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Land Reform and the Failure of Government:

Lessons from Scottish Civil Society

Graham Boyd, June 1999,The Caledonia Centre for Social Development

Contents:

Four Periods of Government Failure

What lessons can be drawn from 150-years of organised efforts in social land ownership and how can these lessons inform the current land reform debate about the failure of past Governments to take appropriate action to tackle popular concerns. There are four discernible periods of Government failure on land reform. These are described below with approximate historical dates.

1. The failure to legislate to break up sporting estates (deer forests) and sheep farms into smallholdings and thus secure the continuity of peasant society in Scotland. 1840 to 1886.
2. The failure to legislate to protect scenic landscapes, provide a right to roam and establish national parks. 1890 to 1940.
3. The failure to legislate too fully protect and safeguard areas of national and international significance to nature conservation. 1950 to 1999.
4. The failure to legislate to protect the public and local community interest in land for livelihood improvement and economic development. 1950 to 1999.

These major failures by successive Governments to respond to popular land reform issues have prompted a practical response by civil society organisations. A short synopsis of these often highly innovative responses is provided in the following paragraphs.

Peasant Challenges

The response generated by peasant society took a variety of forms. These included the establishment in the 1880s of the first independent British political party representing working class people - The Crofters Party. The establishment of the Commercial Land Company in 1875 whose primary purpose was to buy sporting estates and break them into smallholdings. Other actions included the formation of land reform associations and direct action by landless crofters and cotters in the form of land raids and rent strikes.

Recreational Action

The outdoor-recreational movement organised popular campaigns both in the urban areas and through Parliament to have a statutory right to roam enshrined in law. From 1890 to 1939 some 22 Parliamentary Bills were presented in Parliament with success finally coming at the outbreak of the Second World War. Another popular campaign that the outdoor-recreational movement helped to mobilise was the national park debate. Various Governments refused to take timely action to protect scenic landscape so the movement responded by lunching public appeals to raise money to buy important mountain areas such as Glencoe, Kintail, Torridon and Ben Lawers. It then gifted these properties to the National Trust for Scotland as an innovative means of holding these outstanding recreational and scenic areas for the benefit of the nation.

Conservation Purchases

By 1970 the failure of the Government's nature conservation policy of private ownership public funding of conservation through voluntary management agreements had become a public scandal. Private landowners were milking the system for all its worth while the biological health of these important sites was constantly declining due to damaging developments and extensive over grazing by deer and sheep. Voluntary conservation organisation turned to other charitable sources for funds and appealed to their members for money to buy significant nature conservation sites such as Abernethy Forest, Mar Lodge Estate, the Red Cullin and areas of the Flow country in Caithness and Sutherland. Forty years of Government policy based upon private voluntary approaches to nature conservation were rapidly exposed within less than a decade by the new voluntary conservation owners to be both ineffectual in protecting the natural heritage and a scandalous abuse by private land owning interests of tax payers money.

Community Ownership

The failure of Government rural and economic policy to overcome the problems of remote and fragile communities in which vested land owning interests have blocked and frustrated local development has a long history. The emergence of community property associations in the 1980s and 1990s has provided an innovative means whereby local communities and interest groups have been able to gain control and access to land and other resource for development - Hoy Trust, Dalnavert Co-operative, Assynt Crofters Trust, Borve and Annishadder Township, Melness Crofters, Laggan Forest Trust and Abriachan Forest Trust. By the late 1990s a new and innovative direction had been forged in civil society through the development of a level of co-operation and collaboration between community associations, voluntary conservation organisations and local authorities. This has taken the form of consortia or partnership approaches in which larger and more valuable land and land assets have been brought into social ownership - Eigg and Knoydart.

Stand Together

The re-emergence of land reform has not been the creation of the cut and thrust of debate between the political parties operating in Scotland. Neither should one place any great hope in the weak and ineffectual proposals of the Scottish Office Land Reform Policy Group. They are all part of a typical British Civil Service ploy of dulling down radical change by kicking the really important issues such as sovereignty, democracy, social justice and stewardship into the long grass. However, the bad news for politicians and pawkie civil servants is that land reform in Scotland is most certainly a civil society agenda to which politicians are now constrained to reply.

Civil society can with some pride trace its history of organised efforts in the fields of land reform and social land ownership back to the early attempts to establish club farms in the Highlands and the UK-wide Chartists Land Plan of 1846. In recent year this social movement has found ways of collaborating and standing together that will make it very difficult for politicians, civil servants and the Scottish Landowners Federation to apply their predictable divide and rule tactics. With the establishment of the Scottish Land Reform Convention civil society has come of age. It has taken that vital but giant step of putting in place the necessary mechanism needed to challenge, evolve and exercise power in ways that engage and reconnect the people of Scotland with the land of Scotland.

The Scottish Parliament must now play its part and seize this historic opportunity to finally break the hegemonic power of the landed elite and bring forth popular land reform that truly delivers a programme of radical action. If the Parliament fails to meet the challenge it will find itself harried by Scottish civil society.

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