Letter: Land grabbers

Alex Orr (Letters, 19 October) may have a valid point regarding the revenue accrued by the Crown Estate commissioners, but it's a bit like worrying about having head lice while a grizzly bear is chewing your leg off.

I suggest he takes a good long and hard look at the SNP's docile acquiescence to a land ownership pattern where just 1,500 private owners hold title to half of Scotland. There is a cabal-like land monopoly which annually accrues an estimated 12 billion of publicly created annual land rental value. These same landowners then accrue hundreds of millions of public grants and subsidies, while the rest of us who fund this indulgence are expected to be dealing with vast cutbacks in public services.

If this were not enough, we are now going on to provide landowners with even more money to have wind farms on their land and this will be paid whether the wind blows or not.

If Alex Orr wants to write a really telling letter, I would suggest that his skills would be better directed to his beloved SNP in asking them to engage in the land reform they once championed, but have now eschewed.

Please could he remind them that all the great issues in politics eventually boil down to the ownership of land.

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire