The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain

Brett Christophers. New York, NY: Verso, 2018. xviii and 362 pp., notes, index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 9781786631589), $19.95 paper (ISBN 9781786631596), $9.99 electronic (ISBN 978178663161).

Brett Christophers's The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain is a rare bird: a book by a geographer that has escaped the confines of academe and entered the broader political consciousness. The New Enclosure reveals the almost unbelievable extent to which British governments (at all levels, but directed and coordinated by the central government in London) have sold off public land, literally Britain's commonwealth. Christophers shows that since the 1970s, 10 percent of the British landmass has been sold by public agencies to private interests, often at fire sale prices. As he notes, until now, and in comparison to such well-known privatizations as social housing through the “right to buy,” the railroads, British Airways, British Telephone, and British Steel, as well as the never-ending attempts to privatize the National Health Service, this sell-off has gone on largely unnoticed.

Until now. Exceedingly clearly written, hard-hitting, and timely, The New Enclosure was much discussed in the British media in early 2019. With favorable reviews in The Guardian (Self 2018), the Financial Times (Tooze 2019), and the London Review of Books (Jack 2019), and featured prominently on bookstore shelves (although it did seem slightly overshadowed by its neighbor with a racier title [Ghodsee 2018], when I stumbled across it at the Waterstone's in Glasgow), the book managed to cut through the smothering media noise of Brexit and spark a strong and continuing debate on the importance of public land to a decent social life and the bankruptcy of Britain's privatization-at-all-costs ideology.

The costs are, in fact, high, as Christophers painstakingly shows—and not only the social costs of lost recreation grounds and places open to public protest, or even the somewhat indirect economic costs of lost land that might be necessary for vital public services or as a reserve for future needs, but the direct, staggeringly deep economic costs incurred when local governments and public agencies have been forced, often against all logic, to sell land to private interests that have then, Christophers shows, simply hoarded it. Indeed, the central justification for the massive privatization of land in Britain has long been that private interests can always use it more efficiently, to which, more recently, has been added the argument that only by selling land to private developers can Britain's crisis of affordable housing be addressed. Christophers demolishes this argument, showing that, in fact, precisely the opposite has been the case. Instead of building more housing, developers have built up huge land reserves, working diligently to keep market prices high, both for land and for housing. The new enclosure is not an investment in the future, or a means of unleashing capitalism's “animal spirits” and sparking a frenzy of growth, but simply a massive transfer of wealth.

In the midst of Brexit, and in tandem with the publication six months later of an equally hard-hitting exposé of who—which few—own Britain by the activist-researcher Shrubsole (2019), The New Enclosure asks Britons to think hard about just what kind of state, what kind of economy, and what kind of public sphere has been created in their name since Margaret Thatcher came to power forty years ago, as well as what kind might be possible—or ought to be created—in the future. Brexit's propagandists, including Thatcher's most recent successor in the office of prime minister, Boris Johnson, seem to imagine a future where Britain becomes little more than a totally privatized, low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation export processing zone. To the degree they are successful, it will be due in no small part to the massive privatization of the commonwealth that Christophers documents, for the privatization of public land has been the vital, indispensable material foundation for the destruction of any idea of a public good, which has been so central to the success of the Brexit ideology.

In other words, as much as The New Enclosure is squarely focused on Britain (and valuable precisely because of its laser-like empirical focus), it is not at all a book only about Britain, as the following reviews make clear. Through their rich, critical engagement with—and significant extension of—many of The New Enclosure's crucial arguments, the reviews collected here show that this is a book that asks us to think harder about the role and meaning of public land in capitalism in different geographical and historical circumstances, including its entanglement in imperialist projects; a book that requires us to think much more clearly about the role of the state in capitalism, and how we should understand its potentialities and limits in the struggle for a more just future; a book that forces us to confront just what makes land public and what makes it common—and to what effects; and, perhaps especially, a book that pushes to the forefront, and not only in Brexit-era Britain, but across the neoliberal globe, the inescapable question of what sorts of political ideologies could possibly be adequate to the task of confronting and reversing the ongoing new enclosures that mark our era—as well as to the task of rebuilding society on the basis of the commonwealth that underpins it.

“Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher.” So, reportedly, went the chant on schoolyards in Britain in the 1970s in response to then-Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher's cutting of free milk in schools. The idea of taking publicly funded milk away from schoolchildren seemed to perfectly encapsulate and presage the austerity thinking, reduction of entitlements and social safety nets, and everyone-for-themselves thinking that, after Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, came for many to represent the neoliberal era, in Britain as elsewhere. In The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, however, Brett Christophers suggests that most analyses of neoliberalism in Britain have missed something critical about its material basis. As or more important than, and fundamental to, the cuts in social services and spending that have received so much attention, Christophers argues, was the privatization of public assets, most notably the land itself, as the defining feature of neoliberalism. What mattered more than the elimination of free milk in British schools was that the very land beneath the feet of those schoolchildren—their schoolyards, their playing fields, their shared public spaces, their homes themselves—was being steadily sold off to private developers.

This is Christophers's topic and thesis: that nearly half of the publicly owned land in Britain has been sold off to private interests during the neoliberal era; that this massive transfer has happened with remarkably little notice or protest; and that the privatization of public land has been materially, economically, and politically central to the more oft-recognized elements of neoliberalism. He makes this case in five chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter, drawing particularly heavily on the work of Doreen Massey and Karl Polanyi, provides an exemplary summary of the unique, inescapable, and often internally contradictory roles of land in capitalist societies. The second chapter is historical and empirical, tracing the development of land tenure in Britain through feudalism, the enclosures (which centered on changing use rights, rather than changing ownership of the land itself), and finally the rapid and substantial growth of public land ownership, which occurred mostly from the late nineteenth century through roughly 1970. The theoretical and empirical foundations thus laid, the next three chapters constitute the core of Christophers's argument: In them, he examines the rationales presented for the privatization of Britain's public land during the neoliberal era (Chapter 3), the processes by which it was privatized (Chapter 4), and the outcomes of that privatization (Chapter 5). The argument is a model for critical social science research and should be required reading for doctoral students with even remotely parallel analytical ambitions: Christophers neither embraces nor rejects claims about neoliberalism as an intentional class project, but, recognizing the difficulties of proving them, focuses instead on what can be clearly documented and evaluated: stated rationales, processes, and results. The book is exceptionally clearly written, meticulously researched, and rigorously argued, and so its central conclusions—that the rationales for privatization were intellectually shoddy, inconsistent, and doctrinaire; that all levels of government were effectively compelled to go along with this agenda; and that the results have been more or less precisely the opposite of those predicted and supposedly desired—add up to a scathing and irrefutable indictment of the core logics and outcomes of the neoliberal project not just in Britain, but elsewhere, as so many of those core logics are shared. In a nutshell, Christophers argues that the privatization of so much land has served to shift Britain decisively toward a rentier economy, in which the few profit by hoarding a finite supply of land while dramatically increasing rents on the many.

As I read The New Enclosure, three bodies of scholarship kept coming to mind: on state theory, on property, and on the public lands in the United States. Each raises questions about what, precisely, it means to call land “public,” and each suggests further lines of discussion regarding Christophers's arguments about the relationships between public land and neoliberalism in Britain.

First, with respect to the state, behind the category public land is a sense that state ownership does, or should, equate to those assets being used in the public interest, with Christophers seemingly adhering to the view that the state remains a uniquely democratic and democratizable institution. Both of these positions, although entirely reasonable, could be dug into more deeply in ways that seem relevant to the book's arguments: How fully and deeply did the British state represent the public and its interest at various times? Who truly, politically, belonged to that public, and did they all belong equally? What about the existence of multiple, competing publics and public interests?

These questions become empirical with respect to the dramatic expansion of state land ownership from the late nineteenth century up to roughly 1970 that Christophers chronicles, during which period the British government went from owning a negligible portion of the land in the country to owning roughly 20 percent of it—while also imposing substantial land use restrictions on much of the rest. The book tells us the legal purposes and mechanisms for and by which the land was acquired—resettlement, housing, conservation, and so on, and sometimes by compulsory purchase—but not about the politics of how these acquisitions were received. Yet there are many hints in the text that many middle-class Britons did not regard the public lands acquired for those purposes as “theirs.” Christophers suggests that it was because they did not know about them. Another explanation, though, could be that they knew, but regarded them in just the opposite way: as having been taken from them, for redistribution to others. One wonders whether and how the state's land acquisitions and restrictions, and the associated expansion of state bureaucracies and visibility in everyday life, might have contributed to resentments that eventually found expression in the neoliberal counterrevolution and its party loyalties. Geography offers a hint here: Christophers notes that whereas the sales of council housing, government buildings, and the like provoked almost no opposition, the suggested privatization of public forests provoked an outcry and was quickly dropped. In short, there is a clear class politics to public land, in general and in relationship to neoliberal environmental governance, that troubles the easy equation of “state” with “public,” and demands a more explicit articulation of “the public interest.”

