Who owns the country? The secretive companies hoarding England's land

Multi-million pound corporations with complex structures have purchased the very ground we walk on – and we are only just beginning to discover the damage it is doing to Britain. By Guy Shrubsole in The Guardian 


Despite owning 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of land, managing a property portfolio worth £2.3bn and having control over huge swaths of central Manchester and Liverpool, very few people have heard of a company named Peel Holdings. It owns the Manchester Ship Canal. It built the Trafford Centre shopping complex and, more recently, sold it in the largest single property acquisition in Britain’s history. It was the developer behind the MediaCityUK site in Salford, to which the BBC and ITV have relocated many of their operations in recent years. Airports, fracking, retail – the list of Peel business interests stretches on and on.

Peel Holdings operates behind the scenes, quietly acquiring land and real estate, cutting billion-pound deals and influencing numerous planning decisions. Its investment decisions have had an enormous impact, whether for good or ill, on the places where millions of people live and work.

Peel’s ultimate owner, the billionaire John Whittaker, is notoriously publicity-shy: he lives on the Isle of Man, has never given an interview and helicopters into his company’s offices for board meetings. He built Peel Holdings in the 1970s and 80s by buying up a series of companies whose fortunes had decayed, but which still controlled valuable land. Foremost among these was the Manchester Ship Canal Company, purchased in 1987. The canal turned out to be valuable not simply as a freight route, but also because of the redevelopment potential of the land that flanked it.

Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population



Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. In 2008, it emerged that Peel was a dominant force behind a business grouping that had formed to lobby against Manchester’s proposed congestion charge. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall. Peel’s lobbying paid off: voters rejected the charge in the local referendum and the proposal was dropped.

Throughout England, cash-strapped councils are being outgunned by corporate developers pressing to get their way. The situation is exacerbated by a system that has allowed companies like Peel to keep their corporate structures obscure and their landholdings hidden. A 2013 report by Liverpool-based thinktank Ex Urbe found “well in excess of 300 separately registered UK companies owned or controlled” by Peel. Tracing the conglomerate’s structure is an investigator’s nightmare. Try it yourself on the Companies House website: type in “Peel Land and Property Investments PLC”, and then click through to persons with significant control. This gives you the name of its parent company, Peel Investments Holdings Ltd. So far, so good. But then repeat the steps for the parent company, and yet another holding company emerges; then another, and another. It’s like a series of Russian dolls, one nested inside another.

Until recently, it was even harder to get a handle on the land Peel Holdings owns. Sometimes the company has provided a tantalising glimpse: one map it produced in 2015, as part of some marketing spiel around the “northern powerhouse”, showcases 150 sites it owns across the north-west. It confirms the vast spread of Peel’s landed interests – from Liverpool John Lennon airport, through shale gas well pads, to one of the UK’s largest onshore wind farms. But it’s clearly not everything. A more exhaustive, independent list of the company’s landholdings might allow communities to be forewarned of future developments. As Ex Urbe’s report on Peel concludes: “Peel schemes rarely come to light until they are effectively a fait accompli and the conglomerate is confident they will go ahead, irrespective of public opinion.”

While Peel Holdings is unusual for the sheer amount of land it controls, it is also illustrative of corporate landowners everywhere. Corporations looking to develop land have numerous tricks up their sleeve that they can use to evade scrutiny and get their way, from shell company structures to offshore entities. Companies with big enough budgets can often ride roughshod over the planning system, beating cash-strapped councils and volunteer community groups. And companies have for a long time benefited from having their landholdings kept secret, giving them the element of surprise when it comes to lobbying councils over planning decisions and the use of public space. But now, at long last, that is starting to change. If we want to “take back control” of our country, we need to understand how much of it is currently controlled by corporations.

In 2015, the Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson lodged a freedom of information (FOI) request with the Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales. He asked it to release a database detailing the area of land owned by all UK-registered companies and corporate bodies. Eriksson later shared this database with me, and what it revealed was astonishing. Here, laid bare after the dataset had been cleaned up, was a picture of corporate control: companies today own about 2.6m hectares of land, or roughly 18% of England and Wales.

In the unpromising format of an Excel spreadsheet, a compelling picture emerged. Alongside the utilities privatised by Margaret Thatcher and John Major – the water companies, in particular – and the big corporate landowners, were PLCs with multiple shareholders. There were household names, such as Tesco, Tata Steel and the housebuilder Taylor Wimpey, and others more obscure. MRH Minerals, for example, appeared to own 28,000 hectares of land, making it one of the biggest corporate landowners in England and Wales.

Gradually, I pieced together a list of what looked to be the top 50 landowning companies, which together own more than 405,000 hectares of England and Wales. Peel Holdings and many of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly, feature high on the list. But while the dataset revealed in stark detail the area of land owned by UK-based companies, it did nothing to tell us what they owned, and where.

