Land is power. There is no more consistent reality in history. Those who own the land control the future. On this basis the people of Scotland are some of the least powerful people in the world.
It’s not just that we are the most centralised country in the developed world, with the weakest local democracy. It’s not just that we are now governed by a barely accountable sprawl of public agency empires over which we have little influence. And it’s not just that our economy is now largely owned by overseas investors. It’s the fact that we don’t own our own land.
Begging landowners
We have to beg landowners to let us build houses. We have to beg them not to strangle our rural communities. We beg them to change their practices to restore our wildlife. If we want to start a land-based business, we beg them (usually unsuccessfully) for some land to base it on.
Scots, tenants in their own country
No citizens anywhere else in the world own so little of their own country. Scotland is a nation which has turned its own people into tenants.
Why don’t we fight back? Because land is power. Every single piece of credible research says that Scots overwhelmingly do want to fight back. Land reform is wildly popular, supported by overwhelming majorities. Yet still it doesn’t happen. Why?
The role of the SNP
The public identifies the SNP as ‘the party of land reform‘ but has very low confidence that the SNP is actually going to do anything – and the public is right. Seeing Scotland’s unequal land ownership as unjust and in need of change was fundamental to the creation of the SNP.
Yet the party has had power now for almost an entire generation. Over that period land ownership has become even more concentrated, into even fewer hands, than it was at the start of the SNP era.
SG and the asset management company Gresham House
In fact, some of the concentration of ownership is directly the result of actions the Scottish Government has taken. Inexplicably, the Scottish National Investment Bank used Scottish taxpayer money to give a £50mn to a London-based company that gives advice to wealthy investors on how best to profit from Scotland’s land.
That company, Gresham House, has – in four years and with active government support – become Scotland’s’ second largest landowner. This fact alone should be considered scandalous. How on earth is this even within sniffing distance of being in the public interest?
Tree planting scheme
But that’s not all. The Scottish Government devised a scheme to help the very rich cream off public subsidies for tree planting. Buy land and then the Scottish Government will help you make a fortune from it by planting trees – any trees, anywhere. That is government for the rich, not for the public good.
Second government Bill in a decade
To distract you from this, the Scottish Government uses land reform legislation like a magician waving his left hand about. We’re on our second government Bill in ten years. Its predecessor was a toothless joke, and this Bill is the same. The Scottish Government is going out of its way to avoid ‘real’ land reform while constantly trying to persuade its members it’s tackling land reform issues.
And why? Because land is power. On the one hand making land ownership fairer is hugely popular, but on the other, the existing landowners are very well organised and have enormous influence, exerting great pressure to keep things as they are.
After all, they do well out of this. They are subsidised from public funding in lots of ways. But that is not the fundamental reason why large landowners want to keep hold of their land. If it was economic return that was the primary driver, they certainly wouldn’t manage the land as they do.
Common Weal findings on land ownership
At the Common Weal think tank we have assessed the economic return on a hectare of land from a wide range of possible economic activities – from bioplastic crops to ecotourism to energy generation to housing. We compared this to the land’s existing use, largely for grouse shooting.
Suffice to say it is very easy to find economic activity which creates much more return on land but very difficult to find anything which creates less return.
Large landowners in Scotland hold land for one of three reasons. First, as a hobby or lifestyle issue. Some very rich people just want a country estate or want to dabble in rewilding.
Second, as an investment. This is what is driving the current concentration of ownership. It is not the value of what is done on or with the land that matters, it is simply the appreciation of the asset value of the land itself, as a speculative investment. Tree planting increases the value of the asset, tenants or businesses based on the land actually reduce the value.
And third, because land is power. Scotland’s aristocratic families do not cling to their massive estates only because of income but because of the influence it confers – to them, and their children, and their children’s children. It is about controlling Scotland’s future in the way they control so much of its present.
Giving our rights away
Scotland is truly the most generous of nations. We let our local democracy be taken away from us. We let government shrug off accountability. We let overseas investors buy all our domestic economic assets, then extract and export the wealth. We let a tiny number of people own all our land and we do nothing about it.
No, actually, that’s not true. We do something. We say, “thank you”. We call it efficiency or foreign direct investment or ‘looking after the land for us’. We celebrate being tenants in our own nation and we let the powerful run our lives for their benefit.
Land is power and in Scotland we are complicit in our own powerlessness because we let all of this happen and then make excuses for the politicians who do it to us. If this country can’t grow a spine, take back its own assets and use them for the benefit of its own people, then our future looks bleak.
This article is based on an article published by Robin McAlpine in The Herald on October 13, 2025.
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