Second, property theory generally encourages us to think of property as dynamic and complex. Yet analytically, Christophers treats the high point of public land ownership in Britain as something of a static point of reference. Even though he details its construction, he then treats that 20 percent as a baseline that, implicitly, ought to have remained stable forever more. Likewise, the text treats public and private property as sharply distinct. A secondary argument in the book is that the essence of public property is that it recognizes and provides for a wide array of use values, whereas private property is devoted to the maximization of exchange value. Yet this standard, although doubtless true as a tendency, is likely too binary in practice. To be sure, Christophers proves his central thesis: Vast areas of public land have been privatized, to negative effect. Yet property theory reminds us that categories such as public and private are often blurred in practice. For example, state planning restrictions on private property are in a real sense the assertion of public property rights on private property, whereas many primary commodity producers in the United States figured out long ago that having the federal government retain underlying ownership—and the associated management costs and responsibilities—on federal lands, while leasing or selling the right to extract specific commodities, was a better deal for them than outright privatization.

Third, as the lattermost example suggests, comparisons with public lands in the United States—where, unlike what Christophers describes in Britain, “the public lands” have been a topic of major and overt political debate throughout the country's history—offer some interesting parallels that both reinforce and raise some questions about the comparative purchase of Christophers's central arguments. With respect to privatization, the U.S. land system was designed precisely around the assumption that the vast public territory acquired through the genocide, conquest, and geopolitics of settler colonialism would be privatized, for notably the same reasons given for privatization in neoliberal Britain; that is, private ownership (homesteading, railroads, and the like) would maximize effort, efficiency, and development. That reinforces the centrality of those rationales to capitalism, but troubles, perhaps, Christophers's broader claims that privatization, particularly of land, is what distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier forms of capitalism. Also notable is that the period of major public land acquisition in Britain basically corresponds to the turn to retention and conservation in the United States; that is, starting in the late nineteenth century, both countries recognized a need for a commitment to permanent public land ownership to serve broad social and environmental goods that were not met by the market. That commitment to permanent public ownership and associated public infrastructural projects, in turn, increased the role of the state in everyday life and provoked mainly rural resentments. Meanwhile, a consistent plank in right-wing critiques of public ownership and management was the charge that public lands and agencies (responsible to and for a wide array of public use values) failed to perform well by the sole metric of maximizing exchange value. Both strands fed powerfully into the neoliberal backlash decades later.

Although such parallels are productive, they have major limits as well. Discussions of public lands in the United States turn overwhelmingly on rural, federally owned lands valued for their “natural” use values, whether those be natural resources or wildlife habitat. By contrast, urban lands owned by local governments and agencies and used mainly for housing, hospitals, and other everyday functions are at the heart of Christophers's story—indeed, one of the things that strikes a U.S. reader is the extent to which urban space in postwar Britain was public space. Again, then, it seems clear that the fact that the public is anything but a united whole, and that it encompasses different fractions with different interests and different geographies, has everything to do with Christophers's story of which land, where, has been privatized; who has lost and who has gained in the process; and why those questions have received far too little attention. The New Enclosure compels us to remedy that oversight.

The New Enclosure dramatically lays bare the massive, ongoing plunder of public land in Britain since May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher took office. In the process, Brett Christophers sheds powerful new light on key forces driving escalating inequality and widespread social devastation in Britain over the past forty years that have received remarkably little attention. The book also provokes us to think in new ways about neoliberalism beyond Britain through the spatiohistorical lens of the land question.

A startling revelation in the opening pages is not only that Britain's biggest privatization to date is the sale of 2 million hectares of public land, about 10 percent of the total landmass, for some £400 billion—but also how this process has gone largely unrecognized. Moreover, since the mid-1990s in the United Kingdom, “effectively all of the increase of wealth has been concentrated in land and property” (p. 55). I find totally compelling Christophers's insistence that we assign central importance to land “as a special and finite commodity,” deeply interwoven with the exercise of sociospatial power.