That would take another two years to emerge. Meanwhile, Eriksson had been busy at work with his Private Eye colleague Richard Brooks and the computer programmer Anna Powell-Smith, delving into another form of corporate landowner – firms based overseas, yet owning land in the UK. Of particular interest were companies based in offshore tax havens, a wholly legal but controversial practice, given the opportunities offshore ownership gives for possible tax avoidance and for concealing the identities of who ultimately controls a company. Further FOI requests to the Land Registry by Eriksson hit the jackpot when he was sent – “accidentally”, the Land Registry would later claim – a huge dataset of overseas and offshore-registered companies that had bought land in England and Wales between 2005 and 2014: some 113,119 hectares of land and property, worth a staggering £170bn.

 

Victoria Harbour building at Salford Quays, owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Mike Robinson/Alamy

Private Eye’s work revealed that a large chunk of the country was not only under corporate control, but owned by companies that – in many cases – were almost certainly seeking to avoid paying tax, that most basic contribution to a civilised society. Some potentially had an even darker motive: purchasing property in England or Wales as a means for kleptocratic regimes or corrupt businessmen to launder money, and to get a healthy return on their ill-gotten gains in the process. This was information that clearly ought to be out in the open, with a huge public interest case for doing so. And yet the government had sat on it for years.

The political ramifications of these revelations were profound. They kickstarted a process of opening up information on land ownership that, although far slower and less complete than many would have liked, has nevertheless transformed our understanding of what companies own. In November 2017, the Land Registry released its corporate and commercial dataset, free of charge and open to all. It revealed, for the first time, the 3.5m land titles owned by UK-based corporate bodies – covering both public sector institutions and private firms – with limited companies owning the majority, 2.1m, of these. But there were two important caveats. Although we now had the addresses owned by companies, the dataset omitted to tell us the size of land they owned. Second, the data lacked accurate information on locations, making it hard to map.

Despite this, what can we now say about company-owned land in England and Wales? Quite a lot, it turns out. We know, for example, that the company with the third-highest number of land titles is the mysterious Wallace Estates, a firm with a £200m property portfolio but virtually no public presence, and which is owned ultimately by a secretive Italian count. Wallace Estates makes its money from the controversial ground rents market, whereby it owns thousands of freehold properties and sells on long leases with annual ground rents.

We also now know that Peel Holdings and its numerous subsidiaries owns at least 1,000 parcels of land across England – not just shopping centres and ports in the north-west, but also a hill in Suffolk, farmland along the Medway and an industrial estate in the Cotswolds. Councils, MPs and residents wanting to keep an eye on what developers and property companies are up to in their area now have a powerful new tool at their disposal.

The data is full of odd quirks and details. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the arms manufacturer BAE owns a nightclub in Cardiff, a pub on Blackpool’s promenade and a service station in Pease Pottage, Sussex? It turns out that they are all investments made by BAE’s pension fund; if selling missiles to Saudi Arabia doesn’t prove profitable enough, it appears the company’s strategy is to make a few quid out of tired drivers stopping for a coffee break off the M23.

The data also lets us peer into the property acquisitions of the big supermarkets, which back in the 1990s and early 2000s involved building up huge land banks to construct ever more out-of-town retail parks. Tesco, via a welter of subsidiaries, owns more than 4,500 hectares of land – and although much of this comprises existing stores, a good chunk also appears to be empty plots, apparently earmarked for future development. One analysis by the Guardian in 2014 estimated that the supermarket was hoarding enough land to accommodate 15,000 homes. More recently, however, Tesco’s financial travails have prompted it to sell off some of its sites. Internet shopping and pricier petrol have made giant hypermarkets built miles from where people live look less and less like smart investments. In 2016, Tesco’s beleaguered CEO announced the company was looking to make better use of the land it owned by selling it for housing, and even by building flats on top of its superstores. As for the supermarkets’ internet shopping rival Amazon, whose gigantic “fulfilment centres” resemble the vast US government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark – well, Amazon currently has 16 of those across the UK. And it has grown very quickly: all but one of its property leases have been bought in the past decade.

Companies are increasingly taking over previously public space in cities, too. Recent years have seen a proliferation of Pops – privately owned public spaces – as London, Manchester and other places redevelop and gentrify. You know the sort of thing: expensively landscaped swaths of “public realm”. Aesthetically, they are all very nice, but try to use Pops for some peaceful protest, and you are in for trouble. They are invariably governed by special bylaws and policed by private security, itching to get in your face. I once found this to my cost when staging a tiny, two-person anti-fracking demo outside shale-gas financiers Barclays bank in Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is partly owned by the Qatari Investment Authority, and – bizarrely – photography is banned. Within a minute of us taking the first selfie on our innocuous protest, security guards had descended en masse, and we spent the next hour running around Canary Wharf trying to evade them.

The Land Registry’s corporate ownership dataset contains millions of entries, and much remains to be uncovered. Some of the information appears trivial at first glance – a company owns a factory here, an office there: so what? But as more people pore over the data, more stories will likely emerge. Future researchers might find intriguing correlations between the locations of England’s thousands of fast-food stores and the health of nearby populations, be able to track gentrification through the displacement of KFC outlets by Nando’s restaurants, and so on.

But to really get under the skin of how companies treat the land they own, and the wider repercussions, we need to zoom in on the housing sector, where debates about companies involved in land banking and profiteering from land sales are crucial to our understanding of the housing crisis.

