Hands off Our Land

Something I\’ve just realised about the Daily Telegraph\’s campaign, \”Hands off Our Land\”.

They\’re not in fact demanding that government take its hands off their land.

They\’re arguing that government should put its hands all over everyone else\’s land.

Far from saying \”It\’s my land, gerroff it\” they\’re saying \”that\’s his land don\’t let him do anything with it\”.

Takes me a long time to get there sometimes but eventually I do.

They\’re actually arguing for an increase on government power over the property of others.

Commie bastards.

8 thoughts on “Hands off Our Land”

  1. You’re right, but you’re not even all the way there (your evidence justifies the conclusion ‘statist bastards’, but not ‘commie bastards’).

    They’re explicitly referring to other people’s land as ‘our land’, implying that they feel land belongs to the nation rather than to its owners, which (as long as extended to other forms of capital) is pretty much *the same thing* as communism.

  2. Nah, it’s just the DT reflecting the confused mental states of its readers. These hands off folk are the same who mobilise to save the pub and the post office without realising that to make these village services viable we need bigger villages.
    It’ll be interesting to see if the government can face down this odd coalition of the rich and the bureaucracy. I think they’ll blink.

  3. If we allowed every farmer to build a house once every five years we could solve the housing shortage AND abolish the CAP.
    Oh, wait a minute…

  4. I occasionally have to explain to my classical liberal friends in the US that technically, all land in this Sceptered Isle is owned by the Crown, and that the rest of us are ultimately just tenants.

    And of course some of the Georgist fans of land value taxes etc are fine with this, given their underlying hostility to the notion that ownership of land is nothing more than holding a piece of state-sanctioned paper, and as such, as a privilege that can and should be taxed.

    It makes perfect sense that a paternalist Tory government should endorse this idea.

  5. Yes, I’ve been saying the same thing over at the Telegraph for weeks, and upsetting the Shire Communists a lot. This is one illustration for why Libertarians/Classical Liberals really need to sever this perceived association with Conservatives. I think in one comment over there, I said something like, “how do you turn a Tory into a Communist? Threaten his house price”.

    So yes, the “our” in the campaign name is the Communist “our”. In fact, the Shire Commies want much the same as the problem with the banks; socialised costs, privatised profits. They also generally want Taxpayer subsidy for services in their economically unsustainable “idyll” communities. Ghastly bunch.

  6. Ian B,

    The confusion (and I fell for this myself) is that people thought that Thatcher was the true voice of the Conservatives, where she was actually more of a classic liberal.

    And yes, Conservatives will complain about handouts, but are very keen on people giving village dwellers handouts in kind (subsidising Post Offices, rural broadband and so forth) which increase the value of their homes.

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