In coming to grips with the land question in contemporary Britain, Christophers develops an incisive new cut into neoliberalism. Common conceptions of neoliberalism as financialization, market rule, the economization of everything, and entrenched class power were also characteristic of the era of high liberalism from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, he maintains—and therefore fail to distinguish what is distinctive about contemporary forms. The truly original feature of neoliberalism for Christophers is the privatization of public ownership, because in the era of high liberalism “there was, in Britain and the rest of the liberal capitalist world, no substantive public sector to be privatized” (pp. 17–18, italics added). Compelling attention to what he calls the prehistory of neoliberal land privatization in Britain, Christophers paints a vivid picture of the forces that drove public land acquisition from the 1870s—and how, in the 1960s and 1970s, public authorities sought to resist intensifying pressure to privatize this land. When Thatcher took office, public land ownership in Britain was at an all-time high. In forensic detail, he then goes on to show how the project of modern enclosure in Britain has been put into practice—and the devastating consequences for the large majority of the population. More broadly the book serves as a sharp reminder that neoliberal forms of capitalism and modalities of rule take hold on terrains that always exceed them. It also makes clear that the land question constitutes, quite literally, a key element of such terrains that can only be understood through a spatiohistorical lens.

Although Christophers stresses the specificity of his argument to the United Kingdom, the power of his analysis invites and compels us to think beyond Britain. Not surprisingly I was immediately reminded of South Africa, where land—and much longer histories of racialized dispossession—lie at the heart of contemporary political struggles. Despite an official commitment to redistribute 30 percent of land under white control, the African National Congress (ANC) government's embrace of a market-based model of land reform in the 1990s has produced predictably risible results. Under massive pressure the ANC is now officially committed to land expropriation—although the terms remain vague, and Cyril Ramaphosa has been quick to assure foreign investors that they have “nothing to fear.” More generally, the land question is crucial to grasping a cruel contradiction at the core of South Africa's form of neoliberal racial capitalism: Capital needs the ANC to keep the lid on popular discontent, but its actions render such containment increasingly difficult.

Thinking about South Africa not as a separate “case” but as deeply interconnected with some of the processes that Christophers describes enables some mutually illuminating insights. He notes that popular agitations around land concentration in Britain go back to the 1840s, and finally forced a shift to land reform in the early 1870s. This might have been the British government's first foray into domestic land reform as a means of addressing popular unrest—but it surely must have been informed by a much longer history of dealing with “surplus” populations through settler colonialism, racialized dispossession, and the privatization of “public” land expropriated from indigenous populations.

Directly relevant here is the final chapter of Volume I of Capital (Marx 1954) in which, with scathing sarcasm, Marx discusses Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who “discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the motherland” (Marx 1954, 752). The problem on which Wakefield put his finger was that “Land, to be an element of colonization … must be public property, liable to be converted into private property” (Marx 1954, 755)—but the conversion of the wage laborer into an independent peasant renders impossible capitalist production. Hence Wakefield's principle of “systematic colonization”—setting the price of land sufficiently high so as to compel the immigrant “to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant” (Marx 1954, 759). Wakefield's “sufficient price of land” as Marx (ibid) acerbically put it, “is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land” (ibid).

Wakefield's influence on British colonial policy from the mid-nineteenth century coincided with waves of immigration into the colony of Natal. British settlers were, however, rescued from high land prices by the brutal and contentious formation of an African working class in colonial Natal vividly described by Atkins (1993); the importation of indentured laborers from India from the 1860s, transported to the southeast coast of Africa in conditions similar to those on slave ships; and poll taxes that forced African men to work on the mines from the latter part of the nineteenth century.

These interconnections serve as a reminder of the relations between contemporary land questions in Britain and its imperial history. They underscore as well the bitter irony of the coincidence of political liberation in South Africa with intensified inequality and social devastation for the majority of the population—which the unresolved land question has come to exemplify. What is so compelling about The New Enclosure is that, in addition to powerful new insights about what is going on in Britain, it both encourages and provides the means for thinking beyond it.

The privatization of 2 million hectares of public land, with an estimated value of £400 billion, far exceeds the scale of any other British privatization. Given that, and notwithstanding the excellent work on land ownership by Kevin Cahill, Doreen Massey, Andy Wightman, Guy Shrubsole, and Anna Powell-Smith, it is surprising that the privatization of land has not merited a study of its own before. Meek's (2014) Private Island, to which Christophers frequently refers, tackled Britain's privatizations but did not look at “the privatization of land as land.” Part of the reason is that the subject is so complex and mired in opacity, especially with regard to the exceptional British—and in particular English—failure to maintain an adequate and accessible land register. It is not just a question of pinning down private-sector land ownership, however; there is also the bewildering array of public landowners, ranging from central government departments and agencies to hundreds of local authorities. The Forestry Commission and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) are among the biggest and best known and the sale of the MoD's married quarters estate to Annington Homes did hit the headlines, but the vast majority of public-sector land sales pass unnoticed. To further muddy the waters the “enterprise privatizations” of the utilities, the sale of council housing, and the sale of other public estates, from the NHS to Transport for London, also include large amounts of land, in addition to infrastructure, housing, and public buildings.

