Land reform in Scotland: where has it gone wrong?
The Scottish Highlands have the most concentrated land ownership in Europe. Absentee owners of large sporting estates monopolise land that prevents and discourages economic growth for local communities. In many parts of the Highlands, there is also a population crisis with local schools and health services at risk of permanent closure. The Land Reform Act back in 2003 was intended to put an end to land monopolies and mark the beginning of an economic and social renaissance in the Highlands, but progress has been disappointing to say the least.
Despite a Scottish Land Fund (SLF) worth millions, despite the creation of a Scottish Land Commission (SLC) stacked full of important people, and despite further major legislative changes in 2016, remoter areas of the Scottish Highlands continue to lose people while inequalities in terms of wealth and land ownership remain the worst in Western Europe. And all this at a time when the opportunities to generate wealth from wind and other renewable energy projects has never been greater.
Since 2016 the SLF has only spent 10% of its available funds on land reform projects (£6 million). For context, in the decade before the Scottish Land Reform (2003) Act was passed 23,000 hectares were transferred to community ownership but since 2016 only 3,000 hectares have been acquired. About £38million (60%) of SLF funding has instead gone to acquiring old buildings. While purchases of this kind bolster existing community life they do little in terms of repeopling remoter areas, and certainly do not constitute land reform. The ‘additionality’ of many of these acquisitions is also questionable as many of the properties were already in public ownership of one kind or another.
In rural areas the majority of land purchases appear to focus on providing community groups with small areas of land for cycling, walking the dog and nature conservation. All good things but again not land reform. There is also the recurring question of additionality. Much of this land was already in public ownership or in the case of the ‘Tarras Valley Nature Reserve’ was already fully protected for recreation and nature by the previous owner, Buccleuch Estates due to various heavyweight legal nature designations (SSSI, SPB etc). Buccleugh Estates must have been laughing all the way to the Bank when they received almost £3 million of public money for a clappit-doun grouse moor that they could not sell for commercial afforestation due to these designations.
The reasons behind this epic failure to reform land ownership are intertwined. Firstly, urban communities are easier to organise and may already have a history of use with the building as a community hub. Also, unlike owners of sporting estates, the previous owners are often very keen to sell to the community in order to improve their financial situation (e.g. Local Authority, Police, Church etc).
Secondly, rural land purchases to promote repopulation and the local economy are difficult to bring to fruition due to local politics and complexities/additional responsibilities (farming grants, deer management) and hostile big neighbours. Rural communities can often develop fractures between ‘outsiders’ and ‘locals’, especially with NIMBYism and nascent gentrification on the rise in many places.
Third, the changing economics of land ownership. The growth in renewables, especially wind turbines and the pressure on farming incomes have altered the economics of land sales considerably. Large profits can now be made from moorland that hitherto had little economic value for sport, forestry or sheep, and which could otherwise have been sold to the community.
Last and certainly not least, I think that political support for land reform has evaporated since 2016. The Scottish Government has been cosying up to Scottish Land and Estates for a number of years now and both the SLC or SLF have few Board members with any track record on land reform. The current SLC Chairman, Mike Russell is of course a prominent neo-liberal from the right wing of the SNP who previously called for the Scottish NHS to be privatised and for the nation’s timber stocks to be sold to an American lumber corporation.
Sadly, I do not think much is going to change much in the near future. I am not convinced that current land reform proposals making their way through Holyrood will shift the dial. We need needs something bigger and better to repeople the Highlands and meet the social, cultural and environmental challenges that lie ahead. I do like a good chat around the table, but I don’t think it will deliver meaningful change: a cup of tea and a couple of stale Rich Tea Biscuits is all you can probably expect from many landowners! The very idea that land injustice can be solved by talking around a table is well, terribly middle-class and doomed to fail.
What we need is a ‘gateway’ for new entrants who want to live on the land and gain access to opportunities for housing, farming, forestry and renewables and who will reinvigorate the local economy. To this end we need to establish a Scottish Bank for Rural Land and Development. With recurring capital funding of £10 million per annum for the first 10 years, the financial commitment from the Scottish Government would be small but the impact of this new Institution could be huge. It would offer something new and impactful:
- It will purchase land on the open market and sub-divide it to provide land-based livelihood opportunities.
- Establish a recruitment process and waiting list for aspirant land entrepreneurs wishing to earn a living and create their future in remoter areas. Successful candidates will be assessed on their potential contribution they can make to the economic, social and cultural life of the community.
- Create a process and appropriate financial packages to allow new entrants to transition from tenants to owner-occupiers within 10 years to create an entirely community-owned asset.
- Working in partnership with other interested partners, especially local community groups, as well as outside investors such as charities with a passion for regenerating nature and local communities. Collaboration of this kind could easily double the funds available and provide real additional benefits in terms of nature recovery, regenerative farming techniques, timber processing etc. through certified business practices.
- The Bank will have clout, not just in terms of finance, but also in terms of professional networks that reach the corridors of powers to leverage important changes in the system – for example to alter planning outdated protocols to fast-track sustainable housing development.
Real land reform is possible and practicable with this approach. We simply need politicians with the courage to act.
Why does the Scottish Government consistently underwhelm where land reform is concerned? It’s the goose which lays the golden egg, Independence. It can transform lives, and the government has almost total control over its taxation but fails to do so.
