Scottish Land Reform - SNP bottles it

[Tony Gosling]

<http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/owns-scotland-feudal-pretty-weird/http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view>Alex 
Thomson's View

Thursday 15 Oct 2015
http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/owns-scotland-feudal-pretty-weird/10001

Who owns Scotland? Not exactly feudal, but pretty weird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6DzKzmFtA
You cannot exactly say Scotland is feudal, when 
it comes to examining who actually owns its 
magnificent countryside – but you can say it is certainly pretty weird.
In the early 21st century we have a situation 
where fewer than 500 wealthy people own more than 
half of Scotland’s privately held landscape.
We went to Islay, an island of distilleries, 
wintering geese, tourism, more distilleries – and vast estates.
The Margadale estate on Islay is 55,000 acres. 
not all that unusual across the Highlands and 
Islands of Scotland. You can look across the 
sound to the wilds of the neighbouring island 
Jura where, for example,  a foreign landlord and 
David Cameron’s father-in-law hold huge swathes 
of treeless and deer-infested wilderness.
It is the way it is.
Except that now Nicola Sturgeon has claimed she 
will do something about the way it has been for centuries.
“The government intends to embark on a radical 
programme of land reform,” she said at an SNP rally, to wild applause.
And: “Scotland’s land must be an asset that benefits the many not the few.”
Fair enough. Except, step-by-step and slowly but 
surely, the SNP appears to be bottling it. Review 
groups set up by the nationalist government came 
back with all manner of possibilities such as 
forcing all major landowners to register in the 
EU to at least allow people to know who they 
might be. That didn’t make the bill.

Genuinely radical ideas like limiting the amount 
of land  any individual or company can own – didn’t make it either.
Other plans were raised like improving the lot of 
tenant farmers by giving them more rights to buy 
their land – yup – that failed to make the cut as well.
So the bill currently trundling toward Holyrood 
is a watered-down affair which is arousing 
increasing anger among the SNP faithful as a 
major opportunity  lost to make a fundamental 
chance. To be radical, as Ms Sturgeon promised.
True, the government will impose business 
taxation upon hunting estates. But that is really 
just putting back a long-established taxation regime.
Communities will be able to buy out landowners if 
they can show they have a sustainable business 
plan for what they will do with the land.
But again, this merely enshrines the hard-won 
gains by people like the islanders of Eigg 
against oft-absent landowners and buttresses 
something of an established tradition across the islands.
So it is that we sit one evening in the 
Ballygrant Bar on Islay – whisky bar of the year 
no less – and hear from disgruntled SNP 
supporters accusing their own dear party and 
leader of selling them out on this most basic of issues.
“Radical to me means to the grassroots, somewhere 
where it hasnt been before, addressing the root 
of the problem.” says Margaret Rozga , from a 
family who did manage somehow to buy their farm in recent years.
She still supports the party of course, but is 
shocked at its, to her, anaemic approach to such 
a fundamental issue across rural Scotland. She 
expected better. She expected more.
Down the road we meet the estate-manager or 
factor from the Margadale Estate, Will Inglis.
Scottish – though with an English accent, tweedy 
and very much ex-army in his approach, Willy 
Inglis is the man who goes to negotiate new rent 
rates with the forty or so farmers across the estate.
He says the family he works for – like so many 
big landowners – has preserved the beauty of the Scottish landscape.

“You sound like it means you don’t see the need 
for any bill at all on land reform?” I ask him.
“That is exactly what it means” he says straight back
It is not just the Highland and Islands. Across 
to the east coast south of Edinburgh we find 
Andrew Stoddart, farming 900 acres of mostly 
arable land in the rolling pastures of East Lothian.
He has spent 22 years here building the place up: 
putting up a huge storage barn; draining and improving the land.
But he is on an insecure tenancy, and now his 
lease is up. Nobody is breaking any laws here but he faces eviction next month.
When I ask him how his children are  taking this 
news he lists his children and those of his 
tractor-driver – seven in all – and all about to lose their homes.
And then he simply breaks down, standing here in 
one of the wheatfields. It is too much to contemplate.
For those wanting an upending of the traditional 
order, it may possibly be that the SNP is not 
intimidated by the legal departments of Edinburgh 
on the one hand and the old landed establishment 
on the other. Quite possibly so.
For them, it may also possibly be that this is a 
tentative first step upon a journey that may 
eventually deliver the ‘radicalism’ Sturgeon has set out so publicly.
All this may be possible. Yet it is such a 
tentative first step. For many, it seems so 
little when so much could be done to set the seal 
of the SNP’s massive mandate upon the 
traditional  landscape and ownership of Scotland.
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