Newsflash No.3: Lights in a Dark Age

1. Lights in a Dark Age

First, the aforementioned office is pretty much where I’m going to be living for the next few months, having just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write a new book provisionally entitled Lights in a Dark Age with a view to publication in Autumn 2025.

I’ll say a bit more about the book in future posts but since most of it isn’t written yet I spy an opportunity for some reader input. So, two questions:

1. Taking the title as your cue, what do you think such a book might be about, and what do you think should be in it?

2. Imagine a future dark age in the place where you live. How might it emerge out of present circumstances, and what might it look like – how might people get by?

Okay, so technically that’s five questions for the price of two. I like to think I’m an author who delivers value for money. On which note, I promise to send a free copy of the book to the person who provides the most informative/entertaining reply. There’s a judging committee of one, whose decision is final.

Comments to be made preferably in public beneath this post, but privately if you prefer via the contact form. Please note that my unintentional hopelessness at answering people’s emails promptly or at all is likely to get worse while I write the book, but I’ll do my best to acknowledge any contributions.

I’ll be focusing most of my efforts on the book in the next few months, so I probably won’t be posting much here during that time. I do have a couple more offerings already lined up, and I’ll try to post some brief updates on the book and general check-ins. So I hope you’ll stay in touch…

On that note, and in relation to author value for money, a shout out to those among my Substack readers who have generously opted for a paid subscription. Apologies that you won’t be getting much for your money over the next few months. Feel free to get in touch with me with any thoughts or suggestions about how I can make it up to you.

2. An anniversary

More local news: it’s been almost exactly ten years since I and my family won our bureaucratic fight to live on our landholding, as reported on this blog about, er, ten years ago. There was a party here last weekend which, among other things, celebrated the anniversary. My wife and I got some touching appreciations about the contribution of our project to the local community and to the path of various people who’ve passed through and worked on the site. In my online life I get a certain amount of negative commentary concerning our admittedly limited and faltering efforts to practice the small farm future we preach. The price of sticking my head above the parapet, I guess. Anyway, it was nice to get positive vibes from people here on the spot in real life. Though the same goes, of course, for the wonderful online community of commenters here on this real-life blog also.

3. A chancellor calls

Casting the news net a bit wider, I’ve been tracking some of the fierce debates on social media arising from the announcement in Chancellor Reeves’ recent budget that, within various limits, farmland in Britain will be subject to inheritance tax for the first time. I’m interested to hear views about this. Generally, I’m in favour of inheritance taxes as a way of defusing unearned privilege and keeping society’s goods well distributed among the population so they can do their most effective work. Although this does depend on trusting the tax-raising power with people’s hard-earned money, which I confess is a stretch these days.

But there are two problems with the proposal as I see it. One is that the real estate value of farmland is out of all proportion to the money you can make from producing food from it. So although the allowances in the budget seem generous on paper – 100% relief on the first £1 million of combined agricultural/business property, which probably means most members of the public will give the tiny violin treatment to farmers’ complaints about it – nevertheless it might make it harder to keep financing production out of land equity as many farmers do, and without careful long-term succession planning the new tax could result in next-generation farmers having to break up the farms they inherit and downsize.

I don’t have a problem with smaller farms as such – I did write a book called A Small Farm Future after all – but it looks to me like the new rules are going to disproportionately hit what effectively are small farms within the parameters of our existing absurdly industrialised economy. There’s already what some call a ‘missing middle’ between non-commercial or semi-commercial smallholdings like mine and vast, uber-commodified industrial concerns. I fear the new policy is going to hollow out the middle even more. Arguments are flying about how many farms and farmers it will affect. Not many, say the government. Well, maybe not, but there aren’t that many to begin with.

The other problem is that corporations don’t die and don’t pay inheritance tax. It seems likely that a lot of the farmland passing out of the hands of family farmers as a result of this policy will end up on corporate balance sheets. And if I don’t trust tax-raising governments, I trust land-buying corporations a great deal less.

So I think the position I’ve come to is that, yes, the government should signal a long-term intention to levy inheritance tax on farmland, once it’s sorted out the imbalance between too-low food prices and too-high land and housing prices. The IHT policy might help on the latter front, but other policy levers could come first – maybe a ban on corporations from buying farmland? Or, better, since corporations are viewed as legal persons, perhaps they should now be treated as actual persons and liquidated after three score years and ten, with all assets subject to taxation and wide dispersal upon liquidation. What are the odds of that finding its way into a government budget?

4. A familiar face…

Finally, to go international with our news aggregator, a little snippet you may not have heard – a familiar face will soon be returning to the White House, with a firm mandate to rule. A familiar angry face, judging by the press photos … the guy always seems to look stoked up about something.

Well, me too I guess. But on a personal front, the main news I have to report is how very unstoked I’ve been emotionally by the news. I worked myself up into quite a lather about it the first time around in 2016, before commentators on this blog gently deflated me (belated thanks, by the way). Whereas with the second coming, I’ve found myself almost having to feign the appropriate purse-lipped disapproval to fit in with my friends.

I’m not quite sure why this is. Possibly I peaked too early the first time and burnt out. Possibly it’s because in the last eight years I’ve given up on the notion that mainstream statist politics is going to deliver any sensible solutions to real problems. Maybe a different way of saying that is that I think ‘progressive’ political parties are almost (and sometimes even more) deluded as conservative ones about the nature of the problems we face and keep making terrible choices about how to align themselves. I’ve just come across the writing of Musa al-Gharbi, whose analysis of the election and the political winds more generally I find super-interesting. I’ve seen some commentators calling for a ‘Christopher Lasch party’ to contest the next election, and I hope to write more about that when the decks have cleared.

Anyway, as I’ve often said here, I don’t think renewal is going to come from the centre. So while I genuinely mourn the misery to come for people who, unlike me, are going to be in the frontline, I guess I’m finding it hard to get invested in the politics of the centre.

I say all this neither with great pride nor shame, but I’d be interested in any (polite) reactions to my reaction from valued commenters here.

One small bright spot arising from the election is that I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised at some of the analysis of it in The Guardian, a publication I’d all but given up on. Nice to see this piece from Aditya Chakrabortty speaking up for the virtues of populism as a political tradition, rather than the usual ignorant dismissals of it. And I couldn’t agree more with the argument in another article that what’s needed is:

a massive decentralisation, a devolution of politics to the people, the creation of a genuine democracy that cannot so easily be captured, the building of an ecological civilisation that subordinates economics to Earth systems, not the other way round

I trust we’ll be seeing the pledges in favour of agrarian localism, food sovereignty, ruralism, and against nuclear power, manufactured food, and monopoly in the food and property systems from this quarter soon!

But for now, three quick questions to end, on which I’d be interested to hear any thoughts.

First, I understand from news reports that some of the voter enthusiasm for the Republicans was around a sense they’d do a better job with the economy. Yet the protectionist policies they’re trumpeting seem unlikely to deliver on those expectations, albeit probably more likely in an economy with the size and power of the USA than anywhere else. So how will this play out? I’m broadly in favour of protectionist economic policies, but I don’t think they’re easily justifiable in terms of short-term economic betterment using conventional metrics, especially in rich countries. How can they be realised politically, and what happens if they fail?

Second, as I also understand from news reports, Harris made quite a play in her campaign on women’s rights issues, but it didn’t work out well for her electorally in terms of women’s votes. What happened?

Third, it’s looking like one result of the election might be more political distancing by some states from the federal centre. How might that play out longer term?

That’s a lot of questions in one blog post. I hope there’ll be a rich seam of ongoing debate about them below, while alas I turn my attention fully toward book-writing.