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During the period of gradually rising prosperity which lasted for almost thirty years from the end of the 1840s, many people talked about land reform. What they meant, however, was usually very little more than the removal of obsolete legal restrictions on land transfer; perhaps some facilitation of the means by which land could be acquired for public purposes; and a vague nostalgia for yeomen-farmers.

Then, in the late 1870s, came several exceedingly wet summers, followed by disastrous harvests. The British industrial workers did not starve, because there was free trade in food. Vast numbers of farm workers and small farmers were driven to the towns or to the colonies; but they did not perish. In Ireland, however, there loomed a real threat of famine, when the potato harvest failed.

Towards the end of 1879, the Irish hit back. Through the initiative of a very remarkable man called Michael Davitt, they set up a body called the Land League. This was an organisation of peasants, designed to fight for peasant Interests in general, but, in particular, to fight for what were called the "Three Fs" - Fair Rent (which meant rent fixed by some independent body), Fixity of Tenure (which meant that a peasant who paid his rent could not be evicted), and Free Sale ( which meant that a peasant who left his holding should be entitled to receive the value of the improvements which he had made). The campaign of the Land League was partly open and political, partly clandestine and social; and through this campaign it won its immediate objectives. In 1881, Gladstone's Liberal Government passed the great Irish Land Act, which conceded the "Three Fs".

The so-called "Irish Land War" not only secured the peasants' immediate demands; it also led men to question the whole moral basis of land ownership -- and not only in Ireland. At the height of the Land War, Progress and Poverty appeared, and was soon followed by The Irish Land Question. While the struggle was still raging, Henry George made his first visit to the British Isles, as public lecturer, and as correspondent of an Irish-American newspaper.

Long before that Irish Land War was over, two distinct currents of opinion became evident in Ireland. One, whose principal exponent was Davitt, declared that land belonged equally to all men. The other, whose principal exponent was Charles Stewart Parnell, soon veered from that point of view, and proposed instead the doctrine of peasant-proprietorship: that the peasant should be enabled to acquire the land which he farmed, but as freeholder and not as tenant.

As my principal concern is with the British rather than the Irish aspects of the story, I shall not discuss the mechanism by which the Parnellite view became dominant in Ireland. Suffice to say that a series of Acts of Parliament was passed, which made public money available to buy out the Irish landlords, while the peasants gradually repaid most of the capital and interest to the State over a very long period. This, no doubt, was very good for the Irishmen who happened to be either landlords or tenant-farmers at the beginning of the story; it was not so for the great majority of Irishmen, who had no land.

In 1881, while the Irish Land War was at its height, some fishermen from the Hebridean island of Skye landed at County Cork, in Ireland, and there caught the ideas of the Irish Land War. The activities which these crofters initiated led eventually to some Scottish legislation rather like the Irish Land Act; but it also did a great deal more. It produced a long series of dramatic incidents, which were reported frequently and at great length in the Scottish newspapers, and to some extent in the English papers as well. This widespread interest resulted in many large public meetings in the Scottish towns, often with Henry George as the chief speaker. It evoked tremendous sympathy among urban Scottish workers, many of whom were themselves of recent Highland extraction . What sort of incidents did these newspapers, and those public meetings, record?

In the spring of 1882, the crofters at the Braes, in Skye, refused to pay rent until grazing land which had been abstracted seventeen years earlier was returned to them. This dispute escalated into a battle between crofters and police, and then led to intervention by the marines. At intervals throughout the rest of the 1880s, the Hebrides and the adjacent mainland were ablaze. John Macpherson, Skye crofter, spent a period in prison, and became celebrated as the "Glendale martyr". In Lewis, two thousand crofters camped out in order to exterminate the deer in an enormous "deer forest". In Tiree, with less than three thousand inhabitants, it took a large contingent of police, aided by a hundred marines each bearing a hundred rounds of ammunition, to maintain order. An obscure township in South Uist was at one point described as the centre of the whole agitation. On the mainland, in Sutherland, there arose a series of incidents strongly redolent of Rob Roy. Throughout the Isles, right to the end of the 1880s, the use of gunboats and marines was commonplace.

As early as 1884, the Liberals in Glasgow decided that this struggle had urban aspects which were at least as important as its bearing on the crofting areas. By the late 1880s, the urban land movement had really caught on. Two very important discoveries had been made. First, it was recognised that an annual tax on land values would suffice to meet the whole revenue need of the nation. This, after all, was a time when State expenditure was considerably less than £100 millions a year. Thus the land reformers' demands could be summed up in two words: "Single Tax". The second discovery was that local rating was already based on the value of landed property. If the value of the improvements could be ignored in making the assessment, and rating based on site values alone, then a very large part of the demands of the most avid followers of Henry George could be secured by an exceedingly simple and moderate-sounding reform. So the cry of "Site-Value Rating" was raised.

