© Mark Metcalf – January 18th 2006
“Dynamic duo Peter and Dan Snow lift the lid on how few of Britain’s 60m inhabitants own its 60 million acres of land” was how the BBC’s press office trumpeted its ‘Whose Britain is it anyway?’ programme of January 10th.
Well, not quite, the programme, although you would never have known as he only appeared for 27 seconds of the ninety minutes, was little more than a presentation of the basic facts and figures unearthed and published by the veteran researcher and writer Kevin Cahill in his 2001 book ‘Who Owns Britain?’, published by Canongate Press of Edinburgh, which funnily enough was going to be the title of the BBC programme until it was changed at the last moment.
Cahill is listed as the consultant for the programme, but apparently was only involved for a few hours, and only then because he’d threatened to take out a writ against the Chairman of the Board of Governors Michael Grade, Director General Mark Thompson and Head of Documentaries Michael Poole as well as an interlocutory against the BBC documentary unit in Bristol, forcing the BBC to despatch a team to interview him forthwith.
When the programme was finally completed it was posted out to other contributors before Christmas but not to Cahill. At this point Cahill didn’t even know if he was going to get a credit on the programme.
But it gets worse; much worse, the programme shown was in fact the second attempt to do it. The first collapsed back in December 2004, costs of approximately £100,000 are rumoured. The second programme is believed to have been £200,000 over budget, and to add insult to injury some of the ‘facts’ that the Snow’s quoted were wrong including the most fundamental and important fact in land ownership law and that is that there is only one landowner in the UK, and that is the Crown. A basic error was Snow saying that the Glebe Land of the Church of England was owned by the vicars. It is not and is vested inalienably in the parishes by law.
Why the BBC have acted so strangely cannot be explained after Cahill actually offered the corporation the film rights to the book for nothing in July last year provided that the book was credited as the basis for the programme. Perhaps it may have something to do with the fact that back in 2001 he had a complaint upheld by the BBC itself over the unfair use of a pre-publication manuscript of Who Owns Britain by two BBC producers?
Cahill is now demanding
that Grade investigates the whole background to the programme and is threatening
legal action.