Jeremy Corbyn is right on allotments as part of People’s History
Kevin Ovenden posting on FB correctly pointed to the propensity of the Government to hit on issues that manage to unite unlikely bedfellows against it. In this case it was Angela Rayner’s decision to repurpose some allotments for social housing.
Its August and the story has an element of culture war about it. The number of allotments involved was small in number and Rayner cant do it without consulting the National Allotments Society.
Even so the direction of possible policy seems clear and it led to Jeremy Corbyn writing a piece in defence of allotments in, er, the Daily Telegraph. Corbyn himself is a veteran allotment holder (in East Finchley since you ask). Certainly in North London allotments are hard to come by and highly prized.
I’ll post further on Corbyn’s Telegraph article (which is paywalled) but he is right to position allotments in people’s history. The right to grow vegetables and keep a pig was eroded as land was enclosed and the right to common land has been a political struggle ever since.
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class touches on the issue.
He notes that ‘the yearning for land arises again and again, twisted in with the outworker’s desire to ‘independence’ from the days of (Thomas) Spence to the Chartist Land Plan and beyond. Perhaps its vestiges are still with us today, in allotments and garden plots. Land always carries associations- of status, security, rights- more profound than the value of its crop.
Leave a Reply