ONE year since the campaign to protect East Lothian tenant farmer Andrew Stoddart was launched, another farming family is set to be evicted in exactly the same circumstances on Monday, November 28.

John Paterson, 34, has been the tenant of Glenree farm on Arran for 15 years. His father Jim, originally from Ayrshire, moved the family over to Arran in 1996 to take on the lease for the 5,000-acre livestock farm with a ten-year limited partnership, which was then passed on to his son John and renewed on an annual basis. In 2003, John became a secure tenant courtesy of Scottish Government legislation and he along with his seven-year-old son, mother Christine, Jim and younger brother Ian – who runs a falcon breeding business on the farm – all felt they could breathe safe at last.

They were wrong.

Today Paterson is one of seven tenant farmers across Scotland facing the same fate as Stoddart, who was evicted from the land he had farmed on the Coulston Estate in January with his wife and three daughters. After demonstrations outside Holyrood organised by the OurLand campaign and a 20,000-signature petition was handed into the Rural Affairs Committee, the Scottish Government offered to fund and facilitate mediation, and the Coulston Estate gave Stoddart some compensation.

Paterson’s case mirrors Stoddart’s in almost every way – even down to the date of eviction – with one big difference. A “radical” land reform act has since been passed, yet Paterson and seven other farmers in the same situation are now taking High Court action against the Scottish Government to force them to help – because a past Government is at least partly to blame for framing faulty legislation intended to protect tenant farmers that instead made some vulnerable to eviction.

The problem goes back to rushed legislation in 2003, when the Lib Dems’ Ross Finnie, Scottish Government’s agriculture minister, was furious to discover landowners had been dissolving limited partnership tenancies in an attempt to subvert plans to strengthen tenant farmers’ rights.

The limited partnership system was considered unfair by its critics. Tory MSP Alex Fergusson described it as a “legal dodge” to make sure landowners could get the farm back when they chose. They were certainly not partnerships of equals. If landowners wanted to change the terms, they could easily do so, leaving tenant farmers high and dry.

So Finnie tried to help in the Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 2003, which allowed any limited partnership tenant farmers facing early eviction to upgrade to secure tenant status.

Realising what Finnie was up to, landowners took evasive action the night before legislation was due to be introduced in what many farmers remember as “the night of the long knives”, when more than 300 eviction notices were issued by factors battling through snowdrifts to deliver them before midnight. Some tenants even nailed up their letterboxes after word got round.

But in the Salvesen v Riddell case, which began in the land court in 2009 and ended in the UK Supreme Court in 2013, Finnie’s manoeuvre was ruled unlawful – because landowners before and after a specific date had been treated differently. That constituted discrimination and that breached the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Shortly after losing his case, Andrew Riddell, the farmer at the centre of the long, complex legal challenge, collected one final harvest and then killed himself.

The shock waves reverberated around Scotland’s farming community, but due to the legal complexities, and a belief that agriculture was a specialist area, the public heard very little about it. Most tenant farmers held the Scottish Parliament partly to blame – if they had drafted the legislation properly, all limited partnership tenants would have been given security, the ECHR couldn’t have been used and neither Andrew Riddell nor Andrew Stoddart would have faced the stressful prospect of eviction with scant compensation. Yet now, here we are again.

On November 28, the Paterson brothers and their family will become the next set of Scottish farmers dealing with homelessness and eviction, seven months after the passage of a Land Reform Act that did nothing to tackle their specific situation.

Paterson said: “I’m a relatively young man and believed I had a lifetime’s tenancy here at Glenree.

“After the legal action in 2013, the Scottish Government led us to believe that if we were evicted as a result of their mistake there would be compensation. Now there’s nothing. We are on our own and have had to pay for court action against the Government. It’s all been very stressful. My father took his stroke eight years ago and had another after the eviction letter came in earlier this year, his health has gradually declined over the years due to stress, so we now can’t even discuss the sorry mess with him.

