Simon Fraser Memorial Lecture Series - Dùthchas 2024
As part of celebrations to mark 100 years since the resettlement of Galson township and 100 years of community ownership, with Community Land Scotland we hosted a Simon Fraser Memorial Lecture, with Brian Wilson, on the final day of our heritage festival, Dùthchas.
Brian Wilson, former Labour MP and former Chair of Harris Tweed Hebrides, presented “Why Land Reform Matters: The power of people and place”. The Simon Fraser Memorial Series, which has seen Community Land Scotland deliver six events in Edinburgh, Gigha, Glasgow, Staffin and London, was established in memory of Simon Fraser; a solicitor and pioneer of land reform in Scotland, who was instrumental in the success of some of the early community buyouts. You can read Brian's talk below.
In the early 1990s, when it looked likely that several government owned crofting estates might be given to communities, he developed the legal model of community trusts for places that wanted to take ownership of their land. This meant that he had the right expertise to help crofters in Assynt when they wanted to take control of their local estate which was coming up for sale. Simon helped with negotiation and legal expertise - and this ground-breaking crofting buyout went through in 1993. Many of Community Land Scotland’s founding members benefitted hugely from Simon’s expertise over the following years until he sadly died in 2016 at the age of 60.
We were delighted to host this Simon Fraser Memorial Lecture as our closing event of Dùthchas, in a year which marks 100 years since the resettlement of Galson village, as well as 100 years of Community Ownership. Dùthchas first took place in 2018 and aims to highlight the heritage of the region, bringing awareness to local traditions and cultures, whilst also proving to be a great opportunity for visitors to the area to learn about Galson Estate.
SIMON FRASER MEMORIAL LECTURE, 20TH SEPTEMBER 2024, BRIAN WILSON
Mòran taing airson an cuireadh seo a-nochd. Tha e na urram agus na thlachd a bhith a’ bruidhinn mar chuimhneachan air Sìm Friseal.
It is a privilege to deliver this talk in memory of Simon Fraser who gave so much to so many causes. Most of what I speak about tonight will relate to land ownership and crofting tenure. However, it is important to recall some of the other island objectives to which he was committed and which now form their own memorials. Urras nan Tursachan at Callanish, now embarked on a huge programme of expansion, and the continuing importance of Breasclete as a Gaelic-medium school are among them. Each had the benefit of Simon’s wisdom and commitment at the time when they were needed most. He is hugely missed.
The theme of what I will say tonight is that every change for the good is driven by people – people like Simon - who care enough to make that difference. Without commitment and understanding and belief, without the persistence to turn words into deeds, the vacuum will be filled by neglect or the blandness of mediocrity. The more marginal the cause, the truer this becomes. To most of Scotland, never mind the wider world, the causes to which Simon devoted so much dedication and wisdom, were well outside the mainstream. They were peripheral in every sense. They could only be driven to positive conclusions by a sustained determination to deliver.
Simon brought another essential ingredient to that process – knowledge. Good ideas founder if they are not backed up by the practical expertise required to fight for them. This is certainly true of anything related to issues of land ownership and use. The absolute certainty is that any threat to the status quo will be opposed by vested interests. Beneath a mask of reasonableness, and sustained by centuries of experience, the landowning fraternity will be as cunning as required in ensuring that what they have, they hold. And they are very, very good at it.
That is largely why land reform in Scotland has delivered so little over the decades. Very few politicians have been up for the battle that radical reform would undoubtedly provoke. Far easier to rationalise timidity on grounds that it doesn’t really matter. But, of course, it does matter. It matters massively and, as we can see all too clearly on this island, the difference between private land ownership and social ownership is the difference between night and day; between hope and decline.
The case for land reform in the Highlands and Islands has always sat within a wider context. It is not only an end in itself, though that is important, but as an enabler. Without access to land, there are no people and if there are no people, there is no language or culture. That became the historic truth over vast swathes of the former Gaidhealtachd, pushing survival to the edges. It might be a better public investment if places which are now being re-wilded were instead re-peopled but that is on nobody’s agenda. Instead, there is a constant battle to retain people and values, language and culture within the periphery to which they have been driven back. It should not have been an impossible task and when I first became involved with these matters, 50 years ago, there was still a wider base to build on and a spirit to re-kindle.
A lot of has happened during these decades, much of it for the good. But the necessity to see the economic, demographic and cultural aspects of the periphery as interlocking parts of the same challenge has never really been grasped. The point is illustrated by the fact that, at present, there are three pieces of legislation going through Holyrood which are ostensibly of particular relevance to islands and other peripheral areas – on crofting, on land reform and on Gaelic. By common consent, none of them will make much of a difference to anything and certainly do not recognise the scale of the challenges that exist within each component part. My argument would be – and I am pretty sure Simon’s would have been – that a single piece of radical, creative legislation which recognised the inextricable connections among all three, backed up by the commitment of government, would be a more accurate reflection of what could be inspirational and exciting as well as possible and necessary.
