard of, and the Hiramic Legend, too, until sixty-five years after Cromwell’s death. The Abbe’s absurd story appears to have been composed by paraphrasing Edward Ludlow’s Memoirs in which he described Cromwell’s intrigues for the organization of a new political party, but in which nothing was said about Freemasonry.

http://priory-of-sion.com/biblios/links/larudan.html

Have you ever wondered whether the two important Cromwells in British history were related?

Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell who administered the takeover and sell-off, or dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s…

and Oliver Cromwell, Puritan, roundhead & general of the parliamentary army in the 1640s English Civil war…

Yes, indeed they were. Thomas’ sister Katherine was the great-great grandmother of Oliver. Oliver was the great-great grandson of Thomas’ sister,

Oliver’s great-great-grandfather, Morgan Williams, had married Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine in 1497. Their three sons, Richard, another Richard and Walter, began the practice of calling themselves Cromwell in place of their true surname of Williams, in honour of their famous maternal uncle.

Thomas Cromwell’s older sister Katharine and her husband Morgan Williams, a Welsh lawyer, had a son, Richard, who later served in Thomas’s household and changed his surname to Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell was Richard’s great-grandson.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11375601/who-was-thomas- cromwell-facts-trivia-wolf-hall.html

Map of UK monasteries before the dissolution

The Two Cromwells: Destroying Monasteries And Democracy, A Century Apart

Oliver Cromwell was a blood descendent, of Henry VIII’s smasher and grabber of the monasteries, Thomas Cromwell. Both knew the best way to attack Christendom was to pose as Christian men themselves. Thomas the reformer, Oliver the Puritan

Thomas Cromwell was the brother of Oliver Cromwell’s great, great grandmother. So Oliver Cromwell was the great, great grandson of Thomas Cromwell’s sister Katherine. The line went as follows: Katherine married Morgan Williams who were the parents of Richard Williams-Cromwell. His son Henry Williams-Cromwell’s son Robert Cromwell, was Oliver Cromwell’s father.

The Freemasons Crushed translated into English – Les Francs-Maçons Écrasés; Suite Du Livre Intitulé: L’ordre Des Francs-Maçons Trahi by Abbe Larudan (Amsterdam 1778)

Published over a century after the 1642-49 English Civil War Larudan’s ‘Freemasons Crushed’ was based on various rumours and sources which had been passed down in France. Charles’ wife Henrietta Maria had acted as a Paris magnet for pre-restoration exiles from England. This was published over a century after the events when their significance had been understood only after Freemasonry began to come out into the open in the mid 1700s.

Cromwell knew that whilst he held the king captive on the Isle of Wight he had to find some ‘legal’ means to execute him or Charles would continue as a political force after the war and may well succeed in having him, Cromwell, executed.

With some old wives tale about a (revived Knights Templar myth) ‘noble cause’ of restoring Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, he hand picked self-seeking men from all political factions and initiated them into a classic secret society with the usual bloodthirsty oaths and penalties, with the object of the judicial murder of the king.

Cromwell’s cult began secretly gathering opinions of all the Long Parliament’s MPs on whether the king might have a role in a future settlement. On 6th December 1649 he ordered his son-in-law Colonel Thomas Pride to arrest 140 MPs of all parties who wanted to negotiate with the king, the infamous ‘Pride’s Purge’, thus ensuring the vote on whether or not to try the king for treason would go his way.

Extract from Les Francs-Maçons Écrasés, pp. 76 ff. Abbe Larudan – translated by former GCHQ linguist Alexander Thomson

In 1640, Cromwell, conversing one day with Sir [Thomas] Chicheley about religion, spoke to him in these terms: “I could very well tell you what I would not like, but I cannot tell you what I would like.” Ambiguous words, and ones which contain the design in which Cromwell was to lay the foundations of a Society in which all religious affiliations would be irrelevant. This is in fact easy to conceive of, if one considers the way in which he sought to reconcile, in 1648, a multitude of different denominations. Such, for example, were the Presbyterians; the Independents, who flattered themselves that they could exist under any kind of government; the Agitators, whose army supported the interests of, and who fought, they said, for the free exercise of the Anglican denomination; the Levellers, whose aim was the abolition of all monarchical power; in a word, so many other parties divided in their interests and sentiments, which his approach found the means to unite together.

