{"id":12924,"date":"2021-02-07T06:54:55","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T06:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=12924"},"modified":"2026-04-18T19:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T19:34:31","slug":"oor-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2021\/02\/oor-land\/","title":{"rendered":"Oor land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Whatever the result of the elections to Holyrood due in May, it\u2019s clear that 22 years of devolution have established land reform as a perennial theme\u2014a mantle taken up by various parties and under varying parliamentary arithmetic, passing from Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions to SNP majorities. <\/strong><\/p>\n

It has survived the Conservative Party\u2019s caricature of a government-sanctioned, \u201cMugabe-style land grab<\/a>,\u201d as well as the landlords<\/a> who decried it as an act of \u201cLeninism.\u201d The success of community ownership alone has helped instil a popular consensus around land reform as a worthwhile and positive endeavour.<\/p>\n

But for all that has changed in Scots law, for one of the most influential voices, we\u2019ve only just got started. Andy Wightman has spent decades scouring the Register of Sasines, documenting who owns Scotland in books and maps, and sits as an Independent MSP in Holyrood (having recently parted company with the Scottish Greens). While a new parliament giving Scotland \u201cfull power\u201d over its land laws was the essential \u201cprerequisite\u201d for action, he believes that \u201cthe opportunity for fundamental reform has not been fully embraced by any Scottish administration yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wightman draws attention to how contemporary community landownership still operates on the private side of the old public vs private divide\u2014to be eligible for support, community trusts must be registered as either a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation or a Company Limited by Guarantee. \u201cThis kind of market-assisted land reform will never tackle\u2026 concentrated\u2026 private landownership\u2026 since the opportunities for acquisition and the grossly-inflated values will always frustrate community endeavours,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt should not be left to communities operating in a global property market to fix or reform Scotland\u2019s land problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed in spite of the reform and buyouts, ownership of Scottish land overall remains grotesquely concentrated. Tax breaks still reward private companies more than councils or communities in managing the vast job of reforestation, and offshore havens shelter other land at the expense of the public coffers\u2014and so the public good. As for urban centres, 29 per cent of households in the capital are still living in poverty solely due to housing costs, according to a recent report by the Edinburgh Poverty Commission. \u201cThere is clearly a lot of\u2014and a growing\u2014interest in community ownership within urban communities,\u201d Ian Cooke, company secretary of Action Porty<\/a>, \u00a0says, \u201calthough not necessarily using the [existing] mechanism.\u201d He believes specific reforms to deal with the particular challenges in the urban context are needed.<\/p>\n

Common ownership<\/h2>\n

As Wightman outlines in his book,\u00a0The Poor Had No Lawyers<\/em>, truly progressive reform should transcend the old binaries of ownership\u2014my land or yours, private or public\u2014and perhaps move towards a model of land that is not \u201cowned\u201d in the way we\u2019re used to. We could start thinking again in terms of the great, expansive \u201ccommons,\u201d an ancient concept steadily strangled by the legal systems that enshrined private property. \u201cWe must remember that community ownership is not new,\u201d Wightman says. \u201cScotland\u2019s Royal Burghs received grants of common good land from the Crown as early as the 12th century, and by the end of the 16th century fully half of Scotland was held in some form of common ownership or use.\u201d<\/p>\n

Things have not \u201calways been this way.\u201d And for Wightman, the future of land reform \u201clies with a much-expanded concept of community ownership by extending municipal, co-operative and crowdsourced models of ownership\u201d to cover \u201cassets including forests, energy and infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n

And herein lies the rub with Scotland\u2019s supposedly \u201cradical\u201d land reform journey. The measures so far have not transformed the big picture: some have merely dragged Scotland\u2019s anachronistic land laws into the 20th century as the rest of the world has entered the 21st. Most changes have worked within the old paradigm, treading carefully\u2014maybe even neurotically\u2014around established property rights.<\/p>\n

But the reforms are nonetheless profoundly important for disrupting an order that once seemed immovable. After 400 years, the old laws began to take on the same inevitable quality as the landed estates they helped to preserve. They became ossified traditions rather than working social mechanisms. The very act of abolishing or updating them changes the terms of debate: what was once immovable is not only possible, but real, and the old excuses crumble in turn.<\/p>\n

Scotland today, tomorrow the world<\/h2>\n

This small nation\u2019s land reform story has necessarily been shaped by its distinct historical problems; few other countries will have to contend with overturning feudal ideas like \u201cvassal\u201d and \u201csuperior.\u201d But Scotland\u2019s direction of travel clears a path for others to follow suit, where costly and over-concentrated landownership are problems\u2014in truth, most developed economies.<\/p>\n

The politics looks promising too. The popularity of community ownership, like devolution itself, has shown that any loss of faith in politics today is, as much as anything, alienation from power that feels remote. Put it another way: when you offer people the chance to have a greater say over how their locale is run, even when it is tied to bureaucracy and form-filling, it turns out that a large number will take it up\u2014and with few regrets. To date, no land has \u201cfallen out\u201d of community ownership.<\/p>\n

Many small communities, long oppressed by the way Scotland\u2019s property was owned and regulated, have found they can achieve mastery over their own affairs by taking ownership of the land that their families might have trodden for hundreds of years. The reforms invite Scots\u2014and anyone looking on from elsewhere\u2014to think of land law, and to some extent even property rights, for what they should always have been: not practices to entrench a privileged elite, but rules that all of us can be invested in, if they give us a shot at the freedom that ownership can confer. More than that, the reforms reveal that these rules are something that should be socially negotiated\u2014and something we have the opportunity to change through the democratic process. Today, even if Scotland\u2019s landownership remains heavily concentrated, the law governing it belongs to us all\u2014and who knows where that might lead.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Edited and abridged version of a longer article that first appeared in Prospect<\/a> and is reproduced in this form with permission<\/p>\n

Further reading: Severin Carrell, Stringent tests, The Guardian;\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Images courtesy of Rob Bruce<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“And herein lies the rub with Scotland\u2019s supposedly \u201cradical\u201d land reform journey. The measures so far have not transformed the big picture: some have merely dragged Scotland\u2019s anachronistic land laws into the 20th century as the rest of the world has entered the 21st. Most changes have worked within the old paradigm, treading carefully\u2014maybe even neurotically\u2014around established property rights.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":12706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[69],"class_list":["post-12924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-land-reform"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18604,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12924\/revisions\/18604"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}