Land and Liberty

Congratulations to Her Majesty for making it onto the New Statesman and Spectator covers, for entirely different reasons, in the same week. But the New Statesman article, by Kevin Cahill, is demented, suggesting that Her Majesty could make herself the richest person ever by simply selling all of her Realms and their dependent territories, or might at least empty into her own pocket the contents of the 13 tax havens of which she is Head of State.

Cahill is unable to explain, if the Queen owns the whole of Australia and Canada in that sense, how a further nine of his 24 largest individual and family landowners on earth are Australian, while a tenth is Canadian. His map of the places headed by the Queen is incomplete, and he shows the entire Commonwealth as if it had anything to do with his case. No, the Queen does not own India or Nigeria, to name but two. Not in any sense at all. She certainly does not own the kingdoms of several other monarchs in the Commonwealth. What, exactly, could the Queen ever sell? I can think of nothing more than the Sandringham and Balmoral estates, both bought by Prince Albert and nothing to do with the monarchy as an institution.

The ultra-Catholic in me feels like adding to the observation that the trouble with over-concentrated land ownership in this country goes back to the Reformation, the observation that small time Norfolk squires and Perthshire lairds is about the natural level of the House of Hanover. But the second observation would line me up with the greatest beneficiaries of the first, such as the Spencers. As Chesterton put it of the Whig oligarchs and the Hanoverians, "there was a whole to fill, and they pretty much admitted that they were filling it with rubbish". Such remains their view. I say again, the Spencers.

Liberty is the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed. Equality is the means to liberty, and is never to be confused with mechanical uniformity; it includes the Welfare State, workers’ rights, consumer protection, local government, a strong Parliament, public ownership, and many other things. And fraternity is the means to equality, for example, in the form of trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and mutual building societies, among numerous that could be cited.

Liberty, equality and fraternity are therefore inseparable from nationhood, a space in which to be unselfish. Thus from family, the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learned. And thus from property, each family’s safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, therefore requiring to be as widely diffused as possible, and thus the guarantor of liberty as here defined. The family, private property and the State must be protected and promoted on the basis of their common origin and their interdependence, such that the diminution or withering away of any one or two of them can only be the diminution and withering away of all three of them. All three are embodied by monarchy.

On the relationship between monarchism and Distributism, see the works of John Médaille, beginning, but certainly not ending, here.