Written evidence submitted by Professor James Hunter

Demography of Scotland and implications for devolution

Population trends in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-2016: How the Highland Problem originated and how it began to be solved

1. Introduction

Population of the Highlands and Islands, 1961 to 2011

During the 50 years to 2011, the population of the Highlands and Islands, defined as the current Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) area, grew from 381,000 to 466,000 – an increase of 22 percent. These figures are noteworthy in two respects. First, the 1961-2011 rate of population growth in the Highlands and Islands was far higher than that of Scotland generally – the all-Scotland rate of increase, over the same period, being just 2 per cent. Second, the Highlands and Islands record (underlined by the fact that, between 1961 and 2011, population increase in the area was equivalent to four-fifths of Scotland’s total population gain) is little short of astonishing in light of the fact that, prior to the 1960s and 1970s, the region was synonymous – for well over a century – with runaway population loss.

As will be underlined, the post-1961 performance of the Highlands and Islands as a whole masks local variations, and there remains, in consequence, a big developmental job to do in more than one part of the area. When taken together with other key indicators highlighted later, the region’s overall population growth nevertheless underlines the extent to which the Highlands and Islands constitute one of contemporary Scotland’s success stories.

In this paper’s Part 4, I explore (very tentatively and incompletely) reasons for this success. In Part 5, I suggest that lessons deriving from Highlands and Islands experience should be applied elsewhere in Scotland – perhaps, to begin with, in the South-West and in disadvantaged urban localities. Also in Part 5, I note that, in my opinion, aspects of the current Scottish Government’s overall policy stance – especially as that stance affects the roles of north of Scotland local authorities and HIE – risks jeopardising key drivers of Highlands and Islands betterment.

Prior to that, I touch in Part 2 on why it was that the Highlands and Islands, which had previously been experiencing population growth, entered – in the second half of the nineteenth century – a long period of demographic contraction. In Part 3, I outline the nature of successive governments’ increasingly interventionist attempts to turn around Highlands and Islands fortunes – attempts that began with the Crofters Act of 1886 and culminated in the creation in 1965 of the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB).

2. Demographic and related aspects of what became known as ‘the Highland Problem’

It is impossible to be precise about Scotland’s population distribution prior to the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century – when it is apparent that the Highlands and Islands (as is likely to have been the position for some time) accounted for a much higher proportion of Scotland’s total population than has been the case more recently. During the later eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, despite substantial population growth in the area, the Highlands and Islands began to lose ground in relation to Scotland as a whole – a development attributable to the beginnings of large-scale out-migration from the region as well as to the (ever more marked) population increases brought about by accelerating industrialisation, and associated urbanisation, in the Central Belt.

From the 1760s forward, for a period of about 100 years, population patterns in the Highlands and Islands themselves were determined largely by the landlord-organised mass evictions and dispossessions known as clearances. Their overall effect was to depopulate inland localities – with, for example, the three east Sutherland valleys of Strathnaver, the Strath of Kildonan and Strathbrora experiencing (mostly in 1819 and 1820) the enforced emptying and total destruction of between 150 and 200 townships. While clearance boosted rates of migration (primarily to the Scottish Central Belt) and emigration (mainly to North America), the resulting population loss was not such as to reduce total Highlands and Islands population – not least because outward movement was, to begin with, resisted strongly by landlords who, with help from government, took various measures to curtail it. Instead of being encouraged to quit the Highlands and Islands, then, evicted families were widely resettled on coastal smallholdings or crofts. These were strictly limited in size (three, four or five acres being standard) with a view to ensuring that their occupants could not be full-time agriculturalists – thereby forcing newly-established crofters to engage in landlord-controlled activities like fishing or kelping (the manufacture of industrial alkali from seaweed).

From a landowning perspective, all of this made perfect sense. The depopulated interior was let to sheep farmers from whom lairds received (in an era when wool was in huge demand in the rapidly urbanising south) much higher rents per acre than ejected families had been able to pay. And though fishing, outside one or two localities like Shetland, never delivered a great deal to landlords, the reverse was true of crofter-produced kelp – which, in the years around and just after 1800, was an even more lucrative source of estate revenues than sheep.

