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Community Land Scotland chair to call tomorrow for early action on controversial Land Reform report

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Community Land Scotland Chair, David Cameron, will tomorrow, 6th June, call for early action to implement the Land Reform Review Group report which was published on 23rd May.

He will do so in his address to the Annual Conference of Community Land Scotland, at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on Skye on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th June.

The conference will also be addressed by the Minister for the Environment, Paul Wheelhouse, upon whom Mr Cameron will call to use the forthcoming Community Empowerment [Scotland] Bill ‘to maximum effect’, in delivering early change.

It is of no small concern that a matter so delicate and so far reaching in its impact appears to have been devolved to Mr Wheelhouse – an ambitious but error-prone junior minister. It is not long since Wheelhouse publicly shifted the blame onto his officials following the anger of the Isle of Raasay community at his dispossessing its crofters of the island’s shooting rights, in favour of a sporting group from south of the  border.

Land is a matter of rural affairs – the portfolio of the senior politician, Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary  for Rural Affairs and Fisheries – Mr Wheelhouse’s boss. It is not a matter of environment and climate change, Mr Wheelhouse’s subsidiary brief. Land reform is far too big an issue to be made the training ground for an inexperienced minister.

In his two speeches to the conference – the second when he introduces Mr Wheelhouse on Saturday, Mr Cameron will make clear his support for the conclusions of the Land Reform Review Group report, saying: ‘Land is a precious and crucial resource which requires to be used and owned in the public interest and for the common good, and that greater diversity in land ownership would serve the public interest.

‘The Land Reform Review Group is also right to take head on, the contention that the land question in Scotland is solely or even principally a question of land use. It makes clear it is land ownership which significantly determines land use.

‘These clear statements of how we should view land in Scotland gives the rationale for all the detailed recommendations made in the report.

‘What is important now is that we make progress on as many of the recommendations as quickly as we can, using the coming Community Empowerment [Scotland] Bill to maximum effect.’

In a direct and explicit message to the Scottish Government, the Chair will say: ‘You should be clear that even if there are a few siren voices, you will have the support of a great many people in Scotland in taking forward even the most radical actions called for within the LRRG Report.’

Addressing comments to those opposing change, Mr Cameron is to say: ‘Too often and for too long, too many of our communities were left in a condition where they could not reach their potential, the potential they are capable of meeting when given the opportunity.

‘If you advocate there is no case for any more interventions in land ownership in Scotland, are you really saying that our society should not be entitled to make judgements about what serves the public interest, what serves the common good when it comes to land ownership?

‘In the face of our concentrated land ownership patterns, and with evidence that they are concentrating more as more land falls into fewer and fewer hands, the need has never been greater for ways to consider what is in the public interest.’

The imperative of caution

Land ownership confers a visceral sense of belonging and, in the best cases, an equally visceral sense of responsibility to and for the land and to those whose livelihoods and futures depend upon it.

In that sense, land ‘ownership’ must always be seen as communal, regardless of which individual or corporate name is on the title deeds.

The emigrants whose simple and heartbreaking sung memories of their homelands did not own title to those lands – the heart has never depended on title but on affinity.

As we have said before, landowners of all kinds, hereditary, corporate investors and community trusts, display the full spectrum of behaviours from altruistic, to responsible, to inclusive, to competent, to enterprising, to arrogant, to neglectful, to rabidly self interested, to new feudalist.

It makes no difference whatsoever what their formal type of land ownership is, there are simply good landowners and bad ones; and every sector can show examples of both. It is important to have legislation capable of equal leverage on bad landlords from any sector.

The very real problem with some specific recommendations of the Land Reform Review Group’s report is that they implicitly rely upon – and more importantly, produce, the divisive stereotypes of the past: with ‘BAD’ big landowners, ‘VERY BAD’ hereditary landowners and ‘GOOD’ community landowners. This is dangerously simplistic.

It is important to recognise the evidence that hereditary and corporate landowners can be inclusive, responsible and enterprising in the common good.

It is equally important to recognise that community trust landowners can be internally divisive, poorly managed, with the self interest of controlling or authoritative figures running the agenda and creating fiefdoms as potent as any.

And neither of these pictures above is necessarily representative of their respective sector of land ownership.

And either broad variety of landowner can be competent or incompetent, imaginative or devoid of ideas – depending on the human dynamics of the time.

Making law on the basis of inherited stereotype is risking making bad law. Making such law as quickly as possible heightens that risk significantly.

Because land matters so much in our dwindling rural communities, it could not be more important to get reform of land-related matters as right as is humanly possible – and by ‘right’ we mean fair to all, constructive for all and in the common good.

Here it is important to be clear that ‘common’ good must be about ‘commonality’ and therefore all-inclusive. It must not be understood to be about ‘commonness’ and ‘commoners’ in the completely unacceptable classist sense. And the ‘common good’ is not automatically ‘common ownership’.

The needs, interests, abilities and commitment of each community are unique to that community.  There is no template; and there is therefore none to be imposed that can ensure the sustainability of communities at large.

In this particularly time of heightened  – consciously and strategically heightened – politicisation surrounding the referendum on Scottish independence in September, it would be all too easy for premature legislation on the basis of the Land Reform Review Group’s conclusions to result in injustice, unfairness, the legally actionable – and crucially, the creation of ill-considered change which would result, over time, in the break up of the existence of large parcels of land.

The hereditary system of land ownership has at least kept the reality of large tracts of land – and generally, access to them without payment – part of the tapestry of national life.

Some of the recommendations of the LRRG report overtly seek action to break up those landholdings; with further break ups inevitably following where short sighted new owners from the private or community sectors would sell off parcels of such land for short term gain; or to pay bills resulting from the mistakes of inexperienced management.

The Land Reform Review Group has had no time to consider the range of long term consequences of its more superficial recommendations, like the break up of large land holdings for the sake of it, which are presented at times in rhetorical terms that give rise to their own ‘siren voices’.

The group has also not considered the fact that Community Trusts would – and already have – become the corporate owners of large land holdings. We cannot contemplate law which essentially disposseses one type of owner while empowering another.

The latest incarnation of the LRR group’s membership has had to get this final report out in very short order – because the earlier version of the group essentially failed – leaving a short year to the production of these recommendations.

These are well intended, challenging, honestly produced but far too unconsidered, far too uninterrogated to push for early legislation on the back of them. If we allow a scramble to the statute book on this basis and in the current political context,  we will actually do wrong.

It would make sense to focus first on land use, which would address essential issues of immediate benefit, creating time for the political heat to die down, leaving the room for the calm interrogation and reflection that is a sine qua non before the framing of any legislation.

At the heart of the, partially manipulated, drive for land reform and for the reform of land ownership in particular, is a communist philosophy. Such sympathies are also visceral. The trouble with communism – and we share an interest in that spectrum of political philosophy – is that, as history has shown, when it is translated into law and implemented in governance and administration, it becomes inhuman; and it has been no more immune to the possessive manipulation of the greedy than has any other system.

If Scotland is to consider the adoption of communist values in a 21st century context and in a country also openly set to deliver strong economic growth, we need much more understanding of what is involved in so radical an attempt to marry communist and capitalist values.

Like the so called ‘reform’ of the House of Lords, we cannot just start such an experiment with one isolated move and no overall picture of where we’re going. Actions have consequences and many are unintended. If Scotland is serious about becoming independent, we need to take time to get this – and independence – right.


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