The reason is a radical new land-reform law, expected to pass the Scottish Parliament later this month, that will give commoners a chance to own the hills they work on. Anticipating the legislation, a group of 750 tenants led by a local petrol-station manager, David Cameron, have put in a bid to buy the 4.5 million [euro] property. If the sale goes through, “people here will have a say in what happens on the land on which they live and work,” says Cameron, his eyes teary. The emotion springs from history: in still-feudal Scotland, where just 1,200 people own more than two thirds of all land, the very notion of commoners as lairds would until just recently have been laughable.
Set up four years ago, after devolution from rule by Westminster, the Scottish legislature has made land reform its flagship issue. A classic tactic for new nationalistic regimes, the plan has evoked especially strong feelings in Scotland, where for centuries English lords–and more recently Arab sheikhs and other foreigners–have bought up huge estates that are often used for no more than a few weeks of hunting and shooting a year. On Jan. 23, the government will debate a bill giving communities the right to buy out their landlords–whether or not they want to sell. Prices would be established by independent valuation (regardless of other, possibly higher offers). Crofters, as Highland tenant farmers are called, would go from being latter-day serfs to the de facto monarchs of their realm.
Landowners have denounced the bill as “communist” and “Mugabe-style,” a reference to the Zimbabwean president who’s given his black countrymen free license to appropriate the farms of its whites. Proponents see it as a win for democracy–and a demonstration of Scotland’s independence from both Westminster and the hereditary land-owning interests symbolized by Britain’s House of Lords.
There’s little disagreement that change is overdue. After all, it’s hard to ignore the fact that 80 percent of the nation’s land is in the hands of .08 percent of its people–a concentration of ownership roughly a hundred times that of the rest of Western Europe. Traditionally, these grand estates, owned almost exclusively by rich and often absent foreigners, have been bought and sold over the heads of the farmers and villagers who –live on them. Tenants frequently learn about a sale only when the letterhead changes on their rent bills. They need permission to plant trees or make additions to their cottages. “My landlord owns the salmon in the rivers right outside my door,” says Angus Graham, secretary of the Crofters Union. “He owns the birds, the deer and the minerals.” Landlords also control development. One laird wouldn’t allow a slip to be built for a ferry to his island. Another wouldn’t allow his tenants to set up bed and breakfasts in their own homes. “They dictate community life,” says Alasdair Morrison, a member of the Scottish Parliament.
The owner of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, Jonathan Bulmer, heir to a cider fortune, is a benevolent landlord. “The problem is, you never know who you’ll get next,” says Cameron, expressing the view of the crofters seeking to buy him out. Their bid, funded by taxpayer money and lottery funds, is inspired by successful community buyouts on the islands of Gigha and Eigg. Across Scotland, communities have made about 75 bids to buy land in recent years, ranging from a couple of acres to huge estates like Harris. Government funds help them with the purchases, and a new public agency, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, helps steer them through the sale and management of the land.
Landowners, land agents and their lawyers are scared, both about the bill’s chilling effect on investment and about clauses in the bill that could give crofters lucrative salmon-fishing rights. If the bill passes, some lairds threaten to take the Scottish government to the European Court of Human Rights, on grounds that it interferes with the property rights of individuals. Robert Balfour, of the Scottish Landowners Federation, sees the crofters’ right to buy as “expropriation,” and the bill itself as politically vindictive: “It’s about looking backward, not forward. It’s about settling old scores.”
Those old scores are the infamous Highland Clearances–the evictions of the poor from their farms from the 1780s through the 1850s, when large landowners discovered their holdings were worth more when used for hunting or sheep ranching than raising crops. They ruthlessly evicted hundreds of thousands of tenants–some historians liken the events to modern ethnic cleansing–forcing many to leave the country. The new land reformers say they aren’t righting past wrongs. But it’s also clear that, with elections coming up in May, Scotland’s new parliamentarians are out to make their mark. And in Scotland, there’s no better place to make it than on a surveyor’s map.
