Lloyd George lives on
THE 'Song of the Land' was sung at Liberal Party rallies up and down the country. It was sung to the tune of 'Mar- ching Through Georgia'. Sometimes Mr Churchill himself was there to lead the singing. The song went like this:
The Land! The Land! 'Twas God that made the Land.
The Land! The Land! The Ground on which we stand.
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the Land for the People!
The People's Budget of 1909 is so often invoked as the origin of socialism or the Welfare State in this country that it is easy to forget that what Lloyd George was obsessed with was the Land. When he set Limehouse ablaze that July evening with his attack on the dukes, it was their landholdings in town and country and their effortless enjoyment of the rents and capit- al gains which they derived from them that were his principal target. Land was Power.
The Budget itself contained a heap of measures that together made up what Mr Lloyd George called his Land Reform. There was, first and most flagrantly, the increase in death duties and settled estate duties — raising the gigantic sum of £2,850,000. How Lord Wimborne whim- pered. How enraged they were at Blenheim by Cousin Winston's treachery. The Duke of Buccleuch complained that the new taxes would prevent his paying his subscription to his local football club, provoking Mr Lloyd George's legendary retort that 'a fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts; and they are just as great a terror and they last longer'.
Then there were the land taxes, three of them: a 20 per cent 'increment tax' to be paid on the sale of land or the landowner's death, a 1/2d in the £ levy on the capital value of undeveloped land and ungotten minerals, and a ten per cent reversion duty to be paid by the lessor at the end of the lease. These taxes might not raise much revenue to start with, £500,000 between the three, but never did a wedge seem to have a more cruelly sharp thin end.
That was not all. There were measures to affect the land more directly — grants to prevent coastal erosion, grants for agri- cultural research, and, above all, grants for afforestation. Trees — ah, trees. Mr Lloyd George had a vision of the bare hills and boggy valleys of his native principality clad with young green trees, no doubt dotted with sturdy woodcutters singing `Land of My Fathers' as they washed themselves in the tumbling mountain streams. What sort of trees? Well, just trees really.
The Forestry Commission was still only a glimmer in Lloyd George's eye.That great enterprise had to wait until after the war, along with the measure to provide homes for returning heroes, the 1919 Housing Act, which, for the first time, laid a housing duty upon local authorities and which Dr Addison, the responsible minis- ter, declared would 'transform the face of our country from one end of it to the other' — as indeed it has, with the aid of another measure of that great reforming govern- ment, the regulation of private rents.
But the cause of state forestry was already well advanced before the 1914 war created the fear of a timber famine. Many forestry specialists had had experience of the Indian and Burmese forestry services. Surely Britain should not remain the only great European power without a state forestry service. Mr Arthur Grenfell, late of the Indian Forest Service; argued in a Fabian Society tract that state afforestation of a million acres as urged by the Royal Commission of 1909 'would afford regular work on the land for 100,000'. (Over 21/2 million acres of state forests today employ a mere 4,000 people.) When the U-boats prevented the import of timber for pit props, railway sleepers and a dozen other uses, the case was universally deemed to be proved. Britain must grow her own timber, and the state must take the lead. No matter that Sitka spruce in Britain grew three times as slowly as hardwoods in the tropics or pines in New Zealand. No matter that Scandinavia and Canada already had vast natural forests which Britain was never likely to match for price. What was good enough for India and Burma was good enough for Scotland and Wales and the English uplands.
I can think of no more striking example of what I call 'domestic imperialism' — the thoughtless transplanting to the mother country of institutions which worked or appeared to work in a colonial context (PAYE and the Civil Service as we know it were also transplants from the Raj). And how dazzlingly Lloyd George impressed his ideas upon our century. Every one Of them is with us still: state forestry, state housing, rent control, the taxation of pro- fits made on the sale of building land, death duties (recently revived in something very close to the pre-first world war form). And how fiercely we cling to our Lloyd George heritage. Recently, when a rumour ran round Westminster that the Govern- ment was planning to sell off the Forestry Commission in toto, every available Scot- tish MP rose to denounce the idea, and Mr Malcolm Rifkind was dispatched to kill it as swiftly as a ferret sent down a rabbit hole. How tenaciously local authorities, not all of them Labour, cling on to their housing stock; and how they long to be able to spend the proceeds of their council- house sales on building more council houses. And even those ideas of Lloyd George which appeared to have fallen by the wayside have taken on a fresh lease of life recently — the proposal to tax land lying idle, for example. Land is sacred, Land is scarce, Land must be held in trust for posterity. These three simple proposi- tions — woven together with such dazzling eloquence by the Welsh Wizard — have bewitched us today. Numb and reverent, we watch the state tax and license and restrict the uses of the land in the most arbitrary and high-handed manner, with the most peculiar and unpredictable re- sults.
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