How the British aristocracy preserved their power
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Probably UK is better since a huge estate can make /generate much more income /employment than a 1000 plots of 1.2 acres each.
They have power because they have money. A window washer that is the second cousin of Queen Elizabeth and with a nobility title is just a window washer, barely making ends meet. Now Queen Elizabeth's second cousin with 50,000 acres, a nobility title and two castles is a different thing :)
Consider that a majority of the peerage didn't come out still owning estates - most of them fell out into the middle class and 'work for a living' - even those with great wealth, now mostly act as businessmen rather than merely shepherds of that wealth.
> The figures for Scotland are even more striking. Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies. More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families. In total they hold some 2.24m acres, largely in the Lowlands.
'private individuals and companies' != 'aristocracy', by any means. You could say something very similar about the USA, which has not had an aristocracy in 200+ years - because all countries have considerable wealth inequality. And, uh, what exactly are we supposed to take away from dicing Scottish landholdings into "estates of more than 5,000 acres"? Perhaps we are supposed to be astonished by the fact that rich people buy London real estate and "rent" it out? Or perhaps we are supposed to be impressed by
> According to the 2016 Sunday Times Rich List, 30 peers are each worth £100m or more.
So in other words, they're collectively worth about as much as Magic Leap or Slack? Truly impressive, I see now that England is ruled as much as ever by the aristocracy, it is merely hidden better. Hang the bastards!
Minecraft is a phenomenon. Why would you feel the need to talk it down as an "odd video game" just so that its price doesn't seem so high.
You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable.
> You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable.
It isn't. The Forbes list has many non-aristocrats who inherited much or all of their money and are vastly wealthier. Consider the Waltons heirs. As I said, wealth inequality is nothing new or interesting.
You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either.
Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this?
Notch shared a lot of the money, hence my focus on the total sales price. Lots of people have gotten extremely rich on an individual level from video games, if you want to nitpick about that: Gabe Newell or Palmer Luckey. There are other Asian examples, and a number of billionaires benefit heavily from video games, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of this affects my point: no matter how you slice it, the quoted aristocrat is not particularly wealthy.
> You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either.
That's literally from the article.
> Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this?
Because I am incensed by lying with statistics. There is no excuse for lines like "Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies". That is lying to the reader and trying to trick them. Unforgivable.
Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking?
Can I also note that taking a noble stand against misinformation and misleading uses of numbers seems inconsistent with the points I've already taken issue with.
> Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking?
It is a lie because it is implying that most or all of them are aristocrats and implying 'private individuals' is a synonym for them and trying to get the reader to not notice that technically 'individuals and corporations' != aristocrats and in fact many or most of them likely are not because of the massive decimation in aristocratic wealth, while not even trying to make the case for that; it is pure begging the question, it cannot add any evidence to the claim the aristocracy still controls as large a fraction of national wealth as it ever did (at best, you could reason backwards - 'assuming they are still wealthy, then a large fraction of those 432 must be aristocrats').
A successful startup or enterpreneur achieves wealth because they create something that people want and are willing to pay for, in most cases on a non-zero sum playing field. And also if company A does X, and company B also tries to do X, there is a healthy competition in which there is usually a winning strategy for both companies. If there isn't, it is usually called a monopoly which is at least attempted to be limited by the law.
In the case of nobility, the playing field is so much unlevel that this gives them "unjust" advantages from the start. Even worse, they did not "earn" their rights by creating something new that has value, for example. And nobody calls owning the bottom of a river a monopoly, not even when they get paid by simply allowing a bridge to be built over it (does this really not sound absurd to you?).
The next question one could ask is if there is a better solution to this injustice. At this point in time, we already know several attempts at the solution, most of which failed spectacularly.
This is balanced by their Right to Roam. For those in the US, this will sound completely insane: there is no concept of trespassing provided you act responsibly when on other's land. Access to the country is a common right, and the owners are stewards to it.
~~Arguably, the most practical way for such a law to come into existence is for the bulk of the land to be owned by a tiny minority, and for a democratic majority to create the law.~~ Strike that, didn't research. Sorry.
This view ignores all the history and has it exactly backwards. A full description would require at least one book, although I'd suggest starting with http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers
A few things which must be taken into account:
- pre-feudal common ownership
- confiscation of land during the 1700s Jacobite rebellions. "More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families" is not at all surprising when you consider that those families were given the land from its original owners and occupants at gunpoint by the government.
- the Highland Clearances
In short, the right to roam pre-existed; it was only removed by extremely questionable action; and the minority who owned the land fought access to it.
(For the situation in England&Wales, start at the Kinder Scout mass trespass)
edit: I should also state that the Highland Clearances were complex but get retold as: "rich people stole land from poor people" often.
This is where I think we need to treat history differently from current events, because concepts like ownership, title, rights and such are ultimately subjective outside an agreed legal context. Obviously, there is disagreement here.