One particularly controversial aspect of the housing debate that has generated much heat, and little light, in recent years is the debacle over land banking, the practice of hoarding land and holding it back from development until its price increases.

In 2016, the then housing secretary, Sajid Javid, furiously accused large housing developers of land banking and demanded they “release their stranglehold” on land supply. Housebuilders, not used to such impertinence from a Conservative minister, hit back. “As has been proved by various investigations in the past, housebuilders do not land bank,” a spokesperson for the Home Builders Federation told the Telegraph. “In the current market where demand is high, there is absolutely no reason to do so.”

So who is right? This is a complex area, but one that is important to investigate. Can the Land Registry’s corporate ownership data help us get to the bottom of it?

It is common for UK pension funds and insurance companies to buy up land as a long-term strategic investment. Legal & General, for example, owns 1,500 hectares of land that it openly calls a “strategic land portfolio … stretching from Luton to Cardiff”. Its rationale for buying land is simple: “Strategic land holdings are underpinned by their existing use value [such as farming] and give us the opportunity to create further value through planning promotion and infrastructure works over the medium to long term.”

When I looked into where Legal & General’s land was located, I noticed something odd. Nearly all of it lay within green belt areas, where development is restricted. The company appears to have bought it with the aim of lobbying councils to ultimately rip up such restrictions and redesignate the site for development in future.

In the case of pension funds lobbying to rip up the green belt, it’s the planning system that is (rightly) constraining development, not land banking itself. And none of this implicates the usual bogeymen of the housing crisis, the big housebuilding companies. By examining what these major developers own, is it possible to say whether they’re actively engaged in land banking?

There is no doubt that many of the major housebuilding companies own a lot of land. What’s more, housing developers themselves talk about their “current land banks” and publish figures in annual reports listing the number of homes they think they can build using land where they have planning permission. As the housing charity Shelter has found, the top 10 housing developers have land banks with space for more than 400,000 homes – about six years’ supply at current building rates.

Prompted by such statistics, the government ordered a review into build-out rates in 2017, led by Sir Oliver Letwin. Yet when Letwin delivered his draft report, he once again exonerated housebuilders from the charge of land banking. “I cannot find any evidence that the major housebuilders are financial investors of this kind,” he stated, pointing the finger of blame instead at the rate at which new homes could be absorbed into the marketplace.

Part of the problem is that the data on what companies own still isn’t good enough to prove whether or not land banking is occurring. The aforementioned Anna Powell-Smith has tried to map the land owned by housing developers, but has been thwarted by the lack in the Land Registry’s corporate dataset of the necessary information to link data on who owns a site with digital maps of that area. That makes it very hard to assess, for example, whether a piece of land owned by a housebuilder for decades is a prime site accruing in value or a leftover fragment of ground from a past development.

 

Shoppers in the Trafford Centre, a shopping mall until recently owned by Peel Holdings. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty

Second, the scope of Letwin’s review was drawn too narrowly to examine the wider problem of land banking by landowners beyond the major housebuilders. As the housing market analyst Neal Hudson said when it was published, the “review remit ignored the most important and unknown bit of the market: sites and land ownership pre-planning.”

In fact, if Letwin had raised his sights a little higher, he would have seen there is a whole industry of land promoters working with landowners to promote sites, have them earmarked for development in the council’s local plan, and increase their asking price. As investigations by Isabelle Fraser of the Telegraph have revealed: “A group of private companies, largely unknown to the public, have carved out a lucrative niche locating and snapping up land across the UK.”

One such company, Gladman Land, boasts on its website of a 90% success rate at getting sites developed. Few of these firms appear to own much land themselves; rather, they work with other landowners, perhaps signing options agreements or other such deals. Consultants Molior have estimated that between 25% and 45% of sites with planning permission in London are owned by companies that have never built a home.

This gets us to the heart of the housing crisis. Sure, we need housing developers to build more homes. But most of all we need them to build affordable homes. And developers that are forced to pay through the nose to persuade landowners to part with their land end up with less money left over for good-quality, affordable housing. By all means, let’s continue to pressure housebuilders whenever they try to renege on their planning agreements. But at root, we have to find ways to encourage landowners of all kinds – corporate or otherwise – to part with their land at cheaper prices.

Since the first appearance of modern corporations in the Victorian period, companies have expanded to become the owners of nearly a fifth of all land in England and Wales. Much of this land acquisition is uncontested: space for a factory here, an office block there. But some of it has proven highly controversial. Huge retailers and property groups like Tesco and Peel Holdings have eroded town centres and high streets by amassing land for out-of-town superstores, and lobbied to maintain a culture of car dependency. Multinational agribusinesses have exacerbated the industrialisation of our food supply and accelerated the decline of small-scale farmers. Property firms have made tidy profits from the privatisation of formerly public land – which might otherwise have gone into the public purse, had previous governments treated their assets more wisely.

Though the veil of secrecy around company structures and what corporations own is at last lifting, thanks to recent data disclosures by government, there’s still much that needs to be done to make sense of this new information. The Land Registry needs to disclose proper maps of what companies own if we are to get to the bottom of suspect practices like land banking, and give communities a fighting chance in local planning battles.

