HOME OF THE BRAVE?

The manufacturers and traders of guns are in a lucrative business in the USA and in order to protect their marketplace they have a trade organisation known as the National Rifle Association to protect that market. "There are approximately 90 guns for every 100 people in the US (a rate almost 15 times higher than England and Wales). More than 85 people a day are killed with guns and more than twice that number are injured with them. Gun murders are the leading cause of death among African Americans under the age of 44. And the NRA is no joke. Claiming gun ownership as a civil liberty protected by the second amendment, it opposes virtually all gun control legislation. It claims more than 4 million members, has a budget of more than $300m and spent almost $3m last year – when there were no nationwide elections – on lobbying." (Guardian, 18 April) Being cowardly socialists we wonder if there is a Bullet Proof Vest Association we could contact before visiting the Home of the Brave. RD

CELEBRATING WAGE SLAVERY

In the media led frenzy that will no doubt accompany the Queen's diamond jubilee many workers may imagine that they have something to celebrate. As they raise their cut-price can of cheap lager in celebration they may perhaps reflect that their masters will be celebrating in quite a different fashion. "An ultra-exclusive port, the Graham's Tawny 1952, is being released with royal approval for the Diamond Jubilee. The port is available exclusively through Berry Brothers at £275 a bottle, in three-bottle oak cases at £825, and in five jeroboams (4.5 litres) at £1,800." (Decanter.com, 11 April) We doubt if your local pub will be getting in a stock of jeroboams. RD

CALL THIS PROGRESS?

Glasgow Branch of the Socialist Party GB

Don't recycle Capitalism, BIN IT

PATRIOTISM AND PENURY

With the forthcoming Olympic Games in the offing the media will be whipping up nationalistic pride and crowds will be singing God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia, but behind this nationalistic nonsense a grim reality is at work. "Britons rack up nearly £14,500 in debt before they consider themselves in serious financial trouble, a study has revealed. Up to 10 million of us owe money, while more than 2.5 million are behind with at least one bill, the charity Money Advice Trust found. Debt problems have soared since the credit crunch began in 2008 and more than two million took out payday loans last year." (Daily Express, 17 April) Perhaps the song we should be chanting is "There's a Pawnshop Round the Corner" RD

A WONDERFUL TOWN?

The popular song may declare that New York is a wonderful town but for many of its residents this is far from the truth. "The number of New Yorkers classified as poor in 2010 increased by nearly 100,000 from the year before, raising the poverty rate by 1.3 percentage points to 21 per cent — the highest level and the largest year-to-year increase since the city adopted a more detailed definition of poverty in 2005. The recession and the sluggish recovery have taken a particularly harsh toll on children, with more than one in four under 18 living in poverty, according to an analysis by the city's Center for Economic Opportunity that will be released on Tuesday." (New York Times, 17 April) If you are a millionaire and a resident of New York it may well be "My kind of town" as the song would have it, but for many of the working class of that city there is not much to sing about. RD

Food for thought

Nobody could be more thrilled at the melting of the polar ice caps than the capitalist class who want to get their hands on the vast deposits of oil, natural gas, nickel, palladium, and other minerals beneath the arctic ice. Though some governments have established a claim to some territories, others are disputed. Both Canada and Russia have competing claims to a patch of seabed near the North Pole. Already Russia has a system of security forces, ice-breaking ships, bases and ports across the arctic and is planning on bringing in new nuclear submarines. The Harper government has said that it will establish a new coast guard HQ in the arctic in 2013 and send eight ice-class patrol boats there at a cost of $3 billion. Another war in the making and one the working class has no stake in.
Every second of every day a river of poison consisting of mercury, iron, aluminum, and nickel flows down the hillsides of San Carlos Creek, twenty miles south of San Jose, California. This is from the now neglected New Idira mine, once the second largest mercury mine in the US. The Environmental Protection Agency has measured the mercury that flows into the creek at levels that are toxic to wild life for more than thirty kilometers. It is five times more than the safe level for humans and affects the nervous system, the brain, kidneys, lungs, and the immune system. During the rainy months, the creek's water flows into the San Joaquin River that flows into the San Francisco Bay, a source of drinking water for two-thirds of California. The EPA and the state have been pressured for fifteen years to clean it up but the first stage alone would cost $10 million. Money counts, people don't.
A new study shows that rich people are more likely to engage in unethical behaviour than poor folk -- like cutting off motorists, lying in negotiations, and cheating to win a prize (really!). These were the findings from researchers at the universities of California and Toronto that were published in the proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA. They also found wealthy people were more likely to steal valued items than poor people. Another good reason to abolish a system that creates rich and poor. John Ayers

