Category Archives: Posted

The Land Is Ours – UK land rights teach-ins

The Land is a free gift to mankind and there is an acre of Britain for every single person who lives here so why should anybody pay rent, a mortgage or be homeless?

Land reform

The Diggers, The Chartists, The Crofters, The Irish Land League and today’s criminalized squatters have been spoiling for a fight about the iniquity of eviction, landlessness and destitution for hundreds of years. Britain has a land-mass of around 65 million acres and around 65 million people, that’s roughly a football pitch per person, or around three acres for the average family.
Britain was a free gift to its people, just as the Earth was to mankind. Back in medieval England most land was farmed collectively, few actually owned it but did have the right to a cottage, to stay, and to pass those rights down the generations. But the landowners’ parliament instituted 17th- and 18th-century land privatization, enclosure, evicting hundreds of thousands. A vast factory workforce of destitute landless citizens was created, ripe for the dark satanic mills of England’s industrial revolution.
Across the Irish Sea one million died between 1847 and 1851 in the Irish Famines and a further million were forced to emigrate. So in the late 1800s, with fire in their bellies, the Irish led the way in taking back the land, setting a precedent for today’ solution.
Exploiting the balance of power in London, four laws were forced through delivering interest-free government loans. Penniless Irish tenants could now buy land and build new homes, repayments being far less than those crippling rents. It was one of history’s most successful land reform programs to date.
Figures are hard to come by today but 40,000 ‘land millionaires’, 0.05 percent of the population, now own around half of Britain, most of which they have never set foot on. A further 30 percent is owned by 1 percent of the population, and the remaining 20 percent is owned by banks, corporations and other institutions. Though many have ‘bought their own home’, actually the bank owns it until they pay off their mortgage.
This leaves around 50 percent of the population, or 30 million people, effectively landless, either with a big mortgage, renting or homeless. Britain today too carries the shame of roughly 200,000 homeless people, either overcrowded, sleeping on friends’ floors or sofas, squatting or sleeping on the streets.
http://rt.com/op-edge/usa-government-shutdown-britain-719/

A Short History of Enclosure in Britain

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain’s land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our “property-owning democracy”, nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.
http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

The great property swindle

The myth spun about Britain is that land is scarce. It is not — landowners are paid to keep it off the market
BY KEVIN CAHILL PUBLISHED 11 MARCH 2011
Modern British history, excluding world wars and the loss of empire, is a record of two countervailing changes, one partly understood, one not understood at all. The partly understood change is the urbanisation of society to the point where 90 per cent of us in the United Kingdom live in urban areas. Hidden inside that transformation is the shift from a society in which, less than a century and a half ago, all land was owned by 4.5 per cent of the population and the rest owned nothing at all. Now, 70 per cent of the population has a stake in land, and collectively owns most of the 5 per cent of the UK that is urban. But this is a mere three million out of 60 million acres.
Through this transformation, the heirs to the disenfranchised of the Victorian era have inverted the relationship between the landed and the landless. This has happened even while huge changes have occurred in the 42 million acres of rural countryside. These account for 70 per cent of the home islands and are the agricultural plot. From being virtually the sole payers of such tax as was levied in 1873 (at fourpence in the 240p pound), the owners of Britain’s agricultural plot are now the beneficiaries of an annual subsidy that may run as high as £23,000 each, totalling between £3.5bn and £5bn a year. Urban dwellers, on the other hand, pay about £35bn in land-related taxes. Rural landowners receive a handout of roughly £83 per acre, while urban dwellers pay about £18,000 for each acre they hold, an average of £1,800 per dwelling, the average dwelling standing on one-tenth of an acre.
http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2011/03/million-acres-land-ownership

Farmageddon by Philip Lymbery (with Isabel Oakeshott): Book review

Philp Lymbery head of the estimable British charity, Compassion in World Farming, sounds the alarm about the arrival of mega-farming in his remarkable new book Farmageddon (co-written with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott). It is not a vegetarian rant. It is not anti-meat. But it is an unforgettable indictment of the new hyper-industrialised agriculture originating in the USA which is now spreading around the world.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/farmageddon-by-philip-lymbery-with-isabel-oakeshott-book-review-9112828.html?origin=internalSearch

The Take Back the Land Movement

 