By the 1820s, however, matters were going badly awry. The discovery of a chemical means of producing industrial alkali from salt knocked the bottom out of the kelp market – with the result that crofters (deprived of their meagre but essential kelping income) were left with no resource other than their crofts. On those crofts only one foodstuff, potatoes, could be grown in sufficient quantity to come anywhere near meeting the nutritional needs of a family. Throughout much of the Highlands and Islands, more especially the Hebrides and the north and west coasts of the mainland, potatoes consequently became the universal staple. The eventual outcome – when, in 1846 and for several years thereafter, blight destroyed the potato crop – was famine.  Thus it came about that, just two human lifetimes ago, the Highlands and Islands, integral components of what was then the world’s most economically successful country, were replete with scenes of a sort glimpsed today in only the most impoverished and agriculturally fragile parts of Africa.

During the later 1840s, Highlands and Islands famine relief funds equivalent to many millions of pounds at today’s values were raised in centres like Glasgow and Edinburgh. Government and landlords, however, were concerned less with famine relief than with disposing of what they called ‘a redundant population’ – one possessing little or nothing by way of economic utility. Across the Highlands and Islands, then, the famine years were characterised by renewed clearance – accompanied, this time, by the shipping (sometimes at their former landlords’ expense) of thousands of people to Canada and (increasingly) Australia. There people fleeing famine in the Highlands and Islands often generated much the same sort of suspicion and hostility as is apparent today in attitudes to ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’.

In the Outer Isles, and especially in Lewis, famine was soon followed by a resumption of population growth – growth which (because of enhanced income opportunities arising mainly from the expansion of the herring fishing industry) was to last until the First World War. But the Outer Isles were, in this respect, an exception to what now became the Highlands and Islands norm of steep population decline – decline that was all the more striking in that it contrasted sharply with the position elsewhere in Scotland (and in Britain as a whole) where population continued to increase.

It is difficult (because of complexities arising from a whole variety of boundary changes) to make straightforward comparisons of populations in today’s HIE area (the unit used in this paper’s introductory section) with nineteenth and early twentieth century populations in the same area. But demographic statistics relating to what were to become known as ‘the crofting counties’ – meaning Argyll, Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, Caithness, Orkney and Shetland – tell their own story. Between 1841 (when crofting counties population reached a recorded maximum still to be surpassed) and 1951, total crofting counties population fell from 396,045 to 285,667 – a decline of 28 per cent. But while all crofting counties lost people, the percentage fall varied considerably. In Inverness-shire it was 13; in Ross and Cromarty 27; in Orkney 34; in Argyll 37; in Shetland 40; in Caithness 45; and in Sutherland 47. The Highlands and Islands, it became increasingly apparent, had entered a period of demographic crisis. From this crisis the region was to be rescued only by eventual recognition, on the part of UK governments, that its difficulties were such as to require special treatment – treatment that resulted in the Highlands and Islands acquiring developmental, and even legal, structures that had no parallel elsewhere in Britain.

3. Origins and evolution of interventionist policy responses to the Highland Problem, 1886-1965

The institutional and other initiatives that began to be taken in the Highlands and Islands in the later nineteenth century were a response to direct action, much of it involving rent strikes and land seizures, on the part of crofters. Protest was centred initially in Skye. There, at Braes near Portree, attempts by their landlord and the authorities to evict rent-striking tenants led, in April 1882, to what amounted to a pitched battle between crofting families and 50-plus policemen. Equally violent clashes occurred later that same year and into 1883 in Glendale in the north-western corner of the island. Hence Prime Minister William Gladstone’s decision to establish a royal commission, chaired by former colonial governor and Borders peer Lord Napier, to enquire into the underlying causes of crofting troubles. The commission, whose members were to visit most parts of the Highlands and Islands, began taking evidence at Braes in May 1883.

Napier’s report, published in April 1884, recognised that crofters had legitimate grievances – many of which Napier traced to the continuing impact of clearance. But his recommendations, especially his proposal to phase out croft holdings of under six acres and to extend a measure of security only to the tenants of larger crofts, were rejected by crofters, now organised politically through their membership of the Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), later the Highland Land League. Crofters, it emerged, were determined to hold out for universal security of tenure, for rents fixed by an independent authority and for a restoration of land lost in the course of earlier mass-evictions. The result was renewed unrest that spread from Skye to crofting areas across the north-west Highlands and Islands. Soon, despite troops being deployed in an attempt to restore order, rent strikes and farm occupations were everywhere endemic. In these circumstances, more especially in the aftermath of an 1885 general election that saw HLLRA candidates returned in most Highlands and Islands constituences, concessions to crofting opinion became inevitable. The outcome was the Crofters Act of 1886.

