Land reform in Scotland (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, land reform has been a significant issue. It is widely recognised that there is considerable concentration of land ownership in Scotland. Typically, land reform is an issue in formerly colonised countries, where the occupying power has concentrated land ownership, such as in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to benefit the colonisers and exert control.

The concentration of land in Scotland, through the famous Highland Clearances, was a precursor and a part of the same process, appropriating land for the ruling class and sending people out to colonise other parts of the world.

According to the Scottish Land Commission: 1,252 owners hold 67 percent of privately owned rural land. Of these estates, 87 are estimated to be larger than 10,000 hectares (67 of these are in the Highlands), 667 are 1,000-10,000, and 371 are smaller than 1,000 hectares. There are 5.5 million people in Scotland.

As they note, this is not unusual:

‘Ownership of agricultural land is becoming increasingly concentrated in Europe, with one percent of agricultural businesses controlling 20% of agricultural land in the EU and three percent controlling 50%. Conversely, 80% of agricultural businesses control only 14.5% of agricultural land (European Economic and Social Committee, 2015)’.

Early in the parliament’s existence, the then Labour government passed laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudal land ownership – no longer requiring the payment of feudal duties and creation of outright ownership of land.

The Scottish Parliament took the opportunity to make changes, now it was no longer confronted by the power of landowners in the House of Lords. By 2004, it passed its first Land Reform Act, which included a broader right to roam than in England and Wales, and also introduced community right to buy, where populations up to 10,000 could register a right of refusal on land sales and transfers. This legislation also placed responsibilities on landowners for the management of their property.

The SNP have continued the process by passing further acts in 2015, 2016 and 2025. The 2016 legislation gave Scottish ministers the power to intervene in land sales. Some of this legislation was refinements of the process following human rights cases that upheld the right of private ownership against the provisions of the Land Reform Acts, particularly Salvesen v Riddell.

The 2016 Community Empowerment Act gave communities rights to intervene in disused or neglected land causing harm to communities (including urban properties). The 2025 Act includes a requirement to consider reasonable requests to lease land or convert parts of it into crofting land. This act also requires a plan which will improve biodiversity, adapt to climate change and contribute to net zero.

The large estate owners continue to fight a rearguard action, maintaining that large estates can be run more efficiently and with economies of scale (eg, when a part of the estate has a lean year, they can cross-subsidise from other parts of the estate to continue paying staff for maintenance and other costs).

Campaigners maintain that there is evidence that large estates stifle development, and concentrate power into a few hands:

‘Scotland’s current pattern of landownership frustrates economic development within fragile rural communities. Most of these responses were very general in nature but the overall perception was that because landowners have a very high degree of control over decisions about how land is used, they also have the capacity to either help or hinder economic development. The implication of this is that where local economic development is not regarded as a priority by the landowner, then it will not happen.’

Further, some landowners are perceived as ‘trophy’ owners, holding the land as a status symbol (mostly for shooting); whereas some charities are seen as hindering economic development in the name of conservation. As the land commission notes, ‘This indicates that the issue here is more to do with concentration of power and resources more generally, and that land holdings are acting as an outlet for the exercise of this power rather than its source’.

These frustrations reflect the desire of small-business folk and entrepreneurs who are locked out by their more powerful rivals. Indeed, part of the impetus behind land reform is securing the votes of rural population, including farmers and small-business people. The fact that the legislation is locked in with significant requirements for Scottish ministers to intervene, means that wealth and social connexion may, however, be the real determinant for how much, or how little changes. It will be interesting to see how much this will affect land held by the King in his own right (rather than as Crown land, which itself is managed by Scottish ministers and accounts for 35,000 hectares), such as Balmoral, and if ministers will be willing to impose conditions and lettings on any of his land.

So far, there has been little change in the pattern of land ownership, and sales and transfers of large estates are few and far between. Much as in land reform in many parts of the world, the power and right of property tends to chafe against any attempts to constrain it.

Where land is owned by public bodies, such as ‘Forestry and Land Scotland,’ commercial imperatives still apply, so the logic of capital predominates regardless of titular ownership. It is this logic that will continue to predominate even if the land is parcelled up into smaller lots.

Socialists want to end the private ownership of land and want to see it used rationally to benefit the needs of the whole community. That means, not state ownership or ownership by forestry commissions or trusts, but common ownership and democratic control.

Land being held in common doesn’t mean that people won’t be free to use their initiative to employ the land, but that under properly understood and agreed common and democratic rules, people would be able to co-operate to meet their individual and collective needs without all the layers of complexity and chicanery that come with the private ownership of land.

