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posted by martyb on Friday September 08 2017, @02:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the duke-it-out dept.

For all the tales of noble poverty and leaking ancestral homes, the private wealth of Britain's aristocracy remains phenomenal. According to a 2010 report for Country Life, a third of Britain's land still belongs to the aristocracy. Notwithstanding the extinction of some titles and the sales of land early in the 20th century, the lists of major aristocratic landowners in 1872 and in 2001 remain remarkably similar. Some of the oldest families have survived in the rudest financial health. In one analysis, the aristocratic descendants of the Plantagenet kings were worth £4bn in 2001, owning 700,000 acres, and 42 of them were members of the Lords up to 1999, including the dukes of Northumberland, Bedford, Beaufort and Norfolk.

The figures for Scotland are even more striking. Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies. More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families. In total they hold some 2.24m acres, largely in the Lowlands.

Answer: own all the land, pay no taxes, and get the system to give you massive hand-outs.


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 08 2017, @06:09PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday September 08 2017, @06:09PM (#565245)

    > land rights reform

    When Zimbabwe decided to do that, at the UK's settler's expense, the UK made them a world pariah, moved to destroy their economy, and blamed it all on the crusty dictator.

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