The first undertaking that he managed to accomplish successfully, and that for some time he would not drop except to take care of another which seemed to him no less worthy of his attention, was the reform of politics among the English; a task which a heated dispute between Parliament and the soldiers in 1647 gave him an opportunity to bring about. Parliament, still attached to the party of King Charles, was trying maintain him against the Army, which had become his adversary; but Cromwell was so good at handling the divided sentiments that he was able to head off the uprising by making them understand that they would soon have satisfaction anyway. But this calm which he had just re-established was merely a favourable time that he had wished to buy for himself to sound out people’s feelings cunningly, and to exploit their varying attitudes to bring about the massive projects which he was incessantly pushing. And indeed, in 1648, he was not backward about making known the fruits he had plucked from this interval. Having arrived one day in Parliament with Ireton, his confidant, he held forth in a monologue in which he declared loudly: “King Charles has ceased to be the father of the people, becoming its tyrant; not only does England no longer belong to him as a subject, but moreover this nation is from now on going to have to govern itself. If Parliament is not disposed at once to make work of restoring liberty, I shall have no further obligation to him for the benefits which the nation might produce for him; but I shall owe it all to my belief in the spirit of the soldiers who fight before my eyes, and whose value is going to become England’s sole resource.”

Let it not be imagined here that Cromwell’s purpose in these discourses was only the exclusion of the King, to introduce democratic government: no; his views extended even further, since in the very time when he was enticing the Royalists, the Presbyterians, and the Independents with the hope of an elusive peace, his project was taking on new strengths. He had already communicated it to some of his friends, such as Algernon Sidney, Newell, Martin Wildeman, Harrington, Monk, Fairfax, and a great many others, all of them behind-the-scenes enemies of the King and Parliament. They had even already held some secret meetings, to plot the means of establishing [the plan] with safety, and to lead it with prudence: which brings me inexorably to relate what went on among them, the first day that Cromwell addressed them on this topic.

In the year 1648, a meal which he gave to his friends, at his expense and at the expense of those who knew his purpose, was the favourable moment which he seized to open up to the company. After there had been heavy drinking by all, and some vague speeches given on religion and politics, Cromwell — in the presence of all the guests, among whom were several Members of Parliament, together with some Presbyterians and Independents, broached the topic of the sad state of England: he made them feel pathetically how much this unfortunate nation was having to suffer from all the differences in religion and politics; what a shame it would be for minds as enlightened as they were, not to put an end to these evils which were cruelly tearing the nation apart. Scarcely had Cromwell reached this point when Ireton, who had had the opportunity to prepare his speech, rose abruptly, and looking penetratingly at the whole company, assured him of the necessity of reconciling together, for the public good, so many contrary parties which were its scourge. He added vehemently that he would not hesitate to sacrifice his goods and his blood to remedy so many misfortunes, and to show men the path they must take to shake off the yoke that oppressed them, and to shatter the iron sceptre under which they were being made to groan; but that to begin this great work worthily, it was first necessary to destroy all power which had betrayed the nation’s interests.

After this, he turned to Cromwell, urging him to explain what he thought of the matter. Never was a request more promptly indulged. Cromwell duly rose; and after endless grimaces, accompanied by so many metaphors, the better to prepare his audience, he set forth in ambiguous terms the duty of worshipping God, the necessity of repelling strength by force, of delivering our fellow-creatures from oppression and tyranny; and finishing his speech at once, he desired to pique the curiosity of all the guests by making them understand that he knew an infallible means of succeeding in this great enterprise, of restoring to England the peace which she longed for, by drawing her from the abyss into which she had been plunged; and that this means, communicated to the universe to draw the same advantage in it, would warrant the recognition of men, to the extent of causing the memory of its author to live on to the most remote posterity.

Cromwell was soon satisfied; no sooner had he ceased to speak than every guest prayed him, begged him to reveal this admirable expedient. But far from yielding to their eagerness, he only annoyed them even more by contenting himself with answering modestly that such a prodigious achievement surpassed man’s strength; that being merely the one man who was starting it, by the rectitude of his intentions and the firmness of his courage, but at the same time unable to accomplish it without help, he preferred to groan in secret, and to share in a common [to society] misfortune, than to expose to the most terrible danger men who were perhaps weak enough to be frightened by [the solution].

What address, what ruse [has ever been] better concerted! What political background could have been more ingenious to disguise his designs, and to bring them unwittingly to their purpose! Of all those who were at table with Cromwell, there was none of whose character he was unaware. This remarkable [intelligence] penetration, which revealed to him even the slightest movements afoot in the heart of his enemies, had evidently not abandoned him in the choice of those whom he intended to serve as a support for his project. He spent a few moments, during which he amused himself only by laughing and joking with his friends, making sure of them even more perfectly, and drawing from each heart its last secret, even while shrouding his own in impenetrable darkness. Thereafter, the proceedings recommenced, and they became more lively than before, especially on the part of his confidants, whom he had expressly urged that they should press him unyieldingly.