This study about “the privatization of land as land” sets out to fill this significant gap and entirely succeeds on the terms Christophers has set himself, providing a valuable, forensically detailed, and logically argued account, detailing the policies behind this huge land transfer. With regard to why governments from 1979 on pursued this route, he “eschews conspiracy theory” that promotes the not uncommon view that the privatizations of the Thatcher era, now followed by austerity, have been little more than an agenda for “working class immiseration and capitalist class empowerment,” rather than a means to balance the books. Instead he chooses to demolish the political, economic, and ideological case for privatization made by successive governments, on the grounds of its economic incompetence.

He makes an effective case, providing vital information on how the sale of “surplus” land has not delivered the promised efficiencies, in terms of economic growth, jobs, and the provision of housing. It is an important case to make, not least because the key reason why the issue has received scant attention is because the privatization of land, like the privatization of council housing, is often viewed positively. When the topic does merit a mention the media discourse has tended to praise the removal of land from a failing public sector, making money for the Treasury in the process.

By concentrating mainly on countering the government's case, Christophers pays less attention to the structural and systemic forces that provide the context for privatization. He acknowledges his debt to Harvey, placing privatization at the forefront of modern capitalist accumulation in the context of Harvey's (2003) “accumulation by dispossession,” but the spatial transformation created by the shift from an industrial to postindustrial economy is not the main focus. Simply put, so much former industrial land, which was often but not always public land, became available for new uses. The spatial relationship between the “new enclosure” and the postindustrial economy has seen vast swathes of the former spaces of industry replaced by privatized finance centers and contemporary “malls without walls” (Graham and Marvin 2001). From the transformation of London Docklands to Canary Wharf and centers of cities such as Cabot Circus in Bristol, Liverpool One, and Argent's Kings Cross development, postindustrial public space is increasingly being privatized. This mirrors trends across the postindustrial West, pioneered by the first postindustrial waterfront development in Baltimore's Inner Harbor in the 1970s.

The transfer of land from public to private is not always straightforward, however. For example, a substantial amount of land and property covered by Liverpool One's thirty-four streets and forty-three hectares was not public land and was formerly under private ownership; the Compulsory Purchase of small businesses and privately owned residential properties, at the behest of the local authority, is a common feature of the land assembly of the large privatized estates that now define so many towns and cities. Rather than the ownership of land and property, the key point here is the transfer of control from publicly accountable local authorities that had previously “adopted” streets and public places to management by private estates, which can restrict access and behavior. Today's “malls without walls,” which are policed by private security, encourage public access but such access is conditional on behavior, with filming, photography, and skateboarding routinely banned, not to mention political protest, begging, and rough sleeping.

There is an echo here of the early nineteenth century when the “Great Estates” run by aristocratic landlords such as the Earl of Bedford and Duke of Westminster imprinted a predemocratic model of land ownership onto the city. Today, the Georgian squares and terraces are part of the fabric of the city, but what is no longer visible is that these places were once barricaded and closed to the public. Following growing public outrage, which paralleled the rise in local government and local democracy and was reflected by two major parliamentary inquiries, control over the streets was passed to local authorities and the gates, fences, and guards were removed. Since then it has been standard for local authorities to “adopt” the streets and public spaces of the city, which means that they control and run them whether they own them or not. Now this is changing with implications for the democratic control of the city.

To make matters more complex, many of the private estates are in legal terms still owned by local authorities, under the “long lease privatizations” described by Layard (2019). In common with many private estates, Liverpool One has a lease from the council of 250 years, and in Birmingham, Brindley Place has a lease of 999 years. At the same time, many remaining public estates, such as NHS Estates or MoD lands, restrict access and behavior such as political protest in the same way that private estates do, again highlighting the importance of rights in public space. As Christophers says, the enclosure movement revealed the wide-ranging power that comes with controlling land, removing traditional rights to access over common land that was enclosed. It is the same with this aspect of the “new enclosure.”

Since 1979, around 10 percent of the British landmass has been privatized. In The New Enclosure, Christophers seeks to draw our attention to this most valuable of privatizations, which has fundamentally rewritten the rulebook of what is politically “possible,” with particularly pernicious effect at the level of local government. The result is a deeply angering book, one that deserves to be widely read.

