LAND reform is something that has been historically deficient in Scotland (Letters, November 25& 26). The considerable land mass of the Highlands has demonstrated this over recent centuries, with communities sacrificed for proprietorial avarice and sheep installed where people and cattle previously predominated. But the need of regulated land use is applicable across Scotland. It is in the southern counties, for instance, where Scotland’s biggest landowning concern, Buccleuch Estates, is based. It has around one quarter million acres to its name.
Many issues of local and national pertinence have been rooted in matters to do with land rights, ownership and so on, including that entity called the Crown Estates, which even apparently prevails over coastal sea water.
Land proprietorship in Scotland has not only been a free-for- all for foreign investors, it has been just as loosely molestable by domestic interests.
A model example is Norway, where land is subject to scrupulous control, as it should be. Nobody can, at least within regulatory knowledge, barter land about willy-nilly, exploit it for quick-kill financial profit, and such other shenanigans as is, and has been, regular practice in Scotland. It cannot be employed as a power over the interests of communities. People are prior. Not individuals whose rights to power-happiness supersede the interests of everyone else in the area.
Scotland is long overdue meaningful land reform. Not minor tampering round the edges.
Ian Johnstone,
84 Forman Drive, Peterhead.
ALAN Fitzpatrick (Letters, November 26) has asked whether my proposal to tax the value of land (Letters, November 25) would favour urban gardeners over dairy farmers.
That would absolutely not be the intention. A reduction in corporation tax, business rates and income tax should benefit most farmers.
There is an interesting change where the farmer is a tenant because the burden of a land value tax falls on the landowner, not the tenant. The landowner may attempt to compensate by increasing rent, and if the tenant has made big gains from other tax reductions, he may agree to that, but ultimately the market will set the rental value.
With any tax there are winners and losers. The losers should be corporations and individuals who move tax offshore, and anyone hoarding land that should be productive, not farmers.
Colin MacKenzie,
172 Wilton Street Glasgow.
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