If Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana ever get Your Party off the ground, one thing is for certain: a return to the limelight for Corbyn’s allotment. During Corbyn’s leadership, commentators fixated on the north London plot where the veteran leftwinger cultivates spuds, blackberries, and (most famously) marrows. To a hostile right-wing media Corbyn’s allotment symbolised his senility and amateurishness; potential prime ministers should not have hobbies, and certainly not hobbies so humble and down-to-earth. But defences of Corbyn’s leadership fell back on his allotment too, as a demonstration of the leader’s mildness of temperament, and the baselessness of efforts to paint him as a Leninist wolf in sheep’s clothing. ‘Attempts to show Corbyn in a totalitarian light’, writes James Butler, ‘have usually crumbled on contact with the allotment-tending, jam-making reality’.
Corbyn’s plot is in East Finchley, beside the St Pancras and Islington Cemetery on the eastern edge of Margaret Thatcher’s former constituency. In a birthday photograph posted by his son in 2020, Corbyn sits proudly in a green ‘I’d Rather Be Down The Allotment’ t-shirt. Behind him spreads an oasis of early summer growth. Though every allotment site in the UK is different, there are family resemblances: an expanse of land, owned by the local or parish council, is divided into a patchwork of rented plots and half-plots. Tenants can use their plots how they wish, within reason, but unlike in other northern European countries such as Sweden, where allotments have changed into ‘leisure gardens’ with summerhouses, the focus in Britain remains on growing fruit, vegetables and flowers.
In the twentieth century, allotments became associated with a kind of dogged, land-based patriotism. The Dig For Victory campaign that began in 1939 drew inspiration from an earlier initiative, in the aftermath of the previous war, to provide veterans with smallholdings. Dig for Victory still holds a place in collective memory, and has conditioned the stock image of the twentieth-century allotment: a solidly male, working-class space of cloth-capped men pottering in pigeon-lofted sheds. This was always a stereotype, however affectionate, but it is even more outdated today. Demand for allotments has never been so high, with more than 150,000 currently waiting for access to a plot. People maintain allotments for many reasons, principally for personal wellbeing and enjoyment. But in today’s world of consumerism and climate anxiety, there is less emphasis on patriotic self-sufficiency and more on the need to create and conserve, alternative and sustainable ways of living, even on a personal level. Allotments are no longer exclusively male domains: as of 2020, Elizabeth Cox observes in a recent doctoral thesis on the allotment as a gendered space, half of the country’s plotholders are women.
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Corbyn’s keenness for allotments made the headlines this summer when Angela Rayner (then Deputy Prime Minister) was accused of encouraging local authorities to sell off allotment sites in favour of Labour’s housebuilding schemes. Right-wing newspapers accused Rayner of desecrating England’s sacred idylls. Some investigative digging, from Private Eye and Liam Geraghty of Big Issue, established that this was less of a story than it seemed: the rules allowing councils to sell off land had been in place since 2016, and the proportion of allotments in overall sales remains minimal.
Yet Corbyn seized on the chance to score points on a subject close to his heart – though on political terrain far from his home turf. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph last August he attacked Rayner’s apparent betrayal of working-class communities in their struggle for access to the land. This struggle, argues Corbyn, had been unfolding for centuries, ever since the Civil War in which the Diggers (‘the real revolutionaries’) agitated for the land to be held ‘in common ownership’. The gradual erosion of the grazing and growing commons culminated in the Acts of Enclosure – one of Parliament’s ‘most grotesque abuses of power’. Allotments, Corbyn says, ‘grew out of opposition to enclosures and the privatisation of common land’. In his account Rayner has abandoned this working-class struggle and sold out to the contemporary forces of enclosure.
Yet Corbyn’s letter ends on a lighter note: can Rayner really be proposing to ‘put the nail in the coffin of the joy’, he asks in theatrical disbelief, ‘of digging around for potatoes on a cold, wet, February Sunday afternoon?’ The tone of this last, self-deprecating line shows a side of Corbyn rarely revealed during his leadership. It’s a Radio 4 register familiar from, for example, Gardeners’ Question Time: an enthusiast proclaiming, and in the same breath making fun of, his fanatical passion. It speaks to one of the most overlooked aspects of Corbyn’s personal identity: a left-field but authentic Englishness, of a bottom-up, organic kind. Corbyn has represented Islington North since 1982; his base as Labour leader was the precariat of metropolitan graduates. It’s easy to forget, then, that he grew up in rural Shropshire, a few dozen miles from the rolling Mercian landscape Tolkien reimagined as The Shire. Corbyn is a lover of the outdoors, a keen cricket and football fan, and an amateur in pursuit of private obsessions – in his case, as he revealed on ITV to general astonishment, the history of manhole covers.
