(This came through while I was responding to
@Bullfilter, but I was on my phone so I didn't want to faff about trying to add more multi quotes to the above post.)
Hmm. You haven't mentioned this before? If not, then yes, there is a huge amount of land in the former UK unaccounted for.
So the land itself got dealt with pretty much immediately by the CPGB, as you might expect. The question is mostly how Mosley's rise complicates this after 1934 – or whether it does at all.
The Crown and the Church and the landed artisotracy held a fuckton of it (still do, or at least the first two do). Mostly farmland, heath and Forestry but there's surely something to be done with most of it aside from giving it to the national trust.
As a first step, the land obviously all got nationalised. The specific programme occurred in accordance with the CPGB 1929 manifesto, which dictates that most of this (the stuff able to be cultivated) would be given over to the new farming co-ops. This is what the manifesto says about the management of such co-ops:
(4) Farms over 150 acres would be run as Workers’ State Farms. Farms of 150 acres would be rented to present tenants on a new valuation and on conditions of (a) actual working; (b) maintaining a reasonable level of cultivation, and (c) observance of trade union conditions. All tithes would be abolished. Unoccupied cultivatable land would be allocated to agricultural workers, each worker receiving land according to capacity to work it, assisted by credits to work collectively. Small farmers would be encouraged to develop agricultural co-operative societies to facilitate collective use, and control of wage conditions and hours of labour would be vested in the agricultural workers’ trade union and the workers’ State Department of Agriculture.
In my mind, the farms probably work something like the
Land Settlement Association farms that the government was doing anyway in a small way in the 1930s with the assistance of the charitable sector.
I don't think Mosley will have touched this so long as it carried on working. Possibly he would have been keen to institute larger agricultural operations if regional associations failed, but in the schema of things I don't think it would be high on his list barring crisis.
As for the national trust…
Speaking of, what happened to the national trust? Somewhat socialist in practice and theory, but also at heart extremely classit and obsessed with country estates. All the various heritage places probably got nationalised, unified into one and then (depending on what they had) stripped of much resource (orphans and patients need those houses! Etx).
This is covered back in one of the early post-revolution updates (I think maybe the first Skidelsky one – "The Mongrel Collective", perhaps) but briefly: as per CPGB 1929, the great houses in effect become the basis of the early Syndicated Health. As the manifesto describes,
(10) The Revolutionary Workers’ Government would confiscate all house property, transform the palaces and large houses of the rich into rest homes for the workers under the control of the State Health Department. It would abolish the slums of the towns and the tied cottages of the villages and redistribute housing accommodation on the basis of the housing needs of the workers, rent for workers’ houses to be paid to the Workers’ State or a local Workers’ Council, and regulated according to income (10 per cent. of wages). The rooms of large houses would be let off as workers’ flats on the same principle. (Where a worker has been fortunate enough to secure his own house to live in, the Revolutionary Workers’ Government would not confiscate, the main line of attack being upon landlordism.)
THere's a note somewhere about how Mosley's own family seat got turned into workers' flats, although his family had already sold it on before the revolution.
So everything more or less proceeds as one might predict. I may revisit the Land as an issue gin the 70's and 80's when a character arrives who has quite the thing for Gerard Winstanley…
and what happened to Hammer/do the british still fund the insanely expensive tv shows like Thunderbirds even though they can't sell them to amercia anymore?
This reminds me that I've been meaning to do an update on Postgate and Firmin. I'll add that to the list.
Thunderbirds? Hmm. Probably wouldn't quite fit the mood by 1965. Maybe one for the doubtful column.
The weird academic effect. Everyone goes through relief, withdrawal and craving after graduation. I should expect most if not all MA students are examples of this. And doctorals definitely are.
Yeah, I was always determined not be like my diss supervisor, who has something like 5 degrees and told me very early on in our relationship that he got most of them by accident for want of something else to do. I also spent the entirety of my time at uni under the cloud of severe industrial action, so I'm intimately acquainted with the shittiness of academia as a "career". But at this point in time I've found a course I'd actually really like to do, and it's not like there's owt else going on, so I thought I may as well go for it.