Legally obliged to maximise profits for their shareholders, and biased towards short-term returns, companies make for poor custodians of land. Nor are corporate landowners capable of solving the housing crisis. Hoarded, developed, polluted, dug up, landfilled: the corporate control of England’s acres has gone far enough.

The billionaires’ donations will turn Notre Dame into a monument to hypocrisy

Handouts from France’s super-rich make them look pious, and lend credibility to gross inequality writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

Antoine Arnault, CEO of Berluti, and his wife Natalia Vodianova visit Notre-Dame de Paris after the fire. Photograph: POOL/Reuters


In 2017, a welter of stories appeared in the international press pointing out the brokenness of Paris’s Notre Dame. Cathedral officials showed journalists how patches of limestone would crumble at a finger’s touch. Gargoyles that had lost their heads were patched up with plastic pipes, while fallen balustrades were replaced with wooden planks. All this decay was caused by pollution, acid rain and eight centuries of use – but also official neglect was to blame. Keepers of the building had begged for more money, but neither the belt-tightening French government nor the wealthy grumbling about higher taxes gave enough.

Then came Holy Week 2019 and the inferno by the Seine and all of a sudden, nobody can give too much. After years of preaching the shrinking of the public sector, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, now wants to mobilise the full resources of the state to get the roofless cathedral rebuilt within just five years. And money from France’s billionaire class keeps raining down. In three days, the cathedral has been pledged €100m (£86m) from Francois-Henri Pinault, the ultimate owner of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent; €200m (£172m) from the Arnault family of Louis Vuitton fame; another €200m from L’Oreal owners the Bettencourt Meyers family, and €100 from French oil giant Total.

From these two episodes just two years apart, we can draw two conclusions. The first is that what is happening this week is a remarkable display of public-sector coordination and private generosity, in the service of a great thing: the restoration of one of the world’s treasures. And the second is that the rebuilt cathedral will be a monument to the gigantic hypocrisy of austerity politics.

Francois-Henri Pinault, pictured with his wife, Salma Hayek, has pledged €100m to Notre Dame. Photograph: Nina Prommer/EPA

A heritage site that roused barely a shrug two years ago means the world this week. A billionaire class that shrieked at the wealth taxes of the former president François Hollande is happy to stump up whatever it takes now. A politician, Emmanuel Macron, who has repeatedly told the poor they must live on less and the workers that they must give more to bosses, now plays at being a national leader – like Charles de Gaulle with more hair wax. And a capital city that over the past few months has been under siege from the working poor of the gilets jaunes is reminded once again of the enormous wealth held by a very few of its citizens. Everything that was impossible as late as 2017 is now deemed essential in 2019.

Of course, we would prefer private millions to be pulled out from under goose-feather pillows and spent on public works. But we should also be asking why it takes an almighty conflagration to force this to happen; and why those generous donors are so averse to giving their money to democratically chosen priorities, which is what taxes represent. If the ultra-rich can chuck in so many millions of euros for a building, then what stops them ending hunger and poverty?

Few want to ask that question, nor the obvious follow-up about how much the mullti-billion-owning Catholic church will stump up. The press prefer instead to boggle at the nine-figure sums that have been magicked up, while Macron and others congratulate the donors without asking where that money came from. Some go further still. The editor of Moneyweek went so far as to remark on social media: “Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy.” Well, yes. And democracy can be such a downer and greater equality a massive drag.

But for those who care to look, there is plenty here that is ugly. No sooner had Pinault pledged his €100 million, then his consigliere, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, sprang forth to suggest that all such donations should receive a 90% tax deduction. In other words, the French public should pay for most of its beloved billionaires’ generosity. The suggestion was swiftly withdrawn, but its proposer is no naïf. A former culture minister, Aillagon knows that charitable giving in France attracts a 60% tax rebate: so for every €100m some industrialist papa gâteau wants to chip in, the public will pay €60m. At least Reuters reports that the Pinault family is sitting out this particular  round and not claiming tax relief.

Then there’s the source of that €200m pledge from France’s richest man, Bernaud Arnault, who just a few years ago was reported to be applying for Belgian nationality. This was not to enjoy any tax advantages, said his spokesman, but purely to better order his affairs. Nothing to do with the fact that inheritance tax in Belgium is only 3%, while France charges 11%, non monsieur.

Such ghastliness is not France’s alone. It is international and it is orthodoxy. Just look at Thursday’s Guardian lead story on how 1% of people in England own 50% of its land. Or remind yourself of the Oxfam finding that last year, the world’s 2,200 billionaires got 12% wealthier, while the bottom 3.5 billion people grew 11% poorer. Those at the top extract their wealth from those below – and then are applauded when they chuck us their spare change. From here it is just a short selfie-stick shuffle to a rebuilt Notre Dame boasting an Arnault gallery and a L’Oreal visitor centre. I’m joking, you snort. In which case, let me take you to the Sackler gallery at London’s Serpentine, generously donated by the family that extracted millions from opioid addiction.

