Commoners Rights and the Tragedy of the New Forest Becoming a UK National Park
The New Forest is one of the few places in the late Capitalist UK where land enclosures were successfully resisted and the tradition of commoners using common land persisted for over a thousand years. It also gives a partial glimpse of how a society could structure itself in a true non-capitalist voluntary free market...
In practice this means that farmers and small holders may allow their ponies and cattle to graze the forest without restriction and commoners have formed a number of different voluntary associations such as the New Forest Commoners Defence Association to represent and defend themselves. So the New Forest is a good example of a society that does not operate according to the accepted rules of either the right or the left. Many vulgar Libertarians find it hard to get their heads round the idea of common but not collectively owned land. Whilst left wingers would tend to see the arrangements in the New Forest as a historical anachronism standing in the way of progress, rural stick in the muds who have yet to arrive in the twentieth century.
However the New Forest is not some Mutualist paradise and the state has intervened many times over the previous thousand years with many parliamentary acts trying to regulate the commoners practices. The latest unfortunate example of this is the making of the New Forest into a national park. The commoners rightly fear that power over the running of their forest will be taken out of their hands and professionalised by local politicians and wider national interests. The commoners, who actually work, live and maintain the forest have of course been ignored and overruled as per the last thousand years the central state has decried something and they've got to lump it or subvert it...
It is easy to see why the New Forest provokes these kinds of attacks as it must appear as an irritating anomaly to the dead hand of statist law and tradition, maybe there is a folk memory of the enclosures that haunts our body politic still...
In practice this means that farmers and small holders may allow their ponies and cattle to graze the forest without restriction and commoners have formed a number of different voluntary associations such as the New Forest Commoners Defence Association to represent and defend themselves. So the New Forest is a good example of a society that does not operate according to the accepted rules of either the right or the left. Many vulgar Libertarians find it hard to get their heads round the idea of common but not collectively owned land. Whilst left wingers would tend to see the arrangements in the New Forest as a historical anachronism standing in the way of progress, rural stick in the muds who have yet to arrive in the twentieth century.
However the New Forest is not some Mutualist paradise and the state has intervened many times over the previous thousand years with many parliamentary acts trying to regulate the commoners practices. The latest unfortunate example of this is the making of the New Forest into a national park. The commoners rightly fear that power over the running of their forest will be taken out of their hands and professionalised by local politicians and wider national interests. The commoners, who actually work, live and maintain the forest have of course been ignored and overruled as per the last thousand years the central state has decried something and they've got to lump it or subvert it...
It is easy to see why the New Forest provokes these kinds of attacks as it must appear as an irritating anomaly to the dead hand of statist law and tradition, maybe there is a folk memory of the enclosures that haunts our body politic still...
posted by Beowulf | 4:59 pm
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