Poor Had No Lawyers (eBook)

Andy Wightman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
448 Seiten
Birlinn (Verlag)
978-0-85790-076-0 (ISBN)

Infos

New and Updated Edition Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our common good land back? In this book, Andy Wightman updates the statistics of landownership in Scotland and explores how and why landowners got their hands on the millions of acres of land that were once held in common. He tells the untold story of how Scotland's legal establishment and politicians managed to appropriate land through legal fixes. Have attempts to redistribute this power more equitably made any difference, and what are the full implications of the recent debt-fuelled housing bubble, the Smith Commission and the new Scottish Government's proposals on land reform? For all those with an interest in urban and rural land in Scotland, this updated edition of The Poor Had No Lawyers provides a fascinating analysis of one the most important political questions in Scotland.

Andy Wightman was born in Dundee and studied forestry at Aberdeen University. He worked as a ghillie, environmental scientist, and an environmental campaigner before becoming a self-employed writer and researcher in 1993. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Who Owns Scotland, and a prominent analyst and critic of land reform process. He lives in Edinburgh.

Textauszug

1

Show the People That Our Old Nobility Is Not Noble

Why the land question still matters

 

 

This book is inspired by a talk I gave at the Changin Scotland conference at The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool organised by Gerry Hassan and Jean Urquhart in November 2009. I had last been at this event in 2003 when I organised a ‘walk and talk’ event which took people into the Inverpolly National Nature Reserve where, for several hours in beautiful weather, we discussed everything from deer management, the Moine thrust and carnivorous plants to absentee landlords, capital tax exemptions and land reform.

The talk was called ‘The Poor had no Lawyers’ and was an attempt to synthesise much of the work I have been doing over the past ten years. The title of that talk and this book is taken from an essay by Cosmo Innes (1798–1874), who was Professor of Universal History and Greek and Roman Antiquities (a Chair that was later named Constitutional Law and History) at the University of Edinburgh from 1846 until his death – of which more later. In particular, I wanted to place contemporary concerns about land in their proper historical context since it had been evident to me for some time that, despite a high-profile debate on land issues in Scotland, there remained a dearth of historical perspective, an understandable but distorted focus on the Highlands and Islands and a worrying lack of understanding of how the law operates.

Over the past decade or so, I have met and spoken to many people from all parts of Scotland about issues to do with land. It is clear that land and its ownership in villages, towns and rural areas across Scotland remains a pressing issue of concern. A frequent topic of interest is often a very small piece of land that the community has an interest in and which people assert is common land. The origins of such beliefs are to be found in the history of Scotland’s villages, estates, parishes, burghs and land law and they became the focus for my work on common good and commons in general. Some of the elements of this story deserve to be made better known and this book is a modest attempt at doing so.

The institution of landownership in Scotland evolved gradually and it evolved under the political control of landowners and their agents in the legal establishment. This was the key to its survival and to the development of the current pattern of ownership. The role of the law has historically been to serve the interest of those in power and, in Ullapool and elsewhere, it is evident that there is a hunger for greater understanding and depth to contemporary debates on land in Scotland. It was with this in mind that I felt the time was right to expose some of this to wider public scrutiny.

This book follows a number of previous ones on the topic. Callander’s A Pattern of Landownership in Scotland was (and remains) the most scholarly account of how the pattern of landownership in Scotland emerged. My Who Owns Scotland in 1996 attempted to analyse the current pattern of landownership in Scotland. And Callander’s How Scotland Is Owned was an analysis of the system of land tenure underpinning property rights in Scotland. The Poor Had No Lawyers revisits Callander’s classic from 1986 but goes further in focussing on the legal and political mechanisms that enabled vast areas of Scotland to be appropriated by private interests. This, in turn, leads into an analysis of who owns Scotland today and an exploration of some of the key developments in land policy over the past twenty years. The book finishes with a chapter outlining proposals for reforms to Scottish land law.