The Take Back the Land- Movement is a American network of organizations dedicated to elevating housing to the level of a human right and securing community control over land. The Movement must be led by impacted communities and is firmly rooted in ‘Positive Action’ campaigns, including those which break the immoral laws which allow banks to gain billions in profit while human beings are made homeless.

http://www.takebacktheland.org/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Take-Back-the-Land-Movement/

 

Thousand-Huts Campaign, Scotland

Thousand-Huts Campaign, Scotland

The “Thousand Huts” campaign was launched by Reforesting Scotland http://www.reforestingscotland.org on 15 June 2011. The campaign website is: http://www.thousandhuts.org/ [BROKEN LINK]

The Campaign seeks to celebrate, expand, protect & enjoy the use of huts in Scotland for living, working and relaxing in, & it is calling for: changes to the planning system to support hut building, better security of tenure for existing hutters, & an end to the eviction of hutters such as those at Barry Downs & Carnoustie.

Occupy Movement UK

Occupy Movement UK

On 15th October 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests went global with over 1,000 protests around the world. In the UK occupations occured in a number of towns and cities. In London, activists tried to occupy Paternoster Square in front of the London Stock Exchange & Goldman Sachs. Police removed them, but they reconverged outside St Pauls Cathedral, where they remained for 4 months until they were evicted on 28th Feb 2012. Clergy at St Pauls in media interviews validated the views of the Occupy movement & Occupy’s critique of the current financial system. Occupy London continues to organise events all the time, including Occupy Democracy.

Lammas Low Impact Ecovillage, Pembrokeshire, Wales

http://www.lammas.org.uk/
Lammas Low Impact Ecovillage, Pembrokeshire, Wales:

Welcome to Lammas

The Lammas project has been created to pioneer an alternative model for living on the land. It empowers people to explore what it is to live a low-impact lifestyle. It demonstrates that alternatives are possible here and now.

The project centres around the ecovillage at Tir y Gafel, in North Pembrokeshire, which has been designed using a model that can be replicated across Wales. It combines the traditional smallholding model with the latest innovations in environmental design, green technology and permaculture. The ecovillage was granted planning permission in 2009 by the Welsh Government and is currently part-way through the construction phase. At its heart it consists of 9 smallholdings positioned around a Community Hub building, and it is supported by a range of peripheral projects and networks.

The ecovillage runs guided tours every Saturday from April to October and also runs a range of courses, conferences and events throughout the year.

The project actively supports aspiring low-impact projects in Wales through providing planning guides and resources as well as supporting independent academic studies.

We have just launched this; our new website. Enjoy!

ENGLISH & WELSH FORESTS: NO PUBLIC SELL-OFF …for now

Forest Camapigns NetworkAfter the government was forced to do a u-turn on selling off Britain’s woodlands, they set up a forests panel to help decide what to do next. Their consultation ended on 31st July 2011.

This was TLIO’s response.

On 4th July 2012, the panel published their report, recommending that forests in England & Wales should remain in public-ownership. The Government’s finally responded on 31st Jan 2013, confirming it would not be selling off publicly owned forests in England & Wales . However, in Jul 2013, the Govt published its initial proposals for managing England’s public forests, watering down many of the crucial recommendations in the Independent Panel’s report. To keep up-to-date on the latest developments, see here.

Keveral Farm

http://www.keveral.org/
Keveral Farm, Cornwall:

Keveral Farm is an organic farm community near Looe, Cornwall (in the south-west of England). We are 40 years old this year! The original community was established in 1973, and the farm is now owned and managed co-operatively by the members of the community. We are 10 adults plus a varying number of children. We live in a farmhouse, static caravans, a wooden cabin and a barn conversion.

Our farm-based activities include horticulture and veg boxes, camping including yurts for hire, ecological consultancy, orchards, apple juice and cider, preserves, woodland and tree work, mushrooms…. Some of us also work off the farm.

Volunteer
We take working visitors (including WWOOFers) to help us with our work, in exchange for food and accommodation or camping.

Steward Community Woodland

We are Steward Community Woodland, a group of people who are living and working together and have been experimenting with…

We live on 32 acres of plantation woodland on a steep hillside, located in the beautiful Wray Valley on the edge of Dartmoor. The community was founded in 2000 and is currently twelve adults and nine children.

 

http://www.stewardwood.org/