Land reform: Dangers in the vacuum of political debate

Roger Hutchinson
West Highland Free Press,
26th September 2001

ROGER HUTCHINSON analyses the response now emerging from the landowning fraternity to plans for a radical overhaul of land ownership in Scotland, and finds committed reform campaigners have reason to be a little worried

The moment at which life was injected into a debate around the Scottish Executive's proposed land reform legislation can be pretty accurately identified. It arrived on Monday 10th September at 7.50am.

Around this time, BBC Radio Scotland broadcast an interview with Mr David Cotton, secretary of the newly-formed Crofting Counties Fishing Rights Group which had, Mr Cotton declared, been formed to resist "a Mugabe-style land grab" in the Highlands and Islands.

The Free Press, which has tracked the formation of the new organisation in recent weeks, thought this contribution to public debate worthy of a place among the light absurdities of the Phrase Shed. Elsewhere, however, it seems to have rung more serious alarm bells.

Long-standing advocates of land reform - already uncertain about the direction in which the Executive's protracted efforts have been heading - recognised a real threat. The vacuum of political debate surrounding the land reform package was in danger of being filled by the new pro-landlord lobby group with its extravagant claims of "a Mugabe-style land grab".

Since then, there have been two hard-hitting speeches attacking the motives and arguments of the self-styled Crofting Counties Fishing Rights Group. Brian Wilson MP used a Labour Party platform in Inverness to describe it as "the Countryside Alliance with its kilt on" and warned about the need to counter the landowner propaganda with an authoritative statement of the case in favour of reform.

The chairman of HIE, Jim Hunter, entered the fray at the weekend, to spray withering contempt on the new group and the interests it serves. He took the Mugabe jibe head-on, describing it as "an insult to the many victims of the violence inflicted on white farmers and their black employees".

An even more telling point, however, was one which Mr Cotton had obviously missed. "As it happens," said Hunter, "there's little dispute as to the need for land reform in Zimbabwe. The British government, for instance, stands ready to assist financially with such reform as long as it takes place inside a proper legal framework."

And that is, indeed, a crucial distinction between the Scottish Highlands and just about anywhere else in the post-colonial world. Here, there has never been the slightest trace of any mood for compromise on the existing landowning arrangements. The view of the Scottish Landowners Federation and its apologists has always been, quite simply: "What we have, we hold." It is an attitude that has served them remarkably well, while the rest of the world has changed.

Their position is now threatened as it never has been before. Land reform legislation is promised. The landowners recognise (as the Free Press has identified all along) that by far the most radical proposal in the package is a community right to buy crofting estates, on the basis of fair compensation but without the necessity of a willing seller. This is the one on which they are concentrating their resistance.

But while they are threatened, they are far from being without hope of neutralising the reforming efforts. The landowners are lobbying intensively at every level and the "multi-pronged challenge" promised earlier this year by Sir Michael Wigan, owner of Borrobol Estate in Sutherland, quickly spawned as one of its prongs the Crofting Counties Fishing Rights Group with his factor, Mr David Cotton, as organiser.

The analogy with the Countryside Alliance is very accurate. Already, Mr Cotton and his friends are claiming to speak for "country people" although there is not the slightest evidence - any more than there is with the Countryside Alliance - that the vast majority of "country people" in the Highlands and Islands have a shred of sympathy for these vested interests.

Just as with the Countryside Alliance, vastly inflated claims are being made about the contribution to employment and the local economy which comes from the estates. Jim Hunter, in contrast, estimated their contribution to the economic revival of the Highlands and Islands as "practically nothing".

Norman Macdonald, who represents the Uig area of Lewis on Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, was sufficiently puzzled by these references to "employment" to point out in a letter to 'The Herald' that the crofting estates he is familiar with employ nobody. But, on the other hand, they do a great deal to obstruct the efforts of anyone else who does try to create economic activity.

To most people living on crofting estates that kind of contribution will offer a welcome note of realism. There are doubtless a few shining exceptions, but the vast majority of crofting estates in the Highlands and Islands are largely moribund in terms of job creation and community benefit. In any case, there is not the slightest reason to assume that the right to community ownership, if exercised, would damage anything worthwhile that does exist.

So the argument against the status quo, and in favour of the right to community buy-outs, should not be hard to win if it is promoted just as intensively as the one that is now coming from the landowners' side. And this, one suspects is where committed land campaigners like Wilson and Hunter are beginning to get a little worried.

It is significant that the counter-blasts to the landowners' propaganda have come from Wilson who is a Minister at Westminster, Hunter who chairs HIE and also Michael Foxley of Highland Council - all old hands on the land question. But so far there is little sign of MSPs either making the running or having much interest in entering the fray.

That could be the Achilles Heel of the whole exercise. For most MSPs, representing urban constituencies, this will be thoroughly obscure legislation about an arcane subject. They are, for instance, unlikely to know the difference between the status of crofting and non-crofting land or the reasons, both historic and legal, why the two should be treated differently. But somebody - apart from the Minister handling the Bill - has to be capable of making these arguments.

When crofting legislation of less historic significance than this was going through the House of Commons in the early 1960s, Malcolm K MacMillan set an all-time record for the length of a single Parliamentary speech - all of it based on the complexities of crofting law and the case for reinforcing the rights of crofters.

Even without aspiring to these heights, it would be nice to have reassurance that at least a few MSPs could put together 10 minutes on why Mr Cotton is wrong, why crofting land is different and why community ownership offers a much, much better hope for the future.