A People's History of Scotland (40 page)

Land Ownership

‘Scotland continues to have the most inequitable distribution of land ownership in Europe.' Those are the words of a former New Labour minister, Brian Wilson, in 2012.
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The figures are truly staggering. In 2010, more than 83 percent of rural land in Scotland (94 percent of our total land mass) was privately owned. Just 969 individuals owned 60 percent of it. The vast majority of 5.2 million Scots owned none.
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Scotland's land-ownership pattern is the most concentrated in Europe today and one of the more concentrated systems in the world. Much is still owned by great landed families, but a growing percentage by corporations; between 22 and 25 percent is held in offshore or beneficial ownership with little information available as to who the income accrues, with widespread tax avoidance.
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The writer and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch argues: ‘The single biggest obstacle to the transformation of Scottish rural communities is their lack of control over land … the Big Society in Scotland will remain forever blocked by the power of the Big Landowners – whoever wins at Holyrood.'
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As Shelter notes in a report on housing in rural Scotland: ‘… the
huge concentration of land in a small number of hands can distort access to land. And housing investment, just like any other form of investment with long payback periods, may not be helped by the volatile and unregulated land market in Scotland.'
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For example, 25 percent of estates over 1,000 acres have been held in the same family for over 400 years. In the Highlands, 50 percent haven't been put up for sale since World War II.
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As Bryan MacGregor argues, the primary motivation for many of the frequently absentee landlords – which may comprise as many as 66 percent of the owners – is simply sport and private enjoyment, not the needs of the community as a whole.
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In 1993, Assynt crofters succeeded in buying the North Lochinver Estate in Sutherland, on which they lived and worked, after the Scandinavian property developer that owned the 21,000-acre estate went bust. This inspired other communities to follow, including the islanders of Eigg (1997) and Gigha (2002), and the people of the Knoydart peninsula (1999), as well as the North Harris Estate (2003).

New Labour did give crofting communities the right to buy their land, abolishing the feudal system and guaranteeing freedom to roam. The 2003 Scottish Land Reform Act made it easier for communities to gain ownership of the land on which they live and work. The Act has been criticised, however, as the right to buy comes into effect only when a landowner is willing to sell. Half of Scotland has not been on the market for over 100 years.

In 2012, Corporatewatch cast a light on one community suffering under a corporate absentee landlord:

The Blackford estate, right next to the Gleneagles estate, represents many of the problems which occur when land is owned by a foreign absentee landlord purely for its commercial value. The estate is home to the Highland Spring company – the second biggest bottled water company in the UK. It is privately owned by a series of holding companies believed to terminate in Mohammed Mahdi al-Tajir, the former Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates to Great Britain and billionaire businessman who made his fortune in oil and property.

Once a thriving rural community, locals claim that the owners have systematically allowed Blackford to fall into disrepair, letting farms lie empty rather than replace new tenants. There is nothing the locals can do except watch their community disintegrate, as all rights lie with the unreachable landowner. This is not an isolated example.
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Farther south, another landlord, this time a Scot, has blighted another community:

In South Lanarkshire the Earl of Home, owner of 30,000 acres, permitted Scottish Coal to open a fifth opencast coal mine within a 5km area near Douglas and Uddington. Here, the nearby communities (who sent over 700 letters of objection to the plan, out of a population of 1000) will be subject to increased noise, a constant stream of Heavy Goods Vehicles, destruction of the local environment and, it is alleged, an increased risk of illness due to poisoned ground water and coal dust. The project spawned a seven month long protest camp which was ultimately evicted by Scottish Coal.'
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Scotland is losing huge sums of money in tax avoidance schemes benefitting landowners. In some cases, the real beneficiaries of land take refuge in legal black holes. For example, in 1995 the Duke of Buccleuch had his wealth re-evaluated from £300 million to £40 million in the
Sunday Times
Rich List because his estate was owned by a company in which he did not own any shares. The shares, it turned out, were owned by four Edinburgh lawyers and were worth £4. The money is ultimately held in a trust, and the beneficiaries are unknown.
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As Andy Wightman writes: ‘… over 22 per cent and perhaps as much as 25 per cent of the privately owned rural land in Scotland is held in some form of offshore or beneficial ownership where, to varying degrees, the beneficiaries are unknown and tax is being avoided.'
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In an investigation undertaken in 2003, Andy Wightman and Torcuil Crichton analysed 500 estates and estimated that the annual loss of tax revenue was around £72 million due to offshore ownership, noting that ‘The true figure would be much more if it were possible to survey all of Scotland'.

At the beginning of the last century, Thomas Johnston made this appeal in
Our Scots Noble Families
:

Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.
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As late as 1938, Johnston was moving a private member's bill in the Westminster Parliament, which would have nationalised the land.
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Why not in the twenty-first century? This is a basic right that needs to be revived. Land should be nationalised and controlled by the people who live and work on it.

