Salisbury Democracy Alliance

Tag: land tax

  • Chalk and Cheese, and Save our Salisbury

    February 2021

    In this month’s Democracy Café we debated the question of a land tax a proposal which has appeared from time to time – most recently in the 2019 Labour Party manifesto – but it never lives to see the light of day.  Part of our discussion was taken up with how the Normans established the pattern of ownership in England following the invasion.  Some families who own estates, can trace their lineage back to the Normans even today.

    I was reminded during the discussion of a book published in 1979 by J Martin Shaw (not the actor) entitled Rural Deprivation and Planning, who used to be the County Planning Officer for Norfolk (where coincidentally the actor comes from) who wrote a book about shire county councils and how they worked up until quite recently.  Unfortunately, I lent the book to someone and I cannot find it or its title on the internet.  He described how shire counties like Norfolk used to be run essentially by its landed interests.  For them, a rural county was an ideal form of life.  They had the time and money to be able to take part in local politics and from their ranks, many county and district councillors were elected.  Those who worked the land could not get, or afford, the time off and so the whole issue of rural poverty and disadvantage never got a hearing.

    Wiltshire was similar in many respects.  Wiltshire is unique in that it is the only county not to have a university except for tiny Rutland.  What is now the University of Bath was intended for Wiltshire.   Someone close to the negotiations at the time said the idea of a university was not universally welcomed by those in power in County Hall.  Likewise, the dire state of roads in the county was also as a result of the landowning interests not wanting or needing to improve communications.  They believed in small government, long before the phrase became popular, and county council meetings started at 2pm with the intention of ending by 3pm at the latest.  After a good lunch of course.  As the main aim was to do little and invest even less, this was not difficult.  A senior highways engineer told me they did not want improved communications or roads because it would encourage their workers to look elsewhere.  I have no way of knowing if this was true but it was said with feeling.

    I can see echoes of this thinking in the decisions of county hall even today.  A kind of remoteness and an approach based on ‘we know best’.  When a group of us met the leader of the County Council at the beginning of austerity, their easy acceptance – relish even – for cutting funds in the county was very evident.  There were words of regret but the readiness to cut funding was easy to see.  They talk ‘consultation’ but this is more ‘this is what we plan to do, do you like it?  No?  Tough, that’s what’s been decided.’  When the idea of citizens’ assemblies is put to them, the idea is politely received then during a public meeting in the Guildhall, it is nowhere to be seen.

    There is now a move to get more independents elected onto the City Council.  I suspect this is born of a frustration with continued mismanagement, not especially by the City Council itself, but by their paymasters in Trowbridge.  Will this succeed?  As a Scottish colleague of mine used to say ‘I ha’ ma’ douts.’  One problem is a collection of independents is not a party almost by definition.  Will they be able to collaborate sufficiently to counter the established parties?  Maybe, maybe not.

    Secondly, the City Council is a parish council.  This is really an absurd state of affairs.  I was never a fan of the district council but at least it was local.  A city whose administration is a parish council: bizarre.

    Chalk and Cheese?  This is probably a Wiltshire saying coming from when, in the immediate area of Salisbury, they could only rear sheep on the chalk.  West and north they could raise cattle and produce cheese.  Hence in Salisbury market there were two parts and the cheese was sold outside what is now HSBC bank.  It seems to be a metaphor for the state of affairs we have in the county today with decisions taken in the north of the county and often seem divorced and irrelevant to the south.

    Perhaps we need to think differently and divide Wiltshire into two counties: North Wiltshire and South Wiltshire?  North would continue to run from Trowbridge – after all they seem to have spent millions on the building there.  The south would need to be decided and not necessarily Salisbury.  Save our Salisbury could perhaps direct part of their efforts to this endeavour.  It is likely to reap better dividends and more locally based local government than we have now.

    It leaves the baleful influence of the landed interests still quietly evident.  They can continue, behind the scenes, to select their own.  The only way to counter this is to enliven local democracy.  More independents in a South Wiltshire County Council which has the powers of a county, could make a real difference.

    Peter Curbishley

    Updated 10 March

  • Democracy Café – February

    Two very interesting debates at this month’s Democracy Café meeting held via Zoom

    Two topics won through this month: one on privacy and the other on whether we should have a land tax.  At first sight unrelated but, read on …

    Privacy and the news this week of a legal victory by Megan Markle against the Mail on Sunday who had published letters she wrote to her father.  It raised the question of how much should be in the public domain for us all to see.  There was a lot of interest by the public of things to do with the Royals (as in the Royal family not the TV family of the same name!).  More openness in politics however is a feature of Open Democracy.

    There was general agreement that it depended on what the content was.  Letters between individuals should remain private but if the content was about matters of public concern, then there might be a case for publication. The fundamental distinction was between ‘in the public interest’ and ‘of interest to the public’.  It was noted that we have some of the most restrictive set of rules preventing publication in comparison to other democracies.  Things like Cabinet minutes were kept secret for 30 years when many of the participants would be dead and the matters discussed long since over with.  It was pointed out that SAGE minutes are now published without, it seems, the ceiling falling in.