THE REAL ARTFUL DODGERS

It is a favourite trick of the popular press to depict the unemployed and the poorly paid sections of the working class as cunning recipients of state hand-outs and useless parasites on society, but the super-rich could teach them a thing or two when it comes to being artful dodgers. "Almost one in 10 people earning more than £10 million a year is paying less than the 20 per cent basic rate of income tax, new figures have shown. Treasury officials argued the revelation underlined the need for action to prevent the super-rich exploiting loopholes to reduce their tax bill below that of low-paid workers. The figures, released by the Government, show 6 per cent of £10 million-plus earners pay less than 10 per cent in tax and another three per cent pay below the basic 20 per cent rate. Fewer than three quarters pay more than 40 per cent." (Daily Telegraph, 16 April) The only thing we would argue about in this report is the use of the word "earn"! RD

THE ARROGANCE OF WEALTH

The wealth of UAE billionaires increased by more than 10 per cent to $7.6 billion, according to Forbes Middle East Arab billionaires ranking. In the UAE, according to Forbes Middle East, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair's wealth improved to $2.9 billion from $2.7 billion, Saif Al Ghurair's assets jumped to $2 billion from $1.7 billion, Abdulla Al Futtaim's holdings increased to $1.6 billion over $1.3 billion. "The motivation behind publishing this list is to deliver the powerful message, that behind these billions lay wealthy individuals who have fought long and hard, and given generously. These success stories present lessons to be learned that money cannot buy, and serve as an inspiration to us all," Forbes Middle East's editor-in-chief, Khuloud Al Omian commented on the ranking." (Khaleej Times, 9 April) The amassing of such immense amounts of wealth is credited to individuals who have "fought hard and long" and supposedly "serve as an inspiration to us all". In fact their greatest attribute was to be born to some wealth blood-sucking member of the owning class. RD

MINING FOR MILLIONS

Glencore, the commodity and mining firm worth £27bn, stands accused in the Democratic Republic of the Congo of dumping raw acid and profiting from children working 150ft underground. When Glencore floated in London, five of its partners became billionaires, but the biggest winner was Glencore's chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, whose stake is worth £4bn. "In his first television interview, Glasenberg said that Glencore took corporate responsibility seriously, saying: "We care about the environment. We care about the local communities." But an investigation by the BBC's Panorama has found Glencore dumping acid into a river and it discovered children as young as 10 working in the Tilwezembe mine, which was officially closed by Glencore in 2008." (Guardian, 14 April) When it comes to amassing billions the owning class care little for the environment or the plight of exploited children. RD

The Scottish Commons

The idea of individual (or private) ownership of fixed parcels of land is a relatively recent phenomenon, and by no means universal. Tom Johnston’s skill as a historian was to be able to demonstrate that the rapine, murder, massacre, cheating and court harlotry that led to the accumulation of land in the hands of Scotland’s feudal barons was rooted in historical fact. In particular, Johnston exposed how one of the greatest land grabs was engineered - that of Scotland’s extensive Burgh Commons.