“My marriage deteriorated to the point where it dissolved during all of this – basically the family has been torn to shreds. Right now my mother is busy packing everything we own – even if we win the legal case it might give us compensation but it won’t undo the last stressful years – and it won’t stop the eviction.”

The family had a meeting at the farm with landowner Charles Fforde on Monday of this week and were told they must leave on that Monday in November, and that another lease was not up for discussion.

Nor is any guarantee of compensation despite the fact John and his father have made substantial improvements to the land and farmstead during their 21 years as tenants – they’ve put up sheds, built a slatted house for cows, a silage pit, new sheep handling facilities, erected tens of thousands of metres of fencing and made environmental improvements.

And it’s not just the farm. Ian Paterson explained: “I’ve built an intensive falcon breeding facility at the farm, which will be very difficult to interrupt in the middle of the breeding season and almost impossible to relocate locally.

“I’ve also set up conservation projects, which help protect the Hen Harrier, amongst other species – all of which will be taken over by the landlord, without compensation.”

Faced with financial ruin, John decided to join forces with seven other tenant farmers to launch legal action against the Scottish Government.

Angus McCall, director of the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association, said: “The last four-and-a-half years have been a misery for these tenant farmers since Lord Gill condemned the law that gave them security of tenure as incompetent and contravening the property rights of landlords. The tenants now feel they have been hung out to dry by the Government and its lawyers. None of the assurances given to them by Government ministers or Parliament has been met.

“The mediation process that was supposed to take place never got off the ground, Government has refused to enter into negotiation with the tenants regarding compensation and they now face a lengthy, expensive and stressful legal battle with the Government. If mediation had taken place as promised some of these tenants would not now be facing eviction and the others would have come to a mutually agreeable end of tenancy settlement instead of four years of uncertainty and emotional turmoil.

“This sorry saga has exemplified the harsh and uncaring side of Government, where common decency and a sense of fair play has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. It is not too late. STFA would reiterate the plea for the Scottish Government to accept moral responsibility for the damage done by a previous Government and move without further delay to find a settlement rather than force these families into a long, drawn-out, expensive and life-sapping legal battle.”

Indeed, the only reason Paterson has any energy for the fight is to help the generation after him.

“Everyone involved has a younger person coming on because they believed they had the dream of a secure tenancy. That’s part of our motivation. People are fighting for their children.” Paterson’s only other hope – ironically enough – lies in Brexit. If EU subsidies dry up, landowners will lose the current incentive to evict tenant farmers and claw back farms to claim all the subsidies.

But even if Brexit encourages landowners to start offering leases again it will be too late for Paterson. He fears the leases will probably just be short-term arrangements to avoid triggering more generous conditions for secure tenancy created in this year’s Land Reform Act, which also forces landowners to pay 25 per cent of a farm’s value to take it over again at the end of a lease.

In short John, his family and seven other farmers are caught between a rock and a hard place – through no fault of their own.

He said: “We hoped we’d get a new five-year tenancy but that’s not going to happen now. The Scottish Government promised us a lifetime of farming with generations to follow. My brother Ian’s already said he doesn’t want to stay in farming if we just lurch from year to year and can be removed at any time. Fforde has had the value of this farm in rent seven times over during the last 700 years.”

DOES this picture accord with the spirit of the newly passed Land Reform Act? Must #OurLand activists unfurl the banners, restart the petitions and picket Parliament once more to get a fair deal for the Patersons?

And will this happen with sickening regularity every November until the seven tenant farmers left high and dry by landowner fiat and flawed legislation from Holyrood are all evicted?

The Scottish Government has a few options. It can do the radical thing and find a legal way to stop the evictions. It can start the mediation it promised, use its clout to put pressure on the landowner or just pay the compensation John Paterson and the other farmers are due. The only reason I can see for Nicola Sturgeon’s Government not stepping up is the lawyers’ fear pay-outs might set a precedent for others affected by “bad law” enacted at Holyrood.

That’s not a good enough reason to let this shameful situation continue.

Better to pay out and live with any consequences than give up on hard-working Scots. The ball is in the Scottish Government’s court.