Scottish land reform: Controversial SNP plans rejected by party members for not being radical enough

Party leadership hopes Land Reform Bill will go some way to addressing the inequality of land ownership in Scotland

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during the SNP National conference at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre in Scotland. (PA)

The SNP’s controversial plans to widen the ownership of land across Scotland, which could result in currently private estates being taken away from landowners and handed to local communities, have been rejected by party members for not being radical enough.

The party’s leadership hopes that the Land Reform Bill, which is currently being considered by the Scottish Parliament, will go some way to addressing the inequality of land ownership in Scotland. Some estimates suggest that half of the country’s private land is controlled by just 432 different owners.

But delegates at the SNP conference in Aberdeen sent back a motion to support the Bill by a narrow margin of 570 votes to 440, signalling that they backed an even more radical approach. “This is a good Bill. It could be a better Bill,” said Michael Russell, the party’s MSP for Argyll & Bute, calling for the legislation to be amended.

The SNP leadership narrowly survived another embarrassment when members narrowly rejected an attempt to toughen the party’s stance on fracking, the controversial shale gas extraction technique.

Several speakers called for a motion backing the Scottish Government’s current moratorium on fracking to be sent back and strengthened into an outright ban. Ben McPherson, an SNP candidate at next May’s Scottish Parliament elections, said many members of the party believed that fracking was “environmentally irresponsible, unnecessarily reckless, potentially dangerous and a distraction from our renewable ambitions”.

Tommy Sheppard, the SNP for Edinburgh East, also claimed that “big money and very powerful interests” were at play in the debate over fracking in Scotland. “The need to change to renewable sources of energy is not because the oil and gas are running out,” he said, “It is because the planet cannot afford to take it out of the ground and burn it.”

However, the attempt was narrowly defeated by 427 votes to 550 and the motion was ultimately carried unanimously. The issue has proved divisive for the party, despite SNP ministers extending the moratorium last week to cover underground coal gasification, another extraction technique.

WWF Scotland director Lang Banks said it was clear from the debate that the “vast majority” of SNP members wanted a full ban on fracking and unconventional fossil fuels. “We hope the SNP will listen to their members and to the public, and eventually turn their moratorium into a compete ban,” he added. Dr Richard Dixon, the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland said the SNP membership had sent a “very clear message” to the party’s leadership that “what they really want is a full ban policy straight away”.