In the middle of 2000, when the idea of this pamphlet was first discussed, it was recognised that it would be extremely difficult to obtain accurate, up-to-date information on land ownership in Britain. We reckoned that those involved in organising fox hunting with horses and hounds owned substantial tracts of ‘this green and pleasant land’, thus allowing the hunts to go on, but we had no idea exactly how much. Neither, except those who owned it, did anyone else as. Quite simply there are no accurate Public records, for reasons that are to do with the enormous power that landowners have, and continue, to exercise. Landowners don’t want the mass of the people to know just how much they’ve got, as they may then start discussing how they got it and whether they should be allowed to keep it.

Collecting information and reliable data on who owns the land should be fairly easy as most people own nothing and there are records for land bought and sold since 1925. There are also Land Registries covering Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Wales and England. However if you were to write asking them how much land was owned by, for example, the largest landowners they couldn’t tell you. It has also been estimated that even obtaining all the information they’ve got on their records would cost £150 million, as it costs £7.20 for each land search, some of which may cover only a few metres of land. Yet this is a publicly funded service costing £200 million.

There was a period when it was possible to know who owned the land, but it was over 125 years ago in Victorian Britain – well before the advent of computers and computerised records. ‘The Return of Owners of Land, in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’ was commissioned in 1872 by Parliament and published in 4 volumes between 1874 and 1876. The results have largely been ignored ever since.

The fact that it took only two years to collect a full inventory on land ownership was because at the time each parish kept a record of land transactions stretching back hundreds of years. Since then, whilst the parishes have not been abolished their land-owning records have been. In the meantime, all formal tax on land has also been abolished, and the specific taxes which have been substituted have placed the larger burden of taxes on the smallest landowners, namely private and public householders.

The figures, released in the 1870’s, were used by ‘The Spectator’ in 1875 to calculate that 710 persons possessed over 5,000 acres each in England and Wales, this was a quarter of the land.

You do not have to be a genius to work out why the landowners buried the report, revealing as it did such massive inequalities, so large in fact that they knew they could not possibly defend themselves against charges of exploitation. The same is true today. The landowners were able to remove ‘The Return of Owners of Land’ from public record and discussion as, at the time, they controlled not only the House of Lords but also the House of Commons. This is no longer the case.

Since 1925 Legislation has required that all land transfers be registered at the Land Registry. However if no transfers have taken place then there is no compulsion by landowners to register their land. As might be expected those families who owned massive amounts of land in 1872, and continue to do so today, have not registered their modern landed estates.

It has thus been left to the magnificent work of a tiny bunch of academics and researchers to uncover ‘who does own Britain’. Whilst undertaking the work on this pamphlet Canongate Books of Edinburgh published Kevin Cahill’s ‘Who Owns Britain: the hidden facts behind land ownership in the UK and Ireland’, which apart from saving the author of this particular piece an incredible amount of time is worth £25 of anybody’s money. It should be required reading for anyone who genuinely cares about the future of themselves, their children and their grandchildren. It is an absolute masterpiece. So to is ‘Who Owns Scotland’ by Andy Wightman, who has been undertaking research on land issues for over 10 years and continues to do so.

We, by which I mean all of us who live in England, Scotland, Wales and all of Ireland owe the likes of Cahill and Wightman a great debt of honour for the work they have put in to revealing ‘Who Owns Britain and Ireland’. It is now up to all of us to make the necessary changes, so that those who stole it from the great mass of our ancestors have it taken back from them and used collectively for the greater good.

Cahill has estimated that in England and Wales between 30% and 50% of the acreage of the two countries is unregistered.

Throughout England and Wales 25,918,370 acres of land is occupied by 157,367 individuals or families. This is 0.28% of the population, who own 64% of the land.

These landowners are the beneficiaries of massive subsidies through the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU. That’s right, those who often complain and whinge most about the European Union are amongst its biggest beneficiaries, although the exact amounts each landowner gets is hidden from the public as the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [MAFF], now DEFRA, doesn’t release figures on who gets what.

But it is known that subsidies to the 189,000 families totals £4 billion or £12,169 per year. The same families contribute just £103 million each year in council tax, which isn’t bad for control of over 40 million acres. Compare this to the other 59,000,000 people who live on just 4.4 million acres, who pay on average £550 council tax per household, totalling £10.4 billion. The wealthy gentry are literally stealing bread from people’s mouths.

Of course, whilst this is not the focus of this particular piece of work, it would be remiss not to highlight that if things aren’t bad enough even the actual bread and other agricultural products being grown or developed are of dubious quality. This is a result of intensive farming practices that include extensive use of pesticides, battery farming and a whole host of unnatural practices such as GM production. At the same time, of course the EU’s support for CAP, along with its protective labelling laws, prevent third world producers from gaining entry into the European Market for their products with inevitable consequences.

Amongst the top 100 landowners are some of the following:-

At number one is The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, who owns 270,700 acres with an estimated land value of over £282 million

The Duke of Westminster with 129,300 acres, including highly valuable parts of the richest land of real estate in the World, namely Belgravia and Mayfair in central London, owns land worth over £11.5 billion. He is the wealthiest individual in Britain.

The second wealthiest is the Queen, who with 73,000 acres owns land worth £3 billion. Prince Charles has 141,000 acres worth over one and a quarter billion pounds.

Charles is continuing to acquire land, spending £50 million on October 30^th 1999 for 11,000 acres from the Prudential financial group.

The Duke of Northumberland has 132,200 acres worth in excess of £800 million.

At number 100 is Messrs Elliot of Sutherland who with 23,700 acres is only worth £7 million or so.