Christophers does a thorough job of unpacking the why and how of land privatization—what (and who) justified it, and what mechanisms were deployed to compel it. The first is a story of ideology, in which the notion of a clunky and inefficient public sector has been held in contrast to a virtuous and dynamic private sector through decades of political discourse. The second is a story of policy, through which central government emerges as the key actor. A shifting set of targets, budgetary incentives, and legal changes have compelled (often reluctant) public institutions to offload any “surplus” land, where the delineation of what is surplus is itself an ideological battleground. Some of the figures are simply numbing—10,000 school playing fields (p. 256), 4.6 million houses (p. 255), and more than 900,000 acres of land that had belonged to nationalized industries, all of it sold under the premise that the market knows best. It is hard to escape a feeling of fatalism when recounting these figures, for what could ever reverse this trend, aside from a “revolutionary political-economic transformation,” something Christophers soberly dismisses as “probably a pipe dream” (p. 338)?

The book's anger really begins to shine in the final chapter, which dismantles those “false promises” that had justified land privatization in the first place. Perhaps the most eye-watering gap between discourse and reality is that around house building. The dominant logic tells us that the housing crisis has been caused by a lack of available land, exacerbated by recalcitrant local authorities withholding planning permission. With delightful accuracy, this is shown to be an “empirically bankrupt” (p. 299) myth. Of the 942 sites sold under the first phase of the (English) Public Land for Housing Program (2011–2015), 100 contained enough land for 8,600 homes, with planning permission duly granted for 9,100, of which only 200 (2 percent) were actually built. What happened on the other 842 sites sold under this program remains a mystery, for the government did not bother to collect the data. Targets for the disposal of land were set and met; targets for the construction of homes were neither set nor met. The gap between the land being sold and the houses being built now runs to an average of 15.5 years, meaning that land banking—intentionally holding land empty to speculate on its future value—has become common practice.

There is an intriguing proclamation, toward the end of the book, that highlights one of the great strengths of The New Enclosure as well as a potential weakness. “Britain, by which I mean the British people,” we are told, “has quietly acquiesced to the loss of its own land—which, it bears repeating, is what public land is, insofar as it is collectively owned through representative democratic government” (p. 324). Land has to be questioned, as Christophers well knows, but so, too, do “the people,” and especially carefully in the current conjecture, where the link between the two has once again become a bedrock of nationalist ideology. This is a book clearly aimed at shaping future discussions and policies around land ownership in the United Kingdom (Labour Party manifesto writers, take note). It is accessibly written, with a fluid and convincing tone (the Verso price tag will help). At times, however, it seems to slip too easily into a nostalgic outlook, in which all distinction between common land and state land is denied. There is strategic value to this, but it also represents a soft and compelling forgetting of all those myriad ways in which the capitalist state has never been a synonym for “the people,” but has controlled and exploited them just as willingly as it has housed and nursed them, and often through the same institutions and at the same time. This is all the more intriguing because the fragile threads of “hope” that Christophers brings to our attention in the conclusion are drawn from a tradition that emphatically rejects the dichotomy of the public and the private. Cooperatives and community land trusts strive toward the collective and communal (not state) ownership, management, and control of assets.

I also feel compelled to note (writing this to the rhythm of raindrops on an Edinburgh window) that the book speaks for the whole of the United Kingdom, but at times struggles to incorporate the debates around land ownership in Scotland. This observation should not be overblown, for Thatcherism, austerity, and neoliberalism are no strangers north of the border. This different-yet-similar typology speaks to the wider institutional relationship between the Scottish government and the UK government, which is difficult to neatly define, especially when there are overlapping and sometimes contradictory layers of responsibility for different forms of land ownership and different forms of austerity. Christophers does well to incorporate examples from Scotland—the tireless Andy Wightman gets his due—but I could not escape the feeling that this was a book aimed squarely at Westminster. Perhaps this is inevitable, and no doubt it is valuable, but it is difficult to see the book gaining much traction in a Scottish context. Given the political urgency of its message, however, I hope I am wrong.

In his important book The New Enclosure, Brett Christophers notes a puzzle. During the past forty years, there has been a massive transfer of public assets to the private sector, yet there has been surprisingly little deliberation about the consequences and almost no significant mobilization against it. One of the many contributions of the book is the quantity and clarity of the evidence that he presents to document the scale of land privatization in England. According to Christophers, during the neoliberal era, about 10 percent of the entire British landmass has been privatized (p. 249).

