A significant Highland anniversary is approaching. It was on November 1, 1965 that the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) was constituted.

It is worth recalling some of what the-then Secretary of State Willie Ross said in March of that year when the Highlands and Islands Development (Scotland) Act, setting up the HIDB, was debated in Parliament.

Mr Ross took MPs back a little over eight decades to the time of the Clearances and the Napier Commission's efforts to preserve the crofting communities. He said: “If there is bitterness in my voice, I can assure the House that there is bitterness in Scotland, too, when we recollect the history of these areas. We have to put this aside, however, to do what we are all now determined must be done to redress history.

"We have nine million acres, where 275,000 people live, and we are short of land. Surely, one of the first powers which must be given is a power related to the proper use of the land itself. To my mind, this is basic to any improvement in the Highlands. Anyone who denies the [HIDB] board powers over land is suggesting that the board should not function effectively at all."

Despite the country’s most powerful politician so publicly underlining the vital need for the HIDB to be given real powers over land, it didn’t get them.

Between 1976 and 1979 thought was given to the HIDB using compulsory purchase against some of the worst absentee landowners. But senior counsel's opinion was that its powers were only similar to a local authority taking a specific piece of land to build a school or a road. They wouldn't allow the removal of vast tracts from bad landowners. New legislation was needed. But the Labour Government was running out of time. With Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, the HIDB was seen as lucky to survive with the powers it had.

Crofters and crofting communities were subsequently given rights to buy their land with ministerial approval, whether or not the landowner wished to sell. But in the last 50 years there has been no further legislation in Edinburgh or London to allow ministers or their agencies to intervene directly to take over land and ensure the public interest is served.

That was until the recent passage of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. But this only facilitates community control of land which, in the opinion of ministers, is “wholly or mainly abandoned or neglected” or causes “harm, directly or indirectly, to the environmental wellbeing of a relevant community”.

It is unlikely to alter radically the present balance of fewer than 500 still having possession of half Scotland’s privately owned land.

Neither is there anything in the current land reform bill going through Holyrood to give ministers the power to examine whether the ownership of particular land is in the public interest, and act if necessary. But MSPs so minded could yet rectify that, 50 years after Willie Ross spoke of Scotland's anger.