The vast territories granted to Scotland’s Royal Burghs were designed to act as a bulwark against noble power. According to Johnston, such acreages, together with other common lands, extended in the latter part of the sixteenth century to fully one half of the entire area of Scotland.

But this valuable inheritance did not to last long:
"Until the Burgh Reform Act of 1833 the landowners and the commercial bourgeois class controlled all burghal administration of the common lands, and controlled it in such a way that vast areas of common lands were quietly appropriated, trust funds wholly disappeared, and to such a length did the plunder and the corruption develop, that some ancient burghs with valuable patrimonies went bankrupt, some disappeared altogether from the map of Scotland, some had their charters confiscated, and those which survived to the middle of the nineteenth century were left mere miserable starved caricatures of their former greatness, their Common Good funds gone, their lands fenced in private ownership, and their treasurers faced often with crushing debts. As late as 1800 there were great common properties extant; many burghs, towns and villages owned lands and mosses; Forres engaged in municipal timbergrowing; Fortrose owned claypits; Glasgow owned quarries and coalfields; Hamilton owned a coal pit; Irvine had mills, farms and a loom shop ...."
By the time the Royal Commission on Municipal Corporations in Scotland reported in 1835.
“Wick had lost in the law courts its limited right of commonty over the hill of Wick, and owned no property; Abernethy owned nothing, nor did Alloa. Bathgate was the proud possessor of the site of a fountain and a right of servitude over four and a half acres of moorland. Beith had no local government of any kind; Bo’ness owned nothing; Castle-Douglas owned only a shop; Coldstream was stripped bare, not even possessing 'rights in its street dung'; Crieff had two fields; Dalkeith nothing; Dunkeld nothing; and Dunoon, nothing”"

Nor is such overt municipal corruption and common land annexed ancient history. Take the case of the Cuillin of Skye which were put up for sale in March 2000. Much of the outcry which followed centred on whether or not MacLeod actually owned the Cuillin in the first place. Extensive research culminated in the Crown Estate commissioning a QC’s opinion which concluded in essence that MacLeod owned the Cuillin since his 1611 Crown charter was “capable of including the Cuillin” and he had enjoyed “possession” for an uninterrupted period of at least 20 years. It is important to note that the Crown never examined the question of whether MacLeod’s ancestors had actually been granted the Cuillin in 1611. It is clear that the land put up for sale had never been granted to MacLeod and to this day remains a Crown Common. But the laws of landownership in Scotland are constructed in such a way that render such questions irrelevant. Land which was never granted to MacLeod has become, by default and by neglect by the guardians of the public realm, part of the private possession of one man. It is hardly surprising that the Crown Estate never sought to dig deeper.

Many of the displaced people ended up in burgeoning industrial cities such as Glasgow, where their descendants formed an integral part of the Labour movement.

(The legacy of Scotland’s Burgh Commons is still present across Scotland, for example,in the North and South Inches of Perth, the racecourse at Musselburgh, the mussel beds at Tain, the links at Dornoch, the 1700 acres of Lauder Common and the other commons of the Borders which form the basis for the Common Riding ceremonies each summer)

http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/scotlands_commonweal_2.pdf

SOCIALIST PARTY PUBLIC MEETING. FREE ENTRY

Glasgow Branch of the Socialist Party GB

Don't recycle Capitalism, BIN IT

We are constantly invited by the capitalist media to have an opinion on matters which are considered by the owners to be important. There is no shortage of crazy belief systems being promoted and discussed on television and other media, albeit in a rather superficial way. Some of these crazy belief systems constitute the main barriers to socialism. But we never hear of the stark choice between socialism and capitalism. This is not an accident….

LAND OF THE FREE?

