Orders of the Day — Agriculture.

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 20 December 1927.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr William Wright Mr William Wright , Rutherglen

I can tell the hon. and gallant Member an instance from my own experience as a boy on the land. It was quite a common thing for the hunt of Lord Fitzwilliam in South Yorkshire to gallop over growing crops. That happened when I was a boy working on a farm. I know of one farmer in South Lincolnshire who threatened, and threatened successfully, to shoot the first man who galloped over his land, and after that threat they did not gallop over his land. Another great loss to agriculture in this country is caused by the fact that we import eggs to the value of £19,000,000 per annum. That means an enormous loss to the small farmer and the small poultry farmer. What an enormous trade it wolld mean to these men if we obtained our eggs from them instead of importing eggs from Canada, China, and distant parts of the world, some of which were stamped as fresh eggs six months previously. Let me take another aspect of the question.

I presume the Minister of Agriculture is aware of the fact that there is a considerable amount of a very poor type of wheat produced in this country. Has he ever heard of bunted wheat? Has he heard that Professor Biffen has declared that from the reports of millers 90 per cent. of the wheat grown in this country is bunted wheat? I do not know whether hon. or right hon. Members opposite have ever tested bunted wheat and compared it with excellent white wheat. I have had it under the microscope, and I have here some specimens of bunted wheat. This has a very important bearing upon the question of health, because Mr. John Hepburn, a farmer in the county of Essex, has declared, and he is supported by medical evidence, that there is very close relationship between bunted wheat and cancer. There is an enormous and increasing death-rate from cancer in this country.

I would ask the right hon. Gentleman to look into this question. If he cares to put bunted wheat under a microscope, he will find that, while the pure wheat will show as a pure white commodity, this wheat will reveal, as it were, little gunshot pebbles which are very disastrous to health. I hope he will look into it, because at the present time there are 10,000 children dying from tuberculosis. While I believe that the death rate from that cause is declining, the death rate from cancer is enormously on the increase.

What is the root trouble of the land problem in this country? The hon. Member for Caithness (Sir A. Sinclair) suggested that Members on these benches were of opinion that landlords have a double dose of original sin. I have never expressed any such view and never intend to do so. In our judgment, disregarding all the subsidiary causes, the prime root of the problem of the agricultural industry in this country lies in the fact of the private ownership of land. No man ever made the land, and no man ever made very much of the fertility of the land. All men require access to the land, and that which all men require access to ought not to be the private property of the individual. There is not only the land, but there is the question of the atmosphere and of the nitrogen and bacteria in the air. If you allow private property in land, a landowner can control a hundred thousand acres of land and the valuable minerals underneath it, and even the valuable frost which is falling now. Some people may not like it, but it is a very valuable thing for land. Land which has been lying fallow and which was ploughed in the autumn derives great benefit from it. From the point of view of the land, the private owner controls all these atmospheric conditions.

On the 19th of February, 1872, a, return was moved for by the Earl of Derby as to the ownership of land in this country. The total area of England and Wales was given, after deducting the area within the metropolitan district, as 37,243,859 acres. How was this divided among the inhabitants, Sixty-six persons owned 1,917,076 acres; 100 persons owned 3,917,641 acres; less than 280 persons owned 5,425,000 acres, or one-sixth of the enclosed land of England and Wales; 523 persons owned one-fifth of England and Wales; 710 persons owned one-quarter of England and Wales; 875 persons, or a little more than the membership of this House, owned 9,276,000 acres. One Englishman owned 186,397 acres, another 132,500 acres and a third over 102,575 acres.

That is bad enough for England and Wales, but what do you find when you come to Scotland, in which I am more particularly interested? I am a Scottish Member, representing a constituency in Lanarkshire, where we have an appalling problem of destitution. This is a very serious matter where people live in a climate so severe that it comes down to 26 degrees of frost, as at present, and where some of them have been in semi-starvation for years. I have known people actually starving but for an odd half-crown given to them, to assist them not for a day but for a week. I say that private ownership in land is one of the serious causes of what is going on there. The results in Scotland given in that return are most startling. The total area of Scotland is 18,546,994 acres. One owner owned 1,326,000 acres and also 32,000 acres in England, making a total of 1,358,000 acres. Twelve owners owned over 4,339,000 acres, or nearly a quarter of the whole of Scotland, equal to the whole area of Wales or eight English counties. Twenty owners owned 120,000 acres each; 70 owners owned about 9,400,000 acres, or more than a half of the whole: 171 owners owned 11,029,000 acres, while nine-tenths of the whole of Scotland belonged to fewer than 1,700 persons.