What was the biggest privatisation in the UK in recent decades? British Telecom or British Gas? The electricity grid, utilities or the railways? Think again.

It is easier to get the right answer if you start by asking what was the UK’s biggest public asset when the privatis­ation drive began with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street in 1979. It was not industrial holdings, transport infrastructure or the telephone system — it was land and the public buildings erected on it.

Land makes up a staggering share of national wealth. An estimate prepared in 2017 by the Office for National Statistics concluded that out of total national wealth of £9.8tn, land accounted for £5tn and houses and other structures added another £3.5tn on top of that.

Of all of the land in Britain, in the late 1970s public agencies owned 20 per cent; institutional owners held another 20 per cent, and 60 per cent was in the hands of private individuals. As Brett Christophers outlines in his book The New Enclosure, it was the transfer into private ownership of roughly half of the public estate that was by far the largest element of Britain’s privatisation programme. The disposal of land and buildings, council homes, military facilities, NHS land and school playing fields transferred property — which at current prices would be worth around £400bn — from the public to the private sector.

To put that figure in perspective, ahead of the 2007-08 financial crisis Britain’s public debt came to just short of £500bn. The fact that this huge sale of property does not feature more prominently in the national narrative — at least at the level of North Sea oil, say — reflects the fact that these gigantic disposals took place in dribs and drabs over a matter of decades, often at cutdown prices. Even allowing for inflation, the public sector did not realise anything close to current value from the sales, leaving the public balance sheet in a depleted state.

Christophers’ account may come as a shock to many readers. That in itself is worthy of comment. How did land become so invisible as part of the privatisation story? Since time immemorial it has been the dominant asset. Back to the Domesday Book of the Normans, economic and political power depended on land ownership. Beginning in earnest in the 1500s, the wave of enclosures — fencing in land previously used for common grazing — supercharged the development of agrarian capitalism. Right up until the beginning of the 20th century, the landed elite were a dominant force in British politics and society. As such, they also attracted criticism.

Economists in the classical tradition, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, called for comprehensive nationalisation or land taxation. Free trade politics, spearheaded by the call for the abolition of the corn laws, was anti-landlord politics. Nineteenth-century technological innovations in railways and oceanic shipping enabled the globalisation of agriculture and freed Europe’s urban population from the domination of the countryside. Yet in the cities, property ownership remains a paramount foundation of wealth and political power. Even today, the call for redistributive taxation on landlords unites economists from left and right.

In the 19th century Britain’s ruling elite owned land, but the state itself did not. That changed in the 20th century. Local councils bought land to build public housing and relocate slum dwellers. The age of total war turned the government into a steward of the national economy. After the first world war, the Forestry Commission recognised the need to secure timber supplies. In the second world war, Britain was turned into a giant army camp; the countryside was studded with airfields. Postwar public housing brought huge swaths of urban land into public ownership.

It was in the 1970s that public ownership reached its peak and also its moment of crisis. As public ownership expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, critics carped that government was hoarding land. As Christophers points out, this rhetoric was never well supported by the evidence; the data suggest that private landowners are slower to develop their land portfolios. But Thatcher’s victory put the critics of public ownership in power, and Whitehall was converted to a policy of sale at any price. In 1979, 42 per cent of the UK’s population lived in council housing. Today the figure is less than 8 per cent.

The basic rationale was that privatisation would energise private land use. The evidence is anything but compelling. From a peak of 350,000 permanent dwellings constructed per annum in the late 1960s, construction activity has fallen to around 150,000 units per year.

The most common explanation for this shortfall is the restrictions of the planning system. Christophers will have none of it. Local authorities in fact fall over themselves to speed up planning applications. The main problem is that private property developers hoard land and throttle the supply of housing to maximise value of their assets. Christophers surely makes too much of the contrast between these two vices. The ability of developers to ration supply depends on being able to exclude competitors. Their hoards of land would be devalued were it not for the restrictions imposed for better or worse by the planning system and greenbelt regulation.

Where The New Enclosure is at its strongest is not as an economic history of land use, but as an analysis of governmental discourse. Christophers has a knack for bringing out the wider significance of even the most humdrum regulation. This slow administrative throttling of the state is precisely what neoliberalism is made of.

As a historical analyst, Christophers is remarkably restrained. There is no doubt that property developers benefited enormously from privatisation. Those developers are big donors to the UK’s Conservative party, the major advocate of privatisation. Parliament is full of landowners, great and small. Christophers does not deny that profiteering by a new class of private and corporate landowners is one likely explanation for the privatisation drive. But he does not go down that muckraking path. One can only hope that others, building on Christophers work, will do so.

The privatisation programme was no doubt dramatic. Whether it is really analogous in its historical significance to the enclosure movement that set Tudor Britain on the road to capitalism is debatable. To his credit, Christophers does not push the point. There is no need to. With his carefully crafted and meticulously researched study, he has made an essential contribution to our understanding of politics and government in modern Britain.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, by Brett Christophers, Verso, RRP£20/$29.99, 304 pages

Adam Tooze is the author of ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’

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