As a journalist and politician, that is the holistic approach which I have argued for and tried to promote over too many years. Some good outcomes have emerged through the hard work and dedication of committed people, among whom Simon Fraser was a constant friend. But so much more could have been delivered and so much more retained of all that is good in this society. These are still the challenges in rapidly changing environments; not just what isolated battles can be won and lines held. But how can the case be prosecuted on the basis that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that government, at all levels and of all complexions, must be brought to that realisation.
Crofting tenure is critical to that understanding; the glue that has held these places together over generations and which now, as it weakens, accelerates the risk of them falling apart.
Fortunately, our forebears fought and won the battles for crofting tenure which greatly restricted the rights of private landlordism and hence the value of crofting land. That created relatively fertile territory for community buy-outs; a beacon ignited in Assynt and taken up mainly in crofting estates of the Western Isles, with a few welcome outliers in extreme cases like Eigg and Gigha. In almost all of these, Simon Fraser played a crucial role. He was not only the voice of knowledge and experience, but also of persuasion and self-confidence. Much of what now exists in terms of community ownership would not have happened without him.
But where do we stand today? In some respects, not much further forward that we did 20 years ago. After the first flush of enthusiasm, facilitated in most cases by willing sellers, the spread of community ownership ground to a virtual halt. The 2003 crofting community right to buy has proved largely illusory. Fragile populations doing their best for the survival of crofting communities have battled for years against the casuistry of resistance. In places like the Bays of Harris and Bernera these battles are ongoing. In others, nobody even bothers to try because they know it is all too difficult. The Scottish Land Fund has become, by and large, a property fund because there is so little to support in terms of community land buy-outs. I have no objection to supporting the purchase of pubs and lighthouses. But please do not confuse it with land reform.
As far as land reform is concerned, If the law is supposed to be on the side of the people, it has a very strange way of showing it. And, sadly, we have no Simon Fraser. Even in the Western Isles, the corollary of half the land being under community ownership is that the other half is not, so what are we expected to do about it? And as communities change irrevocably under the weight of market forces and the dead, acquisitive hand of private landlordism, there are no defences at our disposal because land is the key to any strategy that could be transformational.
It need not have been like this and I will quote some history, the only purpose of which is to learn from it. When the government changed in 1997, there was a very strong tide in favour of land reform which I had done something to encourage. However, the major driving force was the knowledge that a Scottish Parliament was coming down the tracks and there would be an immediate expectation for it to do things differently and to deliver radical change. Donald Dewar’s interest in land reform was pretty marginal and he viewed my own as something of an eccentricity. But Donald was a pragmatist and he could see the usefulness of land reform as a flagship for devolution. So we set up a Land Reform Working Group chaired by John Sewel, who was our Minister in the House of Lords, so there would be something ready and waiting for incoming, devolved government.
I remember some of the discussions with civil servants. At that time, abolition of the feudal system which had been promised in the 1960s had been kicked into touch via the Scottish Law Commission and would have taken years to emerge in some half-baked form. Let’s just do it, we agreed, to the horror of the Permanent Secretary in the Scottish Office. So the legislative ground was laid in advance of devolution and to be fair, that one was carried through once Holyrood existed. So too was the “right to roam” and some more useful reforms. But others were not.
It has been years since I looked at the final report from John Sewel’s Working Group and I had forgotten how good it was – a clear-cut agenda to follow. Some of the recommendations were specific to crofting and I well recall the crofting community right to buy was the one which drew the strongest civil service resistance because it was the most important and fundamental. In other words, it was the only one which posed a challenge to the untrammelled rights of private ownership.
The clear-cut recommendation was – and I quote – for “all crofting communities who create a properly constituted crofting trust to have ownership of their croft land transferred to the trust on fair financial terms”. In other words, a straightforward crofting community right to buy which over the past 20-odd years could have transformed the map of Highlands and Islands land ownership, far beyond what has happened. Another recommendation was for the “devolution of crofting regulation” to allow decisions to be taken more locally, a decade before Shucksmith and saying the same thing. Both were ignored.
The Scottish Parliament convened in May 1999 and a Land Reform Bill was introduced 18 months later. As I say, it did some good things. But conspicuously, and to my outrage, all the good stuff on crofting “community right to buy” had disappeared when the Bill was published. The civil servants – and one lady in particular – had done their work. Some of us voiced our protests but Holyrood by then had taken on a life of its own. However, we had one good ally – the rural affairs minister, Angus Mackay, had a strong Carloway connection and understood the significance of what had been removed. And this is where I come back to Simon Fraser.
Probably some time in 2002, I was in Simon’s office when, by pure chance, I got a jubilant message from Angus Mackay. I think it was on a pager, if you remember them. He had succeeded in restoring the crofting community right to buy to the Land Reform Bill. When I conveyed these glad tidings to Simon, on the spot, he was pleased, of course – but also surprised and obviously still a bit sceptical. And, of course, he was right to be sceptical. He knew the system well enough to suspect that while the civil servants may have lost the battle, they certainly had not conceded the war. And, as history has proven, they produced a “right to buy” of such impenetrable complexity that more than 20 years later, it has never been used to the point of enforcement.
That is quite an interesting little footnote in history and the only point in quoting even footnotes in history is in order to learn from them. For me, the lesson has remained inescapable – that unless there is someone who understands enough and cares enough to drive through change, it will never happen. Twenty-one years after the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 delivered a “right to buy” which frustrates all who have attempted to use it, there are, as I mentioned, both a Crofting Reform Bill and a Land Reform Bill in the offing. And neither of them mentions the crofting community right to buy – because, essentially, nobody in government cares enough to drive reform or is equipped with enough knowledge and hinterland to face down the objections which would undoubtedly arise. So just steer clear of it.
Speaking in the midst of community owned estates, it is perhaps ungracious to focus on what has not happened rather than what has been achieved. I could not be more admiring of what community ownership has delivered in this part of Lewis and the role it is now playing wherever it prevails. The deal which the four west side estates have struck with Northland is a triumph. Equally, I assume you would want what you have yourselves to be available to others. On community owned estates, you can build houses, you can subsidise energy costs, you can earn money from wind turbines, you can help local organisations, you can employ people and support businesses. Even when mistakes are made, they are your own mistakes and there is a democratic process to correct them.
Where there is no community ownership, none of that exists. There are no such prospects or opportunities and there never will be if the law does not create that right. These places are changing and declining at such a pace that the desert will soon be called peace and the remnants of what is left will no longer be an inconvenience to anyone. There will be more artists, environmentalists and holiday home owners but precious few crofters or blue collar workers. Landlords will be paid to restore peat while nobody is left to cut it. The great re-seedings of the 1960s will be restored to unproductive wilderness as a matter of public policy.
Then, when there are no people of working age left to deliver public services to the artists, environmentalists and holiday-home owners, a different clamour will gather force and some visiting social anthropologist might even conclude that it might have made a lot more sense to put every sinew of public policy behind the retention of what used to exist – healthy, balanced communities, where people had access to homes, land and work; where a language and culture were sustained.
I do not believe that political devolution has done anything to bring the decisions which affect these outcomes closer to the people or to bring a more knowledgeable or nuanced approach to legislation. There are 28 ministers at Holyrood but almost no specialism based on knowledge or experience. That is the vacuum which the civil service is delighted to fill. You may have read reports of the consultation meeting in Stornoway around the proposed Crofting Bill at which the chief adviser to the Bill, a former chief executive of the Crofting Commission naturally, said they had kept the legislation to a minimum “as that is the best chance of securing Ministerial approval”. That really is a far cry from the spirit of 1886 and it summarises the poverty of ambition which now prevails.
This certainly involves politics but not party politics. In the early days of my own interest in these matters, I became a firm opponent of the individual crofting right to buy which the Labour government included in the 1976 Act and which has had many of the negative consequences which opponents predicted at that time. Now, I would welcome anyone at Holyrood who appeared to grasp the urgent need for action to salvage a system of tenure which kept people in these places for generations. A Crofting Reform Bill worthy of the name would aspire to radicalism rather than minimalism. And a Minister worthy of the name would be demanding no less.
Everyone is entitled to one good idea in their life and my own, in this context at least, was Iomairt aig an Oir – the Initiative at the Edge which I introduced in 1998 and which lived on in name only for a while thereafter. The basic premise was that it is madness to have multiple bureaucracies administering the decline of these places from safe distances rather than integrating them into a single agency operating at very local levels to deal with crofting regulation, housing, economic development and so on. Everything, in fact, that can contribute to retaining population, based on the three essentials – land, housing and work. The civil servants hated it because it cut across their beloved silos – and they had no intention of allowing their silos to be disturbed by a transient Minister!
I think it could have been a transformational approach to many of the challenges which fragile communities continue to face. And, by extension, the same applies at the level of government. If Scotland cares about its periphery, then why not have a Minister responsible for nothing else, with powers to integrate policies and encourage them to be implemented at local levels. And it would surely not be too much to ask, if such a Minister existed, that he or she would become genuinely knowledgeable, capable of learning from past history and making a real and lasting difference before it is too late.
I hope I have said nothing tonight that Simon Fraser would have disagreed with. The fact that we are having these discussions about live issues rather than dead ones, is in no small part due to his years of effort and commitment and that does indeed deserve to be remembered and respected.
I heard a report the other day of Andy Wightman speaking at a conference in which he said the one thing you need in pursuing Scottish land reform is persistence. Not years, not the length of Parliaments, not decades, but for as long as we can, we should unite around the fact that it is still a cause worth fighting for.
Brian Wilson
20th September 2024