Politicians in the USA like to depict America as the epitome of freedom and democracy and sneer at the repressive measures of totalitarian states, but their boasts are ill-founded. "America which is known as the freest country in the world has incarcerated more of it's citizens than the rest of the world combined. 7.1 million Americans are either in prison, on probation or under correctional supervision. The numbers continue to climb each year as more prisons are built nationwide." (CNN News, 2 April) RD

SQUALOR AND SPLENDOUR

The awful poverty and downright squalor of the Chinese working class is amongst the worst in the world but the affluence of their owning class is equally obvious. "The Chinese economy is booming at a blistering pace. It is driven largely by the Fudai: the superrich who call the superpower home. Many are just in their forties. From building 30-storey towers in just 14 days, to amassing a luxury fleet of sports cars or a private jet - China's million millionaires and 600 billionaires are helping to change the country's landscape. And China's mad rush to urbanisation is only helping these elites get richer and richer." (Aljazeera, 10 April) That this country of billionaires and poverty can still claim to be communist is surely one of the world's greatest travesties.RD

SLAVERY AND OPULENCE

Arising out of the case of a 13 year old girl who worked as a maid (for a couple who had gone on vacation to Thailand) and who had been rescued by firemen from a locked apartment, some staggering figures on child exploitation were revealed. The girl described a life akin to slavery, child welfare officials said. Her uncle had sold her to a job placement agency, which sold her to the couple, both doctors. The girl was paid nothing. She said the couple barely fed her and beat her if her work did not meet expectations."The International Labor Organization has found that India has 12.6 million laborers between the ages of 5 and 14, with roughly 20 per cent working as domestic help. Other groups place the figure at 45 million or higher. Unicef has said India has more child laborers than any other country in the world. .... Mala Bhandari, who runs Childline, a government hot line for child workers, said India's urbanization and the rise of two-income families were driving demand for domestic help. Children are cheaper and more pliant than adults; Ms. Bhandari said a family might pay a child servant only $40 a month, less than half the wage commonly paid to an adult, if such servants are paid at all." (New YorkTimes, 4 April) In stark contrast to the the life of that hapless 13 year old girl we have the case of Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire industrialist, who has several hundred domestic workers in his skyscraper residence in Mumbai, the country's financial capital. Child slavery for one luxurious opulence for the other. RD

Roman in the gloamin'

A great deal of patriotic pride has been associated with the idea that Scotland was never conquered by the Romans. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, there was a profound and fundamental shift in thinking across Europe in terms of how countries imagined their relationship with the Roman Empire. As new political ideas about authoritarianism and liberty were discussed, some writers and thinkers sought to identify their country’s national spirit with the indigenous peoples conquered by Rome. Rediscovering resistance to Rome went hand in hand with the nationalisms that swept across Europe in the 19th century. Scotland – despite its more recent incorporation into the United Kingdom – was no different, and a great deal of patriotic pride was associated with the idea that Scotland was never subdued to the might of Rome.

According to Rebecca H. Jones in "Roman Camps in Scotland", the idea of the “unconquered Scotland” is a myth. The idea of an intermittent pillage is debunked. She has shown that Scotland has more traces of camps – temporary or semi-temporary stopping places for the legions – than any other part of Europe. Rome’s presence north of Hadrian’s Wall was more persistent and more imposing than the idea of the sole hold-out in Europe might suggest. The decline of Rome’s significance in Scotland was more to do with apathy and poverty than with Braveheart-like sending them home again to think again. As the Empire fragmented and over-extended, successive Emperors thought to control the heart around the Mediterranean rather than bother with a province which gave little to the imperial coffers and cost a lot to keep going

The Robber Barons

Scottish "noble" families have survived for centuries. In many cases these are people who gained control of large areas of the country by the lottery of inheritance. Often their fore bearers murdered and stole for their estates or were awarded land as payment from a monarch. In the early 1990s at the top of the aristocratic ladder were Britain's 24 Dukes and Duchesses and no fewer than eight of them (33%) were Scots. They were the Dukes of Hamilton, Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch and Queensberry, Fife, Montrose, Roxburghe and Sutherland. Some of their titles predated the Union of 1707. Next are the