Meanwhile, Paul Raymond, the Soho porn king, has managed to acquire 200 acres with a value of, at least, £2 billion pounds.

It is these landowners which allow foxhunting with horses and hounds to continue. For example, the Percy Hunt in Northumberland, has as its Masters Lady Victoria Cuthbert and her brother The 12th Duke of Northumberland of Alnwick Castle, Alnwick, Northumberland NE66 1NG who, as we know from above, has 132,300 acres to play on. The Duke of Buccleuch’s Hunt is, unsurprisingly, not short of a bit of space to run around in, with in excess of a quarter of a million acres of Scottish countryside owned by him. Numerous examples of other major landowners using their lands for foxhunting can be produced.

Of course, a good number of the major landowners, especially in Scotland are more than willing to exploit animals other than foxes for ‘sport’ with some estates presenting opportunities to shoot deer, grouse, pheasants and a whole host of wild-life. It costs to do so, for example, on the Balnagown estate in Sutherland [4] prices for the 1999 season were ‘Red Deer’ - £275, Roe - £60 to £120 plus £50 outing fee, Pheasant - £19 per bird, Grouse - £95 Per Gun per day, Wild Geese and Duck - £80 Per Gun per day.

The estate proudly boasts that; - ‘Few experiences can rival the thrill sheer exhilaration of stalking the redoubtable Red Deer stags across the rugged Ben More Assynt. Alternatively, guests can stalk the elusive Sika or Roe Deer through the woodlands and forest of the lower Glens’. I don’t suppose it pays to be honest and say’ get your chance to blast the shit out of a beautiful Red Deer who has never done you any harm’. Of course, they’d no doubt tell you that they were animal lovers.

The likes of the Duke of Northumberland and Buccleuch have, in recent times, suffered something of a blow with the Labour Government’s decision to reform The House of Lords. By excluding the hereditary peers from it, Blair disconnected the 785 wealthiest families in the UK, who owned perhaps a 1/3rd of the land, from the inner levers of power. Of the top 500 landowners in the UK in 2001, 187 had had seats in the House of Lords until two years earlier. This act is perhaps the Blair Government’s single greatest ‘revolutionary’ act.

The other major blow has come about over the last 10 to 20 years and is a direct result of global capitalisation. This is where hereditary aristocrats were once Directors on the boards of many of Britain’s key financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and stockbrocking firms. They have found that their services are no longer required. They were, of course, well paid for occupying such positions.

The effects of these changes are to leave many major landowners far removed from ‘the corridors of power’. These feelings are intensified by what appears the increasing likelihood of the British people never voting the Conservatives back to [Parliamentary] power as well as the increased support for Labour from some sections of big business, especially those who have become so in more recent times.

The landowners are not exactly isolated. However for a group used to being in charge, and it should not be forgotten that the landowners controlled the Conservative Party, who similarly were the Government on most occasions, until up to the mid to late 1970’s, then not getting what you want must be a strange feeling. If their ‘rights’ to go foxhunting are removed then what next, their land? God forbid!

Of course, it is obscene that so few people own so much of the land in Britain. The same was, of course, once true in Ireland but since the 1800s land re-distribution has been going on. Today, there are no major landowners and parts of agricultural Ireland are booming in spite of the fact that subsidies to landowners are much smaller than in Britain.

This reversed the process in Ireland started by the conquest of the country by Oliver Cromwell in 1649, which saw the start of increased land ownership abroad by British landowners, a process that continued and reached its peak at the end of the 19th century with the British Empire. As detailed elsewhere in this booklet, in Britain itself most of the land had already been parcelled out long before then with William the Conqueror dividing the land between himself, the Church and the Barons. In France, William was known as ‘William the bastard’, possibly a man has never been so appropriately named.

Five hundred or so years later Henry the 8th persuaded the country to give up Catholicism by dissolving the monasteries and distributing the 10 million acres of land to just 1,500 families. The final ‘capture’ was to come with the Industrial Revolution and the various ‘Acts of enclosure’ in which wastes and common lands, on which animals could be grazed, were enclosed. The resultant poverty and starvation removed the peasantry from the land and either forced them in to the factories, abroad or in to an early grave.

Fox hunting with horses and hounds continues to take place throughout Britain because of the massive inequalities that exist in land ownership. These are so indefensible that when official figures were collected 125 years ago the results were immediately buried by the landowners, fearful of a debate on why they had so much land and how they acquired it – namely, by force.

To date no system has been put in place to collect reliable data, despite the fact that The Land Registry Office costs £200 million a year. This has not, however, prevented an ‘unofficial’ record being compiled, revealing a situation where less than 200,000 families own 2/3rds of the land in Britain, forcing many of the rest to live in increasingly crowded cities and spaces.

For those who own such massive tracts of land then ‘their right’ to go fox hunting is more than anything connected with ‘their right’ to continue to hold on land that their ancestors stole from the ordinary people of these islands. Turning the tables so it is not the fox that is being chased but the foxhunter must be our aim.

[2] Anthony Bosanquet – President of Country Landowners Association in 2001 Annual Report

[3] Rebellion in the air at last fox hunt in Scotland – Paul Keele in ‘The Independent’ 26/03/2002

‘Who Owns Britain – the hidden facts behind land ownership in the UK and Ireland’ Kevin Cahill, Canongate Books, 2001, £25

The poor, alas, are still with us – Barbara Gunnell, New Statesman 04/03/2002

The Great Food Gamble – John Humphrys 2001 Coronet Books

The Highland Clearances – Eric Richards 2000 Birlinn Books

Plus ‘Horse and Hound’ and ‘The Countryman’s Weekly’