Andy Wightman's journey out of Holyrood back to the land

How Wightman ended up leaving his party is a journey well-documented in the press and his own blog - the pivotal event being when, in 2020, the vote on Johann Lamont’s amendment to the Forensic Medical Services Bill Scotland, which changed the bill to allow victims of sexual crimes to choose the sex, rather than the gender, of the person who examined them.

He had, in the run-up, been warned by Green MSPs that voting yes to the amendment would lead to action against him, “up to and including deselection and suspension” - the grounds being that such a vote would run contrary to the trans positivity policy of the party. Wightman ultimately voted against the motion, but then resigned from the party. He cited in his letter “the intolerance shown by some party members to an open and mature dialogue about the tensions and conflicts around questions of sex and gender.”

With that, a significant voice on land rights was lost to the Green party.

But my interest in Wightman, in coming here to visit, is not to do with his stance on trans issues. It’s rather to track down the land rights guru and see what he has been thinking and doing since he left parliament last year.

He and his partner, Cathy, have since moving here, spent much of his time hanging out here at the cabin, a forestry store which he hand built after he went on a course in Sweden. “This is a traditional Dalarna cabin,” Wightman says. “Swedes have lots of different styles. The difference in the style is mainly in how they do their joints. And so, you learn how to do that joint. And you do it by hand with a big axe...”

Cathy throws down a lump of wood onto the ground, which turns out to be the sample joint he made in Sweden. It has a rough, elemental simplicity. “I brought that back from Sweden – in my luggage just to remind me.”

For him, the cabin and woods project has been mostly about spending time in nature. “Lesley Riddoch has written a PhD about huts. If you look at other European countries they have much more of a connection with nature, and that’s mainly because there’s more of an uninterrupted connection between people in cities and the countryside. In France and Scandinavia that link is still there. People still have family who live in the countryside. And they have huts. So they have a place to go to recharge their batteries.”

It seems a good contrast to the analytical work he does, this forest life. “Also,” he says, “I think it’s really important to be rooted in working on the land, to understand the challenges and opportunities, and to realise that actually a relatively small piece of land, there’s lots you can do. Small woodlands can be income generating – so that’s not unconnected with an agenda that says we should have many more people owning property.” Eight years ago, Wightman wrote a report titled Forest Ownership in Scotland, in which he analysed 100km square areas of the country, breaking them down their ownership in terms of sizes of holdings – holdings of less than a hectare, 1-10, 10-50 hectares and so on – to create a graph, and comparing with data from 19 countries in Europe, gleaned from the UN Economic Commission for Europe.

“In the European graph, the average of 19 European countries, it’s almost the mirror opposite. 60 percent is held in holdings of less than one hectare. And the thing about continental Europe is that’s basically a by-product of land reform that happened there 200 or 100 years ago where people got small farms and on those farms they have trees. So it’s not surprising that over half the trees in most European countries are on small farms.”

READ MORE: Five big land reform ideas from Andy Wightman

WIGHTMAN was born in Dundee – his mother was a teacher on Skye, his father an architect, and the couple met on Skye before his father got a job as the lead architect on Ninewells hospital. “The outdoors,” he says, “was part of my childhood. We’d head up Glenshee. We’d climb up Ben Lawers. But I never had a childhood fascination with woods, in particular.”

When, last year, he stood as an independent candidate for Holyrood he thought he was in with a good chance – but that vote ultimately didn’t go his way. “At the end of the day,” he says, “the parties are such a powerful political tool and every day they’re on the radio and the television.And the other thing is people are voting on this damned constitutional question – the electorate is split down the middle on this. So the chances of an individual breaking through are slim. I realised this was going to be tough. But I think parliament needs independents. It’s not easy – and I realise now it’s not easy and I wouldn’t do it again.”

It’s not just, however, that he isn’t keen to go through the election process again– he also seems to have turned a corner in terms of desire to get back in to parliament itself.

“I feel,” he says, “and I also felt this when I was in parliament, that if you’re doing your job properly there, you’re working really hard, but 90 percent of the time you’re doing stuff that doesn’t get you excited. It’s important – some of it is incredibly important. But it’s not the most important for you. Ten percent of the time things come along and you think, wow that’s brilliant. But you don’t have the time to devote to it.”

