Universal Basic Land

My mum used to argue that everyone in Scotland should be given half an acre and a cow to sustain them. Her idea was that Scotland's 5.5 million people would easily fit into its 19.3 million acres. 

That's true, but many of those acres are hilltops, including the 282 Munros, and a lot of it is the peat bog that I have walked across and frequently sunk into. So half an acre each might just be feasible, with the cow standing on relatively dry ground, but the distribution would have to be carefully planned. 

I'm not going to defend my mum's argument, but a radical redistribution of land makes a lot of sense. In most of the villages I have passed through, there are signs offering employment. Everything from housekeepers to rangers for the military range at Cape Wrath. Hotels, restaurants and shops are desperate for employees.

 

A job, for a Duke

 

But when I asked John Ure at the Ozone Cafe on Cape Wrath about this, he said that the problem was housing. There were job opportunities, but no one could find a home in the North because so many were taken for holiday lets. Young people move away to the big cities because they can't set up an independent life in the Highlands. 

Alongside these Airbnb-villages are the big estates - tens of thousands of acres owned by the few. Many of these acres are appropriated former common land. 

It would not take much to start to rebalance land ownership, using that common land approach; for each person in a village (I'm thinking of Durness, or Kinlochbervie, but it could be any village), the nearest private landowner with, say, more than 2,000 hectares would be required to hand over, say,  a hectare (just over two acres) per head of population as common land. For Kinlochbervie's population of 410, that would be a pool of common land of 410 hectares, plenty of space to allow the construction of social housing, a small industrial area, and for farming. 

This would be a one-off gift at a set date, to avoid the problem that as these rural populations recover and grow, the landowner has to keep on handing over more land.

Like Universal Basic Income, UBLand takes a resource and shares it out more fairly, regulating the excesses of the market without destroying the market economy. Yes, Grosvenor Estates would have to give up land, but the amounts (410 ha for one village, a few hundreds for others) are derisory in relation to the total holdings of the big estates. 

And yes, this is an idealistic proposal, and I'm not expecting UBLand legislation at Holyrood any time soon. But we need more, more radical solutions to the problem of inequality in land distribution in Scotland: what's your idea? 

Just don't insist that everyone gets a cow. I've met a few on my stroll up Scotland, and I've learned to keep my distance.