Cromwell, therefore, consented to open up, and after having greatly impressed upon the guests the value of a confidence such as this, he told them that he was ready to communicate a great plan to them, on the condition, however, that every guest should engage in an oath to reveal nothing to anyone, and to consider his design, and the plan he was going to propose, with an entirely calm spirit. The conditions were accepted unanimously, and Cromwell, having obtained what he had demanded, began by kneeling, and raising his hands to heaven, taking God and all the heavenly powers to witness to the innocence of his heart and the purity of his intentions. This prayer was accompanied by a pompous mass of emphatic expressions, after which, addressing the guests, he told them that the moment had not yet come for to reveal to them what he had promised; that a celestial inspiration which he had just felt obliged him to postpone for four days, at the end of which interval he urged them to reconvene at King’s Street, at six o’clock in the evening. However desire there was, then, however much keenness everyone felt to know this important secret, it was necessary to postpone the party to the day appointed by Cromwell, and to go their separate ways [for now], but not before having renewed the promise to disclose nothing of what they had witnessed: a promise all the less difficult to maintain, since Cromwell had not yet made anything known.

At last, on the fourth day, everyone went to the appointed place, still in fear, however, that Cromwell had not yet received a visit from the Holy Ghost, who might send him away as before. But this time, he had been so comfortable with Heaven that the ceremony could begin. So he led his band into a dark room, where he prepared them by long prayers, in which he behaved such a way as to make known that he was really in communion with the blessed spirits. This prelude done, he spoke to the whole assembly, saying that his purpose was to found a society whose sole object was to restore to God the worship which is due to Him, and to England the peace which she desired; but that a project of this consequence required consummate prudence and infinite skill. Then, taking the world’s most subtle censer [of incense or meant figuratively of speech], he lavished all its vapours on all those whom the room contained; and after having put them in the most favourable moods, by these praises and elegies with which he overwhelmed them, he made them understand that this had come to him in the spirit of practising a certain ceremony for the reception of every new member which he would have to undergo; that since this ceremony contained nothing relating to the Divinity, it seemed to him a most promising thing to establish, provided, however, that the band consented to accept it.

The proposition was universally received; and Cromwell having received the vote of all present, he chose five from among them, to occupy the places of which we shall speak later; that is, two Surveillants, a Secretary, a Speaker, and a Master; such were the titles which he gave them himself. This new promotion made, he made his band change rooms, introducing them to another prepared for the purpose, and on whose floor one saw a representation of the ruins of the Temple of Solomon: we will have occasion to speak about this anon. From this new room, he passed to yet another, where he advised them to redouble their prayers to be found worthy of finally entering the one that was the centre of this light which was to enlighten them. For his own part, having taken the lead, he sent to his disciples a Surveillant charged with asking each one politely to be willing to allow that his eyes be blindfolded until he had been introduced to the place destined to receive him. The desire to see things more clearly made each one willing to consent to lose his sight of the light for a moment; which was accomplished without having to blandish any of them.

All the ceremonial performed, and the blindfold removed from each man, Cromwell’s conversation turned first to politics and religion. He set out the Presbyterians and the Independents were to be mutually reconciled, exhorting them to abandon all these trivial disputes, which, not at all bearing upon the essence of the matter, merely embittered men’s souls and changed the most tender love into the most irreconcilable hatred.

Former English Civil War Army Officer, now ‘Leveller’ John Lilburne captured by Cromwell’s ‘Council of State’ in 1649

In March, 1649, leading Leveller writers John Lilburne, William Overton and Thomas Prince published ‘England’s New Chains Discovered’. They attacked the ‘arbitrary government’ of Oliver Cromwell pointing out: “They may talk of freedom, but what freedom indeed is there so long as they stop the Press, which is indeed and hath been so accounted in all free Nations, the most essential part thereof. What freedom is there left, when honest and worthy Soldiers are sentenced and enforced to ride the horse with their faces reverst, and their swords broken over their heads for but petitioning and presenting a letter in justification of their liberty therein?”

When Lilburne was jailed in the Tower of London there was uproar. Voices throughout England’s Leveller movement called for his release. This included Britain’s first ever all-women petition, supported by over 10,000 signatures. A group including John’s wife Elizabeth Lilburne, and one Katherine Chidley, presented the petition to the House of Commons on 25th April, 1649.

Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography Of John Lilburne (1961) page 270

Although he agreed with some of the Leveller’s policies, including the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, Cromwell refused to increase the number of people who could vote in elections. Lilburne attacked Cromwell’s suppression of Roman Catholics in Ireland and Parliament’s persecution of Royalists in England and the decision to execute Charles I.

In February, 1649, he published England’s New Chains Discovered. “He appealed to the army and the provinces as well as Londoners to join him in rejecting the rule of the military junta, the council of state, and their ‘puppet’ parliament. Leveller agitation, inspired by his example, revived. He was soon in the Tower again for the suspected authorship of a book which parliament had declared treasonable”.