Pik Smeet

50 Years Ago: The taxation of land values (1963)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In dealing with the question of Taxation of Land Values it must be remembered that the advocates of this measure, from Henry George to Joseph Hyder, always assumed the retention of capitalism in all its other features.

Under such conditions there is no difference in principle between taxing land and taxing lace. Both are cases of the Governmental powers being used to take wealth from members of society for general purposes—as wise old Benjamin Franklin saw.

Taxation is, of course, necessary under capitalism, and the only question is, how shall the “burden” be apportioned among the taxpayers—the capitalist class. The land-owning section are quite sure the “burden” should not be placed on them, while the industrial capitalists are equally certain that they should not be called upon to pay. Hence the minor quarrel between them over taxes.

But under capitalism the joining together of these two sections into a land-owning industrial capitalist group is steadily increasing. For them the problem is solved. From the general capitalist standpoint the portion of wealth best able to bear the “burden” of taxation is land, as it disturbs the production and distribution of commodities— the great factor of capitalism—less than any other method of raising the sum required. Hence large landowners who happen to be still more largely interested in industry, favour taxation of land values, to the great bewilderment of “the man in the street,” who finally explains a landowner being in favour of taxing land by the theory that he is ”a good man.”

Except, then, as an indication of the development of capitalism, and the concentration of both land and industrial capital into fewer hands, taxation of land values, even up to 20s. in the £, no more leads to Socialism than would taxation of toffee. On the contrary, it would merely be one of the steps in the more efficient organisation of capitalism for the benefit of the capitalists.

['The Forum: Taxation of Land Values' by Jack Fitzgerald, December 1913 Socialist Standard.]

The Origin of Private Property in Land. (1905)

From the December 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

"How did possession of land become individ­ualised ? There can be little doubt as to the general nature of the answer. Force in one form or the other is the sole cause adequate to make the members of a society yield up their combined claims to the area they inhabit. Such force may be that of an external aggressor, but in either case it implies militant activity. . . . It seems possible that the primitive ownership of land by the community, which, with the development of coercive institutions lapsed in large measure or wholly into private ownership, will be revived as industrialism further developes. . . . In legal theory landowners are directly or indirectly tenants of the Crown (which in our day is equivalent to the State, or, in other words, the community). The community from time to time resumes possession after making due compensation. Perhaps the right of the community to the land thus tacitly asserted will in time to come be overtly asserted and acted upon, after making full allowance for the accumulated value artificially given".

Herbert Spencer

This land is your land (or maybe not) (2007)

Book Review from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Author Kevin Cahill is wrong. Wider landowning is not the answer as we are excluded from ownership of the means of production in general not just land

So you’ve paid off your mortgage and now you own your house and the land on which it stands. No, you don’t — the land still belongs to the queen, who is the sole legal owner of land in the United Kingdom. So-called freeholds are actually leases from the Crown. This is one of many startling facts revealed by Kevin Cahill in Who Owns the [World] (published by Mainstream at the end of last year).

In fact the queen also owns all the land in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and a number of other Commonwealth countries. In all, according to Cahill, she owns well over six billion acres (one-sixth of the earth’s land surface), making her by far the largest landowner on the planet. She’s not the only monarch who claims ultimate ownership of their country’s land, and various kings, sultans and sheikhs make up the rest of the list of the largest landowners. Countries without kings or queens may still operate on a comparable principle: in Ireland the state is the sole owner of land.

When there is no such system of legal ownership by a monarch or state, there can still be massive landholdings. The Catholic church, for instance, is the second-largest  landowner in New York, and the other big religions are pretty wealthy too. Although they are in theory just tenants of the queen, the British aristocracy own plenty of land — around a billion euros’ worth in the case of the Dukes of Atholl and Westminster. The biggest landowner in the US is Ted Turner of CNN fame, though other individuals or families have more valuable holdings as the land is in richer areas. Fewer than one-fiftieth of one percent of the population of Europe (77,000 people) own 5 percent of the farmland and receive massive subsidies from the government.

At the same time, all this massive concentration of landownership is largely concealed from the general public. Few countries have comprehensive, accurate and easily available land registries, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to discover who owns what. A comprehensive account for the UK (then including the whole of Ireland) was published in 1872-6, as The Return of the Owners of Land. At that time, 96 percent of the population, over 27 million people, owned no land at all, while a third of a million owned more than an acre. Nothing of comparable scope has been published since then. But in 2006, Cahill argues, only 30 percent owned nothing, while 70 percent had a stake in land, i.e. a home. This is one of the themes of his book, the way in which private home-ownership has increased and so made most people relatively prosperous.