Right at the close of the 1880s, we see several remarkable indications of the land reformers' progress. In Glasgow, and in London, the call for site-value rating played a very large part indeed in the local authority elections. On a wider scale, the National Liberal Federation committed itself to a policy which (like most policies of most parties) was not wholly unambiguous, but which the land reformers could reasonably construe to mean the taxation of land values on either a local or a national scale.

During the 1890s and the first few years of the twentieth century, the movement spread further. More and more local authorities became interested; by 1906 no fewer than 518 had petitioned for the right to levy rates on site values. A Royal Commission on Local Taxation reported in 1901, and a substantial minority favoured partial site-value rating. Some of the sympathisers, indeed, were Conservatives. Conservative local authorities like Liverpool; the Conservative Lord Balfour of Burleigh who chaired the Royal Commission; and on three separate occasions substantial majorities in the overwhelmingly Tory House of Commons, were prepared to support at least some measure of site-value rating. As early as 1895, the land reformers claimed that every Liberal candidate in Scotland was committed to their views; and by 1906 they knew of only two Liberal candidates in the whole of Britain who were not. The incipient Labour Party was taking up the cause as well. It would be wrong, however, to overstate the expectations of the land reformers. Some certainly thought that land-value taxation would strike at the very root of poverty and social injustice; others saw it as no more than a moderately useful reform of local government. Nevertheless, the drift was most certainly in the land-taxers' direction.

The General Election of 1906 seemed to open the road completely. For the first time in twenty years, the Liberals won a clear and overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. Land taxers expected quick results. One of the leading officials of the land-value taxation movement wrote, almost casually, in January 1906: "I hear that the government … will this session bring in a Valuation Bill, to amend the machinery of assessment. ...The actual taxing could then wait till next session."

Scotland had a peculiarly strong claim for attention. Eighty-five per cent of the MPs sitting for the Northern Kingdom -- including among them both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer -- were clearly committed to the cause of site-value rating. There was another point which was less widely appreciated. The President of the Local Government Board was John Burns, sometime Socialist. On the kinder view, Burns was just incompetent; on the less than kind view he was one of the most effective obstructionists in the Cabinet. But the writ of the Local Government Board did not run in Scotland.

The Government -- impelled, perhaps by the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman -- decided first to tackle Scotland. Before land values could be taxed, however, it was necessary to assess them. By convention, the House of Lords would not impede a taxation Bill. Twice did Scottish Land Values Bills pass the Commons, and go up to the Lords. On the first occasion, the Bill was thrown out; on the second, it was mutilated beyond recognition.

In 1908, Campbell-Bannerman fell ill, and was replaced by H.H. Asquith; while the new Chancellor of the Exchequer was David Lloyd George. Lloyd George's first recorded public activity of any importance had been in 1886, when he had chaired a land meeting addressed by Michael Davitt. Lloyd George seems to have decided that any land valuation Bill for England and Wales would meet the same fate as the Scottish Bills. He therefore sought to circumvent the Lords. A complicated system of taxes was devised which would collect some land values, and which had the merit that it could be introduced at once. Along with these taxes Lloyd George slipped in a general valuation of land. This, of course, was the real object of the whole exercise. The proposals were set out in the Chancellor's annual Budget for 1909.

Whether by accident or by design, the Government was set on a collision course with the Lords. Their Lordships ignored the convention about not interfering with a Finance Bill. The Budget was thrown out, and Parliament was dissolved. The Government got back, but with a reduced majority, dependent for support on the Irish and Labour. This time, the Budget passed the Lords; and after a further struggle which does not concern us here, the power of the Lords to block Bills from the Commons was drastically reduced.

In 1911 , a Memorial to the Prime Minister was signed by 183 Liberal and Labour MPs calling on the Government speedily to carry through its land valuation, and then to tax land values. Lloyd George gave the Memorialists the bleak information that the valuation process was likely to take a further four years. Obviously this did not please the land taxers; but how could they force the Government to do something about it? The land taxers' strategy was to give every possible encouragement to sympathetic Liberal candidates at by-elections. These candidates tended to do remarkably well in very disparate constituencies, at a time when the general stock of the Government was low. In July 1912 came the real highlight -- Hanley. It was a Labour seat which happened to fall vacant. The Liberals set as their candidate R. L.Outhwaite, one of the most ardent of the land-value taxers. Outhwaite was returned; the Labour defender's vote was absurdly low.

All this produced its effect. Soon after Hanley, the Government set up a Land Enquiry Committee, which proposed to report in three stages.

