A Father's Lesson to His Son

How long do we have to wait - it's now generation on generation already: over seventy-five years since that triumphant Labour win, post-war - before someone grasps the nettle of land-ownership? So many of our current problems in trying to unpick the Gordian economic knot left behind in these dying years of the most destructive economic experiment ever conducted: neo-liberalism; could have been assuaged for all time had the then new Labour government added the nationalisation of land to the social contract. They had the opportunity and the clout to have made it happen. They had a very brief window of opportunity and they blued it, and the land-owning gentry blew a sigh of relief in turn.

Land. Our land. Tir ni, in Welsh; Wales and the earliest inhabitants of these lands - Y Brython, who lost almost everything to the various conquering hordes from across the channel - representing perhaps the very earliest examples of land theft from the commons by self-appointed gentry of whatever stripe. Centuries of theft of common land and enclosure have left the true riches of the British archipelago in the hands of such a very few; and to be fair the least-deserving and the most wasteful of people. They created estates and made fortunes off assumed status and the rentier exploitation of peoples who had farmed and managed the land for thousands of years: they raped both the land and the people in very short order.

Had Labour had the guts to break the cycle of land ownership in 1947/48, so much of what has transpired in the interim could have been ameliorated and the Social Contract could have been preserved for all time in its purest sense. Common ownership of all that was formerly already 'the commons'. Instead, greed replaced common sense and indeed common ownership; proselytised as 'entrepreneurship' and 'endless opportunity for advancement [of whom?]' by a succession of governments. They lied through their teeth and feathered - continue to feather - their short-term nest-building at the expense of our history to come and are leaving as their legacy generations betrayed by these mendacious so-called 'public servants' and their paymasters, whose only service is that of self and kind. This one's for you, Dad: you were always right on this one...