Hence, even when he was an MSP, he was already thinking he might be more effective outside. “I’ve got time now to draft what a comprehensive land reform bill should look like. I wouldn’t have had time. I said in my manifesto last year that I’d take that through as a members’ bill, but I think what I’m drafting is far too much to cope as a member’s bill. ”

The bill will be published in parts on his blog. He’s also refreshing his Who Owns Scotland website, which he had made free when he became an MSP, partly because he wasn’t updating it.

So, who does own Scotland now? Has that changed dramatically? “It’s all big investment companies in London – and it’s just right across the country. The same names coming up. Auchinairn limited liability partnership, some address in London. Church of England commissioners all over the place – they’re the biggest forest owners in Scotland.”

Among the recent developments that concern him is the carbon offset market. “The government has got a target to increase by 50 percent the so-called woodland carbon market by 2025 but it hasn’t said why it wants to do that. There’s no logical reason why Scotland should be trying to boost the market for offsetting. We should be limiting offsetting as much as possible, so every hectare of wood here should be a net capture of carbon, not just offsetting some dirty cement factory.”

He dismisses the idea that Scotland has “done” land reform. “20 percent of our land is forest. There’s no land reform happening there, in fact ownership is even more concentrated. Then 25-30 percent of the land is hunting estates and they’re still hunting estates. Nothing’s changing there. We’ve put all our eggs in the basket of communities, expecting them to be able to pick up stuff on the margins, spend millions in the process and somehow that will transform the country. It won’t.”

The land reform process, he considers, has barely started. “All we’ve done is a little of modernisation of the tenure legislation in the Labour and Lib Dem executives – they abolished feudal tenure and also tenement law and crofting law was a bit modernised. Then all the rest of it we’ve said it was up to communities. It’s not a lack of political will that is the problem. It’s a lack of intellectual grasp of what it is we’re talking about – and lack of understanding that we are behind the rest of Europe.”

So, what, I ask, will be in this draft bill?

The first idea he mentions is surprising. “That the atmosphere should be changed into a commons.”

“If you own land in Scotland, you own it in theory from the centre of the earth to the heavens above. A hectare of land is like a pyramid extending out.”

Wightman’s bill would propose that above the limits of development would be a commons and would be subject to a commons regime. “The air itself will be a commons. The landowner will own up to the limit of your development rights, the limit of the tallest tree or tallest building. But beyond that is common. And that means we can regulate the carbon market. Because people will either have to pay or be paid to take carbon from it. People will pay to pollute it. So that’s one aspect of the bill.”

It’s a startling concept, as is his next idea, relating to a 2003 report from the Scottish Law Commission on the law of the foreshore and the seabed. The report, he notes, describes the crown’s ownership of the foreshore a merely the most predominant modern theory - hence he has come up with a new theory. “What I want to do is amend their bill and say the foreshore belongs to the council and I takes the crown’s ownership for the seabed and transfers that to Scottish ministers.”

Why, I ask him, has there not been more progress on land reform?

“I might be partly at fault,” he says.

A habitual storyteller, he then begins one of his meandering narratives which h begins with an early job he had as a teenager planting trees in Aberfeldy for the Midland Bank, takes him to Aberdeen University where he studied forestry at the time when the Flow Country was being rapidly forested, and then arrives at a moment when the chief executive of Fountain Forestry, a lead player in that process, came to give a talk at his university.

“I asked questions,” he recalls, “about why the government was giving tax breaks to people in London like Hurricane Higgins and Terry Wogan to plant trees in Caithness and why it wasn’t giving it to the landowners and farmers in Caithness. My professor took me to one side afterwards and said it wasn’t a good idea to ask such politically-sensitive questions. And I said, ‘What is politically sensitive and controversial about that? And so I realised that when you start talking about money and power and ownership and land people get bothered.”

Wightman, whose activism had been ignited, would then go on to work on the eissue of John McEwen’s Who Owns Scotland. Ownership became his core issue. “That meant,” he says, “that we’ve had a regular parade of villains and idiots that the media love, and the debate has become about those individuals which is why it’s my fault.”

Land reform debate started to revolve around personalities, rather than the system. “I think,” he says, “there has been too much focus on who owns Scotland. It sounds ridiculous for me to say that –but what we actually need to focus on is land governance. How are decisions made about how land is owned and used?”

“Ownership is still really important, ” he continues. “But it’s not the only thing. Scotland has quite a strong human rights framework around property. Trying to take land off people and redistribute it is just a difficult thing. Whereas if you introduce a governance framework that basically limits the freedom of landowners to do what they want, that says if you want to come and buy land here this is the deal, x y and z, that can have a real impact.”

