Meeting of the Parliament 05 August 2014
I am grateful for the opportunity to debate the motion. Land reform is an issue that has moved up the political agenda in Scotland over the past couple of years, following a lot of action on the issue just before and directly after the Scottish Parliament was formed.
There is a danger that tonight’s debate could become a debate about the outcomes of the work of the land reform review group or the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill. I hope that we will have a lot of time to debate those specific matters over the coming weeks and months, but that is not the purpose of tonight’s debate. Tonight’s debate is relevant to those issues, but it sets them in an international context, in which we should also have an interest.
People assume that land ownership in Scotland is the same as land ownership elsewhere, but it is not. That is news to many Scots. Our land ownership patterns are massively out of kilter with those in the rest of Europe and those in most of the rest of the world. Most European countries took radical action to reform land ownership centuries ago.
The Bunchrew land declaration emanates from the Bunchrew seminar, at which a number of local and international interested parties joined together to explore land ownership issues. They heard Professor Jim Hunter, the writer and emeritus professor of history at the University of the Highlands and Islands, who is known and respected by many of us in the Parliament and beyond, give a paper. What was striking about the paper was the close parallels that it drew between our land history and what is happening to land ownership internationally today. At one point in his paper, Jim Hunter recounted the story of villagers in the Gambela region of Ethiopia being dispossessed of their land. That event mirrors uncannily events in Sutherland in the early 1800s.
What is happening today to many peoples across the globe, as powerful interests force them from their lands and deprive them of their principal means of existence, often with the connivance of their Government, is strikingly similar to aspects of our own history. We see the influence of that today in Scotland in the concentration of ownership of land, the concentration of power and influence and the increasing concentration of wealth that can come from land ownership.
From our history, we know of the actions of successive Governments, back to the end of the 19th century, on land reform, and despite that we are still debating land reform and the need for change today. We have over 150 years of legislation that tries to bring about change to land ownership patterns, yet we are still debating and trying to make decisive change. From our own experience, it is all too easy to see what faces the peoples in other parts of the world who are now fighting the land grab that is going on in their communities. They, too, face a future where the few will dominate the many, where a stake in the precious resource of land is limited or denied, and where power and wealth concentrate as a consequence of land ownership patterns. It must be right that we in Scotland show some solidarity with those peoples and that we learn from them today what their land reform actions are about and what is working best. It is therefore right that we offer to share with them our experience and insights, our policy and legislative actions and our thinking on the subject.
As Community Land Scotland has been discovering, our land debate is highly relevant to others, and their experience is relevant in helping us to confirm that our thinking is legitimate in the international context. The Bunchrew land declaration highlights those points. I hope that in his reply the minister will recognise that we in Scotland have something to offer in all this and that he will work with Community Land Scotland and others to build the links and dialogue that can help us and others. We sit firmly within an international context in which land reform is a necessary, just and common cause.
In commenting on the Bunchrew land declaration, Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition, based in Rome, said:
“Like any country facing high concentrations of land ownership, challenging this structure also means challenging concentrations of economic and political power with which land ownership is so intertwined.”
Wherever we go, land reform struggles are always motivated by issues of social justice, greater fairness and how better to empower people.
I have heard too often from vested interests that the way in which land is owned and managed in Scotland currently is the best way in which to do it and that we should be very grateful to those wealthy private landowners for subsidising us all. The truth is very different. We are now discovering just how much the public purse subsidises many wealthy landowners—through beneficial tax breaks and large public grants—while they watch their land values soar. Meanwhile, few others have a stake in the land. The Bunchrew land declaration reminds us that there are other ways forward, which empower people to have a stake in their own land.
It simply cannot be right in a country that believes in greater fairness and social justice that just 432 people own half of Scotland’s private land. That reflects the concentration in very few hands of influence, power, and wealth. My motion congratulates Community Land Scotland on reinforcing for us, through its Bunchrew land declaration, the just cause of land reform in Scotland. I am encouraged by some of what has been emerging recently, but there is still a long way to go. I hope that in his reply the minister will build on the theme that he has been developing. I believe that we agree that there needs to be a fairer distribution of land ownership in Scotland today, and I hope that we can unite around that as an ambition.