Today in Focus: Who owns England?

It is a simple question with an incredibly complex answer – not even the Land Registry knows the exact ownership of all parts of the country. Guy Shrubsole set out to solve the mystery. Plus Alex Hern on the police’s use of facial recognition technology.

For nearly 1,000 years, there has been no comprehensive answer to the question of who owns England. Ever since William the Conqueror ordered the “great survey”, the issue has not been satisfactorily resolved. Even the central body that should know, the Land Registry, can only pin down the ownership of about 80% of the country.

Using creative techniques and old-fashioned detective work, Guy Shrubsole set about solving the mystery. The author and campaigner looked at the prime suspects: royalty, the church, the aristocracy, foreign oligarchs and major companies. He tells Anushka Asthana that although some of the names have changed, we still live in a country recognisable from the middle ages, one in which a small elite owns the majority of the land.

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UnHerd: The heat is on for Greece

The election marks the first time Greeks will go to the polls since the height of the financial crisis in 2015. This was when fears that the country might tumble out of the Eurozone, and – though an unlikely scenario – the European Union, caused political and financial tremors from Brussels to Washington. [...]

The domestic implications of this are clear. As journalist Yiannis Baboulias, tells me: “Politically, Greece has moved from the anti-austerity financial-based narratives and conflict of the past decade to a political space in which culture wars now dominate.” [...]

Now, New Democracy has continued the populist trend, but from the other extreme, with a scattergun deployment of hard-Right tropes regarding migrants and LGBTQ issues. And as far as they are concerned, Syriza are hardcore communists who will turn Greece into Venezuela.[...]

But most alarming of all is New Democracy’s virulent opposition to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement – the treaty that saw North Macedonia change its name in return for Greece dropping objections to the country’s NATO accession.

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Politico: Trump’s Grand Display of Isolation

One of the many unusual things about this Fourth celebration was its VIP tents; I watched it from the second of four separate areas reserved for VIPs, a dozen or so rows from the podium but with a view of the president somewhat obscured by a decorative military personnel carrier. Around me were numerous service members and their families; closer to the president, and among the multiple military honor guards, were men and women with bars on their starched sleeves indicating the number of combat tours they had served, most at least two or three, others even seven or eight.[...]

There was mention of Lewis and Clark, but no mention of their native guide Sacajawea. There was mention of God, and Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, but none on Lincoln’s meditation in his second inaugural on the Lord’s justice, and perhaps his punishment, for the sin of slavery in hundreds of thousands of American dead.

There was even mention of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking in 1963 from the spot that Trump did Thursday evening, but nothing about the racial and economic divides that he worked to repair, or the work yet to be done before America shall overcome. There was mention of a Catholic nun who has long served the needy in Washington, D.C., but none about young migrants, most of them Catholic, and whether their needs were being met. And in Trump’s call to national service, encouraging young Americans to serve in the military, there was no hint of humility or irony that he had not chosen to do so.

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