It’s unfortunate that the article did not address taxation as no one knows how much land owners would wish to retain if it became an economic burden on them. Surely until we know that, then any policies are half baked?
The other point to note is that land is also a national urban resource and its stewardship and funding potential is significantly greater than rural land
The sad truth is that very few of the politicians in the Scottish Parliament have any feel for the issue, or any understanding of its importance, and that includes the current Cabinet Secretary. Deciding to place responsibility for developing land reform legislation with the Agricultural Troughs Directorate is symptomatic of the Scottish Government’s lack of commitment, despite the fine words in the SNP’s last manifesto. Given the conspicuous inadequacy of the latest Land Reform Bill, the framing of the Scottish Land Commission’s new Scotland Futures consultation as being about ‘completing our land reform journey’ is absurd. Reform has barely begun.
I completely agree on that Graeme. Completion of a journey barely begun! ‘Gas lighting’ is a term that might be appropriate to the messaging from the SLC and SLF on land reform
I’m afraid so.
Land taxation has great potential but I would like to see revenues ringfenced for the local area, rather than siphoned off to subsidise developments elsewhere. The money raised in the northwest could then be reinvested in building houses and creating livelihood opportunities in that area. In this way we can begin to develop a circular economy develop in an area that has essentially been operating under a colonial type economy where little of the value is retained in the area. For example, revenues from the land tax could be used to create local timber processing facilities that can produce timber for housing using state of the art technology. Scandinavia are miles ahead of us in this regard partly because they have lots of smallish owner occupiers.
Aye, Graeme, there’s probably more AGR to be collected 1 kilometre each side of Great Western Road than there is in the Kilpatrick Hills
This piece on Land Reform, or the lack of, needs to be sent to and read by every appropriate Minister and Cab Sec.
Including the FM.
The call to action here and the suggestions on how much more can be achieved must be acted upon, or cogent reasons given why the cant be.
I would like to hope so George but I fear there is an established culture among Ministers of mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru (見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる) “see not, hear not, speak not” thanks to civil servants. There is also, in my opinion, an absence of political will – the appointment of both Mike Russell and Andrew Thin with their leanings, is evidence of this. Rob Gibson was a bit of a land reform champion in the Parliament but he has retired as has Roseanna Cunningham. Andy Wightman was there for a while but seemed to suffer badly from the Greens obsession with transrights. There is no question in my mind that land reform now reflects the ‘capuccino culture’ of the Edinburgh chattering classes than authentic land reform voices. The SLC is full of careerists and I don’t think any Minister is allowed to hear divergent views from the various land reform placebos launched by the SLC.
Aye, Douglas, they have been TIS’d—traduced, infiltrated and suborned along the rubber-grouse circuit
Andrew Thin was the champion fiddler as rome burned ten yrs ago.
He was posted missing when thousands of tenant farmers and their workers were being emptied out due to ludicrous Subsidy policies and tree planting targets.
I attended a meeting at the highland show run by SLC. Tenant farmers didnt feature on the panel.
One tenant farmer submitted a question beforehand but it was not chosen to see the light of day.
There were two lairdy types, a crofter type and the landworkers alliance.
No serious issues were addressed and
Hot air was in abundance.
Another appointment that left me non-plussed was that of Dr George Macintosh CBE to the post of Scottish Land Commissioner for Tenant Farming. This is a man who spent is entire career in forestry – the early part at Kielder Forest in Northumberland which was land taken away from tenant farmers to plant a huge monocultural plantation of Sitka Spruce. For the latter part he was Chief Executive of Forest Enterprise – no freind of farmers. Talk about putting a wolf in with the sheep!!
Land reform has been in reverse gear since the lairds overturned most of the 2003 act.
Scotgov has fiddled while tenants have been evicted by the hundred as they diverted eu subsidies from the poor to the rich.
Thr lowlands are in as big a crisis as the highlands, mostly caused by holyrood stupidity
Yet those with views on the inadequacy of land reform are not mobilising. Revive is probably the closest we have to a land movement.
Indeed. Mobilisation is necessary. Andy Wightman alluded to that in his Edinburgh International Book Festival talk. We need to get busy.
I think you are right on that Rosemary. We need more authentic voices to challenge the cosy debate we seem intent on having. I await to see if any party standing for election at Holyrood has anything meaningful on land reform. Not holding breath!
Well Douglas in the Q&A session following our film on the Loch Garry project we ( Lesley Riddoch, Derek Pretswell and myself) we hope to present at the forthcoming Perth, I won’t be doing cosy-comfy.
Great – I want to come. When and where Ron?
it’s the Revive meeting in Perth on the 8th November. Would be great to catch up after all those years
Purchased my ticket Ron! Hope to see you there.
I agree. Revive is the best vehicle option at the moment. I’m hoping the film Lesley Riddoch, Derek Pretswell and myself are presenting at the forthcoming Perth Conference will add fuel and impetus.
When is that?
Perth 8th November. Google ‘Revive’ for further info.
In Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021), historian David Alston wrote about how some Highlanders returned from colonial careers and enslaving people in the Caribbean to purchase land in the Scottish Highlands and set themselves up as local estate owners.
