HISTORY OF THE CLA
Charles Clover looks at the origins of the CLA
In the Beginning
To open the huge, leather-bound volumes, smelling faintly of
mildew, that contain the glossy monochrome pages of Country Life magazine from
1907, the year the body that was to become the CLA was founded, is to glimpse a
vanished world.
I am in my forties, yet my father was an Edwardian, born in
1903. I shot with him once before he died, so the gents in tweeds demonstrating
how to shoot birds on the left without moving the feet (or taking the pipe out
of the mouth) do not seem so very far distant.
Country Life offers an editorial about “The cost of owning
an estate”, a fascinating insight into the rural economy of the time. The owner
of the estate used as an example gave employment to 74 men, excluding tenants.
The total was made up as follows: house and stables, 26; garden, 20; keepers,
3; labourers, 22.
Such an estate might have been worth £250,000 to £500,000 at
1907 prices, its outgoings added up to £14,370 compared with a total income of
£14,900. Then, as now, the ownership of land was not likely to attract
capitalists who were not born into it as a way of life – unless for social
reasons, or for sport.
The three decades leading up to the foundation of what
became known as the Central Land Association (to distinguish it from county
associations) were a hard, often profitless time for agriculture, caused by the
global marketplace of the British Empire.
Home-produced wheat hit its lowest price for 150 years in
1894.
For the countryside the years before the First World War
were a time of political and financial uncertainty. A number of rural interests
felt the need to band together to make sure their views were represented, or
saw the opportunity to exert more influence.
In 1907 came a pamphlet, The Land and the Social Problem, by
Algernon Tumor, a high-ranking civil servant and former private secretary to
Benjamin Disraeli. In it, he criticised British agriculture for failing to
adapt to changing conditions and blamed politicians for their lack of foresight
in their treatment of the industry. He advocated the co-operation of owners,
tenants and workers in the common interest. His manifesto represented the
conception of the CLA.
Copies of the pamphlet were circulated to general approval
and a meeting was held on April 19th, 1907, in the junior Carlton Club. Those
present were well-connected and had between them a wealth of political
experience. It was chaired by Walter Long, a patrician Tory and former
President of the Board of Agriculture under Lord Salisbury.
The minutes, in his handwriting, still exist in an exercise
book in Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life.
Present beside Tumor were the fourth Earl of Onslow, the
Earl of Harrowby and several MPs and landowners including Christopher Tumor,
nephew of Algernon, a large Lincolnshire landowner and author of several books
on agriculture. The meeting decided to appoint officers of what was initially
proposed to be called the Landholders’ Central Association. From the beginning
the association tended to be an organisation of owners and land agents – other interests
having their own organisations. The National Farmers’ Union – developed from
the Lincolnshire Farmers Union – was founded within a year of the CLA in 1908.
On the face of it, the survival of such an organisation
after a century would appear to be surprising, given that the world that gave
birth to is has vanished utterly. I suspect the clue to the CLA’s survival goes
back to that original meeting and the thinking of its founders, who decided
that they would engage with the interests of the day in a liberal,
forward-thinking way, and not as a club of reactionaries. Lord Onslow, its
first chairman, said of the Landowners’ Central Association: “It will endeavour
to get rid of a rather stick-in-the-mud attitude on the part of some
landowners…if we agree upon a constructive and progressive policy we shall have
nothing to fear in the future.” Those still sound like wise words as the CLA
enters its second century.
The assault on land, 1907 – 2007
The assault on the land, 1907 - 2007History of the CLALooking
back on a century of landowners trying to influence the political ideas of the
day, it is remarkable how many policies – such as a tax on land – are cyclical,
returning in various guises, often without success. Yet it is also worth
celebrating the ultimate demise of a really bad idea from the years of the
great ideological divide, land nationalisation.
As we now know, this idea caused poverty and squalor
wherever it was tried, in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and even Kenneth
Kaunda’s Zambia as late as 1970. It exercised the founders of the CLA for more
than 30 years. We owe it to their good sense that it was not tried here.
The frontal attack on private property was seldom as fierce
as after the Liberal landslide of 1906. The followers of the Liberal
Chancellor, Lloyd George, openly favoured land nationalisation, following penal
taxation. The first was seen off, but not the latter.
The CLA’s founders, including the Earl of Onslow, its
chairman, and its president, Walter Long, wisely did not engage in partisan
attacks. They successfully argued for Lloyd George to deduct maintenance when
assessing estate income. Meanwhile two committees appointed by the Liberal
Government reported in 1912 and 1913 in favour of state ownership of land, as a
panacea for depression in agriculture and supposed insecurity of tenure.
