I have just started reading this remarkable book by Kevin Cahill.

His "Who Owns Britain" was a revelation to many of us. It has a special page for every county, including Oxfordshire, comparing land ownership by the likes of the Duke of Marlborough and the Oxford Colleges now and back in 1872, when a "Domesday Book" was produced. It was almost immediately suppressed as being too revealing about the pattern of aristocratic landownership!

This latest book outlines landownership in all 197 of the world's states and its 66 territories.

I hope to return to the international picture in a later blog, but a topical local issue struck me forcibly:

"The Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE)
gave rural England 30 years to Armageddon in September 2005. Their report warned that if the present rates of development did not stop, there was a danger that rural England would have vanished by 2035.

The report's warning, described as "irresponsible scaremongering" by the Royal Institute for Town Planning, was wrong by either 1,500 or almost 2,000 years, depending on which of the various estimates of rural England that you accept."

"Who Owns the World", by Kevin Cahill, is published by Mainstream Publishing.

Kevin Cahill was born in the Irish Republic and now lives in Devon. He was a researcher on the original Sunday Times Rich List.