Land Matters

Following yesterday’s Guest Blog by John Bryden, former land reform adviser to the Scottish Office, we are delighted to publish the thoughts of Brian Wilson on the topic. Brian was one of the founders of the West Highland Free Press, a newspaper established in part to expose the iniquities of the land question and whose masthead still carries the slogan borrowed from the Scottish Land League “An Tir, an Canan ‘sna Daoine – The Land, the Language, the People”. Brian was Minister of State in the Scottish Office from 1997-1998 and, within weeks of being appointed had set up the Community Land Unit in Highlands and Islands Enterprise which, together with the Scottish Land Fund, was one of the keys to unlocking the latent demand for community ownership of land in the region. (1)

This Guest Blog reproduces with permission Brian’s column in the West Highland Free Press today

The most useless 52 pages ever committed to print

Brian Wilson, 24 May 2013

When the Land Reform Review Group was established by the Scottish Government last year, I predicted that it would turn out to be a waste of time; an exercise in kicking the whole thing into touch until after the referendum. The timetable was the giveaway.

While that judgment stands, I am now tempted to think of it as a practical joke – a last mocking laugh at those who were still deluded enough to believe that anything as interesting as land reform might feature in a Scotland where radicalism has been replaced by the constitutional obsession.

The interim report of the Group is quite difficult to find even on its own web-site.  I can only put this down to cyber-embarrassment. In the long history of reports about what used to be called the Land Question in Scotland, this must surely be the most useless 52 pages ever committed to print.  If a Question exists, then it has entirely escaped the notice of the authors.

Andy Wightman, the campaigner on land issues who gallantly seeks to keep the flag flying, headed his own assessment of the Group’s report with the indictment: “Land reform withers on the vine of complacency and ignorance”.  I fear he is right. Nothing of value will emerge from the remit that the Land Reform Review Group has taken refuge in.

The group is chaired by Dr Alison Elliott, a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, who is doubtless  a well-intentioned soul. But she seems to have approached this task with a knowledge base close to zero and the report suggests little sign of having advanced from that starting-point.

There is no trace of historical context and little attempt to define the status quo, in order to understand why there is even an issue to address.  The nearest we get is the recognition that “Scotland has significantly large private landholdings and the discretions of ownership allow a few people to make decisions about large parts of the country’s land resource and also in some cases about the options available to the people who live their lives on it”.

But, having made that statement, there is no attempt to quantify the scale of what it describes, far less offer any indication of doing anything about it. It does not seem to have dawned that there might be a moral, social or economic issue inherent in the fact that Scotland continues to have the most extreme maldistribution of land ownership in Europe. That would be to bring politics into it, and we mustn’t do that.

Some of the passages are laughable in their naivete.  “Large private estates were quick to invite the group to visit,” the report recounts proudly, “and so the group spent time at the Atholl, Moray, Buccleuch and Annandale Estates”.  I wonder if they spent any time investigating the vast, empty acreages to which they were not invited and to which access might have presented rather more of a challenge?

Sadly, it took them five months to communicate what they were doing due to an unexplained delay in hiring public relations consultants. And it appeared to astonish them that they received nearly 500 submissions as opposed to the 100 which might have been more manageable within the proposed timescale.  Gosh! Are there really 500 people interested in this stuff?  Extraordinary!

The report devotes a lot of space to describing matters that it is not going to concern itself with.  The poor old tenant farmers, who had apparently placed quite a lot of hope in the Land Reform Review Group,  probably due to the bogus rhetoric that surrounded its launch, have been given the complete bum’s rush. “This aspect of rural Scotland is clearly problematic and requires sensitive and expert attention,” the Group declares boldly – before running a mile from having anything to do with it.

In a glimmer of recognition that all may not be absolutely perfect in Scotland’s rural idyll, the report notes that some tenants were “fearful of speaking at open meetings, or even of putting their concerns on paper, because of possible recriminations should their landlords hear they were expressing these views in public”.  How awful!  But absolutely nothing to do with Land Reform, you understand. One wonders what has happened to the unfortunate tenants who spoke up!

As Andy Wightman points out, the remit has been narrowed down to the point where it is “not a land reform review group – it is a community ownership review group”.  And that, frankly, is a cop-out. Of course community ownership is an option in certain places and circumstances but in those areas where the grip of landlordism is tightest, it is pure fantasy to suppose that depending upon  the word “community” is going to change anything.

Reading this report, it is difficult not be scathing about its contents because they are so insipid and contain so many cop-outs. But it would be unfair to lay all, or even most of the blame at the door of Dr Elliot, who was certainly not chosen due to any identifiable track record on the imperatives of the land issue. It the people who put her in this position who should really be called to account.  If land reform is a political issue then it must be tackled by politicians, on the basis of conviction.

The last group convened by Government to come up with a land reform agenda was in 1997 and the difference was that we meant it. The group was not chaired by a lay novice but by a Minister, John Sewel, whose day job had been as a land economist.  It did not have three members but ten, all of them with a serious background in the subject.  It had as its principal adviser John Bryden, who had been intensively involved in land use issues for the previous 30 years.

In other words, it was a politically-driven initiative with a clear objective – to come up with a land reform package which could be handed over for the new Scottish Executive to turn into legislation, which is what happened (though even then it was watered down).  But Scottish land reform was always meant to be a process rather than an event and, since then, there has been nothing – until the setting up of this Group which has little expertise and no political direction.

