Abstract
Commentary I: The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
Brett Christophers’ latest book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, begins with a simple, yet staggering, statistic: since 1979, ‘2 million hectares, or about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass’ (p. 2) has moved from public to private ownership. Taking this as the starting point and major anchor for the book, Christophers dedicates the five chapters that follow to meticulously constructing an explanation that allows the reader to interpret ‘the how, why, and with-what-consequences’ (p. 3; original emphasis) of this particular wave of land privatisation. Chapter 2 provides a rich and detailed history of landownership in Britain and the state’s role within it, tracing the ebb and flow of the politicisation of land over recent history. While the first few chapters lay out the theoretical and historical scaffolding, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are dedicated to substantiating the argument of the book in great detail, focusing respectively on the rationale, process and outcomes of the large-scale privatisation of public land. Throughout these three chapters, the argument is carefully crafted, with the author working tirelessly to construct a data-driven, measured understanding of transformations in the ideology and ownership of public property in contemporary Britain. The book concludes with a call to collective action. Since Thatcher took office, 8% of the entire British landmass has shifted from public to private ownership, and this number is poised to grow, especially with Network Rail’s commercial property estate ‘on the block’ (p. 331). In terms of what to do about this, Christophers points to a number of smaller-scale activist efforts to prevent individual sell-offs, but ultimately determines that ‘change has to come from Whitehall’ (p. 344).
If the aim of The New Enclosure is to bring attention to a critical and understudied social issue in modern-day Britain, to ‘render visible not only the extent of public land that has been lost in Britain, but also – perhaps more importantly – the extent of public land that remains’ (p. 331), the editorial choices that surround the publishing of this book support those goals in ways that should be commended. The book was published with Verso, rather than a more traditional academic press, putting it at a more accessible price point than many books by academics. Furthermore, it strikes a tone that makes it reasonably approachable to the average educated reader, ensuring it will be read beyond geography and cognate academic disciplines. The success of writing a more public-facing piece of research can be seen in the fact that the book has been reviewed in a number of mainstream outlets, including the Guardian and the Financial Times. While there are a lot of upsides to this approach, I see only one negative, and it is a selfish one. I tend to turn to Christophers’ work for novel developments in geographical theory, or as a means of cutting through difficult and tangled debates (like those around theories of financialisation). For me, there were not a lot of novel theoretical contributions to be found in The New Enclosure, though this is a minor complaint given that this book is eminently readable and jam-packed with empirical detail.
In the remainder of this review, I make two points about the book, motivated to some extent by my own work on land and capitalism in the Global North. My research is centred around changing patterns of ownership of open space and natural resource landscapes in the United States. Unlike Christophers’ case study, the transfers of land and property rights that I study – while mediated by and through the state to various extents – tend to move between different types of private owners, rather than from state to private ones. So, while there are differences in our objects of study, there are many similarities as well. The first point concerns land, while the second concerns neoliberalism.
First, I find it simultaneously curious and not at all surprising that the vast transfer of ownership in land could happen without any real fanfare. As Christophers puts it in the conclusion, ‘people are much less likely to protest against a loss if they do not know they have something worth retaining’ (p. 331). As countless scholars have explored, land is life; it is vital for the reproduction of communities, for the making of place, and for providing societies with food and shelter. Yet, in late capitalist societies like the US or Britain, the ownership of land and property is also exceedingly fractured and complicated, governed by lawyers and other specialists and kept out of the view of the public. In the case of the US, understanding who owns land often involves visits to local taxation authorities to collect maps that have not been digitised and that are updated infrequently. Even then, owner names are often shielded through shell companies and LLCs, and ownership can be fractured along the various types of surface and sub-surface rights that can be individuated, or through collective investor ownership. As Christophers laments on p. 188, learning who owns land (public or private) in the UK is not just a tedious bureaucratic exercise but is in many cases virtually impossible. Scholars tend to draw hard lines between land ownership in the Global North and South, with the assumption that there is clear and traceable title in the North, and that there tends to be more informality in Southern contexts. Yet, Christophers’ case is fascinating because it highlights that even where title and other property relationships seem relatively clear cut, transparency is still a major issue. He notes, for example, that ‘as recently as 2005, the ownership of less than half the land mass of England and Wales was officially registered’ (p. 189). In a society where property ownership is deeply fractured, and where there are huge swathes of land for which even the state lacks a clear understanding of title, it is no wonder that one of the greatest privatisations in history could happen without anybody really taking notice.
Second, and perhaps it is blasphemous to ask, but: why 1979, and why Thatcher, as the starting point for the book? My asking this question is not intended to imply that Christophers does not substantiate the reason for focusing on the period. He dedicates a not insubstantial portion of the book to demonstrating that the Thatcher government ushered in a ‘sea change in the prevailing approach to public landownership’ (p. 119), shifting discourse and official policy and strategy towards the widespread privatisation of not just public land, but public corporations and assets as well. That said, he also notes that when Thatcher was elected, ‘winds of change … had been in the air for a decade, perhaps longer’ (p. 119), remarking that the financialisation of land was beginning to occur in Britain in the 1960s, and he makes frequent reference to Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano’s 1978 book Capital and Land: Land Ownership in Great Britain, which recognised emergent forces of financialisation and changes in the nature of landownership before Thatcher was ever elected.
I pose the question because I can’t help but wonder if by taking Thatcherism and neoliberalism as a starting point perhaps we are missing out on the possibility of understanding something larger about property and the capitalist state, and about the British state in general – something that transcends the neoliberal turn. It seems very clear that neoliberalism plays a large role in this story, but I wonder if something might be escaping from view by using 1979 as a relatively firm before and after period for the study. A broader view might be instructive in understanding what is coming next, as Brexit will likely usher in a very different set of relationships between the state, society and capitalist actors. It is obviously beyond the scope of this study, but perhaps a study of property relations with a more detailed view of the longue durée could be helpful in predicting what the coming 40 years might look like.