BUDGET AND COUNTRYSIDE
By CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS
OUR annual national Budget estimates are commonly looked forward to with mingled hopes and fears, and always there are surprises—usually small and frequently unwelcome. But last week the Chancellor quietly wound up his speech with something so startling (because it has been so often asked for and refused) that I, at any rate, find this year's Budget by far the most significant end heartening of any I remember. For a generation at least those of us who have concerned ourselves about the health and good looks of our countryside—with which we know the people's own well-being and happiness are directly linked—have persistently chivvied each successive Government, trying to make it admit that there was, or should be, such a thing as a National Estate, it being surely the State's duty to take over the management of the land from those private owners that it was inexorably dislodging. Instead it looked indifferently on, whilst the torn-off fragments of once well- integrated properties were thrown to the land-wolves or to anyone else who chose to scramble for them, for whatever purpose. That way has already gone so much of the England that I first knew and loved that I sometimes despairingly felt that I could no longer bear to have my home in a country whose social and scenic integrity I seemed to be in real danger of outliving. To be sure, there were hopeful contrary currents—the C.P.R.E., the National Trust, the movement for National Parks and so on—but they all seemed to be fighting a losing battle against official indifference and hard- faced vested and commercial interests, where it always seemed to pay someone to slight or to destroy beauty, and where the dice seemed generally to be loaded against us.
Of course, we comforted ourselves and each other by saying that it was all a matter of gradual education and of getting a truer set of values accepted, and that our propaganda might yet have an effect before all was lost, and that we must be patient and not look for a miracle nor any sudden conversion. And lo! here, amazingly, we have both at once, and of all unlikely places, in the Exchequer itself, whereby the overall effect of the new official view will be as far-reaching and profound as the event was unexpected. Lord Keynes has a flair for being right, or, if you like, of getting his views eventually accepted, and if last Budget day was anyone's, it was surely his, for this is what he wrote in Britain and the Beast, a book I edited ten years ago:
" In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the rich nobility continued in a private, self-regarding, attenuated manner what had been the office of the monarch and the State, with the Church somewhat in eclipse. But there commenced in the eighteenth century, and reached a climax in the nineteenth, a new view of the functions of the State and of society, which still governs us today. This view was the utilitarian and economic— one might almost say financial—ideal, as the sole respectable purpose of the community as a whole ; the most dreadful heresy, perhaps, which has ever gained the ear of a civilised people. Bread and nothing but bread, and not even bread, but bread accumulating at compound interest until it has turned into a stone. Poets and artists have lifted occasional weak voices against the heresy. I fancy that the Prince Consort was the last protestor to be found in high places. But the Treasury view has prevailed not only in practice ; the theory is equally powerful. We have
persuaded ourselves that it is positively wicked for the State to spend a halfpenny on non-economic purposes. Even education and public health only creep in under an economic alias on the ground that they ' pay.' We still apply some frantic perversion of business arithmetic in order to settle the problem whether it pays better to pour milk down the drains or to feed it to school children. One form alone of uncalculated expenditure survives from the heroic age—war. And even that must some- times pretend to be economic. If there arises some occasion
of non-economic expenditure which it would be a manifest public scandal to forgo, it is thought suitable to hand round the hat to solicit the charity of private persons.
" This expedient is sometimes applied in cases which would be incredible if we were not so well accustomed to them. An out- standing example is to be found where the preservation of the countryside from exploitation is required for reasons of health, recreation, amenity, or natural beauty. This is a particularly good example of the way in which we are hag-ridden by a perverted theory of the State, not only because no expenditure of the national resources is involved but, at the most, only a transfer from one pocket into another, but because there is perhaps no current matter about the importance and urgency of which there is such national unanimity in every quarter. When a stretch of cliff, a reach of the Thames, a slope of down is scheduled for destruction, it does not occur to the Prime Minister that the obvious remedy is for the State to prohibit the outrage and pay just compensation, if any ; that would be uneconomic. There may be no man who minds the outrage more than he. But he is the thrall of the sub-human denizens of the Treasury. There is nothing for• it but a letter to The Times and to hand round the hat."
