Land Ownership and the Commons | ep. 96

According to the Right to Roam campaign, 92% of the UK’s countryside and 97% of its rivers are not available to the vast majority of the public. For Episode 96 of It’s Bloody Complicated, we’ll be discussing land ownership and the Commons, and why democratising and sharing control of our land, rivers and seas could slash inequality and help calm political instability in this country.

We were joined by :

• Guy Standing, a leading thinker and writer on this issue. In his book Plunder of the Commons, Guy deep dives into a history of our country’s democracy that created the commons and why we need to fight to keep it.
• Pam Warhurst, the founder and chair of Incredible Edible the community urban gardening project. In its 15th year of “propaganda gardening”, Incredible Edible has 170+ groups in the UK, and around 1000 groups worldwide, growing food, building communities, and transforming our relationship with the public land around us.

On the podcast, we discussed why our relationship to land is such a pressing issue, what a new progressive settlement for the Commons might look like and how we can get there.