ILPC 2026

 Scotland has the rather unenviable position of boasting the most concentrated private ownership of land anywhere in the world.  It is a country of 5 million people, most of these squeezed into what land reformers have called the ‘Central Reservation’ of urban areas that constitute only 3% of the country’s land use.  That leaves a staggering 97% of the country classified as rural.  Of the 12.3% of publicly owned land, most is devoted to strategic/commercial forestry ever since the second world war highlighted timber shortages in trench warfare. Of the remainder, 66 landowners own 25% of the land, half of the land is owned by 343 landowners. 

This is a legacy of a 17th century parliamentary act, a rather cheap version of the English enclosures, and then by outright embezzlement by land owning classes who also made the law.  The landless peasants of Scotland had, as land historian Andy Wightman reminds us, ‘no lawyers’.  The crofters, however, a class of peasant who held land on an annual rental basis from landlords, organised their party in the 19th Century to secure certain ancient land rights, reflecting a growing labour movement against the landed classes into the 20th century.  An intriguing fertilisation of ideas between fishermen, class conscious urban based activists and disenfranchised rural inhabitants gave rise to land riots, rent strikes, political agitation, land raids.  This, however, was all but extinguished by the second world war, and has never recovered.

However the tensions that existed between these parties have resonance in the renewed interest in community based land reform that are the focus of this study.  The 2016 Land Reform Act in Scotland reflected growing community pressure for a redress of these historical wrongs. Its stuttering progress, however, bears the hallmarks of the challenges confronting the Land leagues of the 19th century. Then, as now, the aspirations of activists seeking a radical nationalisation of land, and socialisation of property and return of commons are tempered by rural interests that are conditioned to seek no more than a ‘fair’ deal as tenants from land owners, the considerable power wielded by the landowners, and the within class divisions between urban and rural (often unemployed) workers. The absence of a broader, massive movement for land reform leaves its actual process in the hands of government minsters, market prices and reluctant landowners.  Rather than draw conclusions, this paper seeks to present examples of recent community based land struggles in Scotland to contribute to a discussion around a particular nexus of contradictions facing contemporary rural labour: those between the socialist/egalitarian aspirations of rural social movements activists versus the rentier economic relations of the land; the immaterial notion of autonomy versus the ongoing dependence on market for work and social reproduction; the alienation of urban working classes from the land and those that live beyond the reach of the city.