I don't know much about that period, but there are countless examples of similar things.
The system of land ownership was at one point, tribal (clannish). tribes controled lands and chiefs control tribes, rights to the land negotiated custom and familial means. Chiefs became lords. Tribesmen, tenants. Titles, privelages and customs changed.
Eventually, the lords became modern peope, industrial era capitalists. Economies became monetary. Clans ceased to exist. Titles became wealth. Tenants became squatters.
I think it's hard to follow the history, while maintaining a modern sense of property.
I can certainly see how people view the scottish peasant class as having a moral claim to the property.
They became feudal lords by accepting the King of Scots as their feudal overlord - this is what gave them the "ownership" of lands that had previously been held communally.
"The Poor Had No Lawyers - ho Owns Scotland and How They Got it" covers this and much more:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006WB2E9Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...
Scotland has had well over a thousand years of legal shenanigans around land ownership - it is amazingly complex for such a small country.
Is that or is that not a fair summary, though? If the mass eviction happened to be legal, is that sufficient to make it morally OK? What about the enclosure of genuinely commonly-owned land at the time?
Actually it sounds very familiar as we have a (somewhat) similar tradition in the western US that continues to this day:
To pick a sentence amlost at random:
"More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families."
Today the dominant economic institution is companies. You could make statements like the one above and replace one with the other. Besides that, it's largely similar. The moral mythology is completely different, but the politics and economics largely hold true.
Tryagainbro brings up primogeniture, which is important. Companies have that built in.
The more wealth you have the more potential impact you have whatever the system, and feudal power structures like the UK which were never broken unlike say China and Russia with land reform have strong historical and real world ties to power.
Beneficiaries will obviously justify or diminish its impact, and those not doing well in the current system will direct their anger and frustration here.
Land is the source of wealth and power and is finite. These are generational conflicts as societies figure out the best way to manage their assets and resources. The aristocracy is simply self interested like all of us in doing their best to retain what they have accumulated.
Capitalism has not solved or addressed inheritance, its a nod nod wink wink kind of thing, and claims of equality and the level playing field while loudly made do not hold up the slightest in the real world we live in.
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
http://voxeu.org/article/what-s-your-surname-intergeneration...
It would have been more than prodigal to lose when the system is in your hands...
Daniel 4 is interesting in this regard: "This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men."
Bless them!
How can you prove it's yours? or if someone challenges it, you register it?
This is weird, especially in a country with 1000+ years legal tradition. One would assume that everything is registered, with the state owning the rest that is not assigned to private parties.
In many third world countries it's common for people to work /live on the land that "everyone" knows it's theirs--via family line--but can't prove /register it legally (whatever the law is.)
For an unregistered plot, in theory you demonstrate ownership by providing a series of valid conveyancing deeds back to a valid original grant. If they're lost, flawed, or destroyed in a fire, things can get messy. The Land Registry's guide to handling first registration in situations where the deeds are missing is a good example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/first-registratio...
In practice, if you've occupied the land continuously for a long period of time then you can have possessory rights in the land even in the absence of a good chain of title.
You're right that this is all pretty unsatisfactory, which is why the Land Registry was set up in 1925 and registration made increasingly-more-compulsory since then. But as pjc50 notes, we don't have a full cadastre, so we are where we are.
Interestingly Scotland had a registration system (of conveyances rather than of land per se) much earlier. So even within the UK we're not without precedents.
This was a reasonably common occurrence in the American west. In particular, I believe that's how most of the possessors of Spanish land grants in New Mexico were dispossessed.
There are some excellent books by Hernando de Soto on the subject of trying to turn informal claims of inherited land in the third world into proper usable claims.
As for the article itself, I feel it sadly doesn't even make its own case particularly well, cherry picking statistics and aggregating dissimilar data (e.g. clumping aristos and private corporations together when looking at Scottish landholding)
As it happens I agree politically with the writer that aristocracy is not a good idea (though hard to eradicate in any society), not that I care much if Great Britain has problems.
It also manages to recycle many of the popular tropes about the aristocracy avoiding taxes, perfectly legally, while ignoring the concept of noblesse oblige which was for a long time the flip side of aristocratic privilege. We're starting to see a similar concept return in the form of billionaires being criticised if they fail to sign up to donate their money.
Yeah, so noble of them...
Given the undemocratic and privileged positions many enjoy in the house of lords, some could say the legality of their methods is nothing more than corruption.
The article spends too long telling irrelevant stories to make its few points:
- owning land is a great way to get rich
- the rich evade taxes by restructuring their business
- investing in business keeps your family's wealth intact
- networking from elite clubs helps you find opportunities to invest in
None of these points are specific to aristocrats. We all strive towards these goals - my family started out living in a rented apartment, and their first milestone was buying their own house. They wanted their kids to go to an elite university so we could get good networking opportunities. Investing in business is just a truism - past a certain point of wealth, it's no longer worth it to sell your time for money, compared to investing.
