Introduction

We chose this topic because there is a housing crisis; there is a shortage of social housing, people who are homeless have to wait a year to be housed, rents have skyrocketed, holiday houses and air B&B’s are forcing up house prices and the fastest growing industry in the UK is Buy-To-Let businesses. This is forcing many people further into poverty and displacing them from the places, communities and support networks they know and rely on. In this section we aim to understand; how landlordism came to be, how this has impacted housing, health and communities and what lessons we can learn from past resistance, to apply today. 

‘A h-uile nì ‘n robh smear no luach, Gun spùinn iad uainn le lagh an fhearainn. (Every single thing that was of value, / They plundered it from us by the law of the land)’. These are the words of Màiri Mhòr nan Oran, a Gaelic poet and land agitator from the Isle of Skye in the late 1800s. In these words she describes both the system by which landlords operate, the law, and the impact it has on ordinary people. 

Landlords were, and in many cases still are, Lords of the Land. The origins of the current system lie in the medieval feudal culture of ‘land for service’. Lords were granted decision making power over areas of land in exchange for providing the crown with men for military service and taxes. In turn lords granted their tenants permission to build houses, grow food, run businesses etc in exchange for paying taxes and doing military service. Serfs got basic food and board in exchange for labour and military service. Within Scotland, feudal lords were clan chiefs and a system of cultural practices and expectations known as dúchas existed between the people and their leadership. This meant that people expected to do service to their lords, but in return also expected basic care from their lords. In medieval Europe, though there was a clear hierarchy of power, it was also understood that in order to grow food, generate material objects or defend yourself, you needed people to people to labour. In order to have people to labour, to some degree you had to ensure people were warm, fed and housed. 

The transition from Lords of the Land to Landlords was a process which took place over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. New systems of money and banking replaced older systems of trade, agricultural innovation meant less people were necessary for land work and correspondingly an abundance of labour enabled industrial innovation. Meanwhile the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Statutes of Iona in 1609, the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 and the failure of the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745 all contributed to the anglicisation of the Scottish aristocracy and their increasing remoteness from the lands they held power over. By the 1800s the Scottish aristocracy had become what Steeleye Span described as "a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation". In order to access the wealth offered by participating in the British Empire they willingly joined the apparatus of the British State, abandoning all notions of dúchas in favour of a transactional relationship with tenants and the lands they owned. 

In the next section we will specifically look at The Clearances because it is such a prominent story within Scottish history. However the history of landlordism spans urban and rural experiences and shows how their power has been transformed through time. As landlords pushed people out of rural Scotland, they pushed people into both British colonies and emerging urban centres. Ideas of private property arrived to many contexts for the first time. In her book ‘Serviceberry’ Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the arrival of white colonisers. ‘The “monster” in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little. It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world.’ In Scottish cities the rural gentry transformed themselves into urban slumlords even naming areas of tenements and then council estates after the landed estates they were built on. Factors, once the enforcers of the gentry became arms length caretakers of tenement blocks. 

“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

The law in Scotland has, since the medieval period, prioritised property owners. This is unsurprising given that it was the same group of people who made and enforced the law, as owned the property. This emphasis on the rights of property owners has informed what resistance to landlordism in Scotland has looked like. A significant strand of organising has focussed on making more people landlords, whether through community right to buy, cooperatives or workers collectives building housing. Another strand has pushed for tenant rights in the form of the Crofting Acts, rent strikes and campaigns for social housing. These actions have enabled many people to survive but have not challenged the fundamental idea that land and property should be owned. 

There are also many who have resisted through direct action, blocking evictions, squatting, occupations and other things considered ‘criminal’ activities. These tactics arise either because people have no access to power within the current system, or believe as many indigenous people do, that property is theft. To use Robin Wall Kimmerer's words from Braiding Sweetgrass. "In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us." 

When we explore the histories of resistance to landlordism, it is important that we ask, as Norman MacCuid did in, A Man in Assynt. ‘Who owns this landscape? -/ The millionaire who bought it or/ the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning/ with a deer on his back?’

Further Resources

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