‘Tartan Stalinists”, the “Highland Stasi”, “Scottish Nazi party”. The mild proposals in the Scottish government’s land reform bill, published last week, provoke much fulminations among the proprietorial class. David Cameron’s stepfather-in-law, Lord Astor described Scotland’s proposals as “a Mugabe-style landgrab”. He owns, among the other properties he was enterprising enough to inherit, the deer-ravaged Tarbert estate on the isle of Jura, run by a trust patriotically registered in the Bahamas.
Much of this fury is caused by the plan to cancel the
business rate exemption (granted to the aristocracy by John Major’s government
in 1994) for deer-stalking estates, grouse moors and salmon fishing. Talk about
a culture of entitlement.
As a result of the Highland clearances, which dragged much
of the population off the land destroying their houses and replacing them with
sheep ranches or deer and grouse estates, Scotland vies with Brazil for the
world’s highest concentration of ownership. (It’s hard to tell which comes
first as the ownership of many estates has been kept secret.) One estimate
suggests that 432 people own half the country’s private rural land. No other
rich nation has so excluded its citizens from their common heritage.
Given these circumstances the bill is, if anything, too
timid. It gives local people consultation rights over how land is used,
strengthens the ability of communities to buy land, improves the position of
tenant farmers, removes the business rate exemption, tries to discover who the
owners are, seeks to reduce the ridiculous densities at which deer are
maintained for stalking, and creates a land commission to keep the issue alive.
That’s all.
It seems that two things are missing from the bill. While
there are new opportunities for families and communities, there is no
designation of land for the nation as a whole. There is also little that will
alter the ownership pattern where it is most extreme: in the rocky Highland
cores, which are likely to be unsuitable for community buyouts. As the Scottish
minister Aileen McLeod concedes, “community ownership may not be appropriate
for all land: it’s not a panacea”.
But perhaps there’s a way in which both
issues could be addressed.
With the
possible exception of the western side of the Cairngorms, there are no nature parks in Britain that meet the international definition: places protected
mainly for their wildlife and habitats. When the International Union for
Conservation of Nature sought to classify Britain’s national parks, of which
there are 15, it had to invent a new category. Ours are not set aside for nature. They are, strictly speaking not parks. There are good reasons for this and bad ones. When the parks were
designated, many people were living within their boundaries. It’s essential
that they can make a living and keep their communities alive. (Unfortunately
the industries covering most of the land offer neither possibility: though
lavishly subsidised, they still bleed jobs and money.) But on the rare
occasions when the private owners are not wrecking the land with sheep,
overstocked deer and scorched-earth grouse shoots, the park authorities step in
to finish the job.
With a few exceptions the ecological management of our
existing national parks is irrational, anally retentive and scientifically
illiterate. They remain subject to a 19th-century worldview in which the
natural world is seen as a garden to be pruned and trimmed rather than as a
thriving, living system in which we could escape from the management and
control that surrounds us everywhere else.
Scotland, thanks in part to its dismal feudal legacy, has
only two national parks, and less land designated than in the other parts of
Britain – 7%, while England has 9% and Wales 20%. Is it not time to augment
those with new parks, with a different philosophy. Where Scotland’s deer
stalking and grouse shooting provide possibly the lowest level of employment
per square mile to be found in any temperate region in Europe, national parks
could generate new jobs within an economy built on wildlife and tourism. They
would restore both human populations and the other species that were wiped out
by the clearances. They would bring life of all kinds to barren lands. Long
live the Highland spring.
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