01

Place and Power Are Interconnected

Consider the importance of place to today’s top issues. 1) Immigration (people moving from place to place). 2) The housing crisis (places are too expensive). 3) The North-South divide aka levelling up (places are ‘left behind’ on a regional scale). 4) Climate change and adaptation (places becoming less habitable, which will feed more into people moving place). Place is central to all this. These questions of place – they are spatial, territorial, geographical matters. That’s the geo part of geopolitics. But we are not geographical determinists. Place interacts with power.

When one country invades another, we hear about the ‘geopolitical’ conseqeunces in the news. The logic we apply to international affairs, that geography shapes power, and control of advantaged locations confers benefits, applies with equal force at every domestic scale, from national regions to city streets to individual plots of land.

Power then reshapes geography in turn — through resource allocation, planning decisions, and investment — creating a continuous cycle of geographic advantage and disadvantage.

02

Geopolitical Surplus Arises From that Interaction

We have excellent vocabulary for geopolitics between nations. We have almost none for the equivalent dynamic within them. Geopolitical surplus is the concept we are proposing to fill that gap — naming the value created by where something is rather than what someone does, and asking, for the first time clearly, who that value belongs to.

Geopolitical surplus encompasses four overlapping categories. First, location value — the premium generated by proximity to infrastructure, markets, institutions, and amenities. Second, natural resource rents — the value extractable from rivers, coastlines, mineral deposits, fertile soil, and ecological assets. Third, infrastructure uplift — the increase in site value created by public investment, paid for by all and captured by adjacent landowners. And fourth, political endowment — value conferred by planning permissions, rezoning, and proximity to institutions of power.

The crucial point: none of these advantages are created by any one single person. They are created by nature, by collective investment, and by the accumulated decisions of communities over time. The private claim to the surplus they generate is, on examination, remarkably thin.

03

This Surplus is the Unrecognised source of public finance

The most powerful — and least understood — insight available to this movement: we are not proposing something new. Through the mechanism of tax incidence, the current system already extracts geopolitical surplus. It simply does so indirectly, inefficiently, and at enormous economic cost.

Tax incidence theory tells us that levies on mobile factors — labour, capital, enterprise — do not stay where they are collected. In competitive markets, the burden shifts. And where does it ultimately settle? On the fixed factor — what economists call the inelastic factor. On location. On geopolitical surplus. Business rates, income tax, VAT — all ultimately push their incidence toward land.

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The problem is the routing. Taxes on activity in a marginal location — where the geopolitical surplus is thin — push viable enterprises below the threshold of survival. The shop closes. The high street hollows out. The tax base collapses. This is known as deadweight loss: economic activity destroyed in the process of attempting to raise revenue, because the tax fell on what people do rather than where they are.

04

Accessing the Surplus Openly and Directly will solve a multitude of problems

The Reform Is Clarity, Not Revolution: The proposal is to do openly, efficiently, and completely what the current system already does partially, clumsily, and at enormous economic cost. Opponents are not defending a principle. They are defending waste and confusion.

The central claim of Grassroots Geopolitics is not merely that we should reform how we fund public services. It is a claim about the legitimate source of public revenue — and about the nature of ownership itself.

The Anti-Extraction Principle: Whatever public purposes must be funded — infrastructure, services, transfers, shared amenities — the revenue should come from collectively created value, not from value that individuals and enterprises created themselves. Geopolitical surplus belongs to everyone and to no one in particular. It is the only morally defensible basis for public finance.

This reframes the entire architecture of public finance. The conventional question is: how much do we need, and who do we tax to get it? The Grassroots Geopolitics question is: how large is the geopolitical surplus, what does the public need, and how do we allocate the remainder?

Critically, this is not confiscation. A tax is the state reaching into a pocket. What we describe is the opposite — stopping a private pocket from reaching into the commons. Geopolitical surplus was never legitimately private. Capturing it is not taking something away. It is ending an ongoing enclosure of collectively created value.

05

There are 4 ways to access the surplus

The anti-extraction principle does not mandate a single instrument. There are four broad routes by which geopolitical surplus can be returned to collective use, each operating at a different level of the system.

Legal — Tenure Reform

The most fundamental route is through how land is held. Where the state or community retains the freehold and citizens hold long leases, ground rents become the mechanism by which geopolitical surplus flows back to collective use. Community Land Trusts, municipal freeholds, and leasehold reform all operate through this channel. It does not require any new tax — it restructures ownership itself.

Fiscal — Site Value Rating

An annual charge on the unimproved value of land — or, put more intuitively, a subscription for the services and advantages your location gives you access to. This replaces distortionary taxes on activity (Council Tax, Business Rates) with a charge on what geography, not effort, provides. It cannot be avoided by idling the site, which directly addresses land banking and speculative vacancy. This is politically the most challenging route in the current UK climate, but the most comprehensive in scope.

Financial — Restructured Mortgages

For most people, the mortgage is the primary interface with geopolitical surplus. Conventional mortgages privatise the surplus entirely. An alternative model — index-linked, interest-only mortgages paid to the municipality rather than a bank — would direct the location premium into collective use whilst keeping the home securely in the occupant’s possession. This is an underexplored mechanism with significant potential.

Commons — Shared Access Arrangements

Some geopolitical surplus is best returned not as revenue but as access. Parks, commons, public waterfronts, shared infrastructure — these are forms of surplus returned in kind, as imputed value available to everyone. Protecting and expanding the commons is itself a mechanism for ensuring geopolitical surplus remains collective.

06

We need a ‘middle out’ movement for managing the surplus

National party politics is currently an unpromising vehicle for structural reform of this kind. The path forward is middle-out: beginning at the municipal level, where the argument is most intuitive, the evidence most visible, and the political stakes most manageable. In England, the emergence of genuinely independent local political movements — such as Independents for Frome in Somerset — points toward the kind of locally-grounded politics in which Grassroots Geopolitics can take root.

In an urban context, the case is almost self-evident. A city is a geopolitical surplus generation machine. The municipality builds infrastructure; site values rise. The question — why is our council struggling to fund basic services whilst adjacent landowners collect a windfall from public investment they didn’t fund? — answers itself. And the remedy is local, legible, and demonstrable.

As municipal examples accumulate and the vocabulary takes hold, the principle scales upward naturally — not imposed from above, but demonstrated from below. The UK already has partial footholds: Community Infrastructure Levy, Section 106 agreements, Tax Increment Financing. Grassroots Geopolitics provides the coherent intellectual foundation that turns ad hoc mechanisms into a principled programme.

Scotland and Wales, with greater fiscal flexibility and more openness to land reform, are natural early proving grounds. The devolved nations are where pilots run, evidence accumulates, and the model demonstrates itself.