Roche Limit

I live on the edge of a national park, with hundreds of square kilometres of beautiful, rolling downland. It is a place I spend a lot of time in, walking and relaxing, driving and picnicking. But only five percent of the land in the park is actually open to the public. There are rights of way through much of the rest, but usually that is a footpath or bridleway with fences either side to stop anyone wandering.

Why is there so little open access? The biggest reason is that this national park is 95% owned by eight men: dukes, barons, viscounts and baronets. These eight own the land, and take rent off farmers, but you can't really count this income stream as earnings because they never did even buy the land. It has been granted over the centuries to influential aristocrats who performed a service to another aristocrat or the monarch. It was gifted, even though other people had been living and working on the land continually from the neolithic, through the bronze and iron ages, up to the present. Saxon and Roman settlements and artefacts are commonplace. But a distant King claimed the area, and he gave it to a friend or rival who then arrived to build castles and secure their claim and start their wealth extraction from the local people.

So why do they persist? For the same reason that we haven't taxed billionaires out of existence – they have influence with law makers, which they use ruthlessly to create a financial and legal system that protects their special status and wealth. They are able to shield their property and investments from inheritance tax, they can extract income from inherited wealth and many bolster their status through ceremonial roles. Ceremonial roles are granted by the King or inherited, so that they can appear to be 'important', an indispensable part of the fabric of society, so society gives them a free ride on their 'old-wealth' hoarding of land and treasure which it wouldn't afford wealthy businessmen or other new-wealth individuals.

And the keystone that holds this all in place is the monarch, the uber-aristocrat who is so absorbed into the constitution of the nation that any attempt to separate the monarch from the operation of the state fails in the face of the complexity of the problem in a country that has no unified constitutional documents and relies on historic precedent for so much of its functioning. Parliamentary powers are derived from the monarch, barristers are Kings Counsels, the military swear allegiance to the King as a proxy for the nation.

But there is no public desire for a change in the status of the royal family, no widespread pressure to turn them into private citizens, so the dukes and viscounts who dominate the county in land ownership and influence will remain. Without a republic there will be no nationalisation of land in the national park, and no public ownership of a public treasure.