The great British land scandal

In this issue, the New Statesman launches a campaign to tackle Britain's astonishingly unequal distribution of land. This is a subject that has lingered on the fringes of politics for nearly a century. It is time to put it back on the agenda. Nobody can easily defend the situation that Jason Cowley describes on page 12, whereby 158,000 families own 41 million acres of land while the rest of us - 24 million families - live on just four million acres. Still less can anyone defend the system whereby, through the European Union, the big landowners receive subsidies from taxpayers.

The lopsided distribution of land is the single most important reason for Britain's chronic housing shortage and for the high prices that prevent so many from buying homes. The view that this should change is not confined to the far left. It was shared by the late-Victorian Liberals and their early 20th-century successors, including Winston Churchill, as Tristram Hunt explains on page 16. It is shared today by Ferdinand Mount, once head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit. In his new book, Mind the Gap, he writes: "We need to unlock and allot land on a far wider scale than anyone in this country has so far contemplated." It is often said that other countries have less acute housing problems because their people are willing to live in rented urban flats. This is only partly true. As Mr Mount points out, even quite poor people in Ireland, France, the US, Italy and Greece own small plots of land and build on them when they have money to spare.

This ought to be natural territory for a third-term Labour government - a policy that might do for Tony Blair (and/or Gordon Brown) what council house sales did for Margaret Thatcher. There is no need for any "land grab", and the old socialist rallying cry of "nationalise the land" can be ruled out from the start. A mixture of tax (see Dave Wetzel, page 15), incentives and withdrawal of subsidy could do the job. The NS will explore such possibilities in the weeks ahead.