Peter Smith

The gap between rich and poor is widening despite two centuries of innovation. There’s a reason—and it’s not what you think. Two hundred years ago, the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas in Britain was ten years. Today, after the Industrial Revolution, the invention of antibiotics, the digital revolution, and countless medical breakthroughs, that gap has widened . Let that sink in. We’ve split the atom, mapped the human genome, and put computers in everyone’s pockets. Yet the person born in Glasgow today can expect to die years earlier than someone born in a wealthy London borough—and the difference is greater than it was in 1825. This isn’t an accident. It’s not a policy failure or a temporary setback. According to Fred Harrison, one of Britain’s most persistent economic investigators, it’s the predictable result of what he calls “the ultimate crime”—the systematic theft of community-created wealth through economic rent. From True Crime to Economic Crime Harrison’s jo...

  We are witnessing a “Green Grab” that threatens to finish what the Enclosure Acts began. To save the British countryside, we must first admit that our model of land ownership is fundamentally broken. If you look at a map of the British Isles, you see a tapestry of green: hedgerows, rolling fields, patches of woodland. We are conditioned to view this landscape as a natural inheritance, a timeless vista. But this is a lie. The British landscape is not a product of nature; it is the scar tissue of a thousand-year political struggle. It is a geometry of exclusion. For the last twenty-seven years, I have devoted my life to a single, somewhat radical purpose: the reintroduction of beavers. On the surface, this is an ecological mission. But if I am to say the “quiet bit” out loud, my motivation is also deeply political. I promote the beaver because it is the only effective agent of “land theft” currently available to us. When a beaver dams a stream and floods a valley, it pays no rent. ...