Not least among this litany of ironies is that it takes a Catholic cathedral to remind us that we have barely advanced an inch from the medieval buying of indulgences, when the rich could amass their fortunes in as filthy a fashion as they liked – and then donate to the Church to launder their reputations and ensure their salvation. What was it that old Friar Tetzel used to say? “As soon as gold in the coffer rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs.”

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'Calling bullshit': the college class on how not to be duped by the news

Professors at the University of Washington say the course provides the most useful skill college can offer writes James McWilliams in The Guardian

 

‘Our world is saturated with bullshit,’ the professors say. ‘This is our attempt to fight back.’ Photograph: Leland Bobbe/Getty Images/Image Source


To prepare themselves for future success in the American workforce, today’s college students are increasingly choosing courses in business, biomedical science, engineering, computer science, and various health-related disciplines.

These classes are bound to help undergraduates capitalize on the “college payoff”, but chances are good that none of them comes with a promise of this magnitude: “We will be astonished if these skills [learned in this course] do not turn out to be the most useful and most broadly applicable of those that you acquire during the course of your college education.”

Sound like bullshit? If so, there’s no better way to detect it than to consider the class that makes the claim. Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World, designed and co-taught by the University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, begins with a premise so obvious we barely lend it the attention it deserves: “Our world is saturated with bullshit.” And so, every week for 12 weeks, the professors expose “one specific facet of bullshit”, doing so in the explicit spirit of resistance. “This is,” they explain, “our attempt to fight back.”

The problem of bullshit transcends political bounds, the class teaches. The proliferation of bullshit, according to West and Bergstrom, is “not a matter of left- or rightwing ideology; both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit. Rather (and at the risk of grandiose language) adequate bullshit detection strikes us as essential to the survival of liberal democracy.” They make it a point to stress that they began to work on the syllabus for this class back in 2015 – it’s not, they clarify, “a swipe at the Trump administration”.


There has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit

Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? West and Bergstrom think that it is. They write, “Whether or not that usage is appropriate, we feel that the verb phrase calling bullshit definitely applies to falsehoods irrespective of the intentions of the author or speaker.”

The reason for the class’s existence comes down to a simple and somewhat alarming reality: even the most educated and savvy consumer of information is easily misled in today’s complex information ecosystem. Calling Bullshit is not dedicated to teaching students that Fox News promotes “fake news” or that National Enquirer headlines are fallacious. Instead, the class operates under the assumption that the structures through which today’s endless information comes to the consumer – algorithms, data graphics, info analytics, peer-reviewed publications – are in many ways as full of bullshit as the fake news we easily recognize as bogus. One scientist that West and Bergstrom cite in their syllabus goes so far as to say that, due to the fact that journals are prone to only publish positive results, “most published scientific results are probably false”.

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A case in point is a 2016 article called Automated Inferences on Criminality Using Face Images. In it, the authors present an algorithm that can supposedly teach a machine to determine criminality with 90% accuracy based solely on a person’s headshot. Their core assumption is that, unlike humans, a machine is relatively free of emotion and bias. West and Bergstrom call bullshit, sending students to explore the sample of photos used to represent criminals in the experiment: all them are of convictedcriminals. The professors claim that “it seems less plausible to us that facial features are associated with criminal tendencies than it is that they are correlated with juries’ decisions to convict”. Conclusion: the algorithm is more correlated with facial characteristics that make a person convictable than a set of criminal inclinations.

By teaching ways to find misinformation in the venues many of us consider pristine realms of expertise – peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, reports by the National Institutes of Health, TED Talks – West and Bergstrom highlight the ultimate paradox of the information age: more and more knowledge is making us less and less reasonable.

  ‘Even the most educated and savvy consumer of information is easily misled in today’s complex information ecosystem.’ Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA

As we gather more data for mathematical models to better analyze, for example, the shrinking gap between elite male and female runners, we remain as prone as ever to misusing that data to achieve erroneous results. West and Bergstrom cite a 2004 Nature article in which the authors use linear regression to trace the closing gap between men and women’s running times, concluding that women will outpace men in the year 2156. To take down this kind of bullshit, the professors introduce the idea of reductio ad absurdum, which in this case would make the year 2636 far more interesting than 2156, as it’s then that, if the Nature study is right, “times of less than zero will be recorded”.

West and Bergstrom first offered the class in January of 2017 with modest expectations. “We would have been happy if a couple of our colleagues and friends would have said: ‘Cool idea, we should pass that along,’” West says. But within months the course had made national – and then international – news. “We have never guessed that it would get this kind of a response.”

To say that a nerve has been touched would be an understatement. After posting their website online, West and Bergstrom were swamped with emails and media requests from all over the world. Glowing press reports of the class’s ambitions contributed to the growing sense that something seismic in higher education was under way.

The professors were especially pleased by the interest shown among other universities – and even high schools – in modeling a course after their syllabus. Soon the Knight Foundation provided $50,000 for West and Bergstrom to help high school kids, librarians, journalists, and the general public become competent bullshit detectors.

In 1945, when Harvard University defined for the nation the role of higher education with its report on General Education in a Free Society, it stressed as its main goal “the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition”. The assumption, which now seems quaint, was that knowledge, which came from information, was the basis of character development.

