Land and its use is one of the most important issues facing Scotland today.  The country suffers under the legacy of past land-grabbing and the displacement of local inhabitants that occurred from 1750 to 1850 in what has come to be known as the highland clearances.  Some half a million tenant farmers and their families were removed from the land they and their forebears had tilled for centuries.  Today one half of the land of Scotland is owned and controlled by less than 350 landowners.  This land is largely unavailable for development.  Successive UK governments have staunchly resisted all calls for a land register that would reveal the true nature of current land ownership.  They have also shown a marked reluctance to tax unutilised land, and instead have subsidised estate owners in different ways.

The remnants of the original tenant farmers were pushed on to small coastal plots where they developed a unique method of mixed farming and fishing, termed ‘crofting’, to survive.  But they were not allowed to own or buy the land they worked.  This has changed slowly over the 20th century, and now at the beginning of the 21st century the devolved Parliament is passing some mild reforms to rectify the worst of the inequities.  

Thus land reform has been described as the “great unfinished business in Scotland”.

For any sovereign country to prosper and to provide opportunity for all its peoples, land ownership and taxation should reflect its democratic ideals and ensure the most beneficial utilisation of its resources.  Most of the contributors to this web site are convinced that we stand in need of much more radical steps to address the structural injustice and economic constraints inherent in our current treatment of the land resource.  Robin Harper, MSP has said, “What we need in Scotland is a combination of land value taxation and a thorough review of the planning system … to achieve environmentally sustainable land reform that upholds principles of justice, equity and ecology”.
 
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LAND AND POLITICS

Land and politics have been intimately related since the beginnings of modern society. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, 'The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society' (Rousseau, 1754). In Scotland, as elsewhere, the history of landownership began with a system of governance based upon the feudal relationship between the Monarch and the nobility - a system of land tenure still with us today 900 years later and an indication if ever it was needed of the resilience of Scotland's land laws and our historic failure, indeed inability, to do anything fundamental about reforming them. Rights over land which began as political rights of civic administration, evolved over time and under the control of those who possessed them, into full-blown property rights.

This transformation has been carefully and assiduously protected and nurtured by landed interests for many centuries. And it has been this careful definition and assiduous protection which has denied Scotland the kinds of reforms enjoyed by our West European neighbours. And closely associated with politics has been the phenomenon of power - political power, economic power, and cultural and social power. As Loretta Timperley observed in her academic analysis of landownership in Scotland, 'Power and land ownership have been synonymous in Scotland from time immemorial'.