The writer also spends some time carefully conflating the aristocracy of old with the modern aristocrats, in a weird non-sequitur parallel. People of old did something bad, therefore...what, exactly? This is bigotry and prejudice, but we hate rich people, so it's okay.
As a whole this reminds me of Varys's riddle from Game of Thrones - if you are so incensed at the aristocracy, why do you keep giving them power?
> preserve the wealth they were handed over from their parents
There's a conflict between these. If your father got his wealth by driving out subsistence farmers at gunpoint, to what extent can you say it's nothing to do with you and that your wealth is a totally meritocratic inheritance?
Note that owning land is a great zero sum way to get rich. If the Duke of Westminster owns half of London, and isn't interested in selling it, you can't invest there.
> if you are so incensed at the aristocracy, why do you keep giving them power
Please explain how the people are incensed are also "giving them power" in any meaningful sense?
This is the point: an aristocracy is a closed shop. The article points out that land and titles can be bought, thus getting a few people and their descendents in, but it is still a system that is designed to exclude the merely capable. Schools like Eton, the London clubs and the House of Lords seats exist to create near-automatic privileges for the lucky few who were born into the "right" families.
The money that Bill Gates made (and later gave some of to charity) isn't the real problem, it's the multiples of that which he destroyed via economic inefficiency or the crushing of other smaller entrepreneurs. Similarly, aristocrats who are not the absolute riches people on the planet, could still have torched Trillions in value by playing silly games to keep them on the top of the heap.
Because it wasn't your father, it was your...how many generations are there between us and the middle ages, again? This is a time jump in the article itself:
> Historically, the British aristocracy’s defining feature was not a noble aspiration to serve the common weal but a desperate desire for self-advancement. They stole land under the pretence of piety in the early middle ages, they seized it by conquest, they expropriated it from the monasteries and they enclosed it for their private use under the pretence of efficiency.
> .....
> And when democracy finally and rudely shunted them aside, they found new means of preserving their extravagant riches without the tedium of pretending they sought the common interest. Far from dying away, they remain very much alive.
Moreover, the UK has been a democracy for quite some time now, and has had ample time to address inheritance law, and land ownership law. Like the article states:
> That is no accident. British laws on land tenure, inheritance tax, corporate governance and discretionary trusts still make it easy to hide wealth from public view. Land is subsidised, and taxed more lightly than residential property. Unearned income bears less of a burden than earned income.
The article claims that this is the secret to the power of the aristocracy. This power is given to them by laws, designed and voted in by MPs, who are in turn voted in by the people.
Democracy does not mean the peasants get to vote. Democracy means that the peasants get to set policy for their own benefit - which means that improving the opportunities, prospects, and living conditions of the majority of the population becomes a national goal, not an occasional failure of default policy.
In a genuine democracy this happens with honest and open public debate and effective economic and political action, not with rhetoric, dishonesty, demagoguery, and misdirection.
Does it really matter if the Duke of Westminster got his land because his father fought a war or because his great^10 father fought a war? The 'moral argument' for society granting him billionaire status is still based entirely upon a past war and primogeniture.
>Moreover, the UK has been a democracy for quite some time now
Democracy isn't binary, it's a continuum. The media is largely owned by elites and until recently, the internal party political machinery of the two major parties were too.
The Duke of Westminster's wealth wasn't stripped because British citizens really wanted him to keep it. He got to keep it because it wasn't seen as a fight worth starting to take it back.
This is true, and it hasn't had time to do it since first properly overruling the Lords in 1911. For some reason the newspapers owned by Lord Rothermere have agitated against it.
The Scottish government has had much less time (since May 1999) to work on the subject and has got much further with land reform.
Enclosure of common land took place mostly in the 18th century. The Highland Clearances went on into the 19th.
It keeps amazing me how many people write 'evade' while they actually mean 'avoid' (or they use it as if it's exactly the same). Avoiding taxes is legal, kids. Evading taxes means you'll (eventually) end up in jail.
I personally know a few Belgian aristocrats with decent wealth. Most are horrible at managing their money and they get screwed left and right by investment advisors.
Most just tend to be really frugal, meaning they don't spend a lot. Several of them work normal jobs. Their wealth isn't meant to be spent or enjoyed (only perhaps a little bit -- they tend to own a nice property), it needs to be invested and safeguarded for the next generation.
Some of these people are still enjoying the gains of land and capital they received or acquired in the 12th century.. most won't take crazy risk with that.
When you say "we" you don't include a big chunk of Guardian readers who believe if you earn above average income you probably are stealing it from someone.
I think that trusts will need to be eliminated at some point.
Not to get rich, but to keep your family rich.
There are a lot fewer aristocracy than there were at the start of the 20th century, but those that remain are extremely wealthy.
That sounds like a very good description of the Bolsheviks the Guardian supported so fervently.