DAVID Ross's Inside Track article ("Land grabs the limelight in human rights battle", The Herald, May 27) correctly highlights the opportunity given to the landed vested interest cabal in Scotland to criticise legitimate and much-needed land reform, by using the hostile community purchase option to portray a Mugabe-style "land grab".
Sadly, as a long-time proponent of land reform, I have to say that there is more than a grain of truth in this viewpoint.
The compulsory community purchase against an individual owner's wishes opens up a potential Pandora's box of totalitarianism and unintended consequences.
There is no doubt in my mind that we can no longer tolerate the quasi-feudal Victorian-Edwardian nightmare world that exists in much of rural Scotland, but removing this danger and replacing it with a neo-tribal, quasi-Stalinist kibbutz-collective type of regime so beloved of the atavistic left/green proponents advocating it, would just create another set of problems that we should strenuously avoid.
In more than 40 years of advocating land reform in Scotland, being involved in the overall movement towards it, and considering analogies in other countries, two very clear major steps are required in the socio-economic and environmental rehabilitation of the wasted land we have made of the Highlands: a much greater area of diverse forest ( native and non-native) and secondly, but not less importantly, the development of an extensive private, democratic land tenure system with empowered private individuals forming empowered communities served by strong local government structures and national services.
The reform starts not with expensive taxpayer-funded buyouts giving more public money to billionaires, but with the collection of societally-created Land Rental Value.
Ron Greer,
Armoury House,
Blair Atholl.
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