In 1886 all crofters won security of a uniquely all-encompassing and never-ending kind – the Crofters Act, as well as rendering its beneficiaries immune from eviction, permitting them to tranfer their tenancies to their heirs. The Act thus guaranteed the continuation of crofting. It also put in place a judicial tribunal, the Crofters Commission, which afterwards evolved into the Scottish Land Court and which was empowered (as the Land Court still is) to fix the level of croft rents – with the result that these are today largely nominal in cash terms.

Those victories were important in their own right – security of tenure, for example, bringing about a marked improvement in housing conditions because crofters could now invest in better homes in the knowledge that they could not be deprived of them. But the Crofters Act was also significant in marking a key departure in British governments’ handling of Highlands and Islands matters. An extraordinarily far-reaching assault on the then prevalent notion that rights of private property in land were absolute and inviolate, the 1886 Act – by providing the Highlands and Islands with their own land laws and with a commission to enforce them – signalled the start of a century-long series of measures founded on the principle that the Highlands and Islands were (in relation to both Britain and Scotland as a whole) an exceptional area meriting, in consequence, exceptional treatment. As before, the most effective pressure for such treatment came from inside the Highlands and Islands themselves.

From a crofting perspective – and still more from the perspective of the many crofting area families who, in the post-clearance era, had been left without landholdings of any kind – the Crofters Act, while welcome, did not go nearly far enough. In particular, it did nothing to restore to crofters, or to the wider Highlands and Islands population, land turned over to sheep farming during the clearances – land that, following a late nineteenth-century slump in sheep farming profits, was increasingly being converted into deer forest. Hence the continuation of what came to be called ‘land raiding’ – raiding that reached a peak in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Hence too renewed governmental recognition of Highlands and Islands exceptionalism. Among the consequences were:

• Taxpayer-financed provision of railways, roads, bridges and ferries.

• An early development agency, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), established in 1897 with a view to its tackling (as its name suggested) the difficulties confronting occupants of drastically overcrowded townships created in the course of clearance.
• A regional precursor of the later National Health Service in the shape of the Highlands and Islands Medical Service launched in 1913.
• An ever more extensive programme of ‘land settlement’ – meaning the acquisition by government or its agencies of land (usually consisting of former sheep farms) on which there were created many hundreds of new crofts.

Nothing of this, however, halted out-migration and consequent population decline. Here and there, to be sure, the extensive creation of new crofts (made possible by the 1919 Land Settlement Act which was much the most radical land reforming measure ever put in place in Scotland) resulted in local reversals of outward movement. An especially striking such reversal took place in the Skye parish of Bracadale, where government-organised land settlement resulted in the translocation of 67 previously landless families from Harris and Lewis. There population grew from 737 in 1921 to 1,170 in 1931 – an increase of nearly 60 per cent. But as it had done in every decade since the 1840s, Skye’s overall population fell in that same period. This was equally true of the rest of the Highlands and Islands – with the Outer Isles, previously the exception to the general rule, now exhibiting the same symptoms of economic contraction and population loss as the wider region. Thus Lewis and Harris, which were home to 35,000 people just before the First World War contained only 27,500 by 1951 – the scale of outward movement from Lewis being underlined by the still-remembered sailing from Stornoway, in April 1923, of the Metagama which took 260 young islanders to North America.

In the course of an embittered cry of outrage about what he called ‘the dreadful waste of our island humanity’ resulting from seemingly unstoppable out-migration, Lewis-born poet and novelist Iain Crichton Smith made the point that by no means every emigrant prospered. But this was not the general Highlands and Islands perception – people there, as in the then similarly situated West of Ireland, tending more and more to buy into the notion (fostered by emigrants naturally making more of their successes than their failures) that (as compared with Canada, the United States or, for that matter, more southerly parts of Britain) the Highlands and Islands offered next to nothing in the way of opportunity.

The outflow of people from the Highlands and Islands slowed somewhat in the 1930s as worldwide depression made emigrant destinations less attractive than they had been. But in the years immediately following the Second War – years when Highlands and Islands unemployment rates were many times higher than the UK national average – out-migration accelerated once more. By 1951, it followed, population totals in some Highlands and Islands districts had fallen by 20 or even 25 per cent in just twenty years.

