Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 126

One of the great paradoxes of late Victorian and Edwardian political history is that at a time when Britain was the most urbanized large country in the world, and when agriculture was rapidly losing its economic significance, land reform should have become a key arena of party conflict between Liberals and Conservatives. Historians have by no means ignored this, but most accounts (E.D. Steele’s Irish land and British politics or Roy Douglas’s Land, people and politics, for example), have focused largely on the role of the ‘Celtic fringe’ in pushing land reform up the political agenda. This can lead to the conclusion that land reform was not an important independent element within English politics and that in this respect at least late nineteenth-century British politics was driven by the agendas of the ‘periphery’ of the United Kingdom. Ian Packer’s study provides an important corrective to this in offering the first detailed study of role of purely English land reform.

Lloyd George, Liberalism and the land is attractively produced, fluently written and carefully researched. It provides the most detailed account available in print of Liberal policy on land reform between 1906 and 1914, and offers a significant reassessment of the role of land reform within the party, arguing that commitment to land reform, although long-lasting, was less deep-seated than many have supposed. Fully-fledged land reformers constituted a small and divided minority within the party. Some adhered to Henry George’s ‘single tax’ on land values, to replace all other taxes, but most avoided what was seen as an extreme position and until the early years of the twentieth century the single-taxers could only count on the support of one MP, the maverick William Saunders. Others favoured leasehold reform but this group was largely confined to London and a few other large cities where leasehold rather than freehold was the dominant form of tenure. The persistence and prominence of land-reforming policies within the party are to be explained, Packer argues, by short-term electoral and parliamentary exigencies rather than ideological principle. In some ways, this downplays the significance of land reform within the Liberal Party. But Packer’s account offers no support for the argument that land reform was a political irrelevance, indicative only of the exhaustion of the late Victorian Liberal Party and of its increasing distance from its working-class supporters. On the contrary, Packer shows that land reform achieved prominence within Liberal policies between 1906 (and earlier) and 1914 as a pragmatic response to party divisions and to the perceived need to make inroads into rural constituencies through attracting the votes of agricultural labourers (and at times even farmers). This strategy had varying success – the Liberal government of 1892–95 received scant reward from the rural electorate for passing the 1894 Local Government Act (which created parish councils and facilitated allotment provision), whilst the 1906 government fared little better with its 1907 Smallholdings Act. Between 1909 and 1914, however, land reform paid dividends for the Liberal Party and would probably have produced electoral gains in rural areas in the 1915 election had the First World War not intervened. A particularly interesting feature of Packer’s argument at this point is his assessment of Lloyd George’s 1914 budget, which included site value rating proposals. The recent consensus has been that the inherent complexity of site value taxation and the carelessness with which Lloyd George put his proposals together caused a serious reverse for the cause of land reform, from which it might not have recovered even had war not foreclosed the issue. Packer rejects this, arguing that at most the treatment meted out to the 1914 budget would have forced Lloyd George to delay introducing his local authority grant and site value rating scheme by a matter of a few months.

Packer displays so much careful scholarship that it would be ungenerous to cavil at his book for failing to do things it did not set out to do. But it is right to point out that this book is essentially a detailed monograph on Liberal land policy with respect to England between 1906 and 1914. To set this in context, Packer’s work (as he would be the first to accept) needs to be supplemented with older accounts – Green on Conservative and Tichelar on Labour policy, Ward’s regrettably unpublished PhD thesis for the Land Nationalisation Society and the ‘single taxers’ of the English Land Restoration League, Douglas for his emphasis on the ‘Celtic fringe’ and for a longer-term perspective. Valuable though it is to isolate and explicate the specifically English component of land reform, the political profile of the issue only really makes sense when seen in this broader context. Nevertheless, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the land marks an important advance in our understanding and should be on the bookshelves of anyone with an interest in early twentieth-century politics, Liberalism or land reform.