OK – you have argued that the land is owned by few people, and that some of the owners do rather well out of European farming subsidies.

But why does the land need to be under “democratic control”?

No where do you really explain what is wrong with someone owning land – and it is worth noting that much of the land is going to be in rural areas of little desirability to the average town worker.

So, I happen to agree that the farming subsidies should be scrapped – across the entire EU and the money used to cut taxes/pay off debt, but I struggle to work out from your article what benefit would come from letting transitory politicians control the land instead of long-term owners.

The average cost of development land in the UK may be £404,000, but to link that figure without qualification to the holdings of people in Scotland who have up to 200,000 acres would seem a little bit silly for two reasons.

Firstly, that is for land for which there is pre-existing permission to build – that is not going to be the case for the vast majority of the land in Scotland as a) the applications are unlikely to have been made for an acre in the middle of nowhere, and b) getting permission to build in areas of beauty can be tricky (Trumps excepted, of course).

Secondly, that is an average figure that surely includes all the development land in the centre of all the cities in the UK. An acre of such land in London has to be essentially offset by an acre of very cheap land to get to such a figure – that very cheap land being, one would imagine, the wilderness areas of the UK, including Scotland.

There may be a question of making it easier for people to buy unused land that is in the possession of a large landowner if the potential buyers will be able to make positive use of it, but using potentially dodgy statistics as polemical tricks is just annoying.

[Note that I do not have the referenced book to check the manner in which the £404,000 figure was arrived at. If I were to have made a mistake on this front and the author's figure is relevant to the point that the article tries to make then I could only apologise.]

Scotland’s topography and its consequent sparse population means that some form of community control is absolutely necessary to build stronger rural communities. Making a market in land from a dispossession of the aristos would just end up substituting bankers for lords. I live in the exact centre of Scotland and a local landowner owns a continous stretch of land lying over fourteen miles. Most of the farming stopped when he took over and its all about shooting parties who only contribute to the landowner’s coffers with no trickle-down to the local economy. Our glen is full of second homes, holiday homes and retirees. There is no work local to speak of and being in such a depopulated area makes daily life quite insecure when you hear about horse thieves, oil theft etc. etc. There would be no-one apart from your own family to call on if you were attacked late at night investigating a suspicious sound.
Just to pick up on one point…there are very few real wilderness areas in Scotland apart from the mountainous ones. All the depopulated glens would find willing farmers if they could be wrested from the idle rich.

Hmm. How much of Scotland’s actual reasonable-quality arable land (i.e. Strathearn, Fife, West Lothian) is held in this way, and how much is Highland parks? Because there is little value in democratic control of large tracts of land with little value other than as parkland and grazing – Scotland having little familiarity with the normal European concept of common land for some reason I’ve never figured.

I’d also like to see the evidence that the land would be better managed or more productive (or both) under ‘democratic’ control. No problem with democratic control and the introduction of commons if that is what you suggest, but maybe you should check it would be a good thing first – if the landscape is better served by the present system, is it worth smashing for the sake of it? It’s not as if people can’t walk across a lot of it is it?

‘No where do you really explain what is wrong with someone owning land – and it is worth noting that much of the land is going to be in rural areas of little desirability to the average town worker.’

The difference between land ownership and other property is that land exists independent of humans; claiming that you own the earth effectively means you are the only one with a right to *exist* in that particular part of the space time continuum (for the purposes of Georgism, ‘land’ actually means ‘space’).

Here are 2 great articles and a video – if you can be bothered to read them – about how important and neglected land taxation is:

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=160421.0

http://www.progress.org/banneker/omara.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZkfmY1PMng&feature=player_embedded