Allotments? So what if the council doubles the rent? They’re for the chattering classes to grow rainbow chard while talking bollocks to each other about shit they read in the Guardian.

Wrong. Allotments have a history.

Our right to an allotment is the only compensation we have for the loss of our right to work common land that’s been systematically robbed from us over the last 1,000 years.

This robbery of land by the rich from the poor can be traced back to Norman Britain; was attacked by Sir Thomas More in ‘Utopia’ published in 1516; was directly challenged by the Diggers (they really did dig) after the English Civil War and caused the 1885 land reform campaign where ‘Three Acres and a Cow’ was the demand in the fight against poverty.

A series of laws followed. The 1887 Allotments Act, the 1892 Smallholding Act and the 1908 Smallholding and Allotments Act gave local authorities the power to create allotments. It’s not much in exchange for the robbery and privatisation of virtually all the country’s land by the wealthy but allotments and the odd tract of scrubby ‘common’ is all we have left.

When our money-grabbing Labour council casually announces it’s doubling the rent on our allotments, it’s the latest attempt to drive the country’s poorest from the remnants of our shared common land.

They can fuck off.