Meeting of the Parliament 05 November 2025
Presiding Officer, 2025 is a year of anniversaries. It is a quarter of a century since the death of Donald Dewar, who warned that Scotland’s land had
“too much control in too few hands”—
that radical action was needed.
It is 60 years this year since the death of Tom Johnston, who began his great work on land ownership with a general indictment of the
“various divinities, dignities and privileges”
of Scots landlords as a class. Our
“Old Nobility is not noble”,
he famously concluded.
It is exactly half a century since the publication of the first “Red Paper on Scotland”, in which John McEwen boldly set his objective to see
“the stranglehold of our mainly absentee landlordism destroyed”,
and in which Jim Sillars argued that, for democratic socialist land policies to be applied, it required the
“devolvement of legislative power from Westminster to a Scottish Parliament.”
But, oh, how we have let them down. How we have let the people down with the timidity of our action, including the rejection of radical amendments to this bill.
This may be my last chance to speak on land reform in this Parliament. My faithfulness to this cause stretches back almost four decades, when, under the tutelage of Alex Falconer, I wrote a short pamphlet entitled “Who Owns Mid-Scotland and Fife?” In it, we exposed that, in the old Central region, including part of the area that I am now privileged to represent in this Parliament, fewer than 100 landowners—92, in fact—owned 50 per cent of all the land. It became yet another compelling reason for me to join the campaign for a Scottish Parliament and why I stood for election to be a member of the Scottish Parliament.
It has been a privilege to be here. I have loved almost every minute of it, but I will leave it, as I entered it, with half of Scotland still owned by fewer than 500 people. I will leave it as campaigners like Andy Wightman have shown: over the last decade, land ownership in Scotland has not got more diverse, it has got narrower; the estates have grown larger and the owners fewer; and there is more capital accumulation, more land monopoly and more ownership concentration, not less.
I will leave it, as well, to the echo of speeches in this debate by Edward Mountain, to whom I bear no personal animus, but they are speeches that could have been delivered by any member of the official roll of the baronetage at any time over the last four centuries.
Although the cabinet secretary told us that this bill is a
“significant step on our land reform journey”
and that the Government was
“committed to delivering ambitious proposals”,—[Official Report, 26 March 2025; c 83, 80.]
I will leave Parliament knowing, as this Government must know, that this bill is neither ambitious nor significant, that it will not fundamentally tackle the power imbalance that exists, that this bill will make no structural difference to the distribution of land ownership and that class inequality will remain Scotland’s hereditary curse.
The final words of that pamphlet written all those years ago, when I was in my 20s, I still stand by. So let them be my final words today:
“Inevitably there should be a move toward the common ownership of land in order that the benefits of what is after all a natural gift can be once again shared by the whole community.”
It will be for those elected to the next Parliament to rekindle the vitality of those ideas, to think big and act radical; to take on those vested interests. Although, by then, I will be gone, I will be outside Parliament—this cause of land justice, this demand for equality and this claim of right for our democracy will forever, forever, have my undying support.
18:28