“This high-souled gentry and this noble and far-descended peasantry, ‘their country’s pride,’ were set at naught and ultimately obliterated for a set of greedy, secular adventurers, by the then representatives of the Ancient Earls of Sutherland.” – Donald Sage

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My Provocation Speech at Community Land Scotland’s “Own Yersel” land reform conference on 10th May. You can watch my speech and the others in the session below.

https://youtu.be/h141kVWHh-s?t=6987

First, I want to point towards my friend Simon Brooke who inspired this provocation.

Rural depopulation, housing, jobs, land ownership. These are all common refrains that I’ve been hearing all day here and every day every since I got involved in Scottish land reform. We’re making good progress – slower than we’d like, but progress nonetheless. I’d like to throw a radical idea into that discussion.

We’re on the cusp of winning greater powers for communities to enact the right to buy the land under their feet and around them and we should be fighting for that right to exist even if the current possessor does not wish to sell, but there are large swathes of Scotland where there are no communities to enact that right. Or, more precisely, where there are no longer any communities. Anyone with the right eye on the landscape can see the ruined foundations of houses, the rubble of walls, the eroded runs of fields untilled for generations. Anyone who knows anything about Scotland can point to other countries and the descendents of the people who lived in those homes and tilled those fields. Hundreds of thousands of lives have never been lived in villages that ceased to exist not through accident or happenstance, but by the deliberate choice of those with power over the powerless.

So how can we return people to a land once Cleared? My provocation is that if no community exists in an area that suffered a Clearance then a group of individuals may register an interest with the Local Authority. Should they do so and should they create a viable community model (I’m deliberately not calling it a “business model”), then they would have the right to act as a virtual community for the purposes of enacting that right to buy with the proviso that the members of the community must live on their land for a certain minimum period of time. The Local Authority would then have the obligation to assist as the community built their new homes on their land and help to provide such public services and infrastructure as required.

Finance could be provided on long, patient terms from the Scottish National Investment Bank or the Local Authority directly via the Public Works Loan Board. Tools like the Rural Housing Burden could be used to ensure that the homes built remain within community ownership or Council housing buyback schemes could move the houses into social housing stock once the first generation no longer need it. The goal is to recreate and maintain a community for decades and centuries, not to create an opportunity for developers to flip houses for profit in months.

This is currently a sketch of an idea with no doubt many details to work out so please – let’s get that discussion started in the Q&A, and beyond. Let’s see if we can repopulate Cleared Scotland. Thank you.