THE General Election, independence or land reform – which subject is currently of most interest to Scotland’s communities?

The first enjoys non-stop news coverage, the second occupies a special place in 1.6 million hearts and the third, well it’s a bit hard to understand.

Not in rural Scotland.

I’ve been talking in Strathpeffer, Farr, Cannich, Sligachan, Corpach and Assynt over the last week and land reform has been the subject of choice. Why?

It’s really simple and urgent. Unless land prices drop from around £60,000 to £10,000 for a third of an acre, another generation of Scots will leave the land like countless generations before them.

Take Strathpeffer. A young woman called Jenny came up to speak, waiting patiently until every other person’s query had been dealt with and apologising for raising “her own personal problem”. Despite having a reasonable income, she cannot find a wee affordable house to rent or buy, or land to build on anywhere in the Highland countryside. At present she is living in a caravan for a few months until summer tourists come, and then will occupy the spare room and occasional sofa of friends. She is tired of chasing the few opportunities that arise only to find even them all beyond her means, and tired of driving through vast, empty sporting estates in which no land has ever been sold for affordable housing and probably never will be. She is thinking of giving up and opting to live in Inverness, like her friends, or leave Scotland for any other country in Europe where finding a place on the land is far easier.

Jenny posed a simple question: will anything in the forthcoming Land Reform Bill change this deadlock within the next few years or even within the next decade? In all honesty, I don’t think it will.

The bill has been described by the landowning fraternity as “a Mugabe-style land raid” delivered by a “communist” First Minister. This is nonsense. In fact this disappointingly modest bill will not quickly change a situation where 500 people own half of Scotland – the most concentrated pattern of land ownership in the developed world.

Interested observers hoped recommendations from the surprisingly radical Scottish Government-appointed Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) would be adopted wholesale – especially a maximum size of landholding and an agricultural tenant’s right to buy. They weren’t. Instead communities can call on ministers to intervene if they think the scale of ownership or conduct of landowners is a barrier to local sustainable development. That sounds good, but it isn’t retrospective and it is does leave the most vulnerable communities looking very exposed. There’s no certainty they’d win and an unsuccessful accusation of neglect against their landowner (often their employer and landlord as well) could leave local relations worse than ever.

There’s also a proposed new duty on trustees of landowning charities to engage with local people over management. I’d love to be a fly on the hall as the Duke of Buccleuch or fellow trustees meet folk from the mass of villages whose growth has been stunted for decades. But the outcome is surely predictable. Local people want cheap land for housing – large landowners generally don’t. So what happens next? The Scottish Government must issue clarification when the bill is launched into Holyrood in June. Unless communities know how to assess their chances of success, few will take the risk of invoking ministerial help.

Why have stronger measures not been adopted, like pre-emptive and compulsory land purchases – both proposed by the LRRG? Perhaps because human rights legislation has been successfully invoked by landowners’ lawyers to protect their “right to property”, perhaps because the SNP are a little feart of the establishment and doubtless because folk living in Highland and rural Scotland have largely remained silent. In each meeting of hugely interested Highlanders this week, only a couple of folk had responded to the Land Reform Bill consultation. The vast majority didn’t know it was happening.

That’s no surprise either – land reform has become a technocratic debate and local government is too remote to keep communities and voters connected with day-to-day politics. This has to change.

Jenny’s inability to find anywhere to live in the Highlands is not a wee personal problem – it’s a scandal eating away at SNP claims to be creating a modern, egalitarian Scotland. In fact, complex land reform proposals stand or fall against her simple test. Do they provide affordable land soon?

If not, ministers must toughen up the bill and Scots must openly demand far-reaching change including land taxation. There’s talk of a Land Festival with music and workshops this summer somewhere in the Highlands, hoping to attract the same numbers as Belladrum.

Land reform isn’t just a northern or a rural issue. But if Highlanders stay silent, the rest of Scotland will assume the land issue has been solved. It hasn’t.

Yet all rival parties bar the Tories back land reform. The Scottish Government must do better on this pivotal issue – now.