This Land Was Made For You And Me

The Campaign to Protect Rural England is concerned that eight thousand houses were built last year on Green Belt land, or 24,000 over the past decade, and that hardly any was affordable even under the present, wildly inadequate definition of affordable housing. 

The Green Belt was a Labour idea. Look at it, and of course it was. But it is now a giant subsidy to horseyculture and golf. The State decrees and pays that more of Surrey be occupied by golf courses than by housing. 

We need the Land Value Tax. With the Universal Basic Income. Set within Modern Monetary Theory, so that the Jobs Guarantee guaranteed the Living Wage and the bargaining power of trade unions.

We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes, with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end.

We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents, with rent controls, and with action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty.

And we need a statutory requirement of planning permission for change of use if it were proposed to turn a primary dwelling into a secondary dwelling, a working family home into a weekend or holiday home.

That would set the pattern for the empowerment of the rural working class, assisted both by the Land Value Tax and by a windfall tax on the supermarkets in order to fund agriculture and small business, with strict regulation to ensure that the costs of this were not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

DEFRA should be stripped of its responsibility for rural communities, as such, since 90 per cent and more of the rural population has no more connection to food production than any other eater has. But DEFRA pays absolutely no attention to us.

It is rubbish at this, just it is rubbish at protecting the fisheries under that always fake Brexiteer, and that career disaster area, Michael Gove.

"A tax on your home, a tax on your garden!", shrieked the Mad Woman last April on the subject of the Land Value Tax. In that of all months, she was apparently unaware of the existence of a tax on your home, a tax on your garden. 

Are 10 Downing Street and Chequers subject to Council Tax? I mean that as a serious question. The point here is that some of us want a fair tax on property, or at least as fair a tax as there is ever going to be.

Alas, the people who do not are going to be numerous within the Parliamentary Labour Party for some years yet. But another hung Parliament is coming. We need our people to hold the balance of power in it.

I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning, at a General Election that it is now worth emphasising might come at any moment.

My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.