Today
The Georgist Party of Britain
The party now campaigns under its present name, which says plainly what it is: the political home of Georgism in Britain, and the continuation of the party Mark Wadsworth helped found. Registered with the Electoral Commission, open to anyone who supports its objectives.
The idea has not changed since 2012, or since 1879: Britain is a home, not an asset class. Its land, its seas and its natural wealth are the inheritance of the British nation, and collecting their value for public revenue is how the nation funds itself without taxing the work of its own people.
2023
Shared Ground
Mark Wadsworth died in March 2023, after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He was the keystone of practically every Georgist and land tax group in the country, the man who could navigate the worst bureaucracy and keep the whole movement registered, organised and arguing. This party carries his work forward, and continues in his memory.
The party had by then renamed itself Shared Ground, after the Electoral Commission refused its first choice, Common Ground, and stood under that name. Mark never led it: he was a founder and, for years, one of its officers, and the person who made sure the paperwork was filed, the candidates stood and the argument kept going.
2012-2019
The Young People's Party
The party was founded in April 2012 by a group of friends and campaigners, among them Mark Wadsworth, economist, blogger and one of the most tireless advocates for land value taxation Britain has produced, who went on to serve as an officer of the party for many years, after years of arguing about policy online and in the pub and concluding that nobody else would ever make the case. It registered with the Electoral Commission as the Young People's Party: the name made the argument in a sentence, because the people locked out of the land of their own country are, above all, the young.
Under that name the party stood candidates at the 2015 and 2017 general elections, in Folkestone & Hythe, Epping Forest, the Cities of London & Westminster and the City of Durham, carrying a platform that will be familiar to every reader of this site: a tax on the value of land, a flat 20% rate on income, and the abolition of VAT, National Insurance, council tax and stamp duty.
1930s, 2010s
The wilderness years
The land question faded from party politics through the middle of the twentieth century not because Georgists were answered, but because Britain capped the problem by other means: rents controlled in one form or another since 1918; council homes built at scale and let for well below what the market would have charged; mortgages written on rules rather than appetite, at about twice the borrower's income; 250,000 to 300,000 homes a year going to people who lived in them; and a tax system that charged the ground as it found it, from Schedule A to Domestic Rates, so progressive that the best house in a county might pay a hundred times the worst.
None of that was Georgism, but all of it did what Georgism does, it capped the share of other people's effort that a piece of ground could claim. Owner-occupation rose from 30% to 60% of households, and private renting, once half the country, fell to a tenth.
Then almost the whole package was removed in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly without a debate: rent control and tenants' security ended in 1988, council stock was sold and rarely replaced, buy-to-let was put on the same lending terms as a home to live in, the loan-to-income norm slid from about two to nearly three and a half, and the 1953 reversal of the post-war betterment charge had already handed the planning premium back to landowners. What replaced the old ceiling was not a market but a transfer.
Lift a cap and the land question returns with undiminished force, which is what has happened. Council tax and business rates, taxes on buildings as much as land, entrenched exactly the incentives Georgists warned against, while the land duty Britain abandoned became Taiwan's and Singapore's road to prosperity. Georgists worked on meanwhile inside other parties, but none made the land question its reason to exist.
1880s, 1930s
The inheritance
British Georgism is older than the Labour Party. The English and Scottish Land Restoration Leagues of the 1880s, the United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values from 1907 and the land campaigners around Lloyd George's People's Budget all carried the same proposition this party carries now: collect the value of the nation's land for the nation, and stop taxing the wealth people create.
Twice, in 1909 and again in 1931, Britain legislated for a tax on land value, and twice the valuation was abandoned before it could bite. The movement never disappeared, but it lost its political vehicle. The Henry George Foundation, founded in 1929, kept the idea taught and argued through the decades when no party would carry it.