My thesis is not entirely new. Much of this story has been told before. But what I want to convey is how the theft of Scotland’s commons has robbed us not only of extensive communal interests in land but of a sense of connection with place which is leading to all sorts of social and economic problems. In recent years, one of my colleagues in these matters, Alastair McIntosh, has been working assiduously on this question to show that soil and soul are vital ingredients in recovering a sense of identity and belonging. Likewise, we will benefit greatly from remembering that the struggle over land is a universal one that knows no geographic boundaries. We are all creatures who require shelter and nourishment and that comes from having a place to call home. Equally, whilst for good historical reasons land issues have become associated with the Highlands and Islands almost to the exclusion of the rest of the country, the historic struggle for land rights took place across the whole country. The womenfolk in Eyemouth defending their ancient rights, the tenant farmers in East Lothian evicted because they voted for the wrong party and the community activist in Easterhouse fighting for better housing are all part of the land reform struggle – a struggle to reform, to change, the legal and economic framework that today still constrains too many people from realising their potential.

I should stress one thing. This book is about how landed power emerged and how the legal establishment connived in this process. Consequently, it says less about how such power was exercised and thus, for example, there is little discussion about the Highland Clearances or other such events where such power was deployed. Devastating though such episodes were, they were merely a reflection of the central question posed here – who owns Scotland and how did they get it? In 1909, Tom Johnston, later to become Secretary of State for Scotland and one of Scotland’s finest historians, wrote:

Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or Court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pockets.1

Johnston’s observation from 1909 got pulses racing at the time and inspired generations of land reformers. Despite this heady rhetoric, however, I was, for some years, sceptical of such claims. In an attempt to avoid being painted as just another populist land reformer, I eschewed such language. Always conscious of its power and authority, however (Johnston remains a distinguished historian), I made efforts to understand the legitimacy of such claims better and the extent to which they were true. My conclusions are that such claims are by and large true. Fraud and murder were widespread. The first Duke of Buccleuch, for example, was the illegitimate offspring of court harlotry and the Cawdor Campbells’ origins are with the kidnap and forced marriage of a twelve-year-old girl. Land indeed was stolen and centuries of legal trickery ensured that it stayed that way.

Why have the implications of this not been more widely understood? It is only on close textual analysis of the best history books that anything of the magnitude of the theft is clear. Mainstream history tends to pay more attention to the narrative of history and the pace and flow of events. In this book, I have tried to show that the power behind this history is what the German writer Marianne Gronemeyer referred to as ‘elegant power’ which is characterised as unrecognizable, concealed and inconspicuous.2

Tom Johnston argued that:

a democracy ignorant of the past is not qualified either to analyse the present or to shape the future; and so, in the interests of the high Priests of Politics and the Lordly Money-Changers of Society, great care has been taken to offer us stories of useless pageantry, chronicles of the birth and death of Kings, annals of Court intrigue and international war, while withheld from us were the real facts and narrative of moment, the loss of our ancient freedom, the rape of our common lands and the shameless and dastardly methods by which a few selected stocks snatched the patrimony of the people.3

In Who Owns Scotland, I told the apocryphal tale of a Scottish miner walking home one evening with a brace of pheasants in his pockets. He unexpectedly meets the landowner who informs him that this is his land and he had better hand over the pheasants.

‘Your land, eh?’ asks the miner.

‘Yes,’ replies the laird, ‘and my pheasants.’

‘And who did you get this land from?’

‘Well, I inherited it from my father.’

‘And who did he get it from?’ the miner insists.

‘His father of course. The land has been in my family for over 400 years,’ the laird splutters.

‘OK, so how did your family come to own this land 400 years ago?’ the miner asks.

‘Well . . . well . . . they fought for it!’

‘Fine,’ replies the miner. ‘Take your jacket off and I’ll fight you for it now.’4

What this neatly illustrates is the extent to which land rights which appear legitimate and almost...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.4.2013
• Zusatzinfo: 8pp b/w plates, tables & maps
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Rechnungswesen / Bilanzen
• Themenwelt: Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Spezielle Betriebswirtschaftslehre ► Immobilienwirtschaft
• Schlagworte: Andy Wightman • Best Scottish books • Bestseller • Books on Scotland • class divide • Essential Guide • frank and fearless • holyrood • land appropriation • land owners • Land ownership • land ownership in Scotland • land theft • rural land • Scotland • Scots law • Scottish Green Party • Scottish Land Ownership • Scottish Parliament • Smith Commission • Statistics • Stolen Land • Urban Land • Who Owns England? • who owns scotland
• ISBN-10: 0-85790-076-5 / 0857900765
• ISBN-13: 978-0-85790-076-0 / 9780857900760