The program of privatization was directed by the national government and implemented by a wide array of public-sector bodies. Under austerity budgets, public agencies ranging from the Forestry Commission to the NHS to local social service agencies were forced to sell land to fund their existing obligations. Supporters of privatization in industry and government advanced two main justifications: the greater efficiency of the private sector and the harm caused by the public sector, which was hoarding surplus public land that could be developed for housing.

In The New Enclosure, Christophers challenges these claims by unpacking the ideological justifications and assessing the outcomes of privatization. He shows that the public sector, far from hoarding excessive amounts of surplus land and preventing residential development, actually owned less undeveloped land than the private sector. The forced sale of public land did not reduce the price of housing. Moreover, many of the council homes sold off under Thatcher's “Right to Buy” program were eventually transferred to commercial landlords and today, they are being bought back by housing authorities at an astronomical cost. Islington, for example, spent £6.2 million buying back houses that the city had sold for less than £1.3 million (p. 270). The most vivid and shocking illustration of the scale of the loss to the public is Annington, a large housing complex sold by the Department of Defense and leased back on a 200-year lease. The deal has already generated over £4 billion in profits for the company, and this figure could skyrocket when lease prices reset to market levels (p. 275).

I have no criticisms of this remarkable book, so my comments focus on the puzzle posed in the introduction, the absence of both a robust critical discourse and a movement challenging privatization. Why was there so little opposition to a set of policies that seem so obviously at odds with the common good? In political science, there has been a robust debate about the impact of ideas on public policy. The dominant approaches tend to emphasize the importance of interests, structural conditions, political coalitions, or path dependency. Other scholars, however, have argued that ideas can operate independently from interests and that they can inform different strategies for addressing economic crises. Even in a neoliberal era, Britain seems to be an outlier compared to other countries, but it helps us see the ideological project of privatization more clearly.

Christophers does not defend a theoretical position on the importance of interests versus ideas, but he does provide some thoughtful reflections on the way that they intersect. Political leaders in Great Britain embraced the ideology of neoliberalism, which led them to introduce policies that enriched rentiers, finance, and developers. They were able to tell a story that linked the interests of powerful financial players with the interests of people who aspired to homeownership. The “right to own,” the policy that privatized council housing, did benefit some poor families, and the sale of public land was described as a way to bring down housing prices. This created the perception that privatization was not simply an elite agenda. Many privatization deals were complicated, and the negative impacts were deferred, because they took the form of higher long-term costs for future government services. What little opposition emerged focused on the privatization of parks and school playing fields.

What is to be done? In the final pages of the book, Christophers notes the benefits of community land trusts, a limited equity instrument introduced in the United States. The real challenge, however, is not identifying the specific legal structure for securing public control, but rather rebuilding the political will to exercise collective oversight of the market in land. I am not sure how much ideas matter, but because ideas are the scholar's tool, we have to at least try to use them. In the early chapters of the book, Christophers introduces a range of alternative theories about the taxation and regulation of land, including the work of Henry George. Polanyi is the hero of the book, albeit a tragic one because he explained how the commodification of land would destabilize flourishing social communities. Yet these fascinating accounts don't add up to a viable public narrative.

We need an alternative to neoliberalism, a theory that connects the privatization of playing fields with broader arguments about common property and the public good. The term neoliberalism was coined at a conference in the 1930s, a period when classical liberal ideas had fallen out of favor. Today, radical ideas about the commons and even classic social democracy are marginalized but also ripe for revitalization. A promising place to start is a theory called solidarism. Solidarism emerged in the late nineteenth century in France, and could be construed as an updated version of the theory of the commons. Solidarism emphasizes that industrial and commercial societies produce value collectively and concludes that society should oversee the allocation of this product to ensure everyone's needs are met. The built environment of the city is a striking illustration of this principle, because the dramatic increase in the value of urban property is clearly due to society. The demos ultimately must decide how to divide the social product into individual and collective shares, but these deliberations should be informed by an awareness that the technological, social, and physical infrastructure is a shared inheritance.

After four decades of market- and private-sector-privileging neoliberalism across much of the world, there is today a hankering across much of the left for a resurgent state: a state that will assume or reclaim a leading role in the ownership and allocation of society's key assets and resources. At the time of this writing, nowhere is this standpoint clearer than in relation to the environment and emergent climate crisis, where calls for a state-engineered Green New Deal dominate progressive agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. The state, the suggestion seems to be, is the only actor that can step up to the plate and act in the interest of increasingly desperate publics both alive and as-yet unborn.