There is some recent research (published 2020) which backs up these claims:
“Scores of estates in the West Highlands and Islands were acquired by people using the equivalent of well over £100m worth of riches connected to slavery in the Caribbean and North America. Many would go on to be leading figures in the Highland Clearances, evicting thousands of people whose families had lived on their newly procured land for generations.”
https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/resources/plantation-slavery-and-landownership-the-west-highlands-and-islands-legacies-and-lessons/
I haven’t watched the hour-long presentation, but plan to do so when I’ve got more time.
So, another aspect in land reform in Scotland should be related to the question of reparations. Perhaps some land should be forcibly confiscated as the proceeds of crimes, sold to local communities at historically low prices, and the money (and a small percentage of income) be transferred to a reparations fund. If the north of the country was a hotbed of petitions for the retention of slavery by 1833, then perhaps we need to reevaluate culpability in one of the worst crimes in recorded history. And the rest of the land should become part of the 30 by 30 initiative to protect the rest of nature from humans (which Scots again stand collectively guilty of in one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe, if not the world).
A hard but necessary message, but one few will want to hear, let alone act on.
It is one of the problems of the constant equating of Britain with England, as if the gross sins of the British empire are all therefore theirs. Ditto the idea of Scotland as a colony of England, another get out of jail free card. Time to grow up.
@Niemand, yes, I share those thoughts. I’ve just watched the online discussion from around five years ago, on the page I linked to, and another ‘D’ would be dynastic politics. Buying land with slavery proceeds was a stepping stone to becoming MPs, which were almost as hereditary as peers of the realm, especially if seats could be passed to those outside the constraints of legitimate male primogeniture. Are we any further forward today? Nobody else has picked up on this question of the staggering effect of slavery proceeds (and reputations) laundered through Scottish land ownership which distorted society here in extreme ways (by European standards, say the report authors) and which effects have passed and rippled down to today’s culture. It probably took outside influences before native academic deference wore off in the last generation. And of course landlordism and evil entanglements still run through our political and tastemaker classes.
My research carried out a few years back uncovered the uncomfortable fact that more than 90% of sporting estate owners are middle aged, white males. Despite their hegemonic possession of the land, they represent the least diverse group in Britain and yet this issue is never raised by a single politician, including the ones that keep on lecturing the hoi polloi about diversity. Would it not be wonderful if a wealthy black citizen, with family links to slavery bought one of the classic sporting estates…… they would have to hide their identity of course.
Most of the nation was guilty of making gains from the use of slaves at all levels of society. People who had come from poor backgrounds made money too.
To confiscate land would be impossible if it had been sold on as the owner would have the a lawful legal title. The fact that the previous Laird had sold it it to someone who had made money from the use of slaves wouldn’t mean the current owner would be culpable. It would be like saying if I robbed a bank and bought a house with the money, then sold it to you, your new house would be confiscated to repay the bank.
@Alistair Jeffs, you can legalise land appropriation by passing legislation, which is what happened during Enclosures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
and British colonial land was stolen by force. Governments can simply renege on treaties too. There is a whole history of the USAmerican government doing this with treaties with Native Americans, some groups of whom successfully legally challenged dispossession and got land back (not necessarily the ‘original’ lands, since during the European settler genocides the indigenous people were often serially dispossessed and displaced, usually Westward).
There was no legal route for foreigners into slavery as far as I can fathom English law (I’m not a lawyer). There were some for subjects (impressment). But nevertheless Parliament voted to compensate slave owners.
There is no legal route to removed the royal family as hereditary heads of state, as far as I know. They are vast landowners, like the established Anglican church. Yet the Church has been ‘legally’ dispossessed of lands by the monarch in past times, and the current royals are facing a public campaign for dispossession.
Whether by royal prerogative or ‘parliamentary sovereignty’, by annexing or decolonisation, land redistribution happens with a legalistic sheen. And there have been many reclamation projects over the years, for example the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
I take your point about the wide beneficiaries of slavery. Some of the most prominent supporters of slavery were workers in related industries, though some workers were anti-slavery. Mathematical models demonstrating the Matthew Effect (the rich get richer, the poor poorer) have shown the importance of seed capital; which allowed those with surplus capital to essentially make those without relatively poorer. So pro-slavery workers weren’t typically campaigning in their own interests.
The point is that land is often redistributed for political reasons, perhaps to head off revolutions, or as promises during civil wars. Otherwise land is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Until you get a revolution or civil war, perhaps.
Land has been reappropriated in the the past though that is not possible in the same way now. The Enclosure Acts and the Prescription Acts were most likely abused to gain ‘legal’ title to property that wasn’t owned by them or common property. However, it would probably very difficult, even impossible, and costly to challenge legal titles from the past where they do exist.
Contemporary law, provides powerful legal property rights through Article 1, Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act, as well as Article 17 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, all of which in essence give a person the right to own, peacefully enjoy and not be deprived of their property. Of course, exceptions exist where there is clear and over-riding public interest. However, with these substantive legal rights protecting property ownership, it is difficult to easily reduce scale or concentration of landownership even when demonstrating public interest and then the landowner must be compensated, all of which will be costly to the public purse.
