Epilogue: The Strange Death of the English Land Question

Abstract

There has never been any doubt in the minds of historians — least of all among those contributing to this volume — that the land question was an important, even a burning, issue in late Victorian Britain, and was building up an impressive head of steam on the eve of the First World War. So impressive, indeed, that there seems little doubt that from the sometimes tumultuous progress of the red vans and the yellow vans down the country lanes in the 1890s, through to the enthusiastic response to the Liberal Land Campaign in 1913–14, land reform in one shape or another was a genuinely popular cause, something more than the pet cry of a clique of radical politicians and intellectuals. This surge of popular demand for land reform, although reflected in the large group of committed land reformers sitting on the Liberal benches after 1906 and in the somewhat less wholehearted commitment of the Asquith government, had not resulted in any decisive settlement of the land question. Thus in 1914, there was still much unfinished business on the land reform agenda, as indeed the Liberal Land Campaign indicated; moreover, its proposals were regarded by land-taxers and land-nationalizers as merely a first instalment of a lasting settlement of the land question. Then on 4 August, controversy and agitation were suspended, and were never resumed. The effect was instantaneous: ‘The Land Campaign’ of The Times’s leader on 5 August referred to the invasion of Belgium and the likely date for the simultaneous arrival in France of the German army and the British Expeditionary Force.¹ There was never again popular agitation, or even party political controversy, on the scale of the pre-1914 passion and vehemence. The great land question simply fizzled out, ending not with a bang but a whimper. That is the strange death that needs to be explained.²