Your article on the community buyout of part of Langholm Moor in Scotland, presently owned by the Duke of Buccleuch (Scottish village buys large part of Langholm Moor from Duke of Buccleuch, 2 November), avoids the fundamental question of the ethics of such aristocratic hereditary landowners profiting from the sale of land that was, in most cases, originally granted to their forebears by the then monarch (understood to have been James II in the case of the Buccleuch estate).
Surely a more equitable process would be for such lands to be transferred to an appropriately established community trust at no cost, rather than relying on public donations and money from a government-established fund. The present owners and their predecessors will have enjoyed centuries of rents and other benefits deriving from their ownership of the freely bestowed land.
When so much of the land in the UK is owned by the aristocracy, such a process would be a much fairer means of achieving land reform than using public money to buy back such land – and better than tumbrils in Whitehall and a guillotine in Parliament Square, perhaps.
Harvey Sanders
London
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