Birmingham: a more exciting place than you might imagine...
A fascinating debate is raging over at the Birmingham Post, whose reporters and bloggers have often impressed me with their insightful writing and out-of-the-box thinking.
It started here, when John Clancy and Professor David Bailey argued that a little land reform might be a good way of reducing the budget deficit.
Yup, the Post have a revolutionary business professor on their hands:
However, how would you like a new revenue policy that helps to significantly cut the deficit but that only affects some 100 or fewer people? Surely, this is a dream from another age, a pre-credit-crunch, pre-banking- crisis world that is consigned to history?
Well, the policy itself comes from history. It’s called crowning. We crown land. We return to the ownership of the Crown in Parliament the country’s great landed estates, which have been languishing for centuries in the hands of individuals and families who won the state lottery at various stages over the last 600 years in a series of land grabs, in some cases going back to the Norman Conquest.
Over the centuries, kings and queens awarded land in return not for money but for past and (more importantly) future services like raising an army (services long since forgotten about) and gave the grantees of the land fancy titles as part of the lottery win, like Viscount, Earl, Duke, Marquess and Baron. Alternatively, they simply stole the land, grabbed it out of opportunity, or fenced it off and enclosed it; possession, in reality, being 9 tenths of the law when it came to land, historically speaking.
Our research estimates that some £100 billion at least is available in asset value, currently in the hands of about 100 men (an almost exclusively male club, by the way), consisting of a sizeable chunk of the land surface of the UK, including much of the commercial property in the hearts of our towns and cities. This land simply has been handed down generation after generation from eldest son to eldest son.
Let’s ‘ave it back! They cry…
This won’t affect Birmingham, will it? This is about the landed gentry in the ‘Shires, surely? No – it’s about central Birmingham.
For rising high at no 6 in our top 20 is our very own Sir Euan Anstruther Gough Calthorpe. Yes, he of the great sprawling Calthorpe estate. By accidents of Birth (and marriages, as it happens) he has come to own the freehold, and more, of great swathes of our city, commercial and residential. You may very well be reading this on Calthorpe Estate land.
This is not a business matter, is it? Well, the wealthiest British-born business man in the Sunday Times Rich list 2009 is The Duke of Westminster. He has assets at his command of £20billion in land simply inherited over centuries to run one of the biggest businesses in Britain, Grosvenor Estates.
All we are saying to the likes of the Duke of Westminster and Sir Euan Anstruther Gough-Calthorpe is: thank you very much for looking after our land for the last few hundred years, you’ve done very well, now mosey along and do something else. Our need is greater than yours, Sir Euan. This land will now be returned to the Crown in Parliament, where it belongs.
This is brilliant stuff! And from a business professor blogging in a Trinity Mirror paper too!
Read an angry response from a fellow blogger at the paper here and their reaction to that here…
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