Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office, Edinburgh - Briefing Document Six

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Parliamentary Officer:Rev Graham Blount
Phone:
0131 558 8137

Briefing Document No 6 - Page 4 of 4

"Whose Land Is It Anyway?" - Continued.

Political Dimensions
1. Land Reform will be handled by the Justice Minister, Jim Wallace, and his Deputy, Angus MacKay; the lead Committee will be Justice and Home Affairs (Convener: Roseanna Cunningham) though the Rural Affairs Committee will have input as well (Convener: Alex Johnstone)

2. The SNP are calling for more radical reform, including community contracts with landowners and locality land councils

3. The Conservatives say they are "not completely opposed" to reforms (though reluctant to say which they do support)

4. The Greens stress land use issues, but have also given some support to land value taxation.

Churches (Theology!)
Following reports by the Free Church and the Church of Scotland, and an Episcopalian conference on this theme, ACTS has been a founder member of the Scottish Land Reform Convention, as a means of promoting and developing the debate on land reform in Scotland guided by four core principles of sovereignty, democracy, social justice and stewardship. This involvement of the churches has been informed by a range of Biblical and theological material as well as the pastoral experience of churches.

As Prof Donald MacLeod of the Free Church has said, "The campaign for land reform is driven by ideals; by a desire to curtail the powerful and to empower the disempowered; by a concern for stewardship and community; by a passion for freedom and justice". As Christians, we belong to a tradition which recognises land as a crucial resource (both personal and communal) held in trust from God, heirs of a covenant that brings God, land and people together on the way to the promised land. As Alastair McIntosh has pointed out, the Anchor Bible Dictionary recognises the theme of land in the Bible as "so ubiquitous that it may have greater claim to be the central motif in the Old Testament than any other".

In a sense, the feudal system recognises this in a pyramid of rights and responsibilities (deriving from God to the crown to the feudal superior to the vassal) which needs to be developed creatively for a new "conditionality" of land tenure. Part of that conditionality lies in the concept of a stewardship of land under God - sustainable development for the sake of the community and of future generations, in partnership with God. The theological contribution of the churches to the debates on sovereignty, on power and on subsidiarity can also be reflected into the discussion on land, in terms of communities taking control of their own development.

The radical justice of the jubilee, restoring land rights to those who have lost them over the years, recognises the damage to families and to communities of concentrations of land-holding (a recurrent Old Testament theme of hostility to those who "add fields to fields", reflected strongly by the Pontifical Commission re land issues and world development). This dimension of social justice in the debate is underlined by the commitment of Shelter and the Poverty Alliance to land reform.

Clearly this is not a matter of transposing Old Testament practice into a modern Scotland; but there is a rich vein of theological thinking to resource the churches' contribution to this debate. That contribution has been seen as significant towards "mainstreaming" land reform; it may also enrich the debate in ways that reflect the commitment of the churches (who are sometimes themselves landowners and feudal superiors) to the well-being of Scotland.