Few would argue that Scotland’s present pattern of land tenure is ideal. Around half of private land is owned by fewer than 500 individuals, corporates or pension funds. The vast estates date from two centuries ago when landlords, often clan chiefs, expelled the Scottish peasantry from their villages in the interests of ‘improvement’ – mainly to create sheep walks, deer-hunting estates or, latterly, forestry. Had we had a French Revolution, landed estates might have been broken up. But we didn’t, and they weren’t.
The idea that a group of pen-pushers in Edinburgh is going to create a new generation of small private landholdings is fanciful
As a result, the Scottish government has been trying to push through a retrospective revolution by using bureaucracy to enforce the division of large landed estates. The Land Reform Bill, passed by the Scottish Parliament this week, will strengthen the rights of communities to buy land when it comes on the market and, most controversially, will allow a new Scottish Land Commissioner to divvy up estates of more than 1,000 hectares into smaller ‘lots’ for Scottish would-be smallholders to buy. At least, that is the theory. In practice, as both landowners and community groups agree, it will do nothing of the kind.
The idea that a group of pen-pushers in Edinburgh is going to create a new generation of small private landholdings is fanciful. For a start, most of these large Highland estates are large for a reason: because it is uneconomic to run them on a small scale. Broken up into little plots, many estates would be unsaleable in the first place. The Scottish government certainly isn’t going to buy them.
Communities already have a statutory right to buy land when land comes onto the market. The Community Land (Scotland) Act of 2003 offers up to £1 million from a Community Land Fund to facilitate the transfer of estates. Some of these buyouts, like the remote Knoydart peninsula, have been commercially successful; others less so. But two decades later, there has been little change in the overall pattern of ownership. Indeed, according to the leading land reform advocate, former Green MSP Andy Wightman, the concentration of land ownership is now greater than it was two decades ago and the new bill will do little to reverse this trend.
The size of Highland estates has a lot to do with the commercial viability of remote land. Profit is regarded as evil by many on the nationalist left. They want to expropriate the landowners because they are morally offended by private ownership. But this very lack of commercial focus is why this latest Land Reform Bill will achieve little, except create a new generation of land-reform busybodies drawing up fantasy maps.
Government ministers will also require existing estate owners to submit plans of how they intend to develop their land in future. These plans will then become legally-binding, backed up with fines of £40,000 for non-compliance. The naïveté of this provision is astonishing. Landowners will be even less willing to commit to risky commercial developments and community projects in case they get fined for them not working out in practice.
It would be wonderful if, somehow, Scotland could be turned overnight into Norway, where land is typically owned by small, family-owned businesses and farms. Norway is a genuine property-owning democracy which tightly restricts foreign ownership. That kind of revolution isn’t quite what the Scottish left have in mind.
Actually, there was a revolution in the 1890s called the Scottish Land Wars which led to the Crofters Scotland Act and the creation of small-scale crofting tenancies. Families owned the rights to croft in perpetuity, but not the actual land. This did not stop the catastrophic depopulation of the Highlands and Islands. Indeed, it accelerated economic decline, because these small plots remained uncultivated in the hands of absentee families.
You can tell the story of the Highlands by observing the lack of roads. Compared with anywhere else in the UK, there are huge areas without any vehicle access at all. Today’s environmentalists, and the ‘Green Lairds’ want it to stay that way. To establish wind farms, rewild the glens or manage peat bogs, you need scale. This is finally why the SNP’s latest land revolution will end up as an empty exercise in tartan virtue signalling.
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