By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.
OK.
Scottish ministers point out that by getting landowners to tell the government before any large-scale sale, they can give community groups a chance to put together a rival bid. But many big estates lie in sparsely populated upland areas where communities lack purchasing power.
So, the land currently belongs to those who value it the most. The problem with this is?
Mr Wightman, a former Green MSP, argues persuasively that the pattern of ownership results from a free market in land which privileges those with the deepest pockets.
And?
His reasoning is that Scotland’s land should be regulated as a shared resource in the public interest.
Doesn’t anyone ever read Ostrom? Or even regard the history of land as a shared resource in the socialist and communist countries? The shit and pollution that results?
Who’s against devastating Scotland’s environment? Anyone? ……..
No no Tim, you don’t understand. Then these moors and hills won’t be full of nasty men with guns and Range Rovers.
It’ll be bunny rabbits and stags and wind farms and lots and lots of beaver.
And lots of magic mushrooms to help convince people voting Green is a good idea?
Zac will hypnotise all the midges into turning vegan.
Sorry, Otto, midges don’t have boobs so it’ll be an epic fail. Presumably his boobilicious activities were too
They’ll have huge tits, too.
This is the point at which a play of Frank Zappa’s “Cosmic Debris” may be instructive.
The effects of magic mushrooms are not that dramatic.
And bagpipe birds…
Which, by the look of them, predate upon the wild Haggis…
If you don’t hunt or allow predators then the haggis will reproduce so fast that they’ll drink all the Irn Bru and then there will be a massive die off from starvation.
There was a lovely Spike Milligan joke about the haggis. Their (two) left side legs were shorter than their (two) right side legs to make it easier to run around the side of the mountain.
Which, I think, misses another joke. We need a fair and comely female haggis with left (s) and right (l) who meets a handsome male haggis who is different – left (l) and right (s) and then we tell the tale of how they could only meet occasionally as they circled the hills in opposite directions etc etc
Viz entry: Haggis sex – like doggie style but with one knee down and the other leg straight. Doing it on a railway embankment.
That joke long predates Spike Milligan – my father (born 1914) retaled, when I was young, how haggis were caught by turning them round so that their shorter legs were dowhill and they rolled down the mountain.
Commies don’t like private property, this we knew.
Maggie had the number of this throbber and his ilk a long time ago.
It’ll be different this time because reasons – no elaboration on why it will be different but apparently it will
I believe Balmoral is the 11th biggest Highland estate. Might Scottish independence have a part to play in this move?
This’ll be land that even in the middle ages before the little ice age was incapable of supporting agriculture.
Either bare rock, peat bog or 1mm deep soil.
Thats supposef to benefit this mythical community in what way exactly?
Shooting ( harvesting) deer / grouse/ pheasant and letting feral sheep graze the rest is the most productive use of the land.
Spot on, but I would say even before that. The Romans didn’t go any further than Northumbria because it just wasn’t worth it.
You can buy land in the Cairngorms for about £2K/acre. And that’s land that has been forested recently and you can get some carbon credit money. Take that away it would be worth close to fuck all.
The Romans didn’t go any further than Northumbria because it just wasn’t worth it.
and the Picts were such nasty little buggers
“The Romans didn’t go any further than Northumbria” Oh yes they did. It’s not very difficult to get this sort of history right, you know. They even took a census of the part of Scotland where I grew up.
Effing bolsheviks.
For a start, have you seen most of the land? It’s not a myth that a large part of the Clearances were voluntary movement: wringing a subsistence from thin, sour soils subject to heavy rain was an utterly miserable business. An unusually bad year for crops or beasts and the buggers all started stealing from their neighbours since people on the whole do like to feed their wives and bairns.
Secondly, even if the land were Edenic it’s still bloody theft. String ’em up.
Progression of the thin end of the wedge in action.
Firstly the porridge wogs proles were given the right to roam which degraded the rights of the land owners.
Next up is the requirement to notify the state when you sell your property.
Final stage will be the confiscation by the state.
Scotland’s old law of trespass was such that Scots anyway had always effectively a “right to roam”. If you didn’t grow up there you will probably have no concept of how freely we could wander about – both by law and by custom.
That doesn’t exclude the possibility that the devolved governments have set about annoying landowners just for the spite of it.
I do wonder about the myth that Scots are good at managing money.
Maybe other people’s, when under penalty of being fired and starving for not doing it.
Scotland was independent. And managed its finances so well that they had to merge with England because the state ran out of money.
And since devolution they’ve managed it so well that they’re getting enormous annual subsidies from England.
Two things about this struck me:
Why wouldn’t landowners seek out every possible buyer on their own so as to get the highest price? If some community group would pay more for the property wouldn’t the current owner contact them?
And, how, exactly, is who owns large parcels of land (most of which is not very useful) a concern for anyone, particularly the gov’t?
I read about this in Aristotle’s Tragedy of the Commons.
OK, Esteban beat me to it – only a particularily extreme conspiracy theorist would assume that a landowner would choose to exclude tenants and neighbours from cnsideration when selling land.
Anecdata – when my mother died, my sister and I chose to sell the house in which we had grown up to a family who lived five doors down the other side of the road in a smaller house because we took it for granted they would be acceptable to our late parents’ neighbours, when I sold the flat in which I lived before getting married I chose the potential buyer that I thought would be the best for my (soon to be ex-)neighbours [clearly the estate agent had underpriced the flat since I had a fair-sized choice and could have sought a higher bid]. I *know* that I am not good with people so, unless I have been exceptionally lucky with my neighbours, most people should be equally or more concerned with their neighbours.
Just how bad should the tenants/neighbours of the Scottish Laird have been that he/she should sacrifice £££s to avoid selling to them?
This is important. When we sell it won’t be to scrotes (unless they successfully deceive us) because I won’t inflict them on our neighbours.
BTW Norman, I’ve, er, updated my holiday advice in yesterday’s thread . . .
Saw that, PJF. I could have been a bit more specific myself, too. Thanks a lot.
Genuinely charming projection, john77, but it’s hardly an extreme conspiracy theory to figure that a landowner, rich or otherwise, might not give the slightest shit what happens to the locals when he sells up and moves away. Just last week there was a story of someone in a nice spot who sold land to pikeys who tarmaced overnight without planning and moved their shit in.
You didn’t read my first sentence! A landowner who didn’t give the slightest shit would accept a better offer from a “community group”. It is only one who is totally pissed off by the locals who would choose not to do so.
Housing costs in Edinburgh are fantastically high, so everyone focus on those huge areas of sod-all in the middle of nowhere.
Scottish ministers want you to give the government notice before sale so community groups can then fail to gather funding for a rival bid? Because they can’t afford it? Which the ministers admit themselves?
So what would be the point?
Also, how often are these sales engineered so that only one bidder is viable? Usually the thing to do would be to list the property and wait for bids to come in. Or you could approach the owner with an offer even if the property is not currently for sale.
So community groups could just monitor the news – large sales make the news – or knock on the door and make an offer at any time.
Look, ‘feudal’ is about relationships. If it’s sparsely populated, then it cannot be feudal.