The first report, which concerned the rural areas, appeared in October 1913. The wider questions had been deliberately excluded from the Committee's terms of reference, and its proposals were mainly concerned with items like minimum wages and half holidays for farm labourers, and security for tenant farmers. The publication of this report was tied up with the inauguration of a land campaign which was received with great enthusiasm in the rural areas.

In April 1914, the urban report appeared. This recommended a rather complicated system of rating, under which all local authorities would be required to levy part of their rates on the basis of site values, while those who desired to do so could levy a much greater proportion. The urban proposals were received a good deal less rapturously than the rural recommendations, but the public reaction was certainly not hostile. Finally, in July 1914, the Scottish report came out, and seemed a good deal stronger on the question of site-value rating.

Within a month came the War. Political issues of all kinds were swept under the carpet as expeditiously as possible.

Land reformers varied widely in their reactions to the problems posed by war. Asquith and Lloyd George were by no means single taxers; yet both had proved themselves good friends of land reform. Before the war was over, they were leading opposite sides of the House, with Lloyd George as Premier, heading a predominantly Conservative administration, Of the land reforming extremists, some -- like Outhwaite and C.P. Trevelyan -- took a pacifist line; while others, like J.C. Wedgwood, became ardent participants in the war. Of those who supported the war, some were linked to Asquith, some to Lloyd George, and some to neither.

By the 1918 General Election, all was chaos. Land taxers could be identified in both wings of the Liberal Party, and in the Labour Party; while others were adrift from all Parties and opposed on all sides. All kinds of land taxers found themselves not only at enmity with fellow reformers, but in alliance with other people who shared not one whit of their enthusiasm.

In the years which followed, the chaos got worse. Many of the land taxers went Labour -- not because they had become socialists, but because they thought they could turn Labour in the land taxing direction. By-election after by-election told the story of utter confusion . Sometimes the Liberal was the better land taxer, sometimes the Labour man; sometimes they were both land taxers, and sometimes neither of them.

In this period of ideological disruption, King Party resumed his rule, to the great discomfiture of the land-value taxers and most other reformers as well. Thus, in the Parliament which met in January 1924, the proportion of sincere land reformers was probably at least as high as it had been immediately before the war; but those land taxers were scattered in different parts of the Liberal and Labour Parties. A prominent land taxer, Philip Snowden, was Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer; but the animosities and battles of lesser men ensured that the Labour Government should achieve little, and should finally collapse ignominiously.

In the middle and late 1920s, it seemed for a time that the leadership of the land reforming cause would again be taken up by the Liberals. A move in the alternative direction of land nationalisation was beaten off, and the Liberal Party seemed wholeheartedly committed to its old cause, with Labour echoing at least a part of that enthusiasm.

The General Election of 1929 set Labour again in office, although the Liberals held the balance of power. Again and again Labour's own backbenchers, and the Liberals outside, tried to goad the Government into action over land reform. At last, after infinite dithering, Snowden began to attack the land problem, through his celebrated Budget of 1931 . This proposed that an immediate valuation of land be made and that the collection of taxes on the basis of that valuation should commence two years later.

Yet by 1931 it was too late. Economic crisis was looming. The Labour and Liberal Parties were both visibly disintegrating. The Budget was indeed forced through the Commons; but long before it could become effective the Labour Government fell, and a so-called National Government was formed. Very speedily, that Government became Conservative in all but name, and the Liberal and Labour Parties together could not muster a hundred MPs. The land valuation was first suspended, and then the legislation wholly repealed.

Since 1931 , there have been flashes of interest. In 1938, the London County Council sought to introduce in Parliament a Bill to levy rates on site values. Just after the War, a very large section of the Parliamentary Labour Party set out arguments in favour of land-value taxation and in opposition to the notorious Development Charge which their Government introduced in 1947. Be it noted, then, that neither the rise of the land taxers nor their decline bore much relation, if any, to the inherent merits of the case. Yet land is always with us; and we may now see the land problem assuming a new form and a new challenge. Surely those socialists who really believe in social justice must have noticed that the really massive postwar fortunes have been made, not by capitalists exploiting their employees, but by property speculators robbing the nation? Surely those Conservatives who really believe in the cause of private enterprise must feel some concern at the discredit which has reflected -- quite unjustly -- upon the system of the free market through the activities of men who contribute nothing to the general good, but only withhold land from use?

We may look, too, at the world beyond our own country. It is notable that every one of the so-called Marxist revolutions has occurred, not through workers rising against capitalism, but in countries where capitalism barely existed, through peasants rising against landlords. Land Wars remain Land Wars, whether they are dressed in Marxist dogma or not.

Thus does the land problem remain with us. Let us be prepared to learn from the past - not for the sake of the past, but for the sake of the future Let us try to understand both the wisdom and the errors of land reformers in the past, in order that the effective strategies should be repeated, and those which failed should not.