In contrast with much of the rest of Britain – a country told by its then prime minister (Harold MacMillan) that it had ‘never had it so good’ – the Highlands and Islands of the 1950s (as can be seen from comments reproduced above) were thought by many observers and policy-makers to be inescapably trapped in a ceaselessly demoralising downward spiral characterised by the interplay of inadequate opportunity on the one side, the continuing departure of the region’s people (its young people above all) on the other. Retrospectively, however, this can be seen to have been unduly pessimistic. While it was easy to conclude, in 1950s circumstances, that the interventionist policy approaches of the preceding 70 or so years had failed, it is arguably also the case (despite its being difficult to prove a counter-factual) that, had successive governments (Liberal, Conservative and Labour) not launched their various Highlands and Islands initiatives, the region’s plight, bad as it indubitably was, would have been a good deal worse.

Had crofters not obtained security of tenure and fair rents in 1886, had infrastructural improvements of various kinds not been undertaken, had there been no land settlement, no Highlands and Islands Medical Service, then – surely – even more people would have quit the Scottish north. They would have left in greater numbers still but for much the most significant Highlands and Islands development of the twentieth century’s middle decades – the rural electrification programme undertaken by the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board.

Today, when it appears to be insuperably difficult to extend superfast broadband into rural areas or to provide the subsea interconnectors needed to permit Scotland’s island groups to benefit fully from their wind and tidal power resources, it seems scarcely conceivable that a public agency once succeeded in providing almost every home in the Highlands and Islands with a heavily subsidised connection to the national grid. But such was the achievement of the Hydro Board and of Labour politician Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition. In 1941 Johnston set up the inquiry committee, headed by Scottish judge Lord Cooper, that swept aside landowning and other objections to large-scale hydro development. In 1943 he piloted a Hydro-Electric Development Bill through the House of Commons. In 1946 he quit active politics to become chair of the resulting Hydro Board.

Making electricity generally available in the Highlands and Islands was basic – as were parallel efforts to instal and improve domestic water supplies – to regional betterment. Without these efforts, the area’s prospects never would have been turned round. But of themselves, or so it had been concluded widely by the early 1960s, they were not sufficient to bring about economic expansion and population growth in a part of the UK were both these things had been absent for more than a century. Hence the establishment in 1965 of the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB).

Since the 1930s, when campaigners like Ballachulish GP Lachlan Grant and Inverness provost Alexander MacEwen first contended that the north of Scotland required an agency modelled on US President Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, there had been pressure for the region to be provided with an organisation capable of finally putting to rights all that had so self-evidently gone wrong in the Highlands and Islands. It was just such an organisation that Willie Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland in Harold Wilson’s then newly formed Labour government, outlined to the House of Commons when, in March 1965, he introduced his Highland Development Bill.

4. Solving the Highland Problem, 1965-2016

Had anyone dared to prophesy in 1965 that the population of the Highlands and Islands would grow by getting on for a quarter in the ensuing 50 years, their forecast would have provoked only derision. But that is what has occurred. Although (as will be touched on later) there is much still to be done in the Highlands and Islands, what has already been accomplished – especially when set against the dismal record of the preceding 100 or more years – is nothing less than remarkable. That is why the Highlands and Islands experience merits a lot more study and analysis than it has so far received – not least with a view to ensuring (a) that poorer-performing parts of the region are enabled to catch up with better-performing parts and (b) that some overdue consideration is given to how Highlands and Islands success might be replicated elsewhere.

A comprehensive account of the many factors contributing to the Highlands and Islands upturm (whether demographic or otherwise) of recent decades is way beyond the scope of this paper. What follows, then, are no more than pointers as to what such an account might include.

Large-scale inward investment – of the sort typified most strikingly today by Inverness-based Lifescan Scotland (a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary) which employs over 1,000 people in Inverness – has been helpful to the Highlands and Islands. Its role, however, ought not to be exaggerated. Enterprises resulting from such investment – the Dounreay Nuclear Establishment, the Fort William pulp mill, the Invergordon aluminium smelter, the oil production platform fabrication yards at Kishorn, Nigg and Ardersier – have certainly been major sources of employment and income. But even when such enterprises were intended to be permanent features of the Highlands and Islands scene – and the fabrication yards (it needs acknowledging) were never in that category – they have mostly proved disappointingly short-lived. Hence my own conviction that the key to Highlands and Islands regeneration lies in stimulating more locally-based entrepreneurial effort and that an essential starting point, in this connection, lies in the enhancement (at both an individual and collective level) of self-esteem and self-confidence – attributes which, for reasons rooted in the region’s history, the Highlands and Islands long lacked.