If Cahill had simply compiled and organised a mass of information about landownership throughout the world, his book would still have been a most useful work of reference. And there’s no doubt that that is what it is. If you want to find out, say, the largest landowners in Estonia, this is the place to look (it’s the Estonian state, a Finnish milk cooperative and IKEA). However, the book is far more than that: it is also written in support of a particular analysis of capitalism and a programme for change. The argument, basically, is that enabling people to own land and a home outright, with a proper free market in land, will lead to ‘universal prosperity’. Further, it ‘creates the essential condition for the universalisation and democratisation of capital.’ The claims here need to be assessed very critically.

For a start, what difference does it really make if in the last analysis the queen owns the land your house is on, supposedly making you and everyone else serfs rather than free individuals? In Britain the government can no longer legally seize land in the name of the Crown, but in theory the queen could sell Canada (just as Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867). However, converting land to be genuine private property of its owner rather than something held on a kind of sufferance from the monarch would have not the slightest impact on workers’ daily lives. Those who now really owned a bit of land would still have to work for a living, just as they do now, and just as those in rented accommodation have to under any system.

Furthermore, home-ownership, whether true ownership or via Crown lease, is not all that it’s cracked up to be. It does not in itself remove a person’s status as a wage worker, and a mortgage is an enormous burden on most workers (witness the number of repossessions). Cahill asserts that increased home ownership leads to increased prosperity, but he never considers that the causality might be the other way round, that higher wages might lead to more workers owning their homes. In fact, from a comparative viewpoint, there seems to be no necessary connection here at all: his figures for owner-occupation in Europe show that Ireland, Spain and Greece have the highest rates (over 70 percent), while Sweden, Germany and France are at or just under 50 percent. Cahill’s bizarre description of Ireland as ‘the most advanced capitalist country on earth’ only makes sense on the basis of a very odd idea of how to measure such advancement.

He also goes wrong in describing a home as ‘capital’: the house you live in is not used for investment or productive purposes. And there is no such thing as a right to shelter, nor any point in putting such a ‘right’ in a country’s constitution. What matters is the effective ability to buy or rent a house or flat, not some abstract unenforceable ‘right’.

Much of this book is directed at landowners, complaining about the kind of subsidies they get from the taxpayer, which means other members of the ruling class. The capitalists think that landowners are unproductive and merely monopolise something which is in short supply and can therefore receive massively high rents, which are a drain on the capitalists’ profits. The idea of taxing land values as a way of hitting landowners and cutting taxes on other capitalists has been around for many years and was recently revived as a way to ‘make the New Labour project actually work’ (Ashley Seager, Guardian, 8 January). Socialists have always refused to take sides in debates about how the capitalist class distribute the paying of tax among themselves.

Cahill’s pro-capitalist views are clear from a throw-away remark about the unions having been out of control and needing to be tamed by Thatcher. He does at one point come close to seeing the real problem, when he writes that poverty is caused by exclusion, specifically by exclusion from ownership and use of, and access to, land. However, there is an extra step (or giant stride) which needs to be taken, to realise that this exclusion must be seen in terms of workers being excluded from ownership and access in the means of production in general, not just land but also factories, offices, shops, warehouses, etc. It would be unreasonable in the extreme to think that one book, written by one individual, could have assembled information about the ownership of all this as well as the land. But increasing home ownership and letting people own land directly will make no impression on the capitalist class’s monopoly of the means of production, and that is what needs to be done away with.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Feudal Relic (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued a report on the finances of the Duchy of Cornwall which, since feudal times, has provided a private income for the heir to the throne. A reminder that the “royal family” not only supply heads of state for UK Capitalism Inc but are also aristocrats in their own right, with their own landed estates.

The thrust of the committee’s report – dominated as the committee is by New Labour MPs who favour a “modernised” capitalism – was that Prince Charles was not running the Duchy as a proper capitalist enterprise. But the Duchy is a landed estate rather than a capitalist corporation. The aim is still of course to end up with a surplus, but Charles’ income comes mainly from the rents paid to his estate by tenant farmers and, increasingly it seems, commercial firms for the use of the land he has inherited from previous heirs to the throne. According to the report, the Duchy’s assets at the end of 2004 were valued at £428 million, most of it land.

