The Land-Taxers

For Josiah Wedgwood the fight for the taxation of land values was both an expression of ideological belief and an issue of popular politics where he made his name as an advanced Radical in an eight-year campaign to reform the basis of British taxation. As a considerable body of historiography has shown, the politics of land was central to pre-1914 Radicalism. Landownership remained highly concentrated – 1 per cent of proprietors still owned 30 per cent of land by value and perhaps up to 60 per cent by acreage – and those owners were largely hereditary aristocrats who still remained highly prominent in British political and social life. Radicals since the seventeenth century had argued that the ancestors of the landlords had stolen the land from its rightful owners, the people, while the growing awareness in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain of overcrowded and inadequate housing had done nothing to alleviate the anti-aristocratical tendencies of many aspiring social reformers. Class resentment aside, the working people of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also faced a rising tax burden in the form of local property taxes or rates, which were raised to pay for rapidly expanding municipal services, so that by the end of the Edwardian period property taxes took up some 28 per cent of the annual rental value of property. Another bone of contention was that while agricultural land was far more lightly taxed than urban property, substantial profits were available to those rural landowners whose fields could be built on as towns and cities continued to expand. Such profits – known as the unearned increment – were not subject to taxation.

David Ricardo and J. S. Mill had accepted that such ‘unearned’ profits were ripe for special taxation and after 1886, when the Liberals lost most of their own aristocratic supporters in the split over Home Rule, the party had the option of attacking landed privilege and calling, in effect, for a redistribution of wealth. Such redistribution would favour the increasingly enfranchised working classes, whose votes the Liberals now needed. Thus the fight against landed interests and the alleviation of poverty became a central feature of Radical Liberalism, although there were sharp differences amongst Radicals about how to achieve these aims.