In 1883, when giving evidence to the Napier enquiry into crofting conditions, John Murdoch, an activist and land reformer, said this: ‘The language and lore of Highlanders being treated with despite has tended to crush their self-respect and to repress that self-reliance without which no people can advance. When a man was convinced that his language was a barbarism … and that the only good thing about him – his land – was, because of his general worthlessness, to go to a man of another race, what remained that he should fight for?’

John Murdoch there anticipates the concept of inferiorisation as developed by anti-imperial and anti-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Inferiorisation occurs when people buy into external assertions of their homeland’s – and their own – supposed inadequacy. Of course the Highlands and Islands were never colonised in the way that Africa, say, was colonised. But inferiorisation has at times been rife here all the same. It was evident (as already indicated) in the long persistent notion that personal advancement was something that could only be secured elsewhere. It was evident in widespread (and often officially sanctioned) denigration of language, dialect and culture. It was evident too in constant refrains to the effect that the Highlands and Islands lacked resources and that the area was, and would unavoidably remain, remote, peripheral, isolated, inaccessible.

To take on board such notions of yourself and your surroundings is, developmentally, disastrous. It is to deny all possibility of locally organised betterment, enterprise, initiative.

Challenging, and as far as possible overturning, this once endemic state of mind is central to Highlands and Islands recovery. Insofar as that task has been accomplished, credit belongs to very many people, very many organisations. But critical to such success as has been achieved is the extraordinarily wide-ranging remit and powers first given to the HIDB by Willie Ross and his colleagues – a remit and powers which (greatly to their credit) Highlands and Islands Enterprise’s Conservative creators, Ian Lang and Russell Sanderson, handed on intact in 1991 to the HIDB’s replacement agency, HIE, and to that agency’s ten Local Enterprise Companies (LECs).

In a Highlands and Islands context, the notion that economic and demographic recovery might have social and cultural dimensions was first apparent in Shetland. There, as in the rest of the Highlands and Islands, post-1945 circumstances were unremittingly bleak. Shetland agriculture was in the doldrums; the fishing industry, formerly a Shetland mainstay, was in crisis; unemployment (as noted earlier) was high; and with Shetlanders leaving in droves for the British mainland and for overseas destinations like New Zealand, depopulation was accelerating. It is unsurprising, then, that a 1953 contributor to the Shetland Times should have commented: ‘It is hard to foresee a stable economy whereby prosperity of any degree would be enjoyed by the majority of the Shetland people.’

And yet – in a way that differentiated the island group from the Highland mainland and the Hebrides – the 1940s and 1950s were a period of intense cultural activity in Shetland. At an institutional level this activity was given focus by two related developments: the formation in 1946 of the Shetland Folk Society; and the launch in 1947 of a periodical entitled New Shetlander. The Folk Society aspired ‘to collect and preserve what remains of our folklore, folk songs, fiddle tunes, traditions, customs, placenames and dialect’. As for the New Shetlander, its first issue proclaimed it a vehicle for ‘writers, poets, critics and others’ who were interested in ‘northern tradition and letters’ and who had ‘regard for our Shetlandic heritage’. To the Shetland Folk Society is owed much of the initial impetus for a musical revival that would eventually give Shetland fiddlers like Ali Bain an international renown. To the New Shetlander there can be attributed a corresponding literary upsurge – an upsurge which, very soon, had sparked the thought that pride in Shetland’s distinctive identity might, in time, underpin badly needed entrepreneurial endeavour.

Thinking of this kind led to the formation in 1957 of a Shetland Development Council which embraced a range of Shetland interests and which – crucially – had the blessing of Zetland County Council. By 1959 the development council had evolved into Shetland Council of Social Service and had recruited a highly effective secretary in the person of a young man, Bob Storey, who simultaneously occupied the post (the first of its kind to be created by a Scottish local authority) of Zetland County Council’s development officer. From Storey’s perspective, and increasingly from that of the county council, pride in local identity was a prerequisite to locally based economic expansion – as could be seen, it began to be asserted, in the flourishing economy that had taken shape in nearby (and then recently autonomous) Faroe.

