Government stealing your property to give to museums

You are digging in your garden and find something. It looks old. You like it. Maybe you will keep it? Maybe you will sell it?

Not so fast. The government has stolen your rights and is busy making sure that even more finds will belong to the state from now on. No, you won’t see this being debated in Parliament. They are sneaking this outright theft through on the nod by means of a statutory instrument. This means that they place their plans at the doors of the Commons and Lords and if no-one objects and demands a debate it becomes law, thus bypassing democracy, especially if no-one notices what is in the SIs placed there.

It seems that museums have been complaining that when people find items and put them up for sale the museums can’t afford the price and they get sold to private collectors or, worse still in their minds, get taken out of the country. So your rights are being removed in order to ensure that museums get your property on the cheap.

We don’t need to make treasure law more stringent. We need to abolish it. Reinstate the rights of landowners and roll back the state. If we don’t then either treasure hunters will not bother to look for artifacts or they will keep them hidden and then they really will be lost to the country.