In another pamphlet Lilburne described Cromwell as the “new King.” On 24th March, Lilburne read his latest pamphlet, out loud to a crowd outside Winchester House, where he was living at the time, and then presented it to the House of Commons later that same day. It was condemned as “false, scandalous, and reproachful” as well as “highly seditious” and on 28th March he was arrested at his home.

Richard Overton, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince, were also taken into custody and all were brought before the Council of State in the afternoon. Lilburne later claimed that while he was being held prisoner in an adjacent room, he [put his ear to the keyhole and] heard Cromwell thumping his fist upon the Council table and shouting that the only “way to deal with these men is to break them in pieces … if you do not break them, they will break you!”

Enclosure For Empire: Witchcraft, Freemasonry and Oliver Cromwell

by Ian Jenkins

Dish out your tawdry, bloodsoaked gongs

Reward your friends for all their wrongs

Hang sigils struck from stolen gold

From those who do just as they’re told.
Wrap criminals in silk and ermine

Make peers and knights of lying vermin

Honour those who turn their hands

To murder and theft in ravaged lands 
But throw some plebs an OBE

In the name of fake egality

And as cover for this filthy game

Of honours as a mask for shame.
And when your shabby little list

Is safely grasped in the monarch’s fist

Pray to the darkest gods to bless

Your litany of wickedness.
But year on year the luster fades

Of ersatz honour on parade

And one day all will wonder how

Humanity was made to bow

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-housing-policy-starter-homes-right-to-buy-housing-association-sajid-javid-tories-a8119266.html

Exclusive: Plans to build 200,000 homes for first-time buyers and help more people access Right to Buy are excluded from latest plan amid ‘complete rethink’

Ben Kentish @BenKentish 20 hours ago – 275 comments

Two of the Conservatives’ flagship housing policies have been dropped from a key government document, raising questions about the future of the plans.

The new “single departmental plan” published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) does not include a single reference to Starter Homes, which form a central plank of the Government’s commitment to increase home ownership, or of the planned extension of Right to Buy.

The document, which forms part of the guidance for civil servants working on housing, is in stark contrast to the previous plan published last year, in which the two policies featured prominently and were mentioned several times as part of the Conservatives’ housing strategy.

In the latest version, five specific pledges to boost home ownership, including delivering Starter Homes and the extension of Right to Buy, have been downgraded to a single-line promise to “increase home ownership through schemes including Help to Buy”.

Fewer social homes being built than at any time since Second World War

Furthermore, a specific commitment to “increasing home ownership” has been absorbed into the broader aim of fixing “the broken housing market”.

Starter Homes are properties supposedly affordable to first-time buyers because they are offered at a 20 per cent discount.

Ministers had promised to build 200,000 of them by 2020 but The Independent revealed last month that not a single Starter Home has yet been built. This led to officials admitting the policy remained an “ambition” – but have now removed all mention of it from DCLG’s housing objectives.

The previous iteration of the departmental plan included a clear commitment to the policy. It said: “We are delivering a major boost to affordable home ownership with Starter Homes and extending Right to Buy to housing association tenants.”

It reiterated a pledge to build 200,000 Starter Homes, including 30,000 on brownfield land – former industrial sites earmarked for development.

References to the planned extension of Right to Buy to 1.3 million housing association tenants have also been quietly dropped from the latest document.

Whereas the 2016 document promised to “implement a voluntary agreement with housing associations and the National Housing Federation that will extend Right to Buy level discounts to 1.3 million housing association tenants, giving them the opportunity to buy their own home”, the latest version includes no mention at all of the controversial Right to Buy scheme.

The omissions will probably fuel speculation the Government is wavering in its commitment to two of its most contentious housing policies – especially given the delays in implementing them.

Amid widespread concern about the future of social housing, Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, admitted in October the Conservatives had “failed” on housing in recent years and promised a “complete rethink of our approach to social housing” in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

That revaluation could have consequences for the two policies not included in the latest DCLG plan, both of which are predicted to accelerate the loss of social housing – something highlighted by the Grenfell tragedy. The extension of Right to Buy is expected to lead to the loss of 75,000 social homes, while Starter Homes will be built at the expense of other types of affordable housing, including those for social rent.

Flagship government housing plan fails to deliver a single home in three years

Labour said the omissions in the new document showed the Government had “given up” on helping first-time buyers.

John Healey, the party’s Shadow Housing Secretary, said: “With home ownership at a 30-year low and the number of younger homeowners in free fall, the Government has now given up on first-time buyers.

“We need much more affordable housing for younger people looking to buy their first home but ministers have erased new housing for first-time buyers from the Communities Department’s official objectives.

