A timely essay by Shirley-Anne Hardy as local residents throughout Highland Perthshire grow increasingly restive over local land use issues
Dick Barbor-Might is doing sterling work in speaking out for Rannoch against Tayside Health Boards – as are likewise RAID in Pitlochry on the matter of the Curling Rink development. But there was a certain phrase elsewhere in the November issue of Comment which particularly struck me. It appeared towards the end of the cover article Think Local! Which, after discussing the success of this slogan in the business world, reflected on where further so potent an idea might lead us – perhaps encouraging us to be “more self-sufficient politically”?
Self-sufficient politically? Yes! – that’s what we want! An end to all these protracted, essentially political, wranglings that weigh us down: a people so long disempowered – for so long subjected to the external management of our own affairs – that we have forgotten there is any other way to live!
Simply as to the economics of it we ought to be up in arms. A cool £750 million of taxpayers’ money is pocketed by that bureaucratic dinosaur Tayside Health Board which is now persecuting us with its devious ways – (exactly as it did over Fluoridation in the 1970s, as some of us very well remember) – and the only talk from the Scottish Government is of making its members elected! A pale concession, clearly banking on none of us remembering that, before local government’s weaselly reorganisation in 1976, we had simple Health Committees that were already part of elected bodies – and all the local councils in the Tayside area never needed a fancy £750 million to run health matters then!
Centralisation
The American Ralph Borsodi interestingly worked out how it was that his wife provided for them more cheaply by canning and preserving home-grown produce, than by buying in from factories with all their advantages of mass production. He stumbled on a natural law overlooked by economists – namely, that whatever the economies achieved by centralising production, these were always overtaken by the attendant diseconomies of the distribution that must follow.1
The same concealed falsity today roams the political sphere, in the supposed economies of ever-increasing centralisation of political power - now increasingly trampling our communities. (As for Holyrood – Westminster – Brussels … where next?) Here the ‘distribution’ is in the form of rivers of communication that exhaust everything in their wake from forests to frayed tempers. Anyone arriving from another planet where life was lived more sanely, would think we were crazy to carry on as we do!
How much longer are we going to endure this madness? – or how many more battles, up and down Scotland, ere we weary of it? For a surprisingly simple way, in fact, exists for communities to take back – in a way that cannot be refused – power over their own lives; a way to realise that “political self-sufficiency” raised by Comment.
Local Revenue Creation
There has been some discussion in Comment’s pages, in recent years, about the locally-created revenue that flows from the land’s rental values via the natural Law of Rent, and about how this should be collected and disbursed locally. But what about the power of assessing those rental values? Has anyone yet paused to consider the implications of that? Certainly one such pause, made recently by one inhabitant of Highland Perthshire, on this very matter, proved of quite extraordinary outcome!
One day early in September, while sitting in the porch and pondering the threat to Rannoch of which I had just been reading in the latest Comment, I found the words unexpectedly forming themselves in my mind. “Open Thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law” (Psalm 119). I thought – that’s strange! – because it’s the Law of Rent I’m thinking about! I was considering its application to the Rannoch situation. Nothing further came, and so presently I got up and fetched the issue of Comment with the Rannoch article in it, wondering if it could afford me any further clues. And suddenly – there it was!
For years it had been obvious to me that, in the operating of this Law of Rent, land being local, the rents must be locally collected and disbursed – thus beautifully opening the way for the economic empowerment of local communities. But this would not be enough, of course, were a centralised political power still to claim authority over the use to which the land was put. (Windfarms and Donald Trumps and the Beauly-Denny Line, “for the greater good”…) Now, suddenly, here in our hands, as yet unrecognised, was the very lynchpin that had been missing from our situation – the point where the political power intersected with the economic – and the economic carried the political with it!
