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The Changing Face of the Highlands (Chapter Four)

© Simon Hill

The work of the press and Highland societies in revealing and discussing the problems in the Highlands had forced the political establishment to take notice. By the 1870's it had become clear that both political and public opinion were firmly opposed to any further clearances. The use of brute force would not be accepted as justifiable and so the government was effectively forced to look at other ways of placating the crofters. There was a growing realisation among politicians that reform was needed to maintain order.

It was difficult for the crofting community to obtain political representation until the Reform Act of 1885 which greatly increased the electorate. Before that time the requirment in order to vote was that you owned or rented at least £10 of property. The Ballot Act of 1872 improved matters somewhat by making the vote secret so it would be more difficult to coerce people into voting a certain way. Before the reform legislation of 1885 Highland politics was dominated by landowners or their representatives often supporting the Conservatives who put the landowners interests first.

One of the first MP's to speak out on crofters issues was Charles Fraser Mackintosh who was elected member for Inverness burgh in 1874. However Mackintosh was on the fringes of the landowning class and later broke with the Crofters Party. Other politicians who made up the Crofters Party included G.B.Clark, Angus Sutherland and Dr. Roderick MacDonald though they didn't meet with much success until the 1880's. The consolidation of Highland societies, sympathetic press and crofters combined with the extension of the electorate allowed later success. In the 1870's the crofters remained politically isolated with little or no representation in parliament but as mentioned they first had to raise their profile to create a platform for their politicians. Despite gaining the sympathy of part of the political establishment there was little effective challenge to the economic principles behind the clearances. Ultimately the population was too large for the land to support them all, but the situation had been badly handled by many landowners. Mass clearances had a destructive effect economically, socially and culturally and the crofting system may have been flawed from it's inception.

Politically, events in Ireland stimulated debate about the situation in the Scottish Highlands. If the Liberal Party under Gladstone was seeking to placate the rural Irish population with a land act then why not the crofters? As Hugh Miller said "They [the Irish] are buying guns and will be bye and bye shooting magistrates and clergymen by the score; and the parliament will in consequence do a great deal for them. But the poor Highlanders will shoot no-one .... and so they will be left to perish unregarded in their hovels". It was a natural extension of the principle that if a land act was to be created improving the rights of rural tenants that it should also apply to the crofters of Scotland. It is no suprise then that after the Irish Land Act was passed in 1881 the Crofters Act followed in 1886.

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