Calling Bullshit, which provides the tools for every American (the lectures and readings are all online) to disrupt the foundation of even the most trusted source of information, reveals how profoundly difficult endless information has made the task of achieving that humane tradition. How the necessary shift from conveying wisdom to debunking it will play out is anyone’s guess, but if West and Bergstrom get their way – and it seems that they are – it will mean calling a lot of bullshit before we get to the business of becoming better citizens.

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How Scotland erased Guyana from its past

The portrayal of Scots as abolitionists and liberal champions has hidden a long history of profiting from slavery in the Caribbean writes Yvonne Singh in The Guardian 


The mangrove-fringed coast of Guyana, at the north-eastern tip of South America, does not immediately bring to mind the Highlands of Scotland, in the northernmost part of Great Britain. Guyana’s mudflats and silty brown coastal water have little in common with the lush green mountains and glens of the Highlands. If these landscapes share anything, it is their remoteness – one on the edge of a former empire burnished by the relentless equatorial sun and one on the edge of Europe whipped mercilessly by the Atlantic winds.
But look closer and the links are there: Alness, Ankerville, Belladrum, Borlum, Cromarty, Culcairn, Dingwall, Dunrobin, Fyrish, Glastullich, Inverness, Kintail, Kintyre, Rosehall, Tain, Tarlogie, a join-the-dots list of placenames (30 in all) south of Guyana’s capital Georgetown that hint of a hidden association with the Scottish Highlands some 5,000 miles away.

As a child, I knew little of my parents’ country Guyana. I knew that it was part of the British West Indies and the only English-speaking country in South America. I knew that my parents, as part of the Windrush generation, had answered the call for labour in postwar Britain. My father, aged 19, travelled by ship from Trinidad in 1960 and enjoyed a long career with the Royal Mail; my mother arrived by plane a couple of years later, to work as a nurse at Rushgreen hospital in Essex.

I had visited Guyana just once at nine years old (our only plane holiday as children) when my mother’s youngest sister was getting married. My memories of that time are fragmented and rather strange: the scorching heat; the propensity of people to douse themselves with Limacol (“breeze in a bottle”); the glossy rubber leaves the size of dinner plates that were used to serve sticky balls of rice at the wedding dinner; the constant nag of insects – mosquitoes, cockroaches, spiders, flies – magnified in size and more vicious than any I’d seen in the UK; the pain and humiliation of getting sunburnt for the first time (“wha’ happ’n wid de gal face”); and finally my aunt looking demure in a white lace wedding dress for the Christian wedding ceremony, then transforming into a Lakshmi-like vision in a red-and-gold sari for the Hindu nuptials.

For this was and is a country that celebrated all religions – Christian, Hindu, Muslim – all features of a colonial past that involved the forced movement of people across continents to a life of bondage and indenture. Those people later settled and made Guyana their home, so it is known as the land of six peoples, with people of African, Indian, Chinese and European descent, as well as native Amerindians and a sizeable mixed-race group, making up its population.

The story of why my own family came to be in the Caribbean had been blurred over time: it was something to do with the British, something to do with slavery, but that was all that was shared. Decades later the Guyanese-American journalist Gaiutra Bahadur published the seminal book Coolie Woman, which brought much insight, but there have been few other notable works. Guyana doesn’t feature in the history books or the school curriculum in Britain.

This is astonishing when you think that the British had such a role to play in that nation’s birth and how central that colony was to the United Kingdom’s industrial wealth and growth in the 19th century. Unlike the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, it is possible that Guyana’s unique geography (being attached to the South American mainland) has rendered it and its history all but invisible from the collective British consciousness. Perhaps fittingly, it was the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

I am standing on a ridge cluttered with dried grass and leaves on the eastern bank of Loch Ness. Below me, shimmering like a sheet of burnished steel, is the fabled water. I watch as puffy clouds tow shadows across its surface. North of where I stand is Dochfour House and Gardens, a sprawling, sandy-coloured, Italianate mansion, the ancestral home of the Baillie family, now owned by Alexander Baillie, after the death of his father – the eccentric Lord Burton – in 2013. The late lord was a hands-on estate owner and guarded his lands fiercely up until his death – one story has him forcing a car bonnet down on the hand of a passing motorist who had the temerity to examine his car engine near the entrance of the property.

Today the 11,000-acre estate can be hired for “exclusive house parties” and corporate events. Guests can spend time in the grand mansion, or enjoy shooting, fishing and sailing in the extensive grounds.

It’s an impressive legacy, even more so when you realise that the Baillies of Dochfour were leading “West Indian merchants” in the 1700s and early 1800s, active in the slave trade and the ownership of plantations in the Caribbean. Brothers Alexander and James, along with their cousin George, started trading in St Kitts and Grenada as Smith & Baillies in the 1760s. Their substantial interests spread to include plantations in Jamaica, Nevis, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago.

When the soils of the neighbouring islands had been exploited, excursions into Guyana presented more fertile territory. Consequently, the Baillies established a number of plantations there, with this colony yielding substantial profits even after the abolition of slavery.