“After seven years of failure on housing, the Conservatives have no plan to fix the housing crisis. Ministers should back Labour’s plan to build 100,000 FirstBuy homes linked to average incomes to give first-time buyers the chance to own their home.”

The Department for Communities and Local Government said the new strategy document was a “high-level summary” and did not reflect a change in policy.

A spokesperson said: “This single departmental plan is not an exhaustive list of all of the department’s policies. This is a high-level summary of our priorities and overall aims for the Government.”

The latest plan was published as ministers said the implementation of a third major Tory housing policy is to be be pushed back until 2019 at the earliest. Controversial measures introduced in the Housing and Planning Act 2016 will force local councils to sell off their most valuable council homes in order to fund the extension of Right to Buy.

Town hall leaders say the policy will lead to a huge loss of social housing at a time when waiting lists are already up to 10 years in some parts of the country, while housing charity Shelter estimates that up to 113,000 council homes could be sold off under the plans.

The policy had already been delayed until at least 2018 and Mr Javid confirmed last week that it will be pushed back again, until 2019 at the earliest. A government spokesperson said ministers were “considering” how to implement the policy.

He has to pay a £115 victim surcharge

Nine-year-old boy donates half his Christmas money to help homeless man jailed after he fell asleep in a hotel doorway

A homeless man has to pay £115 – after being locked up for falling asleep in the doorway of a hotel in Bath.

When 51-year-old Eli John James refused to leave the doorway of the Westgate Buildings Travelodge in Bath city centre on Saturday, December 9, he was arrested and dragged before the courts.

Two days later at Bath Magistrates Court James pleaded guilty to sleeping in the doorway without a reasonable excuse and was sentenced to three weeks in jail.

The court imposed a £115 victim surcharge.

Mr James, of no fixed address, was in violation of a criminal behaviour order imposed by Salisbury Court in May of this year when he refused to leave the Travelodge doorway.

Bath Magistrates Court also noted that the offence was so serious because of Mr James’s previous breaches of the order, and because the breach was aggravated by the defendant’s previous offending.

Great start Guardianistas…. but

Water is a human right under Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights

Therefore NOBODY should have to pay ANYTHING for it

We got the post WWII welfare state wrong – everyone should have been given these things as a RIGHT – not just to be given enough money to buy them through ‘social security’.

Other basic needs under Article 25 are
Food
Clothing
Shelter
– provided for all in Britain until the 1979 Thatcher government

Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

The Guardian view on plastic bottles: make water available on tap

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/08/the-guardian-view-on-plastic-bottles-make-water-available-on-tap

Editorial Thankfully the campaign to cut our plastic habit by making free fresh water widely available is gathering momentum

Friday 8 December 2017 19.00 GMT

Like a wave building far out at sea, the momentum behind universally available cool fresh water is growing steadily. It is driven by the realisation that the world’s plastic habit must be broken, quickly. It;s reckoned that a million plastic bottles are bought worldwide every minute; the meaning of this number is best expressed in the images of mountains of litter made of this virtually indestructable material piled by the tides on to otherwise deserted beaches in remote corners of the globe. It is an unnecessary disaster. There is no reason why water has to come wrapped in its own environmentally lethal packaging.

This week, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan pledged to develop a city-wide network of water fountains and refill stations. A Bristol-based campaign to set up refill stations in city centres and seaside resorts is flooding across Europe. Australian cities such as Melbourne have digital maps showing where drinking fountains are available.

There could be so much more – airside refill stations in every international airport to slash the thousands of bottles jettisoned at security would be a good start.

A refill station on every platform in every railway station would be even better. The choice between income from retail outlets or a low-cost move to help end plastic pollution is really no choice at all.

An enforcement officer served the squatters with a possession order from the landlord

House prices aren’t the issue – land prices are

Timely revisit of what will for many be an old cookie

There’s a simple solution that will give us cheaper homes – if only the chancellor would listen Winston Churchill in 1910. He promoted the ‘people’s budget’ and lamented landowners’ profits.

Patrick Collinson Saturday 18 November 2017 07.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2017/nov/18/house-prices-land-prices-cheaper-homes

While reporting on the recent court case where controversial landlord Fergus Wilson defended (but lost) his right to refuse to let to Indians and Pakistanis, I learned something about how he’s now making money. He is now far from being Britain’s biggest buy-to-let landlord. He’s down to 350 homes, from a peak of 1,000. And what’s he doing with the cash made from sales? Buying agricultural land close to Kent’s biggest towns. One plot he bought for £45,000 is now worth, he boasted, £3m with development permission. And therein lies the reason why we have a housing crisis.