    Would we risk being overloaded someone asked?  If all sorts of government papers were published, could we be drowned by it all?  Another point: would publication inhibit civil servants, experts and others giving frank advice to ministers?  The problem – which seems to be increasing – is that many decisions are being made behind closed doors without either the public or parliament knowing what is going on or being able to discuss them.  Was the Windrush decision for example ever discussed in Cabinet?  Who said what in the lead up to the Iraq war?  This increasing secrecy has almost certainly led to the rise of the ‘chumocracy’ with hundreds of millions of pounds in contracts being issued to friends, cronies and party supporters without proper oversight.  Good old fashioned corruption in other words.  The opposite of public interest is private interest it was noted.

    A fundamental assumption was that decisions were made competently after a careful assembly and consideration of the facts and opinions sought from  those who know.  The reality is that decision making is chaotic with the actual decisions made in private rooms and the Cabinet simply assembled to rubber stamp what has already been decided elsewhere.  Decisions were made on the basis of political expediency.  If there was more openness, the likelihood was that actual decisions would shift elsewhere.  A film of the G7 summit was mentioned, attended by President Trump, showing him casually deciding whether to pull out of NATO and subsequently pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

    The whole concept of privacy has been questioned recently in a book Life after Privacy.  We have been willing to give away our privacy for the benefits of shopping on line.  Sites like Amazon and Google collect huge quantities of data about us which we seem willing to give. Does it matter? 

    In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt discusses loneliness and distinguishes it from isolation.  We chose our privacy she claims. 

    The second half moved onto a discussion of land tax a topic we have discussed before.  The topic arose from a recently published book, The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes.  There was firstly, an economic argument since a major slice of the price of a house is the land it sits on.  The supply of land and hence its price was a key factor in the economy.  Yet land itself is largely untaxed.  Thomas Picketty argues in his book Capital in the 21st Century, that there should be a shift away from taxing earnings to taxing wealth which was in many respects unproductive.  It would also enable the elimination of other taxes such as the community charge.  Developers for example, had collectively around 5 years supply of land with planning permission, and they were able to build as an when it was profitable for them, not when houses were needed.  Taxing the land would act as an incentive to build. 

    However, could such a tax act as a disincentive to develop?  It was indeed one of the problems of the Betterment Levy – one of the attempts to tax land and development – that landowners simply declined to sell and waited for the tax to be abandoned which ultimately it was.  This led onto the question of taxing land which was for the benefit of the community or was not earning income, for example, wildlife habitats.  This need not be a problem since there was already a system of grants to encourage this activity and such uses could be zero rated.  The tax could also be used to incentivise the use of land for solar energy or wind farms for example.  

    Letchworth Garden City was mentioned which is managed by the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation the income from which is invested in the community.  This could readily serve as a model elsewhere. 

    It was noted that all land is owned by the Crown which introduced the notion of stewardship.  The second point was that we have got used to the pattern of land ownership a system introduced by the Normans.  William the Conqueror simply handed out parcels of land to his barons and dispossessed the English.  This pattern of ‘land grabs’ has been the case through history and fuelled the Empire.  In this connection, the lack of footpaths in Ireland was noted and almost certainly this arose because the country was once part of the Empire and there would have been little interest in the needs of Irish peasants.   One participant found the signs put up by local landowners – saying PRIVATE, KEEP OUT – to be needlessly aggressive.  Should we rethink the whole basis of the ownership of land?  We have somehow accepted the current pattern established by the Normans and have never really challenged it.  

    How will it benefit society?  A difficult question but at least it will make things a little fairer with wealth paying its share.  Tax based on land would be very easy to collect since it cannot be concealed that easily (although perhaps it should be noted that what Britain’s largest landowner – the Duke of Buccleuch – owns is unknown even to some of his tenants.)  One of the most efficient taxes however is Stamp Duty: easy to collect and hard to avoid.  

    There was a brief discussion about criminal trespass which was an act introduced to protect ancient monuments.  This was about the time of the infamous ‘Beanfield Massacre‘ incident near Stonehenge in 1985.   

    Will it change?  The idea of a land tax was suggested in the Labour Party manifesto in 2019 and was successfully characterised as a garden tax by the Conservatives.  Politically, it seems a toxic idea that will need a lot of work to sell and to explain the benefits of to the voters.  Another point is it was revealed this week that the Queen sees all bills for vetting before they come to Parliament and has amended or squashed a number of them before they have seen the light of day.  A land tax will hit her estates and those of other royalty with higher taxes so such a proposal would find difficulty getting debated.  Then of course there is the House of Lords …  Hence we came full circle with privacy and secrecy linked to the taxing of land.

    An excellent debate and our next is in March.

    ***

    Unconnected with the discussion it was noted that there is an attempt to recruit more independents onto the council in the forthcoming elections.  How Salisbury is managed (or is it mismanaged?) politically has been the subject of several of our debates in the Café over the years and if there were more independents on the council perhaps this would help.   

    Peter Curbishley