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Corbyn could have done more to emphasise these aspects of his character, but he was often at pains, initially, to portray his leadership as a step away from the character-driven style of the recent past. Voters were allowed to project, therefore, the radicalism of Corbyn’s personal politics onto Corbyn’s person; the streak of mild-mannered self-deprecation was obscured. Corbyn’s views on foreign policy, so close to his heart, had a particularly de-Anglicising effect. The new leader’s defenders always protested that his historic campaigning demonstrated a universal sympathy for the oppressed peoples of the world. (It’s worth remembering that such general solidarity with the underdog has been characterised, sometimes to self-congratulatory excess, as an English trait.) But the special emphasis in Corbyn’s career on struggles perceived as anti-imperialist – in Ireland and Latin America, and more recently in the Middle East and former USSR – meant that an unforgiving media could always portray him as anti-British and, thus, un-English.
While the Radio 4, Women’s Institute, raffle-ticket Corbyn might have secured a few more Middle English votes, then, our contemporary politics reminds us of the futility of centre-left attempts to steal the right’s thunder on nationhood. In the shrill conversation of a polemicised media, nationhood has very little to do with particular people, places and things – cricket clubs, allotments and manhole covers – and everything to do with racial identity and its symbols. Even as it regresses into essentialism, belonging becomes abstract, detached from the literal ground.
Corbynism’s greater and less excusable mistake is its failure to foreground the more serious aspects of the Telegraph letter: the ancient politics of the commons. One way to narrate Britain’s modern history is as an ongoing struggle for access to the land against the forces of enclosure. This is the story E.P. Thompson tells, in magnificent detail, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963). As Corbyn’s glance to the Diggers indicates, the struggle against enclosure has deep roots, traceable to the early modernity of the seventeenth century. Enclosure – the incorporation of ‘waste’ and commonly tilled land into private hands, avowedly for ‘improvement’ and always for profit – had gradual late-medieval beginnings, but intensified in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its opponents, then, have always looked both forward and back, to a future restoration of a communal life located in the pre-modern past. Since the Diggers, the politics of the commons has fought for more than literal access to land: it has positioned such access as the first step in the process of establishing a commonwealth, a society of shared goods, where freedom exceeds the formal equality of individuals before the law. ‘The commons refers’, says the historian Peter Linebaugh, ‘neither to resources alone nor to people alone but to an intermixture’. What Linebaugh calls ‘commoning’ denotes a politics beginning with land access and ending in the extension of democracy through all parts of social life. Commoning’s dynamics are centrifugal and grassroots: beyond the amplification of silenced voices, commoning seeks the redistribution of power.
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Allotments play a complex role in the parliamentary history of British commoning. For nineteenth-century liberals they promised to mitigate the immiserating effect of enclosure on the rural poor. Amending the bill that became the Inclosure Act of 1845, William Cowper-Temple advocated the inclusion of allotments ‘for the labouring poor’ as a condition of new enclosures. Cowper-Temple quoted from Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’:
A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man.
Fundamentally, however, allotments in Cowper-Temple’s speech served a moral rather than an emancipatory function. They contributed more to the labourer’s spiritual wellbeing than his economic comfort, providing the wholesome ‘amusement’ to keep him ‘steady, sober, industrious’. A generation later, the Allotments Act of 1887 brought the provision of allotments under the purview of local government. Its chief proponent, the Liberal Unionist (and Unitarian) Jesse Collings, conceived similarly of their benefits in moral terms. Collings, however, who in 1872 had addressed Joseph Arch’s ‘Revolt of the Fields’ in Warwickshire, recognised that no moral improvement was possible without a degree of land security. Allotments did not challenge the principle of private ownership outright, either on the enclosed estates or in their own allocation. But by providing a means of supplementary subsistence, allotments furnished the rural poor with greater bargaining power in the sale of their labour. Understood this way, allotments encapsulate the merits and limits of social democracy: on the one hand, they represent a foot in the door of socio-economic equality; on the other, they belie a compromise that forecloses on something more radical.
From a heterodox leftist perspective, however, the radicalism inherent in allotmenteering comes into focus. The anarchist Colin Ward saw in allotments an enduring paradigm of the horizontal self-organisation that he advocated as the base of true freedom. In their classic 1988 study of The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture, Ward and David Crouch show that legislation in favour of land reform by liberal parliamentarians followed pressure from working-class groups – ‘friendly societies, the cooperative movement and the trade unions’. Noting the shift away from subsistence as its primary function, Ward and Crouch embrace the idea of the allotment as ‘recreation’. But allotments challenge, they suggest, the commodification of recreation and ‘the gentrification of leisure’. The allotment aesthetic is of ‘untamed collective individualism’, an expressive flourishing enabled by a culture of ‘spontaneous mutual aid’. A liberal streak runs through this kind of radicalism, rooted in the principle of autonomous expression; it refuses, however, an orthodox liberal dichotomy of individualism and solidarity. In Earthly Paradise, Martin Stott’s photographic portrait of Oxfordshire allotments in 1991, tenants of all sorts bask in the ease of one another’s company, holiday kings and queens of all they survey. As everyday life becomes ever more alienated from the ecosystems it degrades, this otherworldly quality of allotments can only increase. As ‘one of the few spaces that relies upon the natural rhythms of the seasons’, says Emma Bonny in an in-depth study of an east London site, ‘the allotment seems to defy the conventions of time’.