These were worrying times for the CLA, as its annual report
acknowledged in 1912:
“Probably at no time in the history of our country has there
been a greater need for a strong non-party organisation to watch over and
safeguard the interests of agriculture and to form and develop a sound and
progressive land policy…By this means only will it be possible successfully to
meet the attack directed against the landed interest by those who, without
knowledge or experience of rural conditions and for reasons quite unconnected
with the welfare of the industry, seek to make sweeping and revolutionary
changes which, it is believed, would be disastrous, not only to agriculture,
but to the country generally.”
To add insult to injury, CLA members felt its leaders had
failed to state their case forcibly enough at a crucial time and membership
fell.
The First World War killed off Lloyd George’s land taxation
plans. It briefly strengthened the fortunes of agriculture and convinced the
CLA that it needed to be more organised in representing landowners, rather than
tenants and farm workers. Nevertheless, the renamed Central Landowners’
Association was confronted by Lloyd George’s National Government in 1920 with
the decision to withdraw support for agriculture. There followed a decade and a
half of agricultural recession.
The CLA had its victories, the greatest of which, the
de-rating of agricultural land and buildings, came about in the 1928 budget.
Its membership was bolstered by thousands of new owner occupiers – one of the
many reasons why by the mid 1930s land nationalisation had faded into the
background. But over the interwar years, and worse still in the years following
the Second World War when many country houses were demolished, the break up
estates through taxation and death duties had wide repercussions.
Employment in agriculture tumbled. Crafts died out. Estates
became dependent on mass-produced materials from outside. Instead of
nationalisation, we got a halfway house for bankrupt estates, the National
Trust. Was this really desirable?
Over a century, you could argue that landowners have escaped
the worst. The urban masses no longer want to appropriate their land. In part
this is due to the pragmatic lobbying skills of the CLA, which have been
respected by politicians of both sides. But the landowner has found himself
bound increasingly, like Gulliver, by a multiplicity of gossamer threads which
affect his freedom to use the land and even his leisure.
Conflicting Interests
Trespassers may legally be shot under a number of
circumstances in the United States and South Africa. In Britain the rights of
landowners have always been more tenuous. Over here, landowners have to think
hard before uttering the words: “Get off my land!” if they dare do it at all.
You might wonder why public access to the countryside has
been such a bone of contention over the last century, and so time-consuming for
the CLA. The proximity of the industrial towns, with their burgeoning
populations, to the high moors and fells was the flashpoint for change. Access
to the hills became the focus of ideological protest after the First World War,
culminating in the great mass trespass in 1932 on the Duke of Devonshire’s land
at Kinder Scout, part of the Dark Peak, in which five ramblers were sent to
jail for up to six months after an affray with gamekeepers.
The Hobhouse committee set up by the post-war Attlee
government recommended in 1947 not only the creation of national parks, but
also public access to the open countryside. This led to the National Parks and
Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, in which open country was defined as
mountain, moor, heath, down, cliff and foreshore. The amazing thing is that a
government otherwise hell-bent on nationalising promised to pay landowners
compensation for giving up their right to exclude people from land not on a right
of way.
The leaders of the CLA were probably too pressed dealing
with the thicket of legislation produced by that Labour Government, which
included the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and the 1947 Agriculture Act,
to do more than utter a quick sigh of relief. They did take the lead in urging
the Government to write and publicise a Country Code, urging people to kept to
footpaths, close gates, keep their dogs under control and put out picnic fires.
The Country Code had to be revised when the Countryside and
Rights of Way Act 2000 received royal assent. In one of his more brilliant
coups-de-theatre Tony Blair appointed Ewen Cameron, now Lord Cameron, a former
president of the CLA, to head the Countryside Agency charged with bringing in
the new right. It is probably the case that the right came in more sensitively
as a result – though the biggest rollbacks came from individual landowners on
appeal.
The Greening of Farm Policy
It is a measure of the influence of the CLA that what it has
called on governments for the past 25 years to do – replacing subsidies for
food production with support for farming aimed at benefiting the wider rural
environment and economy – has now come to be the “direction of travel” for the
three main parties.
The story of the greening of farm policy is one of the
little-known achievements of Britain’s landowning organisation, and it is a
story worth telling, not only because it is, perhaps, unexpected, but because
it is so seldom told. One reason is the CLA’s sensitive relationship with the
National Farmers’ Union, set up in 1908.
The distinction between the two organisations was relatively
obvious at the beginning. The CLA, by and large, represented landlords. It
began at a disadvantage, and has had to trust to the persuasiveness of its
brightest thinkers instead of megaphone diplomacy. The NFU, at the beginning,
represented farmers, then overwhelmingly tenants.
Now over 60 percent of CLA members own 100 acres of less,
and only 4 percent own 1,000 acres or more. Many farmers and landowners are
members of both bodies. But the distinction between the CLA’s outlook and that
of the NFU remains. As someone put it: “The NFU are the profit and loss
account. The CLA are the balance sheet.”
