The Commons and the People

When the poor of Medieval Europe shook off the chains of serfdom, they ushered in a period that historians have called “the golden age of the European proletariat”. From the late fourteenth century, roughly to the year 1500, wages rose in England to unprecedeted levels, while peasant farmers worked cooperatively to build local self-sufficiency based in large part on  shared use of  village land - the commons. 
One of the benefits of this evolution was vast improvement in both land productivity and conservation. The feudal system, by which a tiny nobility controlled most of the land, had proved injurious to the environment. Nobles were concerned solely with profit extraction, and serfs had no interest in or permission to  engage in conservation. The result was deforestion, overgrazing and reduced soil fertility.  Centuries later,  Adam Smith noted the absence of enviromental awareness as well as productivity among the landowning nobility:
“The estate of a great family stands very little chance of being farther improved than it is at present. The lord has nothing to lay out upon it and the tenants are not in the state which would induce them to improve. If this estate was divided into a number of small possessions each having a separate master, it would soon be cultivated to a high degree. Farms set out for long leases or feus are those which tend most to the improvement of the country…”
As the sixteenth century dawned so did the backlash. Rapacious landowners began evicting tenant farmers and seizing the commons by enclosing or “privatising” them. Some villages listed in the Domesday Book were completely erased. The result was impoverishment and the return not of serfdom but, at best, of low-paid labour that peasants were forced to accept to stave off destitution. 
Enclosure - as the process became known - did not meet with universal approval among the educated classes as Thomas More expressed though his fictional character Rafael Hythloday:
“No longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives which do no good to society, (the nobles and gentlemen) must actively do it harm by enclosing all the land they can for pasture and leaving none for cultivation.”
Puritan writer Philp Stubbs wrote in his in his Anatomy of Abuses published in 1583 that:
 “These inclosures be the cause why rich men eat up poor men as beasts do eat grass…They take in and inclose commons, moors, heath and other common pasture, whereout the poor commonalty were wont to have all their forage and feeding for their cattle, and (which is more) corn for themselves to live upon.”
It was no concidence that the number of beggars and vagrants became a subject of comment in Renaissance England. In 1569 a search by constables throughout the country seems to have resulted in the arrest of as many as 13,000 “rogue and masterless men”, and in 1594 the Lord Mayor of London estimated the number of beggars in the city at around twelve thousand.
Still, enclosures continued to take place. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries successive governments got in on the act, disposessing villagers of their best remaining acreage and awarding that also to the aristocracy - which often meant to themselves. Between 1760 and 1844 almost four thousand enclosure acts were shovelled through parliament, each designed to legalize a land seizure.  Peasants thereby found that if they grazed livestock or hunted on traditional common lands, they would be treated as thieves and subjected to the full force of the law. Theft, in those days, even of a shilling, was punishable by prison, deportation or even death. Much of the land appropriated by the aristocracy has remained in the hands of their descendants or fallen into those of the nouveaux riches.  At the height of the industrial revolution, German sociologist Max Weber noted that “the free labour force necessary for conducting a modern factory was created in England,… by the eviction of the peasants.”
Britain’s industrial revolution brought wealth to some and hard graft to many, including to working-class children forced into long hours of labour on the anvil of capitalist enterprise. Alongside rapid economic growth, it launched an age of widespread poverty, of Blake’s  “dark, satanic mills”, Dickens’ Marshalsea prison, and the feared workhouse that Daniel Defore suggested “…has become such a terror to the Beggars that none of the strouling crew will come near the city.”
A philosophy lay behind the creation of so much distress: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious”, wrote 18th century pamphleteer Arthur Young. When food prices rose this was not a reason for higher wages but for greater economy on the part of the poor. The same argument is in play today. Lee Anderson, former Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, claimed that food banks were unnecessary, and that the poor should learn to budget and to cook - a graceless, unoriginal opinion movingly speared long ago by Augustine of Hippo:
“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like".
So much for the commons understood as land. Some 350 years after the enclosure movement began, there appeared another kind of commons dear to the working men and women of the country. Launched as an initiative of government, the post-war consensus, as it became known, aimed to address what William Beveridge in his landmark report listed as the five giant evils: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness - ills that were the inheritance of enclosure and its offspring - capitalist industrialisation and working-class oppression.
Beginning in the reign of Elizabeth I and continuing into the early twentieth  century, governments made intermittent attempts to alleviate the worst ravages of poverty, but none addressed the problem of landlessness and marginalization caused by enclosure. The Beveridge report - published astonishingly in 1942 during the height of WWII,  became an outline blueprint for a Welfare State that embraced a National Health Service, retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, free education, a right to housing and so on. It also included a programme of nationalization of key industries and services. That blueprint emerged as a totem of policy under the Labour government of 1945 and, with variations under subsequent governments, held sway for nearly thirty-five years. All of the nationalized econmic activities became public property by definition - a modern version of the commons.     
When Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 she initiated a backlash against the new commons in a repetition of history. Privatization became the 20th century equivalent of enclosure. The sale began of public transport facilities (rail, buses, airports), water and sewage services, gas and electricity supply, along with many public buildings and research establishments. Some assets were effectively given away via subsidies. 
Just as in the past, the process has taken time to fufill its objectives. Well over a hundred public companies have so far been privatized, several of them, like the UK Atomic Energy Authority, British Nuclear Fuels, and BBC Technology, arguably of irreplaceable research and development importance. For several years, a withering privatization assault has been underway on the National Health Service.
And the consquences? We can’t be sure because influences on the socio-economic life of a country are many. However, there are curious parallels with the past; these include over 5000 food banks with NHS nurses among the users, increasing homelessness, four million children in households with food insecurity. While legislation against rough sleeping has existed since the 1824 Vagrancy Act, the 2014 Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act goes much further in targetting “conduct that has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person”, a remit wide enough to encompass pretty well any activity of which the “powers that be” disapprove.
Much has rightly been made of reductions in hospital beds and the disaffction of hospital staff, the sewage discharges into UK waters by feckless water companies, the UK’s fragmented, still highly subsidised and poorly integrated railway network and so on. An irony of the country’s privatization project is that many of the transportation and utilities operations formerly home-owned have passed into the hands of other states, among them France, Germany, Italy and Netherlands - members of the European Union - to whose commons they now belong. One can be forgiven for concluding that, for UK governments, maintaining the citizenry in a condition of subdued  insecurity is more important than national ownership of essential services.
Enclosures in the past benefited the already wealthy. Large executive salaries and shareholder returns in privatized firms suggest that little has changed. Defenders of privatization point to a few successes - British Telecom being one, British Airways possibly another. Both are subject to the discipline of market competion. Natural monopolies - whether national or regional - like water, gas, electricity, rail transportation etc. are a different story. Their discipline - in the absence of genuine competition - is supposed to be managed by the sectoral regulator. But regulators perform poorly and to date have done little more than provide advocates with a scapegoat for the inadequacies of the privatized firms whose much vaunted efficiency and incentive to act in the public interest have been exposed as a sham.
Both the UK’s main political parties have made clear their opposition to restoring the commons; and their complacent, post-Brexit hand wringing over poverty and inequality seems destined to continue. Perhaps the most we can expect of changes of government is that after years of being chastised with scorpions we might only be chastised with whips”.