Conversation with Wightman often takes surprising turns. He is a great believer, he says, in questioning - partly the result of having a beloved uncle who did just that. “The best questions are naïve questions. When I asked, ‘Why is the government not giving the money it is forgoing in tax breaks to Terry Wogan to the crofters and farmers in Caithness, it was a genuine question. I suppose the answer that comes back is well it’s all very complicated and political. Well that’s not satisfactory. And I quickly realised that land and power and money has its own dynamic, and I was studying forestry and expecting to go and and work in the forest industry and I couldn’t understand why we were doing that in the Flow Country.”

One thing that’s clear from Wightman’s telling of his life is that he is no stranger to controversy – from a blacklisting from the forestry industry (which he says he recently discovered) over Flow country activism to, more recently, his split with the Green Party.

Controversy, both positive and negative, is his shadow - a result, perhaps of that endless questioning, that stubbornness of conscience. It was there, for instance, when he was pursued by Wildcat Haven Enterprises for damages, and later, when he was cleared, having raised from supporters for his legal fight. It was there again when, as a key member of the Holyrood probe into the handling of allegations against Alex Salmond, he criticised the process.

His split with the Green Party has clearly been a source of some pain. “It’s taken a long time to recover actually,” he says, “because I think one of the most painful things is that people who you thought were your friends suddenly become your sworn enemies and defame you quite frankly. And that’s quite difficult to cope with.”

Wightman initially kept relatively quiet on the story behind his departure – having agreed, he has said, with the party, not to say anything further about it. But in a blog last August, Why I Resigned From The Green Party, he responded to what he called “some significant misinformation circulated by members and officials of the Party”.

“Put simply,” he wrote, “I resigned because I couldn’t work in the environment in which I found myself.” In 2018, the Scottish Green party members overwhelmingly backed a change to rules that meant anyone using “transphobic and trans-exclusionary” language and anyone not respecting “all genders and their self-determination” would face disciplinary action. A year later, Wightman attended a meeting at the University of Edinburgh called “Women’s Sex-Based Rights: what does (and should) the future hold?”

“The ensuing publicity,” he wrote in the blog, “that I had attended this meeting prompted a great deal of online comment and personal abuse. ” Then came the Forensic Medical Services Bill and his resignation. In the end, MSPs voted overwhelmingly to replace the word gender with sex.

Though Wightman was isolated within his party, his views appeared to fall in line with the mainstream.

He tells me now, “When that issue around those words came up around the forensic medical services bill, I looked it up and saw that the European greens had voted for a European directive which we were implementing, but used the word sex, not gender. I thought well that’s a fine idea. I realised there was an undercurrent to this. I was aware of that. But sometimes politicians need to do things that are really, really unpopular. So I put it to the group. I said, I think there’s a case for sorting out our language here. But that was deemed to be transphobic and a betrayal of trans people and all the rest of it.”

Does he have any regrets?

“It’s been great having these five years here. I still am a Green. I believe in green politics, but I can’t work in that highly censorious environment. We only live once. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we live more than once, but I’m not going to spend my time arguing about finer points on heads of pins. It was a fantastic experience being in parliament. You’re getting to the heart of how legislation is made and how politics works. No regrets whatsoever. I think it’s been really useful. I much better understand how power works.” Would he ever think about joining another party, instead of the Scottish Greens?

“Nah, not really. I actually think parties, and people will think I would say this, are part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong, parties are a fundamental part of politics. But they can also really smother. The public expect people willing to say what they think. But that’s difficult to do in political parties – and it shouldn’t be.”

Besides, there are the woods to look after. It seems as if he is quite glad, once more, to be able to focus on land. There’s an enthusiasm in the way he talks about his plans for the forest as he takes us on a tour through the spruce. He is still debating the best plan – whether to clearfell and replant as native birchwood or process it, bit by bit, himself, using a mobile sawmill.

“I don’t like clearfell,” he says, “but I’m 59 and I don’t want to spend ten years working through this. It’s physically demanding work. I’m up at 7.30 in the morning. I do two hours work in the woods. But I can’t do that for another ten years. Well, I don’t want to rely on doing it. So my preference would be probably to clear fell. A lot of this stuff should never have been planted. There’s some beautiful raised bogs over there. Beautiful sphagnum. So we’ll leave that as bog.”

Sometimes, he says, the quietness gets to him. The only sound here, outside the birds and the rustle of trees, is the distant trains. “It can be too quiet,” he says.