Toffs old and new

The books

I was rather taken aback to read in yesterday's Guardian that, according to a very young looking chap called Guy Shrubsole, more than half the land in England is owned by around 25,000 landowners, a number said to amount to less than 1% of the population. Which causes me an arithmetical challenge as the population of England is of the order of 55,000,000 and 1% of that is 550,000 not 25,000.

Another challenge will be the fact the owning land has not been the same thing as being wealthy for a long time. Plenty of people have lots of wealth without having much if any land. And a lot of the land in question will not be good for much except for looking at - although this would have been much more true had Shrubsole taken all the British islands into his brief, given all the bog, moor and mountain in peripheral parts.

The chart

Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case that the land owning aristocracy have still got a firm grip on our land, despite death duties having been around for near a century, despite all those upper class twats blowing the family wealth on fast living and worse. Perhaps their Legal and Financial Services teams have cooked up something more cunning that the old-fashioned entail to keep all the dosh in the family and out of the hands of the tax man.

It also seems odd that there is no requirement to register land with the Land Registry unless you want to sell it. Seems reasonable enough to me that one should require all these toffs to properly register their antique holdings. A first step towards a bit of proper taxation... First the census, then the tax.

I wonder whether it would be much the same story in other countries in Europe, countries with a similar evolution from the Middle Ages as our own. France for example? Simenon, writing in the middle of the last century, often had a pop at the power of the old aristocracy in France, revolution notwithstanding. But then, perhaps, as a Belgian journalist from nowhere, given to louche activities in his free time, he was given the cold-shoulder by said aristocracy, despite his money and his fame.