Land is as important to life as a home, food or clothing – but you can never build, grow or make more. Scotland is finite.
Yet no modern nation has so much land owned by so few people. In few nations do landowners have so much power. And in few nations are they so free to do what they want with it regardless of the public interests of the people who live in the nation which that land forms.
This story is a trick of our history but it does not need to be the shape of our future. We can change this.
And it matters very deeply to Scotland’s future. The few people who own land can extract wealth from the many who don’t through a variety of types of rent. It does much to create the inequality that scars our country.
Land is so important to life that those who own it can exert pressure on decision-makers, shaping it to their interests, distorting our democracy.
Without access to land, rural communities cannot grow to provide a home for the next generation and Scotland cannot build the new, affordable housing it so desperately needs. It chokes the aspirations of our communities and the hopes of our young.
To start a business growing food or developing forestry, to build factories, shops and homes or to find space for tourism, you need land. If ordinary people can’t buy land, ordinary people can’t release their enterprise and create good jobs. It is Scotland’s economy which suffers.
And if land is managed badly and there is nothing the public can do about it, then it can be stripped bare and burned, its natural wildlife killed, its natural foliage grazed until it is gone. Scotland is a brown desert where instead of absorbing carbon from the air, it releases it and where instead of the glorious chatter of our native wildlife there is silence.
It does not need to be like this.
Scotland can change:
It is about justice, but it is about a lot more than justice. It is about the strength of our economy, the vibrancy of our communities, the wellbeing of our environment, the health of our democracy. It is about homes for our children and a fair chance for people with vision and the drive to realise their vision. It is about tackling the inequality that blights our society.
It is about our future. As Scotland. As a nation. As a society. As a community.
For hundreds of years people have campaigned for change and for hundreds of years that change has not come. We can be the generation that ends the wait or we can waste another hundred years complaining. Let us choose change. Let’s reform Scotland’s land.
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We can have transparency, where the public has a right to know who owns all of our land
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We can tax land to encourage it to be used productively and well
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We can change the subsidies we give to land to require its better use
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We can limit how much land any one person owns
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We can encourage and where necessary require landowners to sell some of their land in plots ordinary people can buy
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We can buy land publicly whether owners want to sell or not
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We can set planning requirements for how land is used so doing the right thing isn’t optional
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We can give communities the legal right to a say in how land is used
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We can build a proper local democracy so local people have control
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We can use that democracy to build the rural homes to tackle the rural housing crisis
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We can build an investment fund to help people start businesses and communities grow
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We can reform how land is managed to prevent it being harmed
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And we can start a National Land Agency to make sure all these things happen
All of this is in the power of the Scottish Parliament to do today. There is no excuse, no reason to stand still as a nation.
To find out more about how all of this can be done you can read the ground-breaking report commissioned by Revive and written by the New Economics Foundation and Common Weal
