Why Calthorpe needs to go. Or Good Night, Good Knight, and Good Luck.

Those are assets which should belong to us (technically they do, but in reality they don't) and should be utilised as we think fit. We could sell the land over time (after a big bang sale to kick it off) to hungry buyers around the world, to sovereign wealth funds, to the Chinese and Russians. The annual income alone from these land assets could be as much as £10billion. And that's a conservative estimate.

We would 'crown' and then formally and legally own assets like Ascot Race Course, which no doubt the uber-wealthy Middle Eastern Horse Racing fanatics would be slavering over the possibility of buying.

The asset sale receipts can, for example, be used to counter the losses in tax revenue as a result of the current recession which is one half of the causes of the deficit. It would operate just like North Sea Oil receipts and privatisation asset sales did in the early 1980s.

Another part of the deficit increase (and fear for future ratings of UK plc) has been the Great-Banking-Bail-Out. One particular continuing aspect of this is the government's Asset Protection Scheme: an insurance policy designed to deal with the supposedly 'known unknown' of exactly which of the British Banks' dodgy assets are going to fail.

As taxpayers we are putting at risk direct and indirect present and future tax moneys in case these assets go belly-up (that's the technical term). Darling and Brown said that they did not want to become bankers. Well, we are all insurers now.

We could simply attach some (only some!) of the newly-acquired land assets to the insurance policies we are preparing as the collateral should the dodgy debts fail and require the policies to be called upon. Consequently, the taxpayer is much less at risk and the land now unjustly in private hands is what is at risk instead. The private sector insures the private sector. We will still charge the state premium, of course.

Many of the owners of the land we are talking about here, by the way, can be found on the boards of the merchant banks and hedge funds and financial engineering corporations that got us into this mess in the first place.

By the way, Vince Cable's hastily put together (unusually unadept for him) 'Mansion Tax' is a drop in the ocean and misses the real issue, unfairly penalising the very well off when the extremely well off escape.

Who loses out under our proposal? Some 100 people and probably only 20 of those will be the main contributors. Forget the mansions, Vince, it's the land that has the real value. Never mind properties above £1million, many people could actually conceivably see themselves as owning that.

To be clear, let's simply start the revenue raising at those with personal land assets from about £1billion instead. Can you conceive of yourself owning that much land? No? Well it's pretty much impossible unless you were born with a title.

This won't affect Birmingham, will it? This is about the landed gentry in the 'Shires, surely? No - it's about central Birmingham.

For rising high at no 6 in our top 20 is our very own Sir Euan Anstruther Gough Calthorpe. Yes, he of the great sprawling Calthorpe estate. By accidents of Birth (and marriages, as it happens) he has come to own the freehold, and more, of great swathes of our city, commercial and residential. You may very well be reading this on Calthorpe Estate land.

This is not a business matter, is it? Well, the wealthiest British-born business man in the Sunday Times Rich list 2009 is The Duke of Westminster. He has assets at his command of £20billion in land simply inherited over centuries to run one of the biggest businesses in Britain, Grosvenor Estates.

All we are saying to the likes of the Duke of Westminster and Sir Euan Anstruther Gough-Calthorpe is: thank you very much for looking after our land for the last few hundred years, you've done very well, now mosey along and do something else. Our need is greater than yours, Sir Euan. This land will now be returned to the Crown in Parliament, where it belongs.

The land can vest in the ownership of a select committee of parliament and be managed and, if necessary, be sold by a newly reformed Crown Estates office. This body currently looks after the Crown Estate (the income from land owned personally by the Queen). The new body would own the freehold of the Crown Estate and add to it the freehold and leases of the other great estates.

So, we take from the very rich who have simply inherited vast swathes of British land, and give back to the Crown, because the Crown now has a better use for it. Call it a modern day Robin Hood economic policy. And before you say it's a crazy and can't happen, please note that most other countries have had land revolutions at some point. The enduring feudal legacy of British land ownership needs to be tackled for the benefit of wider society. We should, of course, say thank you all those fine barons, dukes, earls and the rest, and have our land back.

And to Sir Euan Anstruther Gough Calthorpe we say, "Good night, good knight, and good luck."

John Clancy is a former commercial lawyer and runs two SMEs including www.mediafuturesalert.com and JustLiteracy.com. Professor David Bailey works at Coventry University Business School.

*Calculations from 'Who Owns Britain', Kevin Cahill, (Canongate) 2001, updated with 2009 agricultural and commercial property land values and increases since 1999 from: Crown Estates Office Reports, RBS Agricultural Land Price Indices 1999-2009, Valuations Office Agency Property Value Reports 1999-2009, Office of National Statistics - UK National Statistics Land Value Reports 1999-2009, Knight Frank Commercial Research Reports 2009, Group Economics - Economic Factbook 2009
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