England was the classic country of a landowning class of this type, and Marx’s mid-19th century analysis of the operation of capitalism which then still had a large agricultural sector, like that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo before him, was based on a three class system: a landowning class renting out its land to capitalist tenant farmers who employ wage workers. These latter produce surplus value which is then shared between the capitalist employer as profit and the landowner as rent.

Ground-rent is a pure monopoly income which accrues to people who, for accidental historical reasons, happen to be owners of a portion of the globe; which allows them to say, even to capitalists, “you can’t use my land for your farm or your factory or whatever unless you hand over to me a share of the proceeds”. So landowners are parasites on parasites. In the 19th century this was a big issue with capitalist politicians continually raising the “land question”, but it eventually ended in compromise and intermarriage between members of the two classes. We can now talk of an essentially two class system – capitalists and workers – even though ground-rent remains money for nothing.

Actually, Charles is also a bit of a capitalist in his own right. He markets organic food under the label “Duchy Originals” but which, according to the Times (22 July), “made a profit of £1 million on a turnover of £40 million, which most commercial enterprises would regard as an inefficient return”. But then, if you’ve got an income from your private estate of £11.9 million in the tax year 2003-4 (Committee Report) you don’t have to be so ruthless in your pursuit of any commercial profit as you would be if this was your only source of income.

But the New Labour MPs are right. If all capitalist firms took the same aristocratic attitude to profit-making as Charles, then British capitalism would be in trouble on world markets. The typical capitalist firm has to try to maximise its profits, not just to please its shareholders, but to keep in a fit state to continue to compete by having funds to invest in means to reduce its costs.

In the 1860s when Marx was writing Capital the typical capitalist was still an individual owner who ran his own business or a partnership of such owners, though this was beginning to change with the coming of the limited liability company. Marx described the individual capitalist as “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will” (Volume I, chapter 4). Thus, the individual capitalist’s greed was not a personal failing but a reflection of the fact that he personified capital’s need to expand continuously.

Limited companies (which Marx did discuss in Volume III of Capital) are now the dominant form and maximising profits is no longer a mere personal motivation; it is a legal obligation on those who run companies. The same applies to pension funds and other so-called “institutional investors”; the managers and trustees of such funds are under a legal obligation to maximise the fund’s income or face a breach of trust charge. Which makes them as ruthless profit-seekers as any capitalist corporation or 19th century Gradgrind.

Prince Charles is just not in this league, but then he’s more of a personification of landed property.

Inflation and the price of oil (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent increases in oil prices announced by OPEC, the cartel formed by some producer countries, are once again providing Western governments with an excuse for not honouring their oft-repeated promise to keep down the general level of prices. As after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, we are hearing the refrain again, that inflation is caused by the rise in the price of oil.

Obviously we hold no brief for the OPEC cartel, but the fact remains that inflation is not caused, or even aggravated, by rising oil prices. Inflation, as the word’s etymology suggests (inflate = blow up), means, correctly understood, an over-issue or blowing-up of an inconvertible (into a fixed amount of gold, that is) currency. In fact, in the nineteenth century the phrase was often given in full as currency inflation, inflation of the currency.

The inevitable result of over-issuing, or inflating, an inconvertible currency, is a rise in the general price level. All prices rise in the same proportion because, as has often been explained in these columns, issuing more of an inconvertible currency than the economy requires for its transactions is tantamount to reducing its gold content. (All currencies, including inconvertible ones, are in economic reality related to gold, whether or not this relationship is legally recognised in some regulation or Act of Parliament.) If an inconvertible currency is defined as, say, one ounce of gold, and twice as much of it is issued as is required by the economy, then its definition will in economic practice change to being half an ounce of gold. All prices — expressed in units of the currency — will tend to double. This is purely a monetary phenomenon and, since governments have a monopoly in currency issue, one for which governments alone have ultimate responsibility.

Unfortunately, the word inflation has come to be used more and more loosely over the years so that it is now almost a synonym for simply ‘rising prices’. This usage is wrong. Inflation is not rising prices. On the contrary, a rise in the general price level is the result of inflation. The easiest way to grasp this is to remember that the word is short for ‘inflation of the currency’.