It’s not that I don’t accept arguments for the failings of concentrated landownership but we are in a modern society and people need to be able to own and hold property without fear of it being arbitrarily taken away from them. It’s not 200 years ago so therefore we can’t go round chopping people’s heads off and reappropriating land through revolution (as much as I understand the sentiment lol). That wouldn’t be in the public interest when it comes to wider societal implications and I very much doubt the general public would desire that.
“The landlords would have to be compensated”???
Whats the problem with that??
Its not a reason for doing nothing.
If a general right to buy was introduced, landlords would receive the value of the tenanted farm, from the tenant, so why pay compensation?
The value of the tenants improvements belongs to the tenant already, so shouldnt have to pay for them again.
@Alistair, I don’t see what you refer to in the ECHR, and while the UDHR article does mention property rights that declaration is different from the ECHR in that UN rights are seen as negotiable against other rights and duties, whereas the European ones are absolute and inalienable (which ultimately is illogical since at some points rights will collide).
As evidence that UN rights are negotiable, its FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) addresses land redistribution directly:
https://www.unescwa.org/sd-glossary/redistributive-land-reform-redistributive-reform
Land is not necessarily property in the same way as other property, nor similarly treated by different jurisdictions. And global health requirements will be seen to supersede territorial privatisation, as in the 30 by 30 agreement. Notions of tenancy or stewardship may legally apply. If we had a codified constitution, we might have a really modern take on that.
There appear to be lots of land redistribution initiatives and none of them seem to be constrained by the UDHR, as far as I know. I imagine legislation will likely head in the other direction, with legal limitations on land ownership and purchase, and quite possibly reparations.
Certainly British royals seem to have immunity to compulsory purchase laws here, which apparently let them profit obscenely at expense to the public purse. And of course they have been greedily snapping up all those plots left by feudal tenants on their duchy estates. But that state of affairs need not last forever. Neither feudal overlordship nor neoliberal interpretations of human rights will be sustainable.
As for not killing people for their land, have you been paying attention to the news? What is this modernity of which you speak? Where is this rule of law? If people can still grab land with injustice, surely we can redistribute it with justice instead? And allocate some of it to benefit nonhuman lifeforms too.
I’m talking about Land Reform in Scotland (rather than more widely).
European Convention on Human Rights Article 1 Protocol 1
“Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one
shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions
provided for by law and by the general principles of international law.”
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights#:~:text=Article%2017,arbitrarily%20deprived%20of%20his%20property.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. The UDHR is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels (all containing references to it in their preambles).”
Article 17
“Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
There is no conflict between A1PI and Article 17.
Let’s be realistic. A1P1 and Article 17 are fundamental protections in the public interest for the good of everybody in Scotland. It is doubtful that anybody at all would want us to ignore these. Possessions and property also include land with regards to land reform in Scotland. Case studies if nothing else demonstrate this.
Of course, exceptions exist where there is clear and over-riding public interest. However, with these substantive legal rights protecting property ownership, it is difficult to easily reduce scale or concentration of landownership even when demonstrating public interest and then the landowner must be compensated, all of which will be costly to the public purse. Dispossession must be necessary and proportionate otherwise there is the possibility carte blanche to any of us having our possessions taken from us by the State arbitrarily.
Initiatives on land reform in legislation may well restrict size of holdings or purchases in the future. But that is not the same as dispossessing someone. So even if legislation comes into force in the future that prevents size of holdings that doesn’t mean that existing owners are forced to sell.
The UN link you provided on land redistribution provides a definition of what it is. However, it doesn’t imply in any way that Article 17 can be ignored. In terms of Scottish Land Reform you would still have to go through the legal procedure and prove need and proportionality in the public interest in order to dispossess a landowner of existing holdings.
@Alistair, you are quoting old documents which have been in many cases superseded politically, for example by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants which was adopted in 2018 (despite the opposition of the UK and others):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Declaration_on_the_Rights_of_Peasants
perhaps complementing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
Politics has changed globally since the post-WW2 era, and will continue to change. And more land and sea is intended to be set aside for nature, or for that matter exploited by imperialist-capitalist forces. And as the crimes of empires continue to be more openly recognised, the push towards reparative and restitutive justice continues. It is not just public interest, but environmental interest (including living nonhuman and nonliving entities such as rivers and forests which are increasingly being recognised).
I mentioned recently how Jamaicans were denied access to many of their own islands’ beaches. This follows from British imperial land law and will be challenged. Just as British ‘ownership’ of the Chagos Islands was deemed illegal by UN courts who recognised Mauritius instead.
You cannot reasonably on one hand claim that the UK is bound by UN agreements and on the other declare that the UK is so exceptional it can repudiate them. The old Roman concept of jus abutendi or the legal right to destroy property (ironic considering the facetious European colonial justification of stealing land that other people were not ‘improving’) is facing a fundamental global challenge as the planet is being laid waste (and Britain is recognised by bodies such as the WWF as one of the most nature-depleted places in the world).
I am not going to argue that ‘all property is theft’ but hey, the British Museum is full of loot, those old pink-stained maps are still up fading in some classrooms, the descendants of Norman conquerors are still seated in the Lords, and are the British really the people who should be lecturing the rest of the world on property rights?