Land Beyond Price
It was an electrifying moment! It had always seemed obvious that the power to assess these rentals must lie with the local community, as those best knowing these values at first hand. But now I suddenly saw that the power to assess these rentals need not limit itself to placing an actual rental value on all land. Land could be assessed just as truly – and far more truthfully – as being beyond any rental value, as being to that community precisely ‘beyond value and beyond price’. I saw that the community now had the freedom to declare that there was land which should be placed beyond the reach of any development at all – whether vulgar or industrial; land that was to be treasured in itself, for its value to the community for what it was – an especially precious part of our homeground.
I saw, moreover, that the same power would operate in our towns, to preserve vital areas of green space and to rule against developments considered out-of-place, while in our larger towns and cities (whose unnatural growth is wholly due to dispossessed populations) the politico-economic power will rest with the various village-sized areas which make up such towns, and whose plight is frequently as desperate.2
Thus the Law of Rent places in our hands this supreme gift: to write upon our environment itself what it means to us.
Does this seem too utopian a prospect? I said earlier that the way for communities to take back power into their own hands was one that cannot be refused. This is because it is an incontrovertible fact – which the illustrated Law of Rent makes fully visible for all to see 3 that, under the present structure of society, the people are robbed of both their land and its rents. No political body confronted with the illustrated Law of Rent will be able to deny this, and the present ignoring by the Establishment of this twofold robbery depends entirely upon the knowledge of this natural law being kept suppressed.
Galvanising Threats
Perhaps these burgeoning development threats are just what we needed to galvanise us. For it is communities at present embroiled in battles over planning, and distraught at what threatens them, which by working together can finally break the silence on this fundamental, incontrovertible economic law – by acquainting themselves thoroughly with it, sharing their knowledge of it, and encouraging others to do likewise.
Certainly nothing fundamental is going to change – there will continue these incessant battles with a bullying Establishment – until the people themselves arise, unite their forces, speak with one voice, and make that voice heard. Nobody else is going to do it for us – (and certainly no political body). The vista of a free, empowered and happy life opens before us – but we have to make the effort ourselves to enter that ‘promised land’.
This recognition of the political potential of the Law of Rent leads to a deeper understanding of the uniqueness of this system of public revenue. For it is one that achieves the wedding of a system of revenue which is a blessing to the people, with a system of land governance which blesses the land, as stemming from those whose homeground it is. No other system of public revenue does this. Of no other system can it be said that it truly blesses land and people alike, (while of course entirely dispensing with the curse of taxation).
It will surprise many to learn that this is how life was once lived, for long stretches of time, by peoples across the globe. For the vita landmark which delineated the boundaries of land, ensuring a continuing birthright in land for all, was held sacred – and no political layer of society existed at all, for there was nothing to bring it into existence.4 Thus there is nothing utopian about the concept of living free from the shackles of political power.
For local communities to federate together for certain joint ventures, (while ever retaining the essential economic purse-strings), a helpful patterning towards such a structure is provided by the Bioregional movement – active so far mainly in North America and Canada. Indeed the Bioregional movement and the Land Rent movement need to get together, for they are made for one another! – (albeit the former has yet to discover the natural Law of Rent).
Here is a brief but apt quotation from a founder of the Bioregional movement which catches the fuller vision, above, of a society governed by that natural law: “Imagine a society divided into territories and communities where love of place is an inevitable by-product of a life mindful of natural systems and of patterns experienced daily – however far removed this may seem just now from the gigantic, destructive society around us.” (Kirkpatrick Sale, in The Ecologist, 22 Feb 02).
It is political self-sufficiency, bestowed by the natural Law of Rent, which opens the path to that new society.
References
(1) Acknowedgements to John-Paul Flintoff’s Through the Eye of a Needle, a treasure of a book with some hilarious passages. (Green Books, 2009).
(2) One need only mention officialdom’s shameful closing of the Ark café near Waverley Station in Edinburgh – or its attempts to build a giant incinerator right in the town of Perth.
(3) See The Land Question - this is available as a free download at http://www.commentonline.co.uk/supplement/index.htm
(4) See In Quest of Justice, by Francis Neilson, also the works of G T Wrench.