As long ago as 1909, Winston Churchill, then promoting Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” and its controversial measures to tax land, told an audience in Edinburgh that the landowner “sits still and does nothing” while reaping vast gains from land improvements by the municipality, such as roads, railways, power from generators and water from reservoirs far away. “Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and the cost of other people … To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced … he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.”

Landowners pocketed £9bn in profit from land they sold for new housing in 2014-15

When Britain’s post-war housebuilding boom began, it was based on cheap land. As a timely new book, The Land Question by Daniel Bentley of thinktank Civitas, sets out, the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act under Clement Attlee’s government allowed local authorities to acquire land for development at “existing use value”. There was no premium because it was earmarked for development. The New Towns Act 1946 was similar, giving public corporation powers to compulsorily purchase land at current-use value. The unserviced land cost component for homes in Harlow and Milton Keynes was just 1% of housing costs at the time. Today, the price of land can easily be half the cost of buying a home: £439,999 is the cost of land with planning permission for one terraced home in a less salubrious part of London such as Peckham.

What happened? Landowners rebelled and Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government introduced the 1961 Land Compensation Act. Henceforth, landowners were to be paid the value of the land, including any “hope value”, when developed. Today a hectare of land is worth 100 times more when used for housing rather than farming. Yet when a bureaucratic pen grants permission, all the value goes to the landowner, not the public. Bentley says landowners pocketed £9bn in profit from land they sold for new housing in 2014-15. For each new home built that year, £60,000 went as profit to the landowner. Major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail 2 and the Bakerloo tube line extension are estimated to cost the public purse £36bn. Landowners, meanwhile, will pocket £87bn from increased land values nearby.

In the Netherlands, the only sizeable country in Europe more densely populated than England, the Expropriation Act allows local authorities to buy land at current-use value. They prepare it for development, use part for social housing and sell the rest for commercial use, often at a large profit.

Think of it. Councils take all the financial uplift from planning permission, using potentially huge profits from land sales to build social housing almost at no cost to the public purse. Developers focus on making profits from building high-quality homes, not from hoarding plots. Land speculation is killed off almost overnight.

Instead, the chancellor will tell us in this week’s budget that the solution is billions more for help to buy. All that does is raise property prices and landowner profits. If only Philip Hammond could be more like Churchill.

Duke of Westminster’s five main estates: 11,500 acre Eaton Estate in rural Cheshire; 23,500 acre Abbeystead Estate in rural Lancashire; 96,000 acre Reay Forest estate in rural Sutherland, the La Garganta Estate in rural Spain and 300 acres of prime central London land in Mayfair and Belgravia worth c. £10bn.

Hugh Grosvenor became Britain’s youngest billionaire following his father’s death in 2016. Most of the father-of-four’s personal estate was left in trust with the income going to his widow Natalia but trustees were given the power to transfer all or any of the capital to her. The UK’s inheritance tax of 40 per cent of any assets worth over £325,000 is not payable on anything left to a spouse or on charitable donations. If it had been applied to the late Duke’s entire wealth, the liability would have been around £3.4 billion.

Paradise Papers bring to light key parts of structure used to manage £9.5bn fortune inherited last year by Hugh Grosvenor, 26

Juliette Garside @JulietteGarside Tuesday 7 November 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/07/duke-of-westminster-offshore-firms-wealth-paradise-papers

The international property empire of the dukes of Westminster pumped dividends worth millions of pounds into secretive companies in Bermuda and Panama, the Paradise Papers reveal.

Hugh Grosvenor became Britain’s youngest billionaire after his father’s death last year. Thanks to careful planning by his predecessors, the 26-year-old inherited the sprawling Grosvenor Group without having to pay the 40% death duties imposed on most British taxpayers.

A leak of 13.4m files, including documents from the archives of the offshore law firm Appleby, combined with public information from the UK companies register, has brought to light key parts of the structure used to manage the seventh duke’s fortune – estimated at £9.5bn in the Sunday Times rich list.

What are the Paradise Papers?

The Paradise Papers is a special investigation by the Guardian and 95 media partners worldwide into a leak of 13.4m files from two offshore service providers and 19 tax havens’ company registries. The files reveal the offshore financial affairs of some of the world’s biggest multinational companies and richest individuals, and set out the myriad ways in which tax can be avoided using artificial structures

They reveal for the first time the names, settlors and creation dates of the five UK trusts that have been used, for generations, to keep in the hands of a single family an estate that includes much of Belgravia and Mayfair in London, 165,000 acres of British countryside, hundreds of developments in North America, Australia and Hong Kong, and an island in Vancouver.

The trusts established by successive dukes to control Grosvenor are UK resident and subject to British tax – they pay a 6% charge on the value of many of their assets every 10 years. Assets worth £600m belonging directly to the 6th Duke, which were not held in trust, were inherited by his wife exempt from tax, as is normal for married couples. Death duties will be payable in the UK when her children inherit.