As I pointed out I am talking about Land Reform in Scotland (not more widely). If want to debate other stuff then start a new thread.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights has not been superseded. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
Article 17 remains in force:
“Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”
European Convention on Human Rights remains in force: https://rm.coe.int/guide-art-1-protocol-1-eng/1680a20cdc
“Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall
be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for
by law and by the general principles of international law.”
Nobody is lecturing anybody on these fundamental rights and they have been reconfirmed since their post-WW2 inception.
A1P1 and Article 17 are fundamental protections in the public interest for the good of everybody in Scotland. It is doubtful that anybody at all would want us to ignore these. Possessions and property also include land with regards to land reform in Scotland. Case studies if nothing else demonstrate this.
Of course, exceptions exist where there is clear and over-riding public interest. However, with these substantive legal rights protecting property ownership, it is difficult to easily reduce scale or concentration of landownership even when demonstrating public interest and then the landowner must be compensated, all of which will be costly to the public purse. Dispossession must be necessary and proportionate otherwise there is the possibility carte blanche to any of us having our possessions taken from us by the State arbitrarily.
Initiatives on land reform in legislation may well restrict size of holdings or purchases in the future. But that is not the same as dispossessing someone. So even if legislation comes into force in the future that prevents size of holdings that doesn’t mean that existing owners are forced to sell.
Scotgov could start on this today by limiting the amount of subsidy one person can collect.
The dukeof buccleuch collects over £2 million annually from the taxpayer for simply owning land.( or being rich)
Is that a just position today?
@Hector, I mean, it is perfectly possible to tax people out of excess land ownership. With an annual tax of 1p for just one are, doubling the area while multiplying the tax by 10 (and skipping collection of liabilities below £100), you would reach approximately £100,000,000 pa at 10 hectare area (if my maths is OK, but you get the gist), and say you would divide that by how many people lived on the land.
Impose a deadline and watch land prices fall on the market.
You could have a different tax for community-owned land.
But perhaps these old European ideas (ie fictions) about land ownership need rejected and replaced by something more healthy. I mean, you see what John Locke’s propertarian views excused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarianism
All this talk of the UDHR is bullshit, of course. It’s easy to make property a human right if you have already vastly more than your fair share of property, and in various European countries various people (like married women) were denied the right to own property long after the UDHR, and this remains elsewhere despite the (legally unenforceable) UDHR. See France’s Napoleonic Code and, I think, Switzerland for holdouts. After all, the language of the UDHR is gendered in places (as I think Eleanor Roosevelt noticed), which is *superseded* by later *interpretations*. Otherwise it would be ‘his’ property. So why wasn’t land redistributed before the UDHR article on property rights was published? I ask rhetorically.
Anyway, doesn’t property gained by theft or robbery void future contracts in Scottish property law? All land is stolen land in Scotland and throughout the colonies Scots occupied and profited from. The Empire ran on the proceeds of crime, and pretty much feudalism before that. We’re just too used to landowners ruling over us, maybe, just like slaveowners in previous days.
Of course you are correct, but a land tax will be fought tooth and nail by the aristocracy who have ample funds to do so.
The current subsidy system on the other hand could be altered tomorrow by scotgov without any need to legislate.
The golden carrots that Scotgov dangled in front of landowners to evict tenants and “farm” themselves( the slipper landlords) should never have happened, its time to reverse that trend.
Not disagreeing with anything you say but taking back land acquired with proceeds of slavery could get complicated. Iain McKinnon and Andrew McKillop’s discussion paper, Plantation slavery and landownership in the west Highlands and Islands: legacies and lessons (2020) talked about ‘the amounts received by those estate purchasers who benefitted from the £20 million fund (more than £16 billion in today’s terms) created by the British government under the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act, 1833, to compensate slaveowners for the loss of their ‘property’ when slavery was abolished in the British Empire.’ There is a database listing names of these beneficiaries and how much compensation each of them received. It would be quite a task to relate this data to land purchases across Scotland but well done Iain McKinnon for making a start.
Who wants to live in an isolated midge infested bog? No bank, no post office, no schools, no doctors, no shops, no jobs…
I recon it needs more than land – it needs a rural policy that restores and establishes functioning villages, with buses between and a good internet. I’m looking for a new home at the moment, prefering rural Aberdeenshire and cannot help noticing the houses in small towns go quickly, whilst those in the middle of nowhere stick for years, even though some of them are lovely.
We already have enough wind turbines, by the way.
To those who mentioned tax – yes, what ever happened to the land tax idea? Are the Greens still advocating it?
At a theoretical level, land is nature’s contribution to the classical three factors of production – there is not much excuse for claiming to own it.
“Who wants to live in an isolated midge infested bog?” Pretty pig ignorant view of the Highlands and Islands.
The anglo centric edinburgh elite will never allow any real change.
The judges all take tea with the landed gentry and decide the course of events.
Any leaders who emerge are swiftly bought off or evicted if they are tenants..
MSP s are easily turned , not many principles in that lot.
We cannot allow ourselves to become defeatist. I was brought up in Edinburgh. 🙂
Its not defeatist, it’s reality.
Judges all come from the elite knobocracy, who will never allow change.