In other words, the people who arguably worry most about
protecting their assets, which also happen to be the country’s and the
countryside’s, are those who would like to believe their offspring will be
managing them in 50 years time. From the first, the CLA was far closer than the
NFU to being an environmental organisation.
For its first 50 years the CLA was largely preoccupied with
ownership issues: land nationalisation, land tax, death duties, forestry, the
de-rating of agricultural tenancies and the removal of tithes. Then, as now,
landowners derived much of their income from outside farming. Indeed, there is
some evidence to show that in all but a few boom years of the last century,
non-farming activities have produced more income.
The relationship to farming changed, however, in 1947, when
landowners were given statutory recognition and new duties as partners in the
drive for greater home food production under the Labour government’s
Agriculture Act. The priority was growing cheap food for a starving and
bankrupt Europe. There began the post-war extension of the dig-for-victory era,
which lasted 30 years.
These years saw great changes. Hedges were pulled out,
wetlands drained, watercourses dredged and canalised and millions of acres of
moorland and permanent pasture were “improved” by farmers with grants from the
Ministry of Agriculture, sometimes to the rueful regret of landlords.
The crucial change came in 1973 with UK entry into the
Common Market. In Brussels, there was a growing sense that the EU budget was
limited. Its finance ministers looked for an excuse to deal with excessive
spending of agriculture and the resultant butter and grain mountains and wine,
milk and olive oil lakes.
Around the early 1980s the CLA became, by reason of its
culture, the purveyor of solutions to a political class that had decided things
could not go on as they were. A recurrent theme among progressive landowners
and leaders of the CLA was the feeling that: “I think I’m damn good at what I
do. If my neighbour farms very badly, but you continue subsidising him to farm
in that way, you will eventually put me out of business.” Then as now, the
CLA’s predisposition was towards the classical Anglo-American case for free
enterprise and free trade.
In the late 1980s the CLA published a paper which argued
that public subsidy purely for production should be switched to a menu of
environmental services. At the time I wondered how realistic they were, and
whether anyone was listening.
It turns out they were pushing at an open door in MAFF.
Reform started in the second half of the 1980s with the Alure (Agriculture,
Land Use and the Rural Environment/Economy) package, the abolition of
production grants, the creation of environmentally sensitive areas, the Farm
Woodland Scheme and the subtle introduction of the “duty clause” in the 1986
Agriculture Act, which meant the ministers had for the first time to have
regard to the wider rural economy, the enjoyment of the countryside by the
people, and the rural environment. The support of the CLA gave the ministers of
the time confidence to push the measures through.
When you look back to the late 1980s today, agricultural
reform seems to have moved at a glacial pace. Environmental groups would argue
that vastly more money needs to be moved from Pillar I, production support, to
Pillar II, environment and rural development. But the developed world has
accepted the argument that there should be free trade in agricultural goods and
protection of the environment. And all who love the countryside can thank the
CLA for its part in winning that argument.
This is an edited version of a series of articles written by
Charles Clover to mark the centenary of the CLA.
Charles Clover is an environmental journalist, author, and
columnist for The Sunday Times.
Planning and Conservation – the state weighs in
A J P Taylor wrote that before 1914 a law-abiding Englishman
had little contact with the state. He could travel without a passport, own a
weapon and, on his own land, shoot almost anything he liked and build what he
wished.
This is the world into which the CLA was born in 1907. That
the world has changed so much since is testament not only to the tightening
grip of the state, but also to the growth of an increasingly wealthy middle
class. The latter competed for the land previously under the control of aristocratic
landowners, and had the time and resources to develop an interest in planning,
animal welfare and nature conservation.
A pre-1914 landowner might find Parliament telling him he
must sell land. That came with the increasing role of the state in providing
public infrastructure. But by and large it did not tell him how to build on
land he owned. That came with the post-war Attlee government and the Town and
Country Planning Act 1947, the birth of the modern planning system.
The report of Lord Justice Scott’s committee, produced in
1942, had recommended that all new building should be in existing settlements
unless there was some overwhelming reason why it should be in open countryside.
Another of Scott’s recommendations was that fertile land should be retained in
agricultural use. This, a novel idea at the time, was emphasised in the CLA’s
evidence.
In case the 20th century looks like a story of constant
encroachment of private rights by the state, it is worth celebrating one high
water mark, Crichel Down. Crichel Down, near Wimborne in Dorset, was 300 acres
of land owned by Mary Anna Marten. The land had been compulsorily purchased in
1937 as a bombing range for the Air Ministry. When it was no longer needed
after the war, it was not offered back to the family, as it should have been by
policy agreed by the Government at the time at the instigation of the CLA, but
was passed to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, who found a new tenant.
Eventually, after local feeling had been whipped up, the
press enlisted, and political connections utilised, Parliament came to realise
that a major injustice had been perpetrated. The Conservative Minister of
Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, was forced to order a public inquiry. The
Martens got their land back.
No comments:
Post a Comment