Having written The New Enclosure, in which I offered a broadly based critique of the UK state's large-scale abandonment of public land ownership during the neoliberal period through its wholesale privatization of British land, one would imagine that I would identify readily with this position. The state, I intimated (and at points asserted), needs to repossess the land rather than carry on shedding it, and thus reclaim its erstwhile role as a major owner and steward of this unique resource.

It seems to me, though, that the central value of the five wonderful commentaries gathered together here—for which, needless to say, I am enormously grateful—is in reminding us of the many reasons to be cautious about this line of argument: reasons that, it would be fair to say, and as the authors of those commentaries do say, I underplayed in the book. I want to use this opportunity for a response to draw out and reflect on those reasons.

One, of course, is obvious. Let's not forget that for all the undoubted cajoling and lobbying by the private sector, it is the state that ultimately has downsized itself—at least in its role as asset owner and resource allocator—under neoliberalism. This is arguably reason enough to be wary of its nominal virtues looking ahead. That's clearly not all, though. As Anna Minton correctly notes in her commentary, the UK state continues in many of those cases where it has retained land to be just as regressive a landowner as a private-sector owner might be, similarly restricting access and behavior such as political protest, for instance. The state also frequently uses its powers of compulsory purchase (eminent domain in the United States) in ways that seem to actively stymie rather than further the public interest, the assembly of the large privatized estates mentioned by Minton being a prime example. These, then, are just some of the factors behind the historic popular resentment of (much less yearning for) the UK state that James McCarthy discusses in his commentary, and that has and continues to grease the wheels of the land privatization juggernaut.

So Hamish Kallin, in his commentary, is quite right to caution against any Pollyannaism, or, looking retrospectively, any nostalgia. As he says, the state—least of all the capitalist state—“has never been a synonym for ‘the people,’ but has controlled and exploited them just as willingly as it has housed and nursed them.” Public land (owned by a state with full discretion over access and use rights) is not synonymous with common land (where common rights of access and use apply).

Partly, the problem is simply that the capitalist state, almost by definition, acts for capital. We have known as much for 150 years, even if we sometimes forget the fact. Yet it's also because to the extent that the state does act in the “public” (rather than capital's) interest, that public—and its relationship to the land—is neither homogeneous nor even, which is again something I underemphasized in my book.

The public, for one thing, always has a fractured and jagged sociality. Thus, questioning my often simplistic imputation of public interest to historic UK public land ownership, McCarthy asks: “Who truly, politically, belonged to that public, and did they all belong equally? What about the existence of multiple, competing publics and public interests?” Gillian Hart, in her commentary, raises even more searching questions about the ineluctable class politics of land ownership under capitalism, whereby alienation from the land has underpinned the necessity for the majority to sell their labor power all the way from the time of Marx's “primitive accumulation” to the present.

Moreover, as a geographer such as myself should well know, “the public” also has a fractured and jagged spatiality. Ironically, though, as my reviewers gently note, geography is probably not The New Enclosure's strongest point. There's the relative peripherality of Scotland (not to mention Wales) noted by Kallin, which I did try hard to avoid, although ultimately the book is aimed squarely at Westminster. Then there's the urban–rural dimension of public land and “publicness” discussed by McCarthy. Last, but definitely not least, there's the great beyond—the world outside the United Kingdom—taken up by Hart but that scarcely received a footnote in my book. As Hart infers, the UK “public” has historically long been constituted in significant part by its multiple geographic others. We would do well to remember this constitutive (and typically subordinated) otherness when we turn to the question of “the public” on whose putative behalf we increasingly call on “the state” to save the world from climate catastrophe. To paraphrase McCarthy: Who truly, politically, belongs to that public, and do—will—they all belong equally? What about the existence of multiple, competing publics and public interests?

If, in any event, our goal, as Margaret Kohn remarks in her commentary, is some sort of collective rather than privatized oversight of our future commons—whether that commons be as local as British land or as global as the planetary ecosystem—we will need, as Kohn insists, not just political will but also a convincing narrative, one alive to the aforementioned factors. Does the notion of “the state” acting in “the public interest” meet this narrative need? Likely not. Nor, as Kohn says, do I even begin to offer one in my book. This, then, is the left's challenge. Kohn suggests “solidarism”—“an updated version of the theory of the commons”—as one possibility. It might not be the full answer, but it is, at least, a start.