It Is Our Oil (and Wind, and Waves, and …)

In May 2013, the former Labour Chancellor Denis Healey told
Holyrood
magazine that an independent Scotland would ‘survive perfectly well' due to North Sea reserves and that the rest of the UK would ‘just need to adjust'. He also admitted that the money from North Sea oil in the 1980s had not been used to benefit ordinary people: ‘Thatcher wouldn't have been able to carry out her policies without that additional 5 per cent on GDP from oil. Incredible good luck she had from that. It's true we should have invested the money in things we needed in Britain …'
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BBC Scotland's main morning news programme,
Reporting Scotland
, gave fifteen seconds to this story, despite it being front-page news in that morning's
Scotsman
and the previous day's
Sunday Post
. In contrast, the UK Treasury report into the viability of an independent Scotland's financial sector dominated headlines throughout the day on BBC Scotland and was repeated in regular news bulletins on TV and radio.
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Margo MacDonald MSP responded angrily: ‘Westminster politicians, in all parties, lied and misinformed about the oil revenues, size of the oilfields and for how long they would produce oil … Scots were lied to, the secret Cabinet papers recording that the books had been cooked to make it look as though an independent Scotland would be a poorer place to live …'
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North Sea oil accounted for 10 percent of the UK government's budget in the 1980s. It was frittered away: ‘The government of Margaret Thatcher supported a policy of rapid extraction, making the UK a net oil exporter and generating substantial tax revenues …'
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The revenue from North Sea oil allowed Thatcher to drive up interest rates and the value of sterling. Both damaged manufacturing by increasing the cost of exports and burdening companies with higher interest rates. She used these measures to sacrifice the ‘lame ducks' in order to, supposedly, create a leaner, fitter industrial sector. In reality, it profited the City of London and the finance sector.
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Now the central UK state is about to do the same, rushing to let corporations exploit natural resources at knock-down prices, in search of a quick inflow of money to the Treasury in Whitehall.

In March 2013, Moray Offshore Renewables (MOR) was given exclusive rights to build the world's biggest offshore wind farm in the Moray Firth. It is hoped it will supply electricity to between 800,000 and 1 million homes, a substantial proportion of Scotland's housing. MOR is a joint venture involving the Spanish oil company Repsol, the Portuguese power group EDP, and China's Three Gorges group, which is wholly owned by the Chinese state. Who gave MOR exclusive rights? The answer is the Crown Estates, a London-based body that controls, on behalf of the House of Windsor, all of the sea bed in Scotland's territorial waters.

Writing in
Scottish Left Review
, Gordon Morgan points out:

MOR pays the Crown Estate a commercially negotiated rent for its rights. No figures are available for this, however, the income from marine rents in 2010/2011 of the Crown Estate for the whole of the UK was £46.5 million. The right to commercially exploit our natural resources does not seem highly valued. The Scottish
Government justifiably wishes devolution of the Crown Estate powers in Scotland.
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You might think that in this day and age the land, waters and seabed of a country would belong not to a monarch but to the citizens of that country. If we took control of these natural assets, they could be used in an environmentally friendly way to benefit the people and the country.

A Woman's Place

If any decent society can be judged by its treatment of women, then Scotland today falls short. It would be good to report progress, but it remains a society scarred by sexism and negative images of women. We have got a serious problem affecting the everyday lives of countless women right at home. According to Amnesty International, there is an incident of domestic violence recorded every ten minutes in Scotland, with one woman in five experiencing such abuse in her lifetime. One in three young women who are in a relationship will suffer an unwanted sex act.
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The report found: ‘twenty six percent of Scots surveyed in 2007 thought that a woman bore some responsibility for being raped if she wore revealing clothing.'
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In 2009–10 there were 884 cases of rape reported in Scotland. Of these, ninety-two were prosecuted, resulting in forty-one convictions. In 2008–09 the conviction rate was 3 percent of reported rapes.
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Between 1997–98 and 2006–07 there was a 90 percent increase in the daily sentenced female population and an 83 percent increase in the number of women jailed on remand. But 56 percent of the adult women admitted to jail were serving sentences under six months.
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Women still bear the responsibility for bringing up our children. Childcare costs across the UK are among the highest in Europe, and are a barrier to mothers who choose to return to work. Speaking prior to a debate on childcare in the Scottish Parliament in May 2013, Eileen Dinning, Chair of the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) Women's Committee, argued:

Free childcare would boost the economy and support families to lift them out of poverty, as evidenced by the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) ‘Making the Case for Universal Childcare'. Making childcare free at the point of use would be good for families and for public finances as universal childcare would bring a net return to the government of £20,050 over four years for every woman who returned to work after one year of maternity leave.
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In 2013, full-time female workers in Scotland earned 14 percent less than male workers, while for part-time jobs the difference is a full 35 percent. The findings were revealed in a report compiled for Glasgow Caledonian University by Emily Thomson, Co-Director of Women in Scotland's Economy Research Centre (WISE), and Morag Gillespie, Senior Research Fellow, Scottish Poverty Information Unit. Thomson concluded: ‘While we found some evidence of employers considering the issue of equal pay in their workforce, there was much less evidence of action being taken to make equal pay a reality. This was particularly acute in the private sector.'
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In the summer of 2013 it was revealed that fewer than 0.3 percent of apprentices are disabled and fewer than 2 percent were from an ethnic minority. Meanwhile, only 1 percent of construction apprentices were women, according to research for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in Scotland. A total of 11,381 women began an apprenticeship in 2011–12, with women totalling 43.1 percent of all new apprentices.

But the research, by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, said that compared with England, Wales and Northern Ireland, ‘Scotland is the only country in which the number of female starts is persistently lower than male starts' and that the other countries had ‘succeeded in correcting previous trends of female under-representation in terms of starts'.
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The outlook for women, faced with the Westminster austerity drive, is not a happy one, as Mhairi McAlpine outlines: