Land and territory
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Land Struggles: From Bolivia to Britain, the way that land is owned and controlled is central to many contemporary inequalities and political battles. Laurie Taylor talks to Brett Christophers, Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden, about ‘the new enclosure’, a UK study into the appropriation of public land by the private sector – an astonishing two million hectares worth £400 billion – in recent decades. This ownership now forms the largest component of wealth in Britain and is the largest privatisation of a public resource in European history. Also, Penelope Anthias, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at University of Durham, describes the lives of indigenous people in Bolivia as they struggle to regain ancestral territory after a century of colonialism and state backed dispossession.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.2 | I'm Laurie Taylor and this is a Radio 4 podcast for Thinking Aloud. |
| 0:40.3 | The podcast in which I investigate the massive |
| 0:43.7 | and often completely unknown sale of public land in the UK in the last 40 years. |
| 0:49.4 | I'm never eating dairy milk again. My father told the family breakfast table on the 17th of October 1960. |
| 0:59.0 | The day when his beloved news chronicle, formerly owned by the Cadbury family, was bought out by the daily mail. |
| 1:05.0 | Well, that was already quite enough for Father, but then there was the additional indignity of discovery |
| 1:09.4 | when he went to the Vestibule that his usual Chronicle had been replaced by a gloating copy of the daily mail. |
| 1:16.6 | Other dedicated paper and magazine readers no doubt experienced a rather similar literary trauma |
| 1:21.8 | when their favorite publications |
| 1:23.2 | failed to appear. When Melody Maker played its last chorus, when the |
| 1:27.4 | listener could no longer hear, when Nova was over, and when the Social Sciences |
| 1:31.6 | Weekly New Society was brutally killed off by a merger with the new statesman. |
| 1:37.0 | Paul Barker, who was the magazine's editor from 1968 to 1986, |
| 1:41.0 | and who oversaw an extraordinary eclectic group of contributors, John Berger, Angela Carter, |
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