Opinion: 'Land should be a natural gift shared by the whole community' - Richard Leonard MSP

It exposed how, in the then Central Region, which of course included Falkirk, fewer than 100 landowners owned half of all the land.

So, when the Scottish Parliament gave its final consideration to the Government’s latest land reform proposals last week, I took the opportunity to speak in the debate. As I am standing down next May it was possibly my last chance to address this most quintessentially Scottish imbalance of wealth and power.

Ministers claimed the latest Land Reform Act was both “significant” and “ambitious.” It is neither.

The truth is I will leave Parliament as I entered it. With half of Scotland still owned by fewer than 500 people, with more capital accumulation, more land monopoly, and more ownership concentration: not less.

In Parliament Conservative MSPs defended this. They gave speeches which could have been delivered by any member of the landed classes at any time over the last four centuries.

The Government must know that the Act will not fundamentally tackle this sordid inequity. That it will make no structural difference to the distribution of land ownership and so the distribution of wealth and power in Scotland. That class inequality will remain Scotland’s hereditary curse.

I still stand by the final words of that pamphlet written when I was in my 20s: “Inevitably there should be a move toward the common ownership of land in order that the benefits of, what is after all, a natural gift can once again be shared by the whole community.

"In a democracy, power over land use cannot be left to a handful of people. We have not come very far in 900 years; it is time we dragged land ownership into the 20th century.”

It will be for those elected in May to think big and act radical, and to take on vested interests.

I will be outside Parliament but the cause of land justice, this demand for equality and democracy, will forever have my undying support.