Community commons

We have a game in my family where we work out how we can blame things on Margaret Thatcher. If the problem predates Margaret Thatcher, then enclosure. Otherwise, the Normans. Here's a fun article, A Short History of Enclosure in Britain and by fun I mean utterly enraging: Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line. Until we get that guillotine going we have libraries. We need to join our local library. Ours recently got threatened with closure or being handed over to the community - which is what councils do when they want to close it…