Land Reform Policy’s Return Ticket

For an awfully long time the political answer to Scotland’s ‘Land Question’ seems to have been “pass”. The embryonic Scottish Parliament launched its ‘flagship’ Land Reform (Scotland) Act with a cargo of access rights, community and crofting community rights to buy in 2003 amid much hullabaloo about its symbolic significance as the lodestar for a new politics in Scotland; then watched on with apparent indifference as land reform drifted beyond the horizon as an issue of serious policy concern. A decade later several intertwined developments suggest it may have had a return ticket.

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