But in Scotland, a recent survey by Andy Wightman reveals that nearly two-thirds of the privately owned land is held by just 1,000 people. Their sole qualification to own Scotland is that they are rich. There are no controls on who can buy what quantity of land, no requirements of residency as in many other countries, few controls over how a landowner can use or abuse land except where buildings are concerned, and Scotland is thought to be the only country in the world still retaining a formally feudal system in which tenants are vassals in law to their feudal superiors . Lairds , as landowners are known, can and do abuse communities by evicting tenants, monopolising or taxing commercial activity and damaging the environment for bloodsport management. Most of our indigenous crofting communities effectively comprise of native reservations on the poorest land.
Many communities display a deep-seated disempowerment and even social dysfunctionality.
I believe this reflects in the North and West of Scotland s disproportionately high levels of unemployment, smoking, alcohol abuse, suicide and possibly even in the high incidence of heart disease. A relatively recent history of land usurpation and collapse of cultural confidence has literally left communities in a state of heartbrokenness. I s Normanised court. It is a colonising system that is closely tied in with the whole process leading up to the industrial revolution, whereby land in Britain was enclosed - which is to say, privatised. Thereafter land became a market commodity, the worth of which was no longer how many people it could support, but what profit it could yield.