A hundred years ago this week, a meeting of seminal importance to the island of Lewis largely shaped its ownership and demography down to the present day.

Its then proprietor, the soap baron Lord Leverhulme, had abandoned grand plans to turn Stornoway into a centre of fish catching and processing. Elsewhere in his vast empire, financial pressures were closing in.

Leverhulme was a mix of autocrat and philanthropist. His parting gesture came in two offers. The first was to donate the land and substantial assets within a seven-mile radius of Stornoway to a community-run trust; a no-brainer for the town council to accept with alacrity.

His second was much more invidious. Ostensibly, it was the same deal for the rest of Lewis and a District Committee, which formed local government at the time, faced a cruel dilemma. They wanted to accept but rural Lewis was deep in poverty. There were no estate assets and minimal revenue.

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Leverhulme had an irrational hatred of crofting tenure and the hard-won security it provided. He knew perfectly well his second offer, with a one-month deadline attached, would be almost impossible to accept. The District Committee pleaded for more time but he turned them down.

They sent a delegation to Edinburgh but the Secretary of State, Lord Novar, showed no interest. Novar’s predecessor, Robert Munro, had been a stalwart supporter in their post-war battles with Leverhulme to secure land for ex-servicemen and would surely have found a little money. Thus are the fine lines of history drawn.

At an anguished meeting, the District Committee then voted 6-3 to reject Leverhulme’s offer. So, to this day, the land in and around Stornoway is owned by Scotland’s biggest community landlord while the rest was sold off for next to nothing to a hotch-potch of private owners.

That all happened a century ago, so what relevance does it have to the present day? The answer lies not so much in what has happened but in what has not happened. Fortunately, there was a decade from 1997 when community buy-outs were encouraged, backed up by a Scottish Land Fund, which helped buy out some willing sellers of low-value crofting estates.

The result is that half the Western Isles, including the 69,000-acre Stornoway Trust estate now about to mark its centenary, is community-owned. The corollary is that the other half is still as capriciously bought and sold, mainly as sporting estates, as ever; regardless of community interest or population decline, just like most of rural Scotland.

When it comes to resisting change, there is no more effective lobbying power than Scottish landowners. That explains why maldistribution of land ownership is one credential in which we really are world leaders, a condition which our patriotic rulers have shown minimal interest in changing. If only B&B operators had the same lobbying influence.

Over Scotland as a whole, 2.6 per cent of the land is under community ownership and the dial has shifted by 0.1 per cent in the past 16 years. A Land Reform Bill is promised while actual current events, with enthusiastic backing from Edinburgh, are further entrenching the status quo and throwing additional baubles its way.

There is no single measure which will dismantle a structure of ownership which took centuries to put barricades around. However, if there was appetite for change, a whole battery of measures could be put in place to limit large-scale ownership; create fiscal disincentives; force release of land for social purposes, notably housing; create rights of intervention at point of sale, give tenants the right to buy, and so on. Will any of these appear in a Land Reform Bill?

The latest money-making scam, which I have touched on here before, is carbon trading based on “peatland restoration”. Leaving aside the dubious environmental benefits or even the morality of allowing polluters to carry on polluting by buying “credits” produced from Scottish bogs, there is one indisputable fact.

It is that the prospect of profits from this activity has further enhanced the market value of Scottish estates, with absolutely no rights or benefits reserved for communities. And all of this is being fostered by the input of £250 million of Scottish Government money. Can anyone explain why?

I know you don’t get much for a quarter billion these days: maybe a medium-sized ferry if you’re lucky. But of all Scotland’s priorities, I find it impossible to understand how this scale of money can be found for “peatland restoration”. How about giving it to cash-starved local government instead, to improve the environments people live in?

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My strong suspicion that ministers don’t have a clue either was reinforced by evidence to a Holyrood committee from Mairi Gougeon, who is apparently Cabinet Secretary for both land reform and peatland restoration. She told MSPs the £250 million “will complement the work we are already doing to address the concentration and transparency of land ownership and to support more communities into land ownership through a new Land Reform Bill”. It is a pity no MSP had the gumption to ask the one-word question: “How?”. Presumably, some civil servant had given Ms Gougeon this gobbledegook to read out but she might have been expected to notice the contradiction: that far from “complementing” any community involvement, her £250 million is pulling in exactly the opposite direction.

A new paper from Community Land Scotland, an umbrella organisation for the 2.6 per cent, suggests “an intermediate model” which would “require agreement between significant landowners and local communities … to more equally determine and share the benefits” from renewable energy developments, carbon trading and so on.

I doubt if either the landowners or Ms Gougeon will fancy that idea one little bit. We shall see, if and when a bill appears. Meanwhile I have a helpful suggestion. Maybe appointing Kate Forbes as Minister for Land Reform and Peatland Restoration would be an interesting test of words versus actions. At least she would understand what she was reading out.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party MP and Energy Minister