The return of a 1962 Zetland County Council fact-finding mission to Faroe was followed by a determined effort to restructure Shetland’s long faltering economy. Much was achieved as a result. Shetland’s fishing industry was re-equipped and re-organised. Fish processing was revamped. Knitwear, an age-old enterprise in Shetland, was placed on a new, more commercial footing. Soon unemployment had been eliminated and depopulation halted.

The fact that the Shetland economy was thus set firmly on its feet during the 1960s is of crucial importance in relation to what came next in Shetland. Zetland County Council, buoyed greatly by the success of its developmental initiatives, was in an enormously stronger position than might otherwise have been the case when – as happened in the early 1970s – this same council found itself having to cope both with a serious threat to its own existence and with the equally unsettling consequences of Shetland’s proximity to the most productive of Britain’s then newly discovered offshore oilfields.

The modern Shetland Islands Council (SIC) is unique among UK local authorities in long having had many hundreds of millions of pounds of locally generated oil revenues at its disposal. But there would be no SIC had the county council of some 40 years back not had the will to fight off central government proposals to incorporate Shetland into a single Highlands and Islands regional council extending from the Mull of Kintyre to Muckle Flugga. And there would have been no Shetland Oil Fund to deploy had the county council of the early 1970s not had: (a) the capacity to extract from Westminster the Shetland Act of 1974 which gives Shetland’s local authority uniquely powerful controls over development; and (b) the ability to negotiate successfully with some of the world’s most powerful corporations.

Where Shetland thus led in restoring its fortunes and in reversing depopulation, a good deal of the rest of the Highlands and Islands has since followed – a process aided massively (as already stressed) by the wide-ranging suite of powers available to the HIDB where (significantly) Bob Storey was taken on to shape and direct the board’s social and community agenda.

Distinguishing cause from effect in this context is difficult – and that is not attempted here. But the emergence and consolidation of a more confident Highlands and Islands population – a population which is today a mix of long-established families and more recent arrivals – both underpins and is driven by a whole range of recent developments in virtually all of which HIDB or HIE have had a hand. Among these (in no particular order) are:

• The extraordinary (by past standards) flourishing of interest and participation in traditional (but often radically modernised) music and song.
• The fact that, in an area where absentee land ownership has long been prevalent, some 500,000 acres in the Highlands and Islands are now in community ownership – with local land trusts delivering or enabling population growth, housing, new business formation, etc.
• Continuing and accelerating population growth.
• Regional unemployment rates that, for many years, have been below those of Scotland as a whole.
• The emergence of an increasingly buoyant creative industries sector with a presence today in many parts of the region.
• Growing pride among young people in their Highlands and Islands localities and an equally growing interest on the part of young people, both inside and outside the region, in making their lives here.
• Much higher rates of business start-ups than in Scotland overall.
• The appearance of more and more music, arts and book festivals.
• A proliferation of first-rate restaurants and eating places – many of them featuring locally produced foodstuffs.
• The presence of two Highland football teams in the Scottish Premier League.
• The establishment and continuing expansion of the University of the Highlands and Islands.
• The growing impact, regionally and beyond, of Scotland’s Gaelic-medium college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig which, among its may other achievements has helped bring about a doubling of the population of Sleat – the Skye parish (once the most depopulated part of a depopulated island) where the college is located.

5. Building on Highlands and Islands success – in the region itself and in the rest of Scotland

The facts and comments reproduced immediately above – facts and comments of a sort that could be added to indefinitely – demonstrate that the Highlands and Islands of today are a hugely more successful and appealing place than were the Highlands and Islands of the 1950s. This is not to say, however, that the developmental job – the job the HIDB and HIE were set up to tackle – has been done. Challenges remain. The nature of these challenges is clear when the overall demographic record is broken down in such a way as to reveal the performance of the eight sub-areas into which HIE presently divides the Highlands and Islands.

Over the 1961-2011 period, three of these areas exceeded the 22 per cent population growth of the region as a whole. These were: the Inner Moray Firth (including Inverness) where the 50-year growth rate was 71 per cent; Lochaber, Skye and Wester Ross where the rate was 36 per cent; Shetland where it was 30 per cent.

Two areas, while recording increases, came in below the regional average. These were Moray at 18 per cent and Orkney at 14 per cent.

Three more, however, experienced population falls in the half century from 1961. These were: Caithness and Sutherland where population fell by 3 per cent; mainland Argyll and its neighbouring islands where the fall was 6 per cent; the Outer Hebrides or Western Isles where total population declined by 15 per cent.