But the papers show that not all the family’s wealth was managed onshore. Until 1999, about half of the shares in a subsidiary that ran Grosvenor’s North American and Australian operations were controlled by tax haven companies.

Managed from Canada, the international wing of Grosvenor was created in 1953 when the estate made its first big expansion outside Britain by acquiring the 485-hectare Annacis Island in the middle of the Fraser river in Vancouver.

By the turn of the century, Grosvenor International Holdings Ltd (GIHL) had assets worth more than C$1bn (£600m), with 42% of its shares held by screen companies in Bermuda and Panama.

Vesta Ltd, incorporated in Bermuda in 1964, controlled Trumpet Company Ltd, another Bermuda company, which in turn held shares in GIHL. Alongside it was a parallel Panama structure: Nakar Holding SA, incorporated in 1977, owned shares in Compact International Inc, which in turn held part of GIHL.

The identities of the owners of these four companies have never been publicly disclosed by Grosvenor. However, Appleby’s internal database listed Vesta and Trumpet as belonging to the “Grosvenor Family Trust”.

Grosvenor’s annual reports show millions in payments collected in Panama and Bermuda: a combined £1m in 1999, direct from GIHL, and a similar sum the year before. Eventually, the offshore companies swapped their shares in GIHL for a 6.5% holding in the overall Grosvenor Group, collecting £3.7m over a seven-year period.

In March 2007, Grosvenor announced it was buying out Vesta and Nakar for £40m. The reason given was to “better align the shareholders’ interests with the group’s activities”. The companies were dissolved later that year.

A spokesman for the Grosvenor estate said: “Two small overseas trusts were established over 50 years ago, when it was accepted common practice to facilitate the acquisitions of some non-UK assets. No family member has received any benefit derived from these but, as UK residents, if they ever did then they would be fully liable to tax in this country.

“Our policy is to uphold the highest standards of business practice. We are careful to ensure that our ownership of overseas property is through vehicles incorporated in the same country as the asset. Where the group occasionally has entities in offshore locations, it is typically as a result of the requirements of joint-venture partners.”

The papers reveal a number of other offshore entities, some of which held investments in Asia. By 2009, the sixth duke’s trustees appear to have become wary of transacting too much of his business via tax havens.

That year, a member of the Appleby marketing team visited Jeremy Moore, the head of tax at Grosvenor Group, and another colleague. He took a few notes on their conversation. Grosvenor liked working with the firm but was wary of giving it too much to do. Appleby’s officer noted: “They do not have too many offshore holdings as they have to be very careful reputationally, as the property group is owned by trusts for the Duke of Westminster’s family.”

Documents from 2012 show Grosvenor’s shares were held by five trusts and by the sixth Duke of Westminster in his name. The oldest trust, simply referred to as ADWSLF in the data, was settled, or created, in 1953 by the second duke upon his death. The family’s enthusiasm for trusts may be explained by the fact that death duties of £17m swallowed much of the second duke’s £25m fortune.

The next oldest was the Fourth Duke of Westminster’s Settlement, which dates from 1964, three years before his death.

There is a Fifth Duke of Westminster’s Settlement, created in 1965, and the sixth duke, who died last year, created two more. The first was settled in 1971, the second in 1974. His will, published recently, suggests he created yet more trusts before his death.

The tax advantages of UK trusts such as these have been gradually whittled away. Since 1984, they have been subject to a 10-yearly tax charge, although there are exemptions for agricultural land and trading businesses.

Nimesh Shah, a partner at the accountants Blick Rothenberg, said: “Nowadays, trusts are used for a variety of reasons and tax is only one of those reasons. These trusts are about trying to keep control of the assets within the family unit.”

There is no public register listing the names, beneficiaries or holdings of any UK trusts, despite the fact such vehicles control vast tracts of land and property in Britain. HMRC has a register of trusts that pay tax, but this is not available to the public. In Europe, MEPs have been pushing for each member state to improve transparency by introducing public registers of trusts. The papers reveal how reluctant Grosvenor employees were to share trust details.

On one occasion, when tasked with setting up a Bermuda company in 1999, Grosvenor representatives asked Appleby to “seek dispensation” from the normal rules for declaring who the trust beneficiaries were.

The information was required by the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) before the company could be incorporated. Because the Bermuda company was to be controlled by trusts, Appleby would need to follow standard procedure and disclose the names of their beneficiaries and other basic information to the regulator.

Grosvenor did not want to share this data. In a fax dated 9 November, Appleby promised to “revert to the BMA to determine what they will give in on”, saying it had already obtained from the BMA that “they have indicated they will not require a personal declaration from the duke”.

