Owning land is rare luxury in Scotland
Activists seek change in election this week
DORES, S COTLAND On the banks of the famous Loch Ness, Evan Beswick gazes at a scattering of low, slate-roofed houses in the woodlands across from this tiny village.
The shores are dotted with castles and hunting estates. The houses he points to are far from luxurious, but “we couldn’t just save up and buy one of those at the prices they go for,” he said.
Beswick, 30, and his girlfriend are struggling to buy their first home. Like many young people across the Scottish Highlands, they find the abundance of wide open land does not make it easy to purchase real estate.
Scotland has some of the largest areas of undeveloped land in Europe. It also has the most unequal division of landownership. Some politicians running in Thursday’s Scottish Parliament elections pledge to remedy that inequity and help Scots such as Beswick buy homes.
The nation is roughly the same size as South Carolina — 30,000 square miles — but only 432 people own half the land. Sixteen of them own a staggering 10% of Scotland’s territory. Many Scottish families have lived for generations as tenants in villages on wealthy landowners’ property.
That means land for building is in short supply, and homeownership is beyond many Scots grappling with high housing prices and landowners who don’t want to sell space for development.
Landowners defend the system, arguing that their property rights are not up for debate. Viscount William Waldorf Astor, father in law of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, accused activists of wanting a “Mugabe-style land grab,” a reference to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms.
Beswick has long dreamed of building a home on some of the hundreds of empty square miles around Loch Ness. He tried unsuccessfully to pool money with friends to acquire land for a small-scale housing development.
“Land is so hard to get hold of,” he said. “We were a group of pretty well-educated, energetic people, but after two years of trying, we were not able to get anything.”
Highland estate owners include some of the world’s wealthiest people. Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, United Arab Emirates; British Queen Elizabeth II; and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, heir to the Lego toy empire, own huge tracts of rural Scotland. Donald Trump got in the act when he purchased the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire to build a luxury golf course.
Some Scots hope the elections will strengthen their push for radical changes to landownership laws. Leading that drive is Andy Wightman, a forester, writer and veteran activist. Wightman, 52, who is running as a Green Party candidate, said he is determined to give Scots their land back if elected to the assembly in Edinburgh.
Edward Mountain, a landowner running for a seat in the Scottish Parliament, opposes the campaigns to make more private land public through new taxes and state funding for community buyouts. “I would rather talk about land use than landownership, but that isn’t the government agenda,” he said. “If there was a magic way of making money out of land, I think I would know about it, but there isn’t. Just passing it on to the community will put a burden on the taxpayer. We should be spending that money on education and health care.”
“If there was a magic way of making money out of land, I think I would know about it, but there isn’t.” Edward Mountain, a landowner and Conservative Party candidate for Parliament who opposes changes to make more land public