The more recent record, admittedly, is more encouraging in that, during the inter-census decade, 2001-2011, only one HIE sub-area, Argyll and the Isles, saw its total population fall – by 2 per cent.

But the impression nevertheless persists (and persists correctly) that, while the Highland Problem has been solved (or is well on its way to being solved) across much of the region, challenges remain. These challenges are especially acute in the northern mainland, in the Outer Isles and in much of Argyll. It is in this context that it is worth recalling a comment made in 1967 by Robert Grieve, the HIDB’s first chair, when he warned that, irrespective of such wins as it might chalk up elsewhere, the board would ultimately stand or fall on what it achieved, or failed to achieve, in what Grieve called ‘the true crofting areas’ – meaning the Hebrides and the west coast of the mainland from Argyll northwards.

Some remarkable successes have been achieved in these areas, most notably Skye. There, just before the 1840s famine, there were nearly 24,000 people. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the comparable figure was around 7,000 – and had the demographic trends of the previous 120 years persisted there would, in theory, be virtually no-one left in Skye today. Instead there has been a very substantial recovery – with Skye’s population having again passed the 10,000 mark. However, nothing like this has so far occurred on Argyll islands like Mull and Islay, on much of the Argyll mainland, in north-west Sutherland or in the Outer Isles.

This is not to suggest that these localities are confronting difficulties inherently more insoluble than those that once confronted Skye. But it is to suggest that the Scottish Government might refocus HIE’s mission – with a view to its giving far more attention to areas of particular disadvantage – or (and this would be the more imaginative option) the government might establish an entirely new agency (headquartered ideally in the Hebrides) whose remit would be to replicate in still struggling parts of the Highlands and Islands the marked upturn achieved elsewhere.

At present, however, there appears to be little appetite for initiatives of that sort. In some respects, in fact, current Highlands and Islands policy, insofar as there is such a policy, is characterised increasingly by incoherence. Thus the longstanding tendency to provide the region with distinctive answers to its distinctive difficulties is, at one and the same time, being reinforced and undermined. Reinforcement is most apparent in the Scottish Government’s strong support for community land ownership – as delivered by means of the Scottish Land Fund and by legislative measures like last year’s Community Empowerment Act and this year’s Land Reform Act. But while community land ownership is (as noted above) enabling a growing number of Highlands and Islands communities to shape their own futures, and while the Scottish Government’s mooted Islands Bill may have the same effect, policy with regard to HIE, coupled with government-imposed financial and other pressures on Scotland’s local authorities, is tending to reduce the region’s overall capacity for independent action on its own behalf.

(Because my criticisms of Scottish Government policy may be thought to arise from party political feeling, I should perhaps make clear that I’m a member of the SNP.)

Nothing was more central to the HIDB, as originally conceived, than the conviction that it must possess a great deal of autonomy. This autonomy is today much diminished. HIE, despite cuts to both, continues to possess a substantial budget and a dedicated staff. But instead of being expected ‘to act,’ in Willie Ross’s words, ‘at its own hand’, HIE is considered by the Scottish Government to be no more than a ‘delivery agency’ whose role is principally to give effect to policies conceived centrally in Edinburgh. This is to reverse the whole thrust of the post-1886 tendency to put in place and steadily to strengthen a range of distinctively Highlands and Islands institutions – institutions which, as illustrated above, have collectively been greatly to the benefit of the Scottish north.

Consider, in this context, the genesis of one of the most important Highlands and Islands developments of recent decades – the creation of the University of the Highlands and Islands. The ultimately successful campaign to make UHI a reality, when launched in the late 1980s, was an entirely Highlands and Islands initiative conceived and led by Bob Cowan, then chair of the HIDB, with the support of Val MacIver, then convener of Highland Regional Council’s Education Committee. Prior to the HIDB setting out in this way to reshape the entire post-school educational structure in a very large slice of Scotland, no permission was sought from any authority south of the Highland Line. Could something similar be done by an HIE now regarded as a central government ‘delivery agency’? Almost certainly not – a state of affairs that, from a Highlands and Islands perspective, is nothing if not disadvantageous.

