There are some ideas being floated here that I find rather skewed.
My father was the Housing Convener in my home-town in the 1950's and worked incessantly to deliver the ideal that Britain should be "A land fit for heroes"; ie, those who fought against Fascism from Spain to Burma, those who worked to make that a possibility and the wives and children of those hundreds of thousands who lost their lives in doing so. He saw no division between Scot, English, Welsh or Irish, as all deserved a life free from Disease, Squalor, Ignorance, Idleness and Want! More importantly, Britain was rife with the potential for disillusionment, with a male population which, some at a startlingly young age, had both seen and perpetrated the horrors of war and whose greatest experience in life was already behind them. What were the authorities going to do if they kicked off... send out the army?
The economics regarding housing was on the seemingly contradictory basis of both Keynesianism and the sound Market Capitalism of Henry Ford's "Economies of Scale", and had those measures not been sabotaged by the divisive and destructive political agendas of consecutive Westminster Governments, the notion of "subsidised housing" would never have entered the frame.
I can remember only 2 or 3 children in that town whose parents owned their own houses. The headmaster of my primary school lived in a council house, as did most of the local Police -the others lived in Police housing-, all of the local Fire Brigade and ambulance crews, and the tenants of every house in our street were either miners, steel, railway or mill workers. I remember the pride of the community when a lad from up the road graduated in medicine, and guess what... when he got married he moved into a council house. And this was no anomaly, as the greater majority of Britain's population lived in council houses.
It wasn't until the 1970's and the building of high rise blocks that the quality of housing fell -an architect was given an accolade for a building which had to be evacuated and demolished 6 years after construction, as it began to sink- and the back-room policy of the three offer rule placed new tenants and those most desperate into the worst housing stock, creating what were no better than ghettos which stigmatised all who had to live there, and once they were in they couldn't get out!
To quote Toddy, "I sometimes wonder if Scotland and England exist on the same planet". It's not that England never experienced a (lesser) equivalent of The Highland Clearances, the difference is that the Scots remember it and are still outraged at the atrocity. The road between Inverness and Tongue, known as the Destitution Road, is said to have had a constant southward flow of refugees for almost 50 years. We also remember The Seven Men of Knoydart, some of whom were jailed for planting potatoes on The Laird's land, in the mistaken belief that fighting their way past Tobruk and Benghazi on a number of occasions (The Benghazi Steeplechase) before cutting a swathe from El Alamein to Berlin gave them the right!
It's a fallacy that the years of The Great Depression created The Weekenders, folk who grabbed the chance to leave the cities for the countryside at every opportunity. What the years of depression of the 1930's created was a generation of unemployed men who left home in order to remove a mouth to feed in the household and almost accidentally gave birth to the great contribution made to mountaineering by the Scottish Working Class, culminating in the club which has probably made the biggest impact on mountaineering history, The Creag Dhu! Forget the Scottish Mountaineering Club which comprised of the upper crust and the landed gentry, these lads came from the pits and the shipyards and were only accepted by the SMC when they could no longer be ignored. In contrast to the SMC, the Creag Dhu went on their merits and probably couldn't give a toss what the SMC thought of them. There was also the issue that the SMC had reservations as to whether or not the Lower Classes should even be allowed into the countryside, while the so called Lower Classes assumed it to be their right!
Well, time has proved the latter to be the case.
There are issues with the uneducated and disrespectful but that is not an insurmountable problem and the resolution will hopefully not be left for bureaucrats and politicians to solve.
If you're happy enough with medieval English feudal laws and wish to maintain the status quo then that's your choice and yes, we are on different planets. But that makes open access to the countryside a specifically Scottish issue and your contribution isn't required. Let's call it a West Lothian Question turned on its head!
Cheers,
Pango.