Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 144

Since at least the nineteenth century, various political interests and campaign groups have sought to reform legislation and taxation to alter the power of private property. In Ireland, Scotland, and to a lesser extent, Wales, the land reform movement was driven by nationalist movements seeking to remove English control as a route to independence. English land reform has a long historiography, much of which has been led by Tichelar himself. Paul Readman and Matthew Cragoe’s research on the land question has charted radical opposition to the concentration of aristocratic land ownership up to 1914, while Andrew Cox focused on the party-political conflicts over reconstruction of blitzed cities after the end of the Second World War. The period between 1914 and 1945 is less well studied, as F. M. L. Thompson noted in his chapter ‘The strange death of the English land question’ in Readman and Cragoe’s edited collection, The land question in Britain of 2010. In this book, Tichelar seeks to revive the question, bringing together his extensive previous articles and studies to give a detailed narrative of attempts at land reform throughout the twentieth century.

The language of ‘failure’ of land reform and the ‘triumph’ of private property noted in the title presents Tichelar’s argument from the start. Political parties attempted but did not ultimately succeed in legislating for and creating strong enough institutions to redress what has historically, and continues to be, the overbearing weight of private property. But he never quite fully argues that land nationalization was ever a viable solution or that private property was always in the wrong. He points to two key factors which prevented extensive reform. The primary cause, he argues, was ultimately the strength of the Conservative governments in overturning or modifying any of the Liberals’ and then Labour’s policies. Tichelar’s main focus is on the Labour Party, but he compares Conservative policy throughout. The second more practical reason for failure was the complexity of administering the valuation of land separately from buildings, ‘a major constraint on policies seeking to tax land values, especially any levy on the unimproved value of land’ (p. 202).

After two opening chapters outlining the main arguments, the narrative begins with a broad-brush overview of the origins of the English land question. The utopianism of the seventeenth-century Diggers, the anti-enclosure movement of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century Chartist Land Plan and Land Tenure Reform Association and the philosophies of Smith, Ricardo and Mill are presented as pioneers of the broader political critique of the inequalities of land ownership. Tichelar is more confident in the detail when he moves on to the twentieth century. He underlines two main turning points in the chronology of the land question: first, the point when major reform was most possible, and second, when political priorities and ideologies decisively shifted away from idealism to pragmatism and new interpretations of land reform. The first decisive point came with Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, which sought to introduce the rating of site values, a tax on the unimproved value of land regardless of whether it had planning permission for development or not. It was the most ambitious attempt to tax land values in the period, but was repealed in 1921. The central programme of the socialist and early Labour movements prioritized land nationalization in order to reduce the power of the aristocracy, and to encourage a utopian ‘back to the land’ drive among the working class. Following economic crises and the Second World War, however, the demand for reform came to be more associated with taxing the unearned increment and betterment value of land earmarked for development. From then on, Tichelar argues, it became increasingly impossible to enact the taxation of land values for a variety of reasons, mostly because of the ‘ideological triumph of property rights’ and party-political conflict (p. 5). The urgent need for post-war urban reconstruction was accompanied by fears of property developers speculating in the redevelopment of bombed sites. Land reform then became more directly linked to the nationalization of development rights rather than of the land itself (p. 3). The Labour government created a Central Land Board responsible for creating a betterment levy seeking to capture increases in development land values for the community. But as in 1921, the Conservative government of 1951 reversed the progressive policy, repealing the betterment clauses in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act (p. 19). The diminution of aristocratic estates also helped to soften the old radical critique of the propertied elite, while the rights of property owners were subsequently boosted by the growth of owner-occupation and the consequent ideology of home ownership, which reached its peak under the Thatcher government of the 1980s (p. 12).

Tichelar shows how, by the post-war era, land reform came to mean something largely different to its earlier incarnations. The requisition of land for military purposes and the post-war reconstruction plans gave the state control over land on a scale that the earlier land reformers would not have thought possible. The growth of the commons preservation movement further began to shift the focus away from the whole framework of taxing development land. Through progressive town and country planning legislation, the state began to acquire radical powers of access and control over land for specific purposes, including development control, the establishment of green belts and national parks, garden cities and new towns, and national agencies such as the Forestry Commission (p. 5). This attitude to the relationship between the state and land continues today, although issues over the lack of social and ‘affordable’ housing have indicated the relevance of the older debates over inequality of land ownership.

Tichelar builds on his earlier extensive work on the Labour Party’s policies towards land reform, and this focus on Labour runs through the whole book. His research is comprehensive, using a wide range of political and legislative sources, though it would have been interesting to have heard more from landowners themselves about the impact of the various government policies. His argument is threaded clearly throughout the book, although often tending to repetition. Essentially the main narrative is charted in chapter one, and then repeated in more detail through the other chapters. It could therefore be more concisely written, but overall the book makes a significant contribution to the history of land ownership in England, with a continuing relevance to debates today.