Scotland needs land reform, says Brian Wilson

Twenty-five years ago, these words were spoken by Donald Dewar, then Secretary of State for Scotland. The first elections for the newly-minted Scottish Parliament were approaching. Donald needed something radical to say about how it was going to lead change, and what better clarion call than “land reform”?

Of course, most of it never happened. The “centuries-old barriers” are still firmly in place. Public accountability on land ownership and use is as ineffectual and opaque as ever. Scotland, still with the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in the democratic world, has modernised nothing.

Donald Dewar (Image: free)

Well, that’s not quite fair. When Labour came into government in 1997, Donald had allowed a working party chaired by John Sewel, the rural affairs minister, to draw up recommendations which would be handed on to the Scottish Parliament. After much consultation, the radical package he launched in March 1999 was the outcome.

I remember saying at the first meeting that abolishing the feudal system would be an easy hit. The Permanent Secretary loftily advised us that this was a matter for the Scottish Law Commission who would get round to reviewing it in due course. We reminded him gently that abolishing feudalism is a political decision, not a legalistic one.

That recommendation was ultimately enacted, so Scottish feudalism only just made it into the 21st century which definitely counts as modernisation. National parks, of which more later, were another outcome that was delivered. So too was the right to roam. But crucial themes of enabling interventions in the land market, to deliver demonstrable social goods, were frustrated, forgotten or both.

The evidence lies in what we have today. Except on the fringes, the structure of Scottish land ownership has only got worse, now incentivised by crazy schemes to attract speculators in “natural capital”. Humza Yousaf went to the City of London recently to beg financiers to put their money into our bogs and trees, forcing up land prices and waiting for profits to roll. Hail Caledonia!

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Donald can hardly be blamed for not carrying through the heady rhetoric of March 1999 since he died the following year. But the failure of successive Scottish Governments to deliver on that ambition to “modernise Scotland and put people at the heart of land reform” is an indictment of an almost total absence of interest in, or understanding of, why land is fundamental in any society.

Even more than 25 years ago, a comprehensive political debate about land, how it is used and managed, is necessary. An additional element has been introduced under the all-encompassing cloak of environmental virtue, according to highly selective and often self-interested definitions. Public policy is being framed by these interests with minimal regard for what lesser mortals think or fear.

Anyone who questions their assumptions is likely to be accused of being a climate change denier or worse. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, if we are going to pour hundreds of millions of scarce pounds into restoring a fraction of Scotland’s peat bogs, while public services are cut to the marrow, I would like there to be credible scrutiny of proportionate benefits obtained. Is that unreasonable? It certainly hasn’t happened.

By and large, this whole new front in the land debate is encouraged by Ministers less by intent than neglect based on lack of understanding. Having listened to some of Holyrood’s finest trying to explain the virtues of various speculative, greenwashing schemes, I am prepared to grant them the benefit of that doubt. What they prefer not to grasp is that, by encouraging or doing nothing to inhibit the market, Scottish land reform is heading in exactly the opposite direction to the one which attracts political lip-service.

What say do rural communities have about transfers of ownership and changes of land use which facilitate money-making schemes for landlords, green or blue? Precisely none. Nothing has changed.

The lack of public accountability is also illustrated in the debate about national parks. I say that with some regret since I supported their introduction to Scotland 25 years ago without anticipating they would become another quango-led intrusion upon local democracy.

Humza Yousaf (Image: free)

The figure quoted by Fergus Ewing in The Herald that a vote in Aviemore and Spey Valley found 92 per cent thought the Cairngorm National Park is “not working well” should be hard to argue with. Skye has walked away from the idea in face of overwhelming opposition. A good concept has been given a bad name by the agenda pursued.

Forestry is another area in which someone’s version of political correctness is taking hold. Scotland has a great tradition as a forestry nation through a century of the Forestry Commission but now we hear “commercial forestry” spoken of as if it was some sort of pariah. Yet if we don’t grow the right kind of trees to build houses and furnish them, we’ll lose the jobs and import the timber. Where is the virtue in that?

Rural Scotland is a place to live and work, not a museum or a private plaything. The land should be used productively, sustainably and accessibly. The biggest barrier to these outcomes is the structure of ownership which is getting worse rather than better. There is no cohesion of policy and certainly no philosophical understanding of why land reform matters.

If whoever runs Holyrood can get their heads round these basic facts, there might be a chance of Donald Dewar’s unlikely declaration being fulfilled. The alternative is for us to maintain a market-led march towards rural decline and a desert called peace.