Highland aid 'just blood money for Clearances'

GUILT has driven the financial regeneration of the Scottish Highlands, a leading academic is due to claim today.

Professor James Hunter, the director of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) centre for history, is to claim government aid to the region was borne out of a need to atone for previous neglect.

However, there have been calls for Prof Hunter to stop living in the past.

The former chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise is due to make his claims at the Henry Duncan Prize Lecture at the Royal Society of Edinburgh tonight.

Prof Hunter is set to say that, after suffering poverty and de-population in the 19th century, the region missed out on the period of "unprecedented plenty" in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1980s success was synonymous with moving away.

But he is due to add: "Today's Highlands and Islands are no longer a disaster area. They're Scotland's great success story."

He will cite Gigha as an example of a community which was dying but had been transformed with a growing population after a community buyout. Skye's population, which fell from 24,000 in the mid-19th century, to 6,000 in the 1960s, is now up by 50 per cent.

Population in the Highlands and Islands has grown by about a fifth over the past 40 years while Scotland's population has mostly remained static.

Prof Hunter is set to describe Inverness as one of Britain's fastest-growing cities, with more business start-ups in the region per head of population than the rest of Scotland. Unemployment, once higher than the national average, is now below it. One reason behind the change was a willingness of successive governments, irrespective of party, to help the Highlands.

"It's my conviction that, had governments not done what they did in northern Scotland over the last 120 or so years, the upturn I've described could not have happened," he will say.

This included the granting in 1886 of security of tenure to crofters, the setting up in the 1890s of the area's first development agency, early 20th century land reform, the establishment in 1943 of the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board and the founding of the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) in 1965.

"At its core there lies a still-enduring sense that, irrespective of the writings of revisionist historians, the Highlands and Islands, in the past, were dealt the rawest of raw deals.

"Moreover, this raw deal, it's widely thought, was such... to have imposed on the wider nation of which the Highlands and Islands are part, a continuing need to atone for previous neglect - or worse."

Last night, Mary Scanlon, a Conservative MSP for the Highlands, said: "The time has come to stop living in the past and claiming almost victim status.

"There has been a confidence in the Highlands for almost two decades. James Hunter continues to talk about the Clearances and community ownership, almost as if he doesn't want to move forward."

OVER the centuries Highlanders have struggled with both circumstances and the whims of British monarchs.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, when many Scottish clans tried to restore the Stuart line to throne, the Disarming Act was passed, banning Highlanders from possessing weapons in a bid to quell rebellious clans.

And as Highlanders increasingly became associated with rebellion, the government repeatedly repressed them.

At the Battle of Culloden in 1745, more than 2,000 Highlanders were killed or wounded in the last mainland battle on British soil. So brutal was the massacre that the victor, the Duke of Cumberland, became known as "the butcher".

After the defeat, restrictions on the Highland way of life became even more repressive.

The 1746 Act of Proscription further restricted their ability to bear arms, their culture, music, and even banned wearing the kilt under threat of transportation to penal colonies for seven years.

Most notorious in the tribulations of the region were the Highland Clearances.

Highlanders were forced from their ancient ways of subsistence farming by ruthless landowners and it led to mass emigration.

Under of a process of UK-wide agricultural change, the lack of legal protection for tenants under Scottish law, and the brutality of many of the evictions made the Highland Clearances particularly harsh.

Later, the industrial revolution saw many of those remaining migrating in large numbers to cities such as Glasgow to find work, rather than remain as virtually free labour to their landlords. The Highland Potato Famine 1846-7, although more of an agricultural crisis than a true famine, was a period of severe malnutrition, disease, and crippling financial hardship.

The causes were in many respects similar to those of the very real Great Irish Famine of around the same time.

Related topic

• The Highland Clearances
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