 

Stabroek market in Georgetown, Guyana. Photograph: benedek/Getty Images

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 didn’t just bring an end to chattel slavery, it also compensated Britain’s 46,000 slave owners for the loss of their “property”. As Guyana’s plantations were mostly involved in sugar-making, and sugar boilers commanded a compensation figure of £100 compared with that of £18 for an unskilled field worker, the Baillies and other plantation owners were heavily compensated for their estates in Guyana.

Consequently, the Baillies received a total of £110,000 (equivalent to around £9.2m today) compensation for the 3,100 slaves they lost, which they invested in a Monopoly board of estates across the Highlands, ensuring that they and their descendants would become one of the largest landed proprietors in the north of Scotland, largely thanks to the profits of slavery.

Imeet with historian David Alston in Cromarty, a small town in the Highlands that sits at the mouth of Cromarty Firth. Comprised of just a few streets, the town boasts a wealth of Georgian and Victorian architecture and its fair share of chi-chi boutiques, catering to the American and Canadian tourists who visit the area eager to seek a piece of Highland ancestry.

Alston explains that there are 13 different sites in this tiny place that have connections to slave plantations – mostly in Guyana. He says: “If you lived in the Highlands in the 1800s, you would know about Demerara and Berbice [in Guyana]; people would talk about coming back ‘as rich as a Demerary man’.”

It’s hard to process that a network of Scotsmen from here and the surrounding area used Guyana as a “get-rich-quick scheme”, exploiting for profit the trafficked humans (both slaves and indentured labourers) who were my ancestors. A “gold rush” with no thought of the tragic human consequence.

As I wade through research and testimonials of the fate of slaves in Guyana, it’s difficult to suppress the anger I feel: up until 1826 (nearly two decades after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807), “the 11 o’clock flog” was administered in Berbice’s searing heat to men and women who flagged in their tasks; sexual abuse was so endemic in the same district that, in 1819, one in 50 of the enslaved population was the child or grandchild of a white European.

What is also astonishing is that the people I speak to in Guyana don’t seem aware of this link with the Highlands. I speak to an older cousin who grew up in Guyana but now lives in the US. “We were taught about Cuffy [a rebel slave leader] and the slave rebellion of 1763,” she recounts. “But the slave trade wasn’t discussed.”

 A statue of Cuffy, the slave rebellion leader, in Georgetown, Guyana. Photograph: Krystyna Szulecka/Alamy

I tell her about Cromarty and she laughs at the pronunciation of a well-known place from her childhood, near Cotton Tree in Berbice. “You know Aunty Florence’s mother, Big Mama, was half-Scottish,” she says. “We all used to wonder why she was so white and so much bigger than us, but then one day Granny told us that her father was a Scotsman.”

She then recalls a troubling story. “Granny said that the Indian women would be working out in the rice fields and it was then that most of the rapes would take place. No one would hear them scream … it was only nine months later that they had to deal with the consequences.”

The Baillies were part of an Inverness network of Scots, including the Frasers, the Inglis family and the Chisholms, who had substantial plantation interests in Guyana. However, slave ownership wasn’t confined to the wealthy: ordinary working people had a chance to buy slaves too. Alston has compiled a comprehensive index of more than 600 people from the Highlands with connections to Guyana before emancipation.

He says: “Guyana offered some the prospect of making a fortune, even for those of limited means, if they were prepared to start work as clerks, overseers and tradesmen. The key to success was to own slaves.”

Alston explains: “It was a weird accident that so many people from the Highlands went over. Plantations employed all sorts of people: carpenters, gardeners, bookkeepers and doctors were needed. Scotland had a good education system and the population was mobile. Tacksman [prinicipal tenants in Highlands after landowners] led immigrations and looked for opportunities.”

Despite Guyana’s distance and dangers (many Scots succumbed to yellow fever), the reward was seen as worth the risk. The benefits were many, there were people returning from Guyana buying land and estates and improving farms in Scotland, and the plantation economy also fired industrial wealth.

Alston states: “The livelihoods of some of the poorest people in Cromarty depended on what was going on in the Caribbean. There is a red sandstone building near the harbour which was established in the 1770s as a proto-factory: it imported hemp from St Petersburg and employed 250 people and 600 out-workers – more than the population of Cromarty now – to produce cloth to make bags and sacks for West Indian goods.”

The economic benefits of slavery had a trickle-down effect on every part of the Scottish economy: there was a boom in herring fishing in the Highland lochs, as this salted-down fish was a major export to the Caribbean as a protein-rich source of slave nutrition. Similarly, in the Outer Hebrides, many workers were employed in the manufacture of rough linen, known as slave cloth, for export to the colonies. In fact, Cromarty profited so much from the slave trade, it was one of the towns that petitioned against its abolition.

Highlanders also have the dubious accolade of pioneering the first shiploads of Indian indentured labourers to Guyana shortly after the abolition of slavery. John Gladstone (a Guyanese planter and father of the future British prime minister, who received £106,769 in compensation, the equivalent of about £9m today) wrote to Francis Mackenzie Gillanders of Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co in Calcutta, requesting a new source of cheap and easily controlled labour.

