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Am Bratach No. 191 Backcoaster’s Diary DEAR BRUTUS Alastair McIntosh, visiting professor of human ecology at Strathclyde University, made your correspondent splutter over his brose while idly thumbing the letter pages of The Herald. Here, would you believe it, was a Leòdhasach agreeing with the gentry about land ownership! We must make allowances for Mr McIntosh, though, because he has admitted to working as a ghillie while a student. Ghillies work for toffs, and toffs have a predilection for lording over the rest of us. And their views can be contagious. “For once I am in partial agreement with the lairds’ trade union, the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association,” confessed the professor on August 20. “Their suggestion to revoke the rights of crofters individually to buy their land is sound. Land ownership by individuals in a free market never sat comfortably with the crofting ethos. “Embedded in crofting law going back to 1886 is the principle that a crofter owns the ‘improvements’ to the land — the house, fences, etc — but never the land itself. Under feudal landlordism that was deeply problematic. It gave disproportionate power to lairds whose sole qualification was their wealth. But today, under land reform, crofting communities can be democratically accountable landholders unto themselves. It is therefore essential to block the leakage of community assets onto speculative private markets.” What exactly is meant by a “crofting community”, then? Well, it’s not what you might suppose. In fact, the term, as commonly used in the New Scotland, is part of a deception perpetrated to lull the general public into believing that crofters have at last become the masters of their own destiny. It has led to a situation whereby “movers and shakers” living in the vicinity of a crofting township can acquire ownership of the crofting estate without spending a penny of their own money. When they muster sufficient votes, they may buy the land under rights conferred by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 with the assistance of huge grants provided by taxpayers. Should the number of crofters diminish or the number of non-crofter residents swell over time, the crofters can expect to end up in a minority, habitually outvoted on the board of the “crofting community” company they thought was their own. It may be the case, we admit, that the rural idyll conjured up by Alastair McIntosh and his fellow travellers can be realised and lead to genuine improvement. But if so, why have the architects of this panacea stopped at crofting? Why aren’t they acting out their grand plan on the Duke of Westminster’s Reay Forest Estate or the fertile plains of the Carse of Stirling? When the leadership of the Scottish Crofting Foundation dared to pose questions like this to the authors of the land reform bill, their president was vilified and their chief executive hounded out of office following a vicious campaign orchestrated by outside parties. The foundation caved in. What that unhappy episode reminds us of is that, against the trend of the age, crofters remain by and large yoked to “superiors”, feudal or otherwise. And if it teaches us anything it is that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
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