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Corbynism never fundamentally rejected the politics of commoning. Corbyn’s longstanding interest in Latin American politics reflects his appreciation of its rich array of popular movements as much as its anti-imperialist fundamentals. At the 2017 election, the peak of his electoral success as leader, the party made some gestures towards commoning. It pledged to make land ownership more transparent, and to consider a redistributive Land Value Tax. Labour commissioned Land for the Many, a report published in 2019. One of its co-authors, Guy Shrubsole, founded the Right to Roam campaign the following year, firmly in the tradition of the modern land access movement originating from the Kinder Scout trespass in 1932. Right to Roam advocates for England and Wales to follow the progressive Scottish example in legislating for permissive land access. The party’s 2019 manifesto takes up several of the report’s recommendations, such as the revival of County Farms.
By that disastrous election, however, such gestures were overshadowed by the party’s chaotic internal divisions, on Brexit and on Corbyn’s own leadership. Labour won an even smaller proportion of rural votes than in 2017. The party also missed the opportunity to marry up its commitments on land issues with its positions on climate. In 2019 Extinction Rebellion had pushed green politics to the centre, capturing national attention with a style of direct action familiar from the CND, and redolent of the commons: fancy dress and cricket matches; radical sentiments expressed in puns. Both main parties committed to ambitious policies of combining decarbonisation with national renewal: for Johnson’s Conservatives, the promise to Level Up; for Corbyn’s Labour, the Green New Deal. Had they been integrated into a narrative that centred the restoration of Britain’s commonwealth, Corbynist policies on climate and land-based democratisation might have reinforced one another’s prominence and persuasive power.
In the absence of such rhetorical coherence at the level of policy, Corbynism drifted into the dynamics of left-populism, focused less on a political programme than on the talismanic qualities of its leader. From 2018 these qualities began to create serious trouble. Corbyn’s pointless faffing in response to the Skripal poisoning, and his failure to deal with the antisemitism crisis, did Labour’s platform disproportionate damage because its platform had become identical with its leader. A leadership that had once hailed the virtues of party democracy found itself acquiring the top-down structure to which contemporary populism, with its persistent emphasis on charismatic leaders, seems vulnerable. Momentum strove to establish itself as an extra-parliamentary movement for decentralised decision-making, but meanwhile the leadership itself was overtaken by the Unite bureaucracy. It is true that the party’s policies nevertheless (and contrary to breathless media caricatures) continued to promote democratic socialism of a Bennite and not a Marxist kind. Yet the calcification of grassroots energy into a top-down leadership, the warping of commoning into left-populism, meant that Corbynism found itself channelling less of Benn the Digger and more of Benn the parliamentarian – for whom national sovereignty, and not redistribution of power, was the chief bulwark against globalised capitalism.
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Embracing a narrative of commoning would have equipped Corbynism with more, however, than strategic coherence. It might also have cut across the fault lines that ran through the movement from the beginning. Looking forward, it might even heal some of the deeper more structural divisions in the contemporary left. Understood in Linebaugh’s terms as an integration of land and people, the politics of commoning combines a nostalgic commitment to particular places with the revolutionary boldness of utopian visions of the future. It mixes the intersectionality and internationalism of Momentum with Old Labour rootedness. Commoning is sympathetic to the ‘postcapitalist’ leftism popular in the 2010s, with its focus on peer-to-peer and co-operative forms of organising. But it takes these approaches beyond their airy metropolitan comfort zones. Commoning acknowledges the nostalgic attachments inherent to communitarian groupings such as Blue Labour, while challenging the instinctive social and constitutional conservatism to which those groupings tend.
Commoning and left-populism, argues political theorist Alexandros Kioupkiolis, can strengthen one another. Left-populism can supply commoning with the edge of ‘political strategy’. In return, with its impulse towards ‘participation and self-government’, commoning can teach left-populism not to trap itself in top-down processes. It may be that Your Party never gets going – or that if it does, it finds itself crowded out by another party trying to position itself to Labour’s left. Zack Polanski’s Green Party has galvanised an emergent base of leftist voters enthused by its savvy and appealing leader. The Greens must now figure out how to expand beyond this base without diluting too much of its insurgent energy. Perhaps the way to do this is to expand the base itself. However fractured our electoral politics becomes, the Polanskyite Greens must surely at some point address themselves to rural voters – to members of the electorate who live in (England’s) green and pleasant land. A politics of commoning might come in handy, and if the Greens go looking for it they might start on the common green spaces stubbornly persisting at the city’s edge: start, that is, on the allotment.
Archie Cornish is a writer and academic specialising in English literature and politics.