Sadly I have to agree Hector. I know with my own work helping with community buy outs, how often the landowner would buy off the leading members of the group looking hankering for ownership. In one case the landowner, non other than state-owned Forestry and Land Scotland, resisted transferring ownership of a remote forest (which provided no jobs locally) to a local community group. An important community leader (crofter) removed himself from the group when FLS gave him the hard standing he wanted for his vehicles. The group failed.
I have to acknowledge that there now seems to be a cadre of hard core neoliberal zealots who are very hostile to public and community interests at senior levels in Scottish Government and its agencies. It’s quite a dramatic change. It certainly wasn’t the case when I was a civil servant and I find it hard to believe that it has happened by accident. But if things can change that dramatically in the space of a decade, then they can, and must, be changed again. These people do not reflect mainstream thinking in Scottish society and are not serving the public interest.
These top civil servants all have their holiday house in Elie or pitlochry and plenty time to enjoy themselves there.
They have no time for the peasantry who pay their wages.
I think you are right Graeme. Something has manifestly changed over the past decade. The Scot Gov, like virtually all governments of western Europe, has been nobbled by neoliberal interests. How, I know not, but something is definitely rotten in the state of Denmark!
I believe that key drivers were Bridget Campbell’s rearrangement of the deckchairs at Scotland’s forestry and natural heritage agencies, COP26, and Nicola Sturgeon’s decision to put Liz Lloyd in charge of taking forward climate change policy. These things resulted in important parts of public policy on climate change and the environment being contracted out to city bankers. People were put in place at senior levels in the Scottish Government and its agencies who could be relied upon to pursue a neoliberal agenda.
If you want further proof of this policy shift just look at the treatment of limited partnership tenants. (The legal vehicle most favored by criminals and landlords to circumvent legislation.)
In 2003 , the day before the right to buy was to be debated in parliament, 350 plus LP tenants recieved eviction notices.
The liberal minister ross finnie took a dim view and quite rightly awarded those tenants the right to a full 91 act agricultural tenancy.
Those tenants then changed the way they farmed and lived, they invested heavily, they put down roots in the community, they had children, farmed for the long term.
Comparing a short term tenant to a secure tenant is like comparing a series of one night stands to a happy marriage.
The former being deeply destructive and the latter the total opposite.
These tenants spent ten years buildings up these farms for the future till 2013 when scotgov pulled the rug out after their legislation was found incompetent after a legal challenge by scotlands richest man.
Scotgov then allowed the landlords to throw these families out on the street without a penny.
No home, no income, no future.
Suicides followed. Ill health followed
Family breakup followed.
They were left to pursue govt for compensation( which they had promised) for ten yrs till they ran out of money and any remaining will to carry on.
Meanwhile all the land had been grabbed by landlords as they were now receiving subsidy for being “ farmers”
Or planting trees
So no chance of starting again.
Imagine expecting a bunch of homeless jobless middle aged men with families and commitments to go to court for compensation for wasting twenty of their best years pushing shit up the wrong hill??
Thats scotgov under sturgeon
The issue of unlimited private land ownership is absolutely central to the whole Enlightenment in Britain, to Locke and to Hume and all these thinkers, and it’s questioning or even the explicit recognition, that this isn’t something natural and eternal like, say, the rain, but something man-made and recent, very, very recent, in human history, is almost totally absent from our culture…
Why should a tiny number of people own the vast majority of the land in Britain or the world? Where is the logic in it, let alone the fairness?
But we live in a cloistered culture where the media and the creative industries create false walls around us, boxing us into these prejudices and deeply reactionary views, and entirely ignoring the bigger picture… which is way past the point of needing to be challenged…
Jane Austen is adapted so frequently by the BBC for example, for one simple reason. It’s because she writes about property and class and rich white people, and property and class and rich white people, and property and class and rich white people… …book after book after book…
She’s a racist, colonial, imperialist writer and the most adapted English novelists after Shakespeare probably… and used by the BBC to further the British elite’s colonial, neoliberal elitist agenda…
Human lived for tens of thousand of years without the idea of private property exisiting…
That there hasn’t been a good feature film about the Highland Clearances is one thing, that there hasn’t been a single documentary of note, is another…
We were wrong to expect the SNP to lead on this, and on virtually everything else…
We really need some leadership outside the world of politics…
Douglass – absolutely agree with everything you said. Sporting estates are a pillar of the British Establishment and underscore our colonial status. Unbelievably the Scottish Land Commission is actually touring the country proposing that having a chat around a table with the ‘land owners Scottish representative’ over scones and tea, is actually progressive land reform! Crumbs off the table I guess has always worked in the past.
In terms of popular media I totally agree the purpose of so many drama series and films is to promote the idea that we are better off being ruled by toffs, otherwise we will die of a nasty disease or be murdered. In Scottish terms all we ever get are murder dramas which perpetrate the myth that there is a very good chance you will be murdered in Scotland, even on ‘Shetland’ by someone with a Glesga accent. The deeply anglicised nature of the stories, the script, the actors employed and above all the shameless refusal to use Scots Shetlandic or any other dialect of Scots reflects the true nature of the British project. This is even true for important literature written originally in Scots .
Thanks, Douglas.
