George Orwell Against Land Monopoly
Earth for All Humanity, or Only a Privileged Few?
| On August 18, 1944, the following article by George Orwell appeared in The Tribune. Orwell had earlier recommended removing the artificial barriers surrounding "public" squares in London. |
by George Orwell
Apropos of my remarks on the railings round London squares, a correspondent writes: 'Are the squares to which you refer public or private properties? If private, I suggest that your comments in plain language advocate nothing less than theft and should be classed as such'.If giving the land of England back to the people of England is theft, I am quite happy to call it theft. In his zeal to defend private property, my correspondant does not stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.
Except for the few surviving commons, the high roads, the lands of the National Trust, and the sea shore below the high-tide mark, every square inch of England is 'owned' by a few thousand families. These people are just about as useful as so many tapeworms. It is desirable that people should own their own dwelling houses, and it is probably desirable that a farmer should own as much land as he can actually farm. But the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existance. He is merely a person who has found a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.
The removal of the railings in the squares was a first step against him. It was a very small step, and yet an appreciable one, as the present move to restore the railings shows. For three years or so the squares lay open, and their sacred turf was trodden on by the feet of working-class children, a sight to make dividend-drawers gnash their false teeth. If that is theft, all I can say is, so much the better for theft.
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'A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to
drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes
make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony-bin made use of by
some other planet.'
--- George Orwell |
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