This new situation has not arisen because of hostility towards the Highlands and Islands on the part of the Scottish National Party (which has of late done well electorally in much of the region) or on the part of the succession of SNP governments in power in Scotland since 2007. It is merely the Highlands and Islands manifestation of the ruling party’s apparent conviction that political power is best exercised on a centralised and undivided basis. Hence the incoming SNP government of 2007’s immediate decision to axe the previous government’s public sector jobs dispersal programme – which had been moving substantial components of the Scottish administrative machine not just into the Highland and Islands (as in the case of Scottish Natural Heritage for instance) but into other parts of Scotland. Hence too the abolition of HIE’s ten Local Enterprise Companies (LECs).

In much of the Highlands and Islands the demise of LECs had the effect of reinforcing recentralisation of the sort that began with the then UK government’s 1996 abolition of district councils. The impact can be seen clearly in Skye which the Scottish Affairs Committee where I lived and worked in the 1980s and for much of the 1990s. At that time, Skye and and Lochalsh possessed both a district council and a Local Enterprise Company. Both, in relation to the populations they served, were much the smallest such organisations in Scotland. But both were recognised widely to be highly effective – and to have contributed substantially to the area’s socio-economic advance. Today, however, developmental effort in Skye and Lochalsh has been centralised in Inverness-based HIE which is itself (as noted already) much more firmly under Edinburgh-based control – while local authority functions in Skye and Lochalsh are centred on Inverness-based Highland Council which, like all other such councils, has had its own room for financial and other manoeuvre curtailed by the Scottish Government.

All of this runs counter, I believe, to what is to be learned from the Highlands and Islands experience of the last 50 or 100 years – that the Highlands and Islands are best served, developmentally and otherwise, if and when government (by way, if necessary, of regionally empowered institutions) seeks to devolve, rather than take to itself,  decision-making.

The Highlands and Islands record, I’ve stressed, constitutes a Scottish success story. One of that story’s key messages, to repeat, is that decentralised initiative is much to be preferred to – and delivers better results than – centralising approaches of the sort that have of late been all too evident at Holyrood. There are lessons in this, I think, for government policy with regard not just to the Highlands and Islands but to Scotland as a whole.

Imagine if a Scottish First Minister were to make a speech containing visionary sentiments of the sort expressed by Willie Ross when, in March 1965, he made the case for a Highlands and Islands Development Board. Imagine that such a speech – and the new institution it set out to describe – were to concern itself with one or other of the several parts of Scotland still confronting their own equivalents of the demographic and related crises the HIDB was put in place to tackle.

One candidate for such treatment might be South-West Scotland where, in Dumfries and Galloway and in an adjacent areas – South Ayrshire, East Ayrshire and South Lanarkshire – a whole set of essentially rural localities are arguably in worse shape today than much of the Highlands and Islands.

A second candidate might be the many parts of urban Scotland where, as recognised by study after study, multiple disadvantage and deprivation have become entrenched. The difficulties facing people living in these places are, in some respects, very different from the problems facing the mid-twentieth-century Highlands and Islands. In other respects, however, there are similarities between the Highlands and Islands predicament of 50 or more years ago, and the urban predicament of now – not least, perhaps, in both being characterised by inferiorisation (see above) of the sort that can all too readily arise from having your own and your community’s prospects constantly written off. ‘For 200 years,’ Willie Ross said in 1965, ‘the Highlander has been the man on Scotland’s conscience.’ Today the person on Scotland’s conscience ought surely to be the man, woman or child who, in what is (by global standards) a rich country, is condemned, for no reason other than residence in one of our more impoverished housing schemes, to have so many fewer life chances – and, on average, a notably shorter life – than the rest of us. Might it not be time to do for those people something similar to what was done in the past, and done successfully, for the Highlands and Islands.

What’s missing from the foregoing?

To that question, the answer is a great deal. Here are just two of numerous omissions. One, the huge role the Forestry Commission played in providing much of the mid-twentieth-century Highlands and Islands with employment opportunities that would not otherwise have been available. Two, the very significant contribution of local authorities to Highlands and Islands betterment. Some space has been given here to the key role of first Zetland County Council and then Shetland Islands Council in turning around (well before the advent of offshore oil it should be stressed) the Shetland economy. But many more important initiatives were undertaken by other local authorities – not least the provision of six-year secondary schools (and several councils share credit for this) in the Argyll islands, in the southern part of the Outer Isles and on the West Highland mainland. A fuller account of what has been achieved of late in the Highlands and Islands would find space for that and much else. There’s a book in all of this for somebody.

June 2016