The Bermuda entity, eventually called Grosvenor Land Property Fund Ltd, would go on to invest $30m in developing luxury homes in some of Hong Kong’s most desirable neighbourhoods, in a joint venture with another wealthy family, the Keswicks, through their Jardine Matheson Group.

The man from Appleby warned that “it raises ‘alarm bells’ when persons decline to disclose such information fully” and disclosure of ownership was a longstanding policy “designed to preserve Bermuda’s relatively clean image in the offshore world”.

He then proposed an unusual arrangement: “Would it make a difference if the information requested was placed in a sealed envelope and marked for the eyes of the CEO of the BMA only so that such information does not pass through the hands of intermediaries such as ourselves?”

The Grosvenor spokesman said, after checking the records, no evidence had been found “to suggest that the trustees asked for any such dispensation from the Bermuda Monetary Authority in 1999”. He said investors in the property fund would have paid tax in their own countries and the use of jurisdictions such as Bermuda was common for these types of funds, in order to avoid investors being taxed twice.

The information supplied, whatever it was, appears to have satisfied the Bermuda authorities, because the company was successfully incorporated on 16 December.

The seven dukes

First duke: 1825-1899. Hugh Lupus Grosvenor was MP for Chester and died the richest man in Britain.

Second duke: 1879-1953. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, grandson of the first duke, was known to family and friends as Bendor and was a lover of Coco Chanel. He left no son.

Third duke: 1894-1963. William Grosvenor was brain damaged at birth, and died unmarried and childless.

Fourth duke: 1907-1967. Gerald Hugh Grosvenor, cousin of the second duke, left no son.

Fifth duke: 1910-1979. Robert George Grosvenor, brother of the fourth Duke, lived in Northern Ireland at Ely Lodge on an island in the middle of Lough Erne.

Sixth duke: 1951 to 9 August 2016. Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, son of the fifth duke, mentor to Prince William, served in the Territorial Army for 40 years.

Seventh duke: born 1991. Hugh Richard Louis Grosvenor is Britain’s youngest billionaire.

From a dowry of swamp land to a multi-BILLION pound property portfolio: How Duke of Westminster’s family business started with a 17th century marriage and turned 300 acres of bog into an empire 

Marion Shoard was born in the west of Cornwall in 1949 and spent most of her childhood in Ramsgate, East Kent. She read zoology at Oxford University and, in order to work in countryside conservation, spent two years at the then Kingston-upon-Thames Polytechnic, studying town and country planning. http://www.marionshoard.co.uk/About-Marion-Shoard

She then worked for four years at the national office of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), campaigning in topics ranging from national parks to forestry, and rural public transport to wildlife conservation. However, she had become more and more convinced that the main threat to the beauty and diversity of England’s countryside was the expansion and intensification of agriculture and, with the help of a grant from the Sidney Perry Foundation, she left CPRE to research and write The Theft of the Countryside (1980).

This book struck a chord with the public and sparked off a lively debate, with thirty letters published in The Times, for example. During the following few years she wrote articles and gave talks on the book’s theme, lobbied on rural issues in Parliament and helped set up countryside action groups. The Theft of the Countryside included proposals to establish new national parks in lowland England.

A second book, This Land is Our Land (1987), examined the history of the relationship between landowners and the landless, and suggested it should be placed on a new footing. This book also attracted attention. Channel 4 Documentary: Power In Land I presented a one-hour documentary on its subject matter made by London Weekend Television for Channel 4 and called Power in the Land. During the next few years, she wrote numerous articles and gave many talks about a wide range of rural issues. She also taught countryside planning and land management to students at universities, including Reading and University College London. Gaia Books reissued This Land is Our Land, expanded and updated, as a Gaia Classic in 1997.

One element of the arrangements she had put forward in This Land is Our Land was the replacement of the UK’s trespass régime with a general right of public access to the countryside, providing much greater freedom to roam.

With the help of grants from the Nuffield Foundation and The Leverhulme Trust, she set to work out how such a right could operate on the ground, after making trips to Scandinavia, France and Germany to see for myself the very different access systems operating in those countries. Her conclusions on access were published in A Right to Roam (1999), which was acclaimed as Environment Book of the Year in 2000 by the Outdoor Writers Guild.

She has recently supported Jean Perraton’s call for a right to swim in inland waters in the UK, through penning the foreword to her book Swimming against the Stream: Reclaiming Lakes and Rivers for People to Enjoy Swimming against the Stream: Reclaiming Lakes and Rivers for People to Enjoy.

Her activities in the environment sphere were profiled in two articles which you can read here: The Essential Marion Shoard The Essential Marion Shoard by travel writer Jim Perrin Accessing All Areas Countryside Access by environment journalist Caron Lipman.