"Criminal" speaks up in the fight to change unfair land system.

Bill Macaskill

Bill Macaskill is a retired managing director of a Highland timber company and was born and spent his childhood on a croft in Assynt. In this article he looks at the proposals for land reform.

Four days after my 11th birthday I became a criminal. My parents could have been considered accessories to the felony and charged accordingly. Had I been caught by my 16th birthday, I could have been asked for many similar offences to be taken into consideration. The Sheriff’s disposal could have been a spell in borstal.

What had I done to set me on the criminal path so young? That July day, so long ago, I caught a salmon.

At that time, in my community, if you ate salmon or venison you had no choice, you had to be a criminal. Neither could be purchased lawfully within a hundred miles and taking them (and therefore eating them) was a criminal act. An elderly neighbour served a prison sentence after a house raid by gamekeepers found some venison in his home. This despite both foods being the rightful fare of my ancestors for centuries and despite many hungry mouths in the community.

For me, and many like me in the Highlands, the Land Reform Policy Group, chaired by Lord Sewel, offers a chink of light in a long, dark period of land misuse stretching back to the Clearances. Salmon and venison deprivation was no big deal. It merely illustrates how one minor aspect of the total power of the landlords was supported by the law. Our communities could easily have survived without deer and salmon.

What they couldn’t survive without was access to what had been their rightful, ancestral land. Access denied since the evictions. Well, they didn’t survive. In my small village when I was a child the population consisted of just under 40 Gaelic speaking, native Gaels. There are two left, both in their late seventies. The same pattern has been repeated all through the cleared areas of the Highlands.

The Gaels have all but gone from the Highlands. They will not be coming back. The evictions, far from being one-off have, through subsequent generations of land misuse, continued with chilling efficiency to this day. The big question is, can a new Scottish parliament address the cause of this genocide, (for that is what it was) create an inclusive land reform policy fit for a 21st century democracy and thereby reinstate viable communities from the few Gaels that remain alongside more, badly needed, productive emigrants. I believe it can, if it has the will to harness all the expertise within the Scottish community.

In the Highlands today the legacy of the Clearances is evident in that a third of the total land area is owned by 85 private estates, 8.1 million acres. The greater part of these huge tracts of land is kept exclusively for sport, it has also been terribly degraded ecologically through over-grazing by sheep and deer. To conservationists (almost exclusively from a different culture) these areas are wilderness to be preserved from human intrusion. As Gaels, we see them as homelands where our forebears farmed as free members of an equitable society before being forcibly removed.

Around the world indigenous peoples are having their land rights restored, native Americans, Maoris, Australian. Aborigines, etc. We do not seek such impossible goals. We merely ask that those who wish to re-work and re-populate this land can have it unlocked for their benefit.

Since the Clearances 150 years ago the status quo in land use has been easily maintained through the overriding political clout of the land owning class, particularly the un-elected land owners in the House of Lords. Financial capital and political power have always thwarted the aspirations of the people.

Prior to the recent ground-breaking acquisition of North Assynt Estate by its crofters there have been many worthy attempts to own and manage land in the Highlands by its inhabitants. The historical perspective is not of the docile acceptance of an iniquitous and inequitable land use system, on the contrary, many attempts were made to break the mould.

With the sheep industry declining from 1840 onwards, crofters got together in several areas to form sheep stock clubs. Between 1840 and 1890 over 20 such clubs farms operated in the Highlands. The hostile attitude of factors and lairds ensured that access to land for expansion was denied and, combined with lack of capital, they were unable to develop.

The Land and Labour League was founded in 1869 and campaigned for the nationalisation of land. The Land Tenure Association was formed in the same year. The Land Nationalisation Society was formed in 1881 and was specifically committed to the principle of the community ownership of land. The Scottish Land Restoration League was constituted in 1884.

In the latter part of the 19th century The Highlander newspaper in Inverness faithfully reported the spontaneous and organised actions in the Highland area with reports on township rent strikes, evictions, land raids and court cases. Through all of this the land owning class remained unassailable. Until now, land reform has never been seriously considered by government.

The reality therefore, as far as the Highlands in concerned, is that the system of land misuse has, for generations, stifled community development. The net effect has been the removal, through economic necessity, of the majority of the young indigenous people (the producers) from each generation and its replacement with an entirely different socio-economic group of emigrants, retirees, holiday homers, those with independent means (non-producers).

While these emigrants are most welcome, the circumstances which prevail in their favour and thwart the younger producers are undoubtedly created by the present system of land ownership. Thriving, wealth creating communities would establish stable economic societies of entrepreneurial producers able to compete for houses, land,etc. Wholesale nationalisation of land is not, and never has been, an option to those serious about equitable, democratic and productive land use, We need many more landowners, not less. The form of that ownership, whether it be individuals, groups or townships, lease-hold, out right ownership or some other, should be as varied as the type, location and potential of the land itself.

However, apart from the long held aspirations of productive and equitable land use to be considered by Lord Sewel and his group, there are also the contentious issues of the right to roam and conservation. With regard to the former there should be no great difficulty. Legislation by a Scottish parliament can be based on the best practice principle of which there are plenty of examples in existence – Norway and Sweden. Successful concordats are in existence in sensitive areas where all interests are respected and served. Nevertheless, it has to be fully debated. The reality is we are confronting no less than a quantum leap from the 19th century to the 21st in terms of people’s rights.

Conservation is a different matter. Land in the Highlands owned by the state sector (Forest Enterprise, Dept of Agriculture, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), etc.) is just over 14 percent, 1.4 million acres. While the majority of conservation bodies engage well with the population, the size, power and activities of SNH is widely perceived as the biggest threat, next to land lordism, to fragile communities in the Highlands today.

SNH with 600-700 staff (from a different cultural background to the people) with scientific or pseudo-scientific credentials they have few if any sociologists or economists with rural development experience. Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) designations of huge areas (Inverasdale the most recent example) have been made without any socio-economic studies into the impact on the community. On the other hand they demand costly environmental impact studies for any proposed commercial developments that could benefit these communities. At the present time there is considerable concern over their lead on national parks for the Highlands. A concept completely rejected by the people comparatively recently. A decision based on sound research of adverse outcomes in other places.

An unfortunate side effect of their overpowering (but legitimate) conservation activities is social division. Often supported by the landlords or the non-producer emigrants against the producers who have different, usually commercial agendas, their decisions create community divisions, if not along ethnic lines, certainly along cultural ones. These community undercurrents, generally undetected across the cultural divide, can be damaging but are entirely avoidable.

While the foregoing observations are made in a Highland context, land misuse and proposed land reform are of immense importance to the whole of Scotland. So much so that, with respect to Lord Sewel and particularly his land policy group charged with framing a bill for the Scottish parliament, I believe the issue is far too important to be left entirely to the civil servants. The consultation process as it is set up will make a useful contribution. However, the final outcome must be a bill which Scotland will be proud to show to the world. It therefore requires contributions and debate from all levels of the community and particularly from those with first hand experience in land use and its effects.

What then is the way forward? There exists an excellent precedent and model in the Scottish Constitutional Convention.

As the land reform policy we finally agree will make a huge contribution to the future wealth of Scotland and the welfare of its people the two or so years remaining should be used to construct that policy through open debate in the forum of a Land Reform Convention. A forum where all interests, agricultural, sporting, commercial, political, etc would be openly reported in the media. The land issue is too important to be decided behind closed doors.

Let all the people have a say in forming the land reform recommendations to be sent to our first parliament.

Source: West Highland Free Press, 15 May 1998.

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