Lloyd George

No relation to Henry George, but he clearly knew the wisdom of Henry George's ideas.

See the cover art for the board game Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit.

Lloyd George, quoted by James Dundas White in a pamphlet entitled "Land-Value Policy"

The Greatest Grievance

"The great criticism against rating is not merely that it lacks uniformity and is unfair between the parties, but that it is unfair to the class of property that you tax and rate. This is the greatest grievance of all - that it taxes improvements. The more a landlord improves his property the higher he is rated; the more he neglects his property the less he is rated. …If he allows his cottages to fall into decay and become empty, his rates are less; but if he is a good, sound landlord, who repairs ruinous cottages and builds new ones, up go his rates. The man who trusts to obsolete machinery in his business can keep his rates low; but the man who puts in new machinery and improves his buildings has to pay a higher contribution to the rates." [Mr. Lloyd George, in the House of Commons, 28th April 1913]

Tackle Land-values First

"You cannot build houses without land; you cannot lay down trams for the purpose of spreading the population over a wider area without land. As long as the landlords allowed to charge prohibitive prices for a bit of land, even land, without contributing anything to local resources, so long will this terrible congestion remain in our towns. That is the first great trust to deal with, and for another reason --resources of local taxation are almost exhausted. It is essential that you should get some new resources for this purpose. What better resources can you get than this wealth created by the community, and how better can it be used than for the benefit of the community? ...It is all very well to produce Housing of the Working Classes Bills. They will never be effective until you tackle the taxation of land-values." [Mr. Lloyd George, at Newcastle, 4th March 1903]

Who ordained . . .?

"Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth; who is it? Who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour, to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself . . . and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbour receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of the law come from? Whose finger inscribed it?" [Mr. Lloyd George, at Newcastle, 30th September 1909]

Let's Burst It!

"Search out every problem, look into these questions thoroughly, and the more thoroughly you look into them you will find that the land is at the root of most of them. Housing, wages, food, health, the development of a virile, independent, manly, Imperial race - you must have a free land system as an essential condition of these. To use a gardening phrase, our social and economic condition is root-bound by the feudal system. It has no room to develop, but its roots are breaking through. Well, let's burst it!" [Mr. Lloyd George, at Aberdeen, 29th November 1912]

Entering the Inheritance

"We want to do something to bring the land within the grasp of the people. We want to put an end to the system whereby the land of this country is retailed by the ounce, so that there should not be an extra grain of breathing spaces. . . .The resources of the land are frozen by the old feudal system. I am looking forward to the spring-time, when the thaw will set in, and when the people and the children of the people shall enter into the inheritance that has been given them from on high." [Mr. Lloyd George, at Liverpool, 21st December 1909]

 

Take the question of over-crowding; the land question in the towns bears on that. It is all ver well to produce "Housing of working class" bills; they will never be effective until you tackle the taxation of land values."