Known for its beautiful scenery, folklore and welcoming people, the Scottish Highlands attract more than 2 million tourists every year. Its residents may be the envy of many, but they’ll tell a sobering story of poverty amidst obscene wealth of landowners, tourism and energy companies.
A single mother in Sutherland speaking to Highland News in 2022 said:
“We’re hostages to heating oil. When prices doubled last winter, I had to choose: eat or stay warm. This isn’t poverty, its violence”
High energy costs are a menace to the Highlands with households paying 30% more on electricity than those in the South of England. In Scotland, fuel poverty averages at around 31% of households but in rural areas reaches 44%. In the Island communities of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, this reaches 60%.
Speaking to online investigative blog The Ferret (2023) an elderly crofter in Lewis says “My breath fogs in my own living room but SSE (Scottish and Southern Energy) makes millions off our wind and water”. An unemployed tradesman in Caithness, speaking to Common Weal (2023) says “They call us ‘net zero pioneers’ because of wind farms, but we’re freezing in the dark while London investors get rich”.
Discover your Landlord’s Scotland
These quotes show class anger amongst Highland residents who correctly see the link between their poverty and the profits of the investors and power companies.
The Highlands are home to many working poor, with more than 26% of workers in the Highlands earning less than £10/hour (compared to about 19% for Scotland as a whole) with many on precarious contracts. This is in large part due to the particularly exploitative nature of the hospitality and tourism sectors that paint the Highlands as an idyllic utopia whilst exploiting its residents to keep this industry going and neglecting them when it comes to vital services and infrastructure.
In Skye and Lochalsh, AirBnB or short-term lets increased by 89% from 2018-2023, whilst the social housing waiting lists doubled. In the Inverness area, 1 in 10 homes are either second homes or holiday lets, pushing rents to above 40% of local wages, whilst at least 200 in the area are homeless. Crofting communities also suffer, with 10% of crofts being derelict due to absentee landlords and unaffordable repairs.
Scotland has been described as the most feudal country in Europe, referring to the grip that landlords have over the country, particularly in the Highlands. Today, 85% of Scotland is owned by 1,200 aristocrats with 431 individuals owning half the land. The Crown Estate owns 37,000 hectares of land the most infamous being the Balmoral estate, a Highland playground for Royals with nothing better to do than torment grouse whilst the locals struggle to pay rent.
Clearance by Rent
A crofter speaking to The Ferret said: “The council told me I’d wait 8 years for social housing. Landlords charge £900 a month for mouldy caravans. This is clearance by rent”. This reference to “clearance by rent” is no doubt a direct reference to The Highland Clearances which left a scar in these communities.
The Clearances were (The Highland Clearances: A Marxist Analysis) “a series of mass evictions from the highlands carried out from 1760 – 1860. They were carried out by the landowning class, who were trying to make their land more profitable through moving people to make way for large-scale sheep farming and through forcing their tenants to give up subsistence farming and instead become part-time crofters and part-time fishermen or kelpers.”
The neglect carried on into the 20th century. In the postwar period, tourism was developed at the expense of manufacturing and land ownership was increasingly used as a repository for wealth from all around the world.
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Love The Highlands? Seize Them
Amongst workers and youth in the Highlands, there are very few illusions in distant Westminster politicians. It’s instinctively clear to most, that British capitalism is historically at the route of the neglect and exploitation and continues to propel it. Holyrood on the other hand claim to care about the Highlands, but in reality have acted as the local stooge of Westminster.
The SNP leadership are in the hands of big business, landlords and finance. Despite some nice words, they are bourgeois politicians representing a class who continue to exploit the Highlands and its people.
We stand with the workers and youth of the Highlands against this exploitation. We call for the nationalisation of all land as well as the tourism and hospitality industry as part of a wider planned economy which involves the expropriation of banks and big businesses and the democratic workers control of such wealth.
This can be put to hospitals, schools, sustainable transport, housing and all other services and infrastructure. In recent years there have been rent strikes, fishing workers strikes in Ullapool and even crofters’ land seizures, harking back to the Crofter’s War in the late 19th century. On top of this, the strike wave of 2022/23 hit the Highlands as much as everywhere else. There is a growing revolutionary potential in the Highlands that needs harnessed.
Capitalism is destroying the beauty of the Highlands and to stop this we need a party that directs and coordinates the struggle of the working class throughout these islands and the world over in the revolutionary fight against capitalism. If you’re in the Highlands and interested in building such a party, get in contact with us.
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