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Down in Stirling last week, at a meeting hosted by Local People Leading exploring ways to reinvigorate the Land Reform agenda, it was hard to escape the conclusion that we need to do much more than point out the broken bits of the Community Right to Buy legislation.

The political passion which drove Land Reform a decade ago seems to have died at Holyrood;  the agenda has been left in the "safe" hands of civil servants and lawyers, who quite predictably have followed their natural instincts to stymie radical change.

For those of us who want to rekindle the spark, it’s clear that we need to go beyond dissecting the legal technicalities. We need to campaign to put the land reform agenda at the heart of the big debates, where the heat is: the questions about people and power, reinvigorating democracy, community empowerment, sustainable development, action on climate change…

...and a good place to start might be to ask: what is the land for? Are we content for it to remain a high interest deposit account for those who represent Scotland’s past, or do we want it to become the key asset on which the Scottish people build their future? Now that might be a national conversation worth having….

Jon

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