BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
It is a peculiar truth of our age that the most ancient of threats now wears the mask of progress. The air, once thick with the honest grime of industry, now carries a new and more insidious smog, a vapour of ideas which, if inhaled for long enough, breeds a profound and willing blindness. One detects its presence in the lecture halls, in the tweets of those paid by well-funded pressure groups, and in the green-tinged rhetoric that speaks of community while plotting the ruin of the very thing it purports to save.
The threat is the old creed of collectivism, freshly scrubbed and presented as a solution, and its target is the land beneath our feet.
Consider the proposition, now circulating with increasing boldness, that property is theft. It is a phrase of a certain theatrical simplicity, the sort that appeals to the intellectual whose only connection with the soil is the view from a train window or the curated wildness of a public park. The argument, as put forth by the Anarchist Communist Group and fellow-travellers in movements like the Common Weal, runs thus: that the distribution of land in Britain is a monstrous injustice, a relic of the Norman Conquest, and that the only path to justice is to hold the land in common. They point, with a sort of grim satisfaction, to the statistic that less than one percent of the population owns the lion’s share of the country. The image is conjured of a nation of Lords and Commoners, a feudal drama played out on grouse moors and in the shadow of unaffordable housing.
There is, one must admit, a surface-level plausibility to this grievance. The cost of housing, particularly in London, is a genuine and grinding misery for millions. The sight of a hereditary peer or Arab owning tracts of Scotland can stir a deep-seated, perhaps even ancient, sense of unfairness. But the analysis, and more importantly the cure proposed by these new communists, is not merely wrong; it is a prescription for a familiar and devastating sickness.
For their solution is not truly one of access or reform, but of ownership. They do not wish to manage the land better; they wish to seize it.
The State, which they affect to despise, becomes in their blueprint the necessary instrument for this great confiscation. The ‘community’ is to own the land, which in practice means the committee, which in practice means the party. The individual, with his particular attachments to a particular patch of earth—his garden, his home, his farm—is an inconvenient relic to be swept away in the name of the collective. The landlord, a figure of popular resentment, is to be abolished, only to be replaced by the only landlord from whom there is no appeal: the State itself.
One has only to look across the world, to histories not yet distant enough to be safely forgotten, to see the end of this road. Let us speak plainly of Venezuela, a country I know all too well. There, under the late Hugo Chávez and his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, a very similar war cry was taken up against the large, productive farms. The latifundios were denounced as theft, the landowners as parasites. The land was seized, in the name of the people, and handed over to state-controlled cooperatives and communal councils.
What followed was not a utopia of shared abundance, but a lesson in the tyranny of theory over reality. The new owners had the political zeal, but they did not have the knowledge, the capital, or the intricate web of supply chains that turn seed into supper. The machinery broke down, the crops failed, the expertise was driven out. The great farms, which had fed the nation and exported its surplus, fell silent. And so, a country blessed with fertile soil and vast oil wealth now stares into empty shelves. The people, in whose name the land was stolen, now starve upon it. The theft was not undone; it was perfected. The property was not returned to the people; it was taken from competent hands and placed into incompetent ones, with the people paying the price in hunger. This is the unassailable arithmetic of collectivisation: that two minus two does not equal zero, but famine.
The new enclosers of the mind, the Shrubsoles and their ilk, will of course object. They are not, they will say, brutalists like Chávez. They are green, modern, and talk of community gardens and allotments. But do not be deceived by the pastoral imagery or the North Face waterproofs. The underlying principle is the same: the denial of the right of an individual to own, to improve, and to be responsible for his own patch of the world. Their vision of the countryside is not one of thriving, independent farmers, but of a state-managed park, a sort of national museum of nature where we are all perpetual visitors, granted access by permission but never by right. The city, likewise, becomes a grid of social housing and communal spaces, where the tenancy is secure but the horizon is low, and the ambition to possess something of one’s own is treated as a form of avarice.
This is the true threat that now faces Britain. It is not a threat of invasion by foreign armies, but of intellectual colonisation by a doctrine that has failed every time it has been tried. It is a campaign not against the aristocracy of birth, but against the very concept of belonging. They speak of the land being ‘ours’, but their ‘we’ is a vast, featureless collective in which the ‘I’ must be dissolved. They offer a world where no one can be a lord, but in doing so, they ensure that everyone remains a commoner, a tenant of an abstract and unaccountable power.
To defend the right to property is not to defend every existing landlord or to ignore the very real problems of housing and access. It is to defend something more fundamental: the right to a home that cannot be taken from you by a change in policy, the right to the fruits of your own labour, and the right to a future that is yours to build, not the State’s to allocate.
The land is not theft.
The real theft is the attempt to steal from men the ground of their independence, and to replace it with the barren soil of collective ownership. It is a future that smells not of damp earth and growing things, but of the committee room and the ration book. And we must, with every fibre of our English instinct for liberty, reject it.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).