The Squire of Whitehall
The State is already far and away the biggest land-owner in the country. It is typical of its outlook both as an owner and user of land that it hasn't the foggiest idea how much it owns or uses. In 1949 Mr. Attlee, asked in the House of Commons if he could give the total acreage involved, replied : " This information is not available, and it would cause a wholly disproportionate amount of labour to obtain it." Enquiries in Whitehall today will not raise even a conjectural estimate. Of the various departmental squires and squatters, the largest as well as the most productive is almost certainly the Forestry Commission, whose holding of just under two million acres is being increased by the acquisition of roughly 100,000 acres annually. Though the Commission are often unpopular and sometimes deserve to be, they do an essential job and steadily improve the capital value of these islands. The Service Departments do an essential job but have an opposite effect, their principal exports being rabbits and ragwort. The biggest owner among them is, I think, the War Department, with 387,000 acres freehold plus 84,000 under requisition. Few people who have had experience of a Ministry (or one of its satellite organisations) either as neighbour or, in the case of requisitioned land, as squatting tenant, would give the bureacrats very high marks, and there have been too many cases like the current dispute at Crichel Down, to which reference is made in News of the Week, where the authorities have been both high-handed and disingenuous in dealing with the rights of private individuals. There may be countries where they nationalisation of the land works, or would work, well; experience suggests that it wouldn't work at all well here.
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