MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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The biggest rip-off of them all
The New Enclosure is a damning exposé of how public land is being sold off for private profit, says JOE GILL
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
(Verso, £20)
THE PRIVATISATION of British land has delivered nothing that the government claimed it would — value for public money, new jobs and homes and more “efficient” land allocation.
Instead, in a four-decades process that began under Margaret Thatcher, it has transformed Britain into a rentier economy, in which the vast majority of private wealth is held as land and property. Industrial Britain has become landlord Britain, with many of our barons hiding offshore.
Brett Christophers’s The New Enclosure should be required reading for politicians and activists and waved in the face of right-wing talking heads every time they try to peddle the glories of privatisation.
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