Gillanders had already sent Indians to Mauritius under five-year contracts and was keen to fulfil Gladstone’s request. He perceived no difficulty with the new recruits, declaring they have “few wants beyond eating, sleeping and drinking”, referring to the “hill coolies of India” as “more akin to the monkey than the man”, unaware of “the place they agree to go to or the voyage they are undertaking”.

The arrival of the ships Whitby and Hesperus in Guyana in 1838 would herald the movement of more than half a million Indians to the Caribbean to work under overseers in the sweltering plantations, until the end of the practice in 1917.

What is shocking, given the extent of the involvement of Highland Scots in the history of Guyana, is the way their role has been airbrushed from history. Not many Scottish people would have a clue where Guyana is or of its importance to their own nation’s industrial growth.

Scots have been portrayed as abolitionists, reformers and liberal champions, so David Livingstone is remembered fondly, as is Scotland’s role in abolition, while the slave-owning firms of Sandbach Tinne, John Gladstone, HD and JE Baillie, CW&F Shand, Reid Irving and others are referred to euphemistically as “West Indian merchants”.

Unlike in Liverpool, Bristol or London, there is little acknowledgment in Glasgow of public buildings funded by the slave trade. Buchanan Street, Glassford Street and Ingram Street are named after notorious slavers, but there is no mention of this in the city’s history.

“The research I was doing in the 1990s felt very lonely,” says Alston. He recalls the opening of the National Museum of Scotland in 1998. “Despite huge sections devoted to Scotland and the world, there was not a mention of the slave trade or the slave-based plantation economies, which supported the rise of Scotland’s industrialisation. The story sits very uncomfortably with the narrative that people want to tell about Scotland and Highlanders.”

Alston explains that Scotland’s own historical grievances, specifically the Highland clearances (when tens of thousands of Highlanders were forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for large-scale sheep farming), make it unable to confront the past. He says: “If you want to portray yourself as a victim, the last thing you want to do is be the victimiser, and it is difficult for that to change because it is so embedded in the Scottish view of itself and the Highlands view of itself.

 

Cromarty graveyard in the Highlands, where some Scottish slave owners are buried. Photograph: Calum Davidson/Alamy

“In Sutherland county there is a memorial to the clearances funded by a Canadian whose ancestors were cleared [the Emigrants Statue]. The tone on the inscription is very much that the Scots enlightened the world. There was talk of putting replica statues up in all the places that Scots went to … I wonder if they will put one up in Georgetown, Guyana.”

Helen Cameron, who now lives in Australia, visited both Cromarty and Guyana in an attempt to trace her roots. Helen is related to the Camerons of Glen Nevis: John Cameron, her great, great, great-grandfather, came to Berbice in the early 1800s and set up a plantation with his kinsman Donald Charles Cameron. Accounts of their time there include shipments of coffee, cotton, rum and sugar, and the sale and hire of slaves. John Cameron had a relationship with Elizabeth Sharpe, “a free coloured woman” (a descendant of slaves) and they had seven children. The couple’s five sons all emigrated to Australia, while the daughters remained unmarried.

Helen writes by email: “It will seem strange that I did not make the intellectual connection of being a descendant of a plantation owner as also being a descendant of a slave owner. I was slightly taken aback when the manager of the hotel where we stayed in Guyana said, ‘This is the first time I have met the descendant of a slave owner.’”

She continues: “I had known that the family had plantations, but I do confess that until this research I had not considered who actually worked these plantations. I was also ignorant of Britain’s dependence on slavery.

“I hope my ancestors were benevolent slave owners,” she writes. “I do not like to think they were inhumane, even though, as one person in Guyana said, ‘Why would you think otherwise?’”

Scotland’s role in empire does not belong in the margins or footnotes: Highland Scots had a huge role to play in the large-scale trafficking of human beings for profit. I believe that however unpalatable this history is, it is a shared one, and contributes to our understanding of race and how the movements of people from long ago fits with our story now. To obscure these facts is to rob individuals of their stories all over again, and to deny them any sense of belonging or place in the world.

Today, steps are being made to acknowledge Scotland’s slaving past: there is a campaign to establish a museum of slavery, and for memorials and plaques to go up across the country on statues, streets and homes linked to the slave trade. In September 2018, Glasgow University published a report revealing that the institution benefited directly from the slave trade, despite its leading role in the abolitionist movement – receiving bequests of almost £200m in today’s money. The university has now launched a “reparative justice programme” that will involve the creation of a centre for the study of slavery as well as a collaboration with the University of the West Indies.

In Cromarty’s graveyard, the mid-morning sun slants across the gravestones pockmarked with moss and lichen, illuminating the faint inscriptions. The statue of Hugh Miller, the town’s famed geologist and writer, perched Nelson-like on a high column, overlooks the scene. I read the carved words on one crumbling grey stone that has sat in this cemetery for more than 150 years. It says: “John Munro late of Demerara.” Less clear is “Berbice” on another stone. A mere 20 miles south-west of this cemetery, at Gilchrist near Muir of Ord, is an ornate mausoleum containing the well-preserved tomb of Gillanders – he of the famous monkey quote. One truth remains: however hard we try to cover over our past, it rarely stays buried.