Well, a quick gander at the webpage of the Land Commission reveals that most of the “commissioners” (as opposed to the mere “staff”) are academics at Scottish universities… your Scottish academic likes nothing more than a cosy chat over a cup of tea and scone…
We know, and Chomsky makes this point, that academics are among the conservative people on the planet. They might have a liberal veneer, but they are profoundly conservative people in nature most often, absolutely indispensable for the smooth running of the psychopathic colonial capitalist system of never ending exploitation..
We’re talking about the country where one of the leading centres of learning, Edinburgh University, has recently been revealed as a factory of racialist theory and quasi Nazi ideology for more than two centuries, a racial theory they actively used to clear the Gaels from the Highlands of Scotland, and to justify the death of more than one million Irish by famine, not even two hundreds years ago…
The notion these people are going to change anything is surely the most fanciful of ideas…
They were appointed so that nothing really changes in fact… just like Creative Scotland…
Speaking as a retired Academic – your assessment is absolutely spot on!
Then you are one of the exceptions who proves the rule, Douglas… There were a couple of professors during my time at Glasgow Uni a long time ago now like Bridget Fowler and Mike Gonzalez the same could be said of…
The challenge (I find) is trying to find an angle which allows one to be positive. It’s so easy to fall into cynicism not to say despair. It’s no minor issue.
I just finished Kehinde Andrews’ The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule The World.
It’s a fine summation of how White Supermacy created the modern world at the price of so many millions and millions of Black and Brown lives.
But Andrews offers no way forward to a new world order, and explicitly rejects the idea White people have something to contribute here.
He says that change will come from the Global South, ie, the Revolution.
I hope he is right but probably he is wrong. The history books tell us almost anybody who stands up to the Washington Consensus will be killed, from Patrice Lumumba (Congo) to Salvador Allende (Chile) to Mosaddegh (Iran) and so many other cases…
Arguably Nelson Mandela only lived to tell the tale because he spent most of his life in prison…
Andrews offers no answers here either…
The Left has come to a total impasse it seems to me…
Tea and scones with landowners was exactly the approach to nature conservation pursued assiduously by Francesca Osowska when Chief Executive of NatureScot! 🙂
These names certainly resonate with me Graeme. They are the government actors driving this. Another name is of course Andrew Wilson who went form a humble and quite junior forest economist at the Forestry Commission in the 1990s to a rather well heeled mover and shaker in the banking world. A neoliberal facilitator if ever there was one.
@Douglass, as I understand it (I’m not an economist, but I’ve played Empire: Total War), the Physiocrats were all about land improvement, in the sense of exploitation and profitability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiocracy
This is also related to the (in practice, genocidal) concept of terra nullius.
Neither would strictly apply to clearing crofters to replace them with largely unprofitable shooting estates. Something else is going on.
My take is that the rich were basically creating fortresses (before modern weapons made bunkers more necessary) with free-fire cleared zones around them so that their bodyguards could mow down all those crowds with torches and pitchforks. Of course, assassinating such rich sorts in their in the dark hearts of their fortified demesnes is (coincidentally or otherwise) the essential plot and mechanics of many a modern computer game.
Interesting allusion there SleepingDog. Perhaps less far from the truth than many realise. Many sporting estate employees are ex-military and are pretty handy with guns.
In the early 19th Century, landowners found that sporting tenants brought in far more money than traditional farming tenancies based on subsistance farming, so they did make money for the landowners at the time. As time went on, many of the wealthy sporting tenants decided that they preferred to own the land directly themselves, so they started to buy out the traditional landowners.
Aye but cant forget the impact of Balmoral on rich industrialists looking for ownership and all the trappings …..
for which Douglas I coined the acronym VED–Victorian-Edwardian Dystopia
@Graeme Purves, in Silent Fields: The long decline of a nation’s wildlife (2007), Roger Lovegrove writes that from 1840s English bloodsports enthusiasts took rail connections north for stalking, hunting, fishing. Heyday finished with WW1, revival set back by WW2, slow piecemeal recovery since. That for the development of Scottish sporting estates, absentee clan leaders seeking profit had to wait for transport link improvements; the 1843 rail line to Edinburgh made it reachable from England within 10 hours, extended to Inverness in 1863. Deer stalking in woodland did not require ‘vermin’ control unlike most game and fish, and on open ground grouse could alarm deer, so grouse-predators welcomed. 6 deer forests in 1811, 117+ by 1895 covering 1m+ hectares of Highlands. Improved guns killed game and ‘vermin’ more efficiently. Shooting in Scotland on Victorian social calendar every autumn for rich class.
So, there may have been (public) subsidies, cheap tied labour and a cultural elite craze that made such estates profitable (and subsistence farming is not profitable by definition), but these are not the kinds of improvements that Physiocrats were talking about during the Enlightenment, and clearly depended on foreign tourists. Actually diversification would have been more in tune, as happened on plantation estates elsewhere to keep up with modish demands. But most importantly, when a landowning class capture the state, they can make all kinds of land uses profitable by simply legislating them so. I think that was the essence of the Corn Laws, although again, I’m not an economist. But I understand that the Corn Laws represented the pre-Enlightenment protectionism of mercantilism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
Royal, imperial or oligarchic ‘sporting estates’ similarly have an ancient pedigree, and were profitable in the sense that the ruling class controlled the treasury and legally owned or otherwise controlled the land. They didn’t have to contribute as much to GDP as alternative land uses, because that wasn’t the point.