It does seem remarkable that there appears to be no politician in the current Scottish Government with the remotest interest in land reform as a cause.  The interim report must be -  so many words in the past and so little action in the present.

NOTES

(1) See page 259 (first edition) 350 (2013 edition) of The Poor Had No Lawyers for the details of his which happened.

We are delighted to host this Guest blog from John Bryden who was External Adviser to the Scottish Office Land Reform Policy Group (LRPG) 1997-1999. John delivered the 3rd John McEwen Memorial Lecture in 1996 and now lives and works in Oslo. Further details of John’s involvement in land relations are detailed at the end of the blog. Further publications by John together with contact details can be found on his website and he can be contacted via email jmbryden08@gmail.com.

Scottish Land Reform: A Comment

John Bryden Oslo, Norway. May 23, 2013

Land Reform in Scotland was always going to be a big mess, and it is! It’s not the fault of the SNP, or Labour. Scotland badly needs a redistribution of property if it is to build the kind of social democracy, and more equal society, that Norway has. The sentiments and history that could encourage such a society are much more ‘present’ in Scotland than they are in England, or indeed in many other countries of the world, but the political, social and economic conditions need to be built over time. In my view this is essential for the kinds of policy reforms that I – and I think many others – believe Scotland needs, whether as an independent nation within the EU, or whether under ‘devo-max’ or a federated structure of some kind. We cannot evolve distinctive, just, and fair policies under present UK political conditions, which are deeply affected by the structures of inequality of wealth, income and opportunity that those same political conditions have created.

It was the equal distribution of property that gave Norway its large number of voters in the first half of the 19th century, and which shaped its political, economic and social advances after that. Norway’s ‘exceptionally liberal’ constitution of 1814, adopted following independence from Danish rule, gave the vote to all owners of land, making about 45% of males over the age of 25 eligible to vote. This compared to a mere 4,500 male property owners out of a population of 2.6 million who had the parliamentary vote in Scotland after the much-lauded British Reform Bill of 1831. The important point is that Norway’s political settlement on independence from Denmark, its relatively large number of property owning small farmers and hence voters, together with the creation of strong local government shortly afterwards, established the political conditions necessary for Norway’s extraordinary development over the following 150 years or so, a period when it moved from being among the ten poorest nations in the world to being in the top ten.

However, the world has moved since the 19th century, and we now have – irony of ironies – a European ‘Human Rights’ legislation that protects property owners, and under present conditions makes it impossibly expensive for any government to make radical changes to landownership directly.

So radical land reform in Scotland has to be started mainly through an indirect approach, through land taxation and other measures that progressively limit the land market in ways that inhibit speculation and investment in land as a store of (great) wealth, and encourage ownership by individuals who work the land with their families, and by communities working together.

In a more autonomous Scotland, there would be a battery of possible measures to achieve this that would not breach Human Rights legislation, but which are not normally at the forefront of discussions of ‘land reform’ as such. First among these, and by far the most important, is land value taxation which should be collected and used by local authorities (and hopefully much smaller ones than we presently have). This would scare off the speculators and lower the price of land, which will be a good thing for nearly everyone in Scotland, and make it easier to get into the necessary major redistribution. If land taxation were augmented by local income tax, using the Norwegian system whereby local authorities are responsible for collecting it and retain an agreed share before sending the balance to higher levels, there would be no need for a Scottish central government to subsidize local government in general, although there would be a need for a Nordic-style fiscal equalization scheme. (1)

Other supporting measures would speed up this process. These could include

(1) a requirement that purchasers of land should be ordinarily resident on their land for more than 6 months in the year, and should be a Scottish income tax payer, and

(2) that they should be ordinary persons and not limited companies or corporations, and that they should demonstrate appropriate skills and training. There would be a lower size limit on these rules to avoid negative effects on the crofting community.

I would add that nothing I have said changes my support for the key measures of the limited reforms undertaken after devolution (and, let us remember, only possible because of devolution). Small steps indeed, but steps in the right direction. The Land Reform Policy Group (LRPG) was inhibited on the topic of land taxation because of the limited tax powers in the devolution settlement, and the sensitivity of the taxation issue at that time. The LRPG also received legal advice on the impact of the EU Human Rights legislation. The report of the current review group must in my view be judged not by its ability to tinker with existing reforms, but by its future vision and the practical measures it proposes to reach that vision.

John Bryden was external advisor to the Land Reform Policy Group established by the Labour government in 1997, and which reported in 1999. Most of the LRPG proposals were implemented by the Scottish Parliament after Devolution. He also served on the first Scottish Land Fund until its absorption into the ‘Big Lottery Fund’.  He was earlier largely responsible for the HIDB Land Reform proposals in the period 1976 to 1979, while head of the land development division. In 1996 he gave the John McEwen Memorial Lecture on Land Tenure and Rural Development in Scotland where he argued, among other things, for the introduction of Land Value Taxation. Between 1995 and 2004 he held the Chair of Human Geography at Aberdeen University, and was co-Director of the Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research. John read Political Economy at the University of Glasgow, and took a PhD in Development Economics at the University of East Anglia, where he also taught for some years. He currently lives and works in Norway where he is collaborating with a number of Scottish and Norwegian authors on a book that seeks to explain why Norwegian and Scottish development paths took such radically different directions after the 18th century.

(1) Note as a matter of interest that kommunes in Denmark levy a land tax which is also owned on land owned abroad. This means that the 290,000 acres of land in Scotland owned by Danes is contributing to municipal services in Denmark but none in Scotland.