Am Bratach No. 192
October 2007
editor@bratach.co.uk

Otter sets cat among pigeons

No punches pulled by Oldshore crofter

“I must say I feel a bit like the prophet Jonah,” Yorkshireman Michael Otter confided in a speech to the 2007 annual gathering of the Scottish Crofting Foundation, held in Dingwall.

Jonah, he reminded his audience of mainly crofters, politicians and civil servants, was told by the Lord to go and speak to the indigenous people of Nineveh, went off in a boat instead, was thrown overboard and got gobbled up by a big fish. “And he didn’t even have the West Highland Free Press to contend with!” quipped Mr Otter, a croft tenant in Oldshoremore since 1994.

It was to Ireland that Michael Otter turned for inspiration in support of his strongly felt view that over-regulation is killing crofting. “The Irish small landholders gained true and full ownership of their holdings a hundred years ago,” he said, “and I mean full ownership, including of course the right to do what they judged best with it, and the right to sell.

“Do we really want to be a hundred and more years, four and more generations, behind the Irish?” he demanded. “Do we want to stay further behind them, still restricted in what we can do and who can do it?

The picture he painted of present-day crofting was far from rosy.

Had not the foundation’s own newsletter reported that only three out of about forty crofts were in active use in one particular township on Skye? “In my area, the pattern is similar,” he pointed out. “In two townships, there is not a single active crofter. In another, our friends there (who we sell our own lambs with) have gone down from selling 1,200 lambs to 400 in the past six years, and that trend is continuing.”

It was at this point that the man from Oldshore took a potshot at one of the fashionable theories informing public policy. “So-called occupational pluralism, which was forced on the people displaced by the Clearances,” holds no attractions, he declared. “Young people, by and large, just aren’t interested. They want a steady job, which brings in a reasonable income; and those who want a croft mostly want it for a house site, not to work it.”

“There are a number of reasons for this dire situation, but the restraints and restrictions of crofting regulation, often arbitrarily applied or not applied depending on the whim or the prejudice of the [Crofters] Commission or the landlord, are in my view a major factor. In some ways, it is even worse than it was.

“We are now surrounded and restrained, not by traditional and objective civil servants and the landed gentry type of landlord who, for all their faults, knew their country and knew that people were an integral part of it, but increasingly we are controlled and constrained by unaccountable quangos with computerised data about each individual, who can and do make arbitrary decisions, and by so-called conservation trusts established to protect so-called wild places from folk like themselves, who have their own agenda, and who regard people who live in their would-be wildernesses as a nuisance to be managed and dealt with as they think fit (and who use other peoples’ money if you try and stand up to them).”

A century ago, the Irish government, faced with deadlock between landlords and tenants, turned tenants into fully-fledged owners, Mr Otter explained. “Allowing true and full ownership, free of crofting regulation, and subject simply to the general law of the land (including of course planning law, applied by democratically elected and accountable councils, which is the proper basis for controlling housing and other development ) would encourage those who are absentees or who have given up farming, to offer their land to those who are ready, willing and able to make something of it, whether as individuals on their own, or by individuals joining freely in partnership or association with other like-minded people, pooling their resources and skills.

“And I stress the word ‘freely’: enforced collectivism failed in the Soviet Union. It failed under Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao. (Okay, they were extreme cases.) It has failed here. We are facing the opposite way from the rest of the world.

“Yes, money will change hands,” he conceded. “Yes, it will lead to bigger and viable units. Yes, those with enterprise and energy will succeed. Good, good, good. It will hopefully also create jobs, because those viable units will need working and servicing. It will reverse the trend toward neglect. By the simple rules of supply and demand, it should also lead to a big reduction in site values and therefore help ease the problem of rural housing.”

Michael Otter was taking part in the first Angus MacRae Memorial Debate, speaking in favour of a motion that “the regulation of crofting no longer serves a useful purpose”. Speaking against the motion was former UK government minister, Brian Wilson. In the vote that followed, the motion was defeated by a comfortable margin.