What Lord Keynes, the economist, may have thought of the Budget as a whole I do not know, but as our most eloquent and effective champion of civilised amenities and official cultural enter- prise, he will feel, I imagine, very much as I do about this (to me) unlooked for Land-Fund of L50,000,000, and the sudden falling of the Walls of Jericho that we have been trumpeting at so loudly and so long. As a member of the Government Committee set up to report on the project for National Parks, I was not, of course, unaware that substantial funds would have to be forthcoming from somewhere, if parks were ever to be established with credit and suc- cess. That " if " consequently loomed menacingly large in my mind ; it rather seemed that we were perhaps being encouraged to conceive an infant that the public was certainly eager to see born, but for whose reception no official or adequate arrangements seemed to have been made. But now all is well. The Minister of Town and Coun- try Planning had evidently privily got together with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with this happy outcome—a substantial endow- ment fund, derived from the disposal of surplus war stocks, as working capital for the Land Board or Commission or whatever body is set up to acquire, hold, administer and develop the lands from which will be built up the new National Estate. These new Crown Lands are to be selected, used and managed with the greatest happiness and well-being of the greatest number as their main objective, not merely as financially sound investments from a revenue point of view, though imaginative and liberal-minded enterprises have an odd way of sometimes embarrassing their altruistic pro- moters by turning out resounding and flagrant commercial successes.
But such " making good " all round does imply the most expert, skilful and enlightened management, which has so far been to seek in most publicly-held lands, whether under central or local govern- ment, or such great corporate bodies as the Ecclesiastical Com- missioners. Even college properties have too often been treated as mere counters in an opportunist financial game, rather than as parts of England for whose integrity and welfare such ancient and learned foundations should have felt themselves responsible, as did the best of the great private landowners of the past. As the new Budget drives yet another nail into their inevitable coffin, it is well indeed that provision should have at last been made for the take- over for lack of which England has suffered incalculably in the past half-century. An unsmirzhed Loch Lomond might have been
safely ours today had not our rigidly cash-minded Treasury snubbed the Duke who had imaginatively offered it as part payment of his death duties.
The new National Estate will need and deserve even better and more expert direction than was lovingly bestowed on the best-run private property that ever adorned the English countryside at any time. In his Social History of England Dr. Trevelyan recalls several successive and differing golden ages, in each of which our country's land was becoming increasingly comely and prosperous— though not, of course, without here and there its tarnished bits and pieces. For the first time in a century it does now seem that havoc may be stayed, and even that the coming of a new, yet quite other, golden age may be something more than a fond and fading dream. But it all depends on how things are now managed—on the powers and personnel of the Land Commission itself and the use that is made of the advisory body that should surely be set up to voice the people's views, both sectionally and at large. The Chancellor mentioned youth hostels, ramblers, National Parks and the National Trust as amongst his prospective beneficiaries, and one would expect all such to be represented and to sit alongside co-opted persons chosen for their special country wisdom and general en- lightenment. On the Commission itself would presumably sit, along with economists, educationalists and politicians, the very ablest and most progressive representatives of land-owners, land- agents and land-users, who should now have the greatest opportunity in all our history of leaving the mark of their genius on the land they love. Somewhere amenity societies would he duly represented, and the landscape architect must not be a forgotten man.
The object of planning has been shortly defined as "the best use of the land "—whether for agriculture, industry, housing or re- creation. More briefly still, I would say that the ultimate end of all planning is, or should be—quite simply—more fun for more people. Mr. Dalton now seems, astonishingly, to agree. If that is so, he will surely apply the " best use " test to our waters as well as to our land, and remove the queer and crippling tax on little boats that now prevents our adventurous youth from sailing into self-reliant manhood through the tough discipline imposed by the best of all blood sports, where the blood involved is your own. In view of his exordium I feel he may be trusted. This was how he ended: " I should like to think that through this Fund we shall dedicate some of the loveliest parts of this land to those who died in order that we may live in freedom. . . . In this way let this land of ours be dedicated to the memory of our dead, and to the use and enjoyment of the living for ever."
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