Oil Prices
The recent rise in the price of oil is merely a rise in the price of a particular commodity and not a rise in the general price level, which is unaffected by this change. All that has changed is the price of oil relative to other commodities. Those who have been buying oil now have to pay more and, if they want to continue buying the same amount, will have to cut back on their other purchases. No extra purchasing power — no inflation — is created; there is simply a re-direction of the previously existing purchasing power. This re-direction may be a painful process, since it means that demand for some non-oil products is going to fall, with inevitable bankruptcies and sackings in firms which will no longer be profitable enough. But whatever the result, it can’t be inflation, since that depends on the government. (Of course, if governments respond to the recent increase in the price of oil by printing more money to allow non-oil spending to continue at the old level, then the result will be a rise in the general price level, what is popularly called inflation. But the cause will not be the rise in oil prices but the government decision to print more money.)

The economic laws governing the incomes of those involved in oil production are similar to those governing incomes in agriculture as analysed by the classical political economists in the last century. According to their theory of differential rent, the price of an agricultural product like wheat is determined by its cost of production (plus average rate of profit) on the least fertile farmland in use. All wheat, even that produced on more fertile land, sells at this price. This means that tenant farmers of more fertile land make extra profits, which they have to pay over to the landlord as ground rent. The landowners are thus enabled to draw an income without having to invest any capital, let alone having to do any work, purely and simply because they monopolise a portion of the globe’s surface. The oil sheiks and, in other OPEC countries, the State which owns the land under which there is oil, are in the same position. Their royalties are a pure monopoly income paid them for nothing. (A qualification is necessary here: to the extent that they don’t spend all this windfall income in riotous living — and some of them try hard to — and invest a part in oil production, then a part of their income becomes profit, a return on the capital they have invested, and not differential rent. A part of their income, though, is always such rent.)

Since the cost of production of oil is cheapest in the Saudi Arabia area, the sheiks who monopolise the land there get the biggest free income, differential rent, royalty, monopoly profit, call it what you will, quite literally for doing nothing. This explains, incidentally, why Sheik Yamani can afford to be in favour of more ‘moderate’ price increases than some of his fellow price-fixers. All they have to do is to lounge about in their palaces waiting for the money to roll in — just like the landed aristocracy of Britain until the opening up of much more fertile wheat lands in North and South America during the nineteenth century deprived them of this privilege.

Absolute Ground Rent
Marx, in Volume III of Capital, identified another element in the income of landowners over and above differential rent, what he called ‘absolute ground rent'. This was the ransom the landlord class was able to extract from the rest of society — essentially, a diversion of surplus value from the capitalist class to the landlord class — by exploiting its position as the monopoliser of a limited natural resource, land. Such absolute rent can only exist where the landowners are well organised, where in fact they form a compact and relatively small group, as did the aristocracy in Britain in the nineteenth century. Today’s oil royalty owners are in a basically similar position. A relatively small group, the members of OPEC, has been exploiting its monopoly position to extract absolute ground rent from the industrial capitalist world. This is different from differential rent — which will come their way anyway, whether the OPEC cartel exists or not, simply as a result of the normal workings of the capitalist economy — and depends entirely on the balance of forces between the two sides.

As the world’s oil resources are used up, so the cost of producing oil — and hence its value and price — tends to rise in any event, since less productive wells and fields now have to be exploited. As the cost of production of oil rises, so, of course, the differential rent of the oil monopolists falls, an additional reason, no doubt, why the rulers of the OPEC countries are seeking to recuperate the loss of this part of their purely parasitic income by trying to increase the other clement in it, absolute ground rent.

This quarrel between the OPEC rulers and the capitalists of the industrialised world is not one that concerns the world’s workers. For, as our analysis has shown, it is essentially a conflict over the division of the spoils of the exploitation of the working class. When we describe the OPEC rulers as ‘parasites’ it should be clear that they are parasites on the world’s industrial capitalists. Since these latter are also parasites they’re the ones who directly exploit wage-labour for surplus value — the oil sheiks and other OPEC rulers are really parasites on parasites.

What happens to the surplus value the working class produce after it has been extracted from them by the industrial capitalists during the process of production whether or not these latter are forced to share some of the loot with some other group, and how much — does not affect the workers. But it vitally concerns the capitalist class. Which is why they have launched the current press campaign — with its racialist undertones and including the myth that rising oil prices cause inflation — directed against OPEC.

If the rent, absolute and differential, of the oil sheiks were reduced to zero, the working class wouldn’t gain a penny. But the capitalist class would, just as they did following the abolition of the Corn Laws in Britain after 1848 which enabled them to pocket a part of the surplus value which they had previously been constrained to disgorge to the landlord class as rent.

Adam Buick