Whether the physiocratic idea of ‘land improvement’ has any worth is another question. Indigenous forms of land management might have been far more effective, while various kinds of ‘improvement’ might have led to environmental degradation. A lot of the experiments of the ‘improvers’ went wrong, sometimes fairly catastrophically. But generally the physiocrats seems to have wanted flourishing rural communities, which the ‘sporting estate’ clearances were in direct opposition to.
Thats not strictly correct
Landowners covered the highlands with sheep first, sport followed later.
And before the sheep were the cattle. Cattle were an export business not subsistence. The surplus was sold ….would have continued to be successful but the laird realised you did not need the people for sheep farming. By clearing the people he could gain real authority and power over land. He replaced people and communities with deep ties to the area …family ties, with sheep tenants who were strictly business
The relentless promotion and recycling of Julian Fellowes excrutiating Downturn Abbey is another example of this cultural conditioning by the media.
Spot on, Douglas we were taken for a ride by the SNP hierarchy when we spent all that time and effort on thew SLC set up by Salmond in the 1990s. I think your opinion of Mike Russel is insufficiently low !
Hi Ron and you are probably right. I have been wondering about Mike Russell a lot – I remember he hovered around the SLC quite a bit , keeping an eye on what we were doing. I didn’t realise he had his own agenda! I wis jist a young loon in those days!
Mike Russell is far to close the the landowners he loves “nobbing”
with the gentry far to much to bring radical, effective and sustainable land reform.- he would rather talk than act.
Just so. Russell recently had the effrontery to post on Facebook a wistfully captioned photograph of the Strath of Kildonan, notorious for evictions during the Sutherland clearances in the early 19th Century. Classic misdirection!
Aye Graeme, but Russel’s FB post opens up ‘having a go’ commentary. I have tried to post this Bellacaledonia piece to Rewilding Scotland( 25,000 + members) to spread the debate out. We will not get rewilding or re-settlement without land reform.
Indeed!
What’s interesting is that writers like John Locke, writing at the end of the 17th Century, feel this need to justify private property at some length, which is something absent in the case of the Greeks as I understand it, and in any case, The Republic by Plato, who writes about the ideal State of course and its Guardians and how they should be educated and how Art isn’t worth the candle being a copy of a copy, that is, the world is but a cheap imitation of the Ideal World where the Real exists, and so Art is just an imitation of a cheap imitation and hence, to be scorned or at least avoided…
He also writes, in that famous passage, about the slaves imprisoned in the cave watching the illusion of shadows on the cave wall which they take for reality, but reality is actually outside the cave (the Ideal) and only philosophers can get access to it, and how the prisoners, when finally taken out, are so dazzled by the light of reality they can’t see at all…
Anyway, private property and a justification for it suddenly takes off as capitalism begings to emerge, merchant capitalism, the wheeling and dealing spiv capitalism of the City of London which the British elite have always been addicted to, and John Locke, of course, is in exile in Holland and very much on the side of William of Orange and the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688/1689 and against the ailing Stuart dynasty.
If I recall, he even travels over to England with William’s 20,000 men strong army in what was a coup d’Etat in favour of private, merchant capitalism and individual liberties against the old regime and the power of kings, not least of which, the right to accumulate untrammeled wealth and property…
If they called in a foreign army to protect their rights as capitalists back then, there can hardly be a shed of doubt they would do so again if even remotely threatened, even if only by a bunch of well-meaning land reformers in wellies and body-warmers…
PS: Important to remember what Tom Nairn said about 1688/89 and the State which come out of it and which has been petrified in time since then right up our own day…
It’s not for Nairn, a Marxist bourgeois revolution at all, as some have said, I think Hobsbawm among them. Nairn refutes this.
there is an emerging merchant capitalist society, almost pre-capitalism, and the State which emerges has more in common with the Republic of Venice of the time than say France in 1789 and the Revolution there, which was a real bourgeois revolution along Marxist lines…
Anyway, private property is absolutely of essence to the regime and still is to this day…
Just nationalise all land without compensation. All land usage and development by leasehold from the government. Owners of land will get free leases for a certain number of years as compensation for their loss of capital value. No carbon credits for forest planting – that’s a total scam. Rent for wind turbines to be controlled and be divided out to local communities. . Is this radical enough? (And I am deadly serious – could it work, of course it could, will it come about, well revolutions do happen if things get dire enough.. I don’t wish that of course, but it might the silver lining in a very black chaotic cloud of political and social disturbance. )
Would contravene the European Convention on Human Rights A1P1.
The public interest overrides all human rights nonsense.
Human Rights is nonsense – a bold statement until you get tortured or you are evicted from your home!
If you read the court papers, or even the newspapers, you would see that human rights protection only apply to landlords.
Thats why it is nonsense in the uk.
The peasantry can be evicted , robbed and driven over the edge with impunity.
This will be old hat for many posting here I’m sure, but I’ve just come across Andy Wightman’s brilliant video discussing Scotland’s landscape, ecology and land ownership here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwE0-3_YXQ I’ve commented this should be the first port of call for all Scots – politicians, business, planners and the ordinary citizen – interested in a better and dare I say it, more communal, future for their country.