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Assynt, Eigg and other local heroes
Lesley Riddoch
New Statesman, 13th June 1997
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Scottish history is made this week as an island is handed over to its
inhabitants. But the nation's need for land reform remains urgent.
Local Heroes - Eigg Islanders
This week, within sight of the beach where Bill Forsyth filmed Local Hero, and
after a five-year struggle that broke new ground in the politics of Scottish
landownership, a bunch of Highlanders become owners of the island of Eigg.
But when the whisky has been drunk, and the guests and media have departed, the
65 inhabitants of Eigg will not be dwelling on the past, because the future of
community control is a more daunting matter than anything they've had to face in
the long campaign to buy their island.
While one landowner was in charge, every islander was in roughly the same
position. Now some are directors of the governing
Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust;
others aren't. With few jobs on offer there wasn't much argument about who got
them. Some will benefit directly from plans for development; others won't. While
islanders had no control there was no point in planning. Now there are bound to
be different ideas about how the island should be managed. Without leases there
was very often low rent; in future everyone will have to pay the going rate.
The Eigg islanders are prepared for changes and the tensions they are bound to
create. These are the problems of success. But beyond the immediate management
issues the long public battle to raise more than UKŁ1.5 million to buy Eigg has
sparked off a wider academic and political debate. Is it right that people can
in effect be bought and sold as part of a land transaction? Should one person be
able to shape lives as employer, landlord and landowner? Is there a way to
prevent private neglect affecting the livelihoods of tenants and crofters - and
will millions of pounds of public money have to be spent to put things right?
Local Heroes - Assynt Crofters
This latter question has been bubbling under for most of the decade since, in
1992, the Assynt crofters became the first group to reverse the tide of Scottish
history and buy back land from a landowner. They had no blueprint and little
support from the authorities. But they did have an opportunity - an estate
already up for sale - and a joker card: the recently established right of
crofters to buy out their landowners at 15 times their annual rent. The
crofters' threat to perform a mass buyout, if their bid for an outright purchase
failed, was a bit of a bluff. But it was enough to deter other bidders and
persuade the Swedish finance company that owned this parcel of Sutherland to
sell to the people.
Land purchase will rarely be that straightforward again. Most of the Highland
estates are not just full of crofters, but have a substantial number of owners
and tenants as well. So the mass buyout threat will generally be an empty one.
And that's why Eigg has been such an important model of change. Crofters,
tenants, a few homeowners and those technically homeless, living in caravans -
with different levels of security and legal protection - together managed to see
off other bidders without and buyout jokers up their sleeves. Now they face the
same challenge: how to run commercially, an island that up to now they have been
able to share only socially.
Eigg makes another piece of history, because islanders opted to share their
new-found control with other agencies that supported the buyout bid: The
Highland Council and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. But can local authority and
conservation resources gallop to the rescue every time a Highland community
decides it has had enough of the lottery of private ownership? The Highland
Council's head of policy, Nick Reiter, says not.
"I think it's quite reasonable for someone living in a city slum to look at Eigg
and say, 'why doesn't someone help me buy my house? Why should Highlanders get
public handouts just because they had bad landlords?' In fact very little public
money went into Eigg, and anyway there was absolutely no alternative in the time
span we were given. But in the future, the transfer of control will have to be
done differently."
The Big Land Questions
Which leaves two big questions. Is land use perhaps more important than land
ownership? And if community buyouts are to continue, who should fund them?
Certainly to place controls on existing landowners is cheaper, quicker and less
politically charged than a transfer of ownership.
The advocates of tighter control on land use believe any form of compulsory
purchase will be politically unacceptable to a new government still making its
mind up about how best to control the hereditary land-based power of the Lords.
And they point to Scandinavian countries, where controls have been made to work.
But landownership is too firmly on the agenda now to slip off just because it
might be politically awkward. And that is not just because of Eigg. The previous
Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, amazed everyone when he backed
the islanders' case and offered to transfer government-owned land to its
inhabitants. The man credited with effecting this transformation is the writer
and historian Jim Hunter. He argued with Forsyth that Tory philosophy, which
extols the moral benefits of ownership, had never been applied to the most basic
asset, land. 7 percent of the people own 84 percent of the Highlands - in effect
a massive monopoly, and a vote-loser. Eventually Forsyth agreed.
Land Solutions
Hunter is drafting a paper
Progressing Community Ownership & Promoting New Types
of Rural Settlements for the July meeting of the Highland Convention a forum of
the great and good set up by Forsyth, which has been given a new, albeit
probably temporary, lease of life, by the Scottish Secretary, Donald Dewar.
"I regret the loss of Michael Forsyth," Hunter says. "He was probably the only
man in Scottish politics who could understand the full force of land reform -
the problems and the possibilities. It seems to me Labour are in danger of
confusing two distinct problems: feudal land rights - which were abolished in
England 600 years ago, and the system of large estates owned by a tiny number of
often absentee landlords. The first problem can be sorted out by a relatively
straightforward change in the law. The second is altogether more difficult. I
believe Labour are genuinely committed to reform. But some parts of the Party
may have a resistance to the notion that public landowners can be bad
landowners, too."
So what's the solution? Last year Hunter inflamed the landowning community in a
McEwen Lecture that suggested all crofting land could be transferred to
community control for around UKŁ1 million roughly the price of a mile of
motorway. His argument was that all crofters wanting control of their estates
should be able to force a sale by offering landowners a sum equivalent to 15
times the annual rent, in effect exercising as a group the same buyout rights
possessed by individuals.
But outside the crofting areas the idea of a Land Bank seems to be gathering
pace. As Jim Hunter points out, such a bank was set up earlier this century in
Ireland by the British government, when the Irish Land Commission bought
estates, transferred ownership to local people and gave them 50-years to repay
the debt. "It'll be tough for disempowered people to consider taking on such
awesome-sounding debts, but once a few have set the example, it will be the
norm." (see
Glendale estate, Isle of Skye)
The Highland Council is already planning to set up one-stop advice shops across
the Highlands, offering access to local enterprise officials, sympathetic estate
managers and landowners, experts on accessing European grants, marine resources,
forestry, development and so on.
So far one Council - with some of the poorest inhabitants, the largest land mass
and the lowest potential for development - has made all the running on land
reform. New Labour has committed itself in its manifesto to a review of Scottish
landownership, but it looks increasingly as though this will be left for a
Scottish Parliament to debate and deliver. In which case dissatisfied Highland
communities will simply have to hope that the local heroes on Eigg have damaged
the market for island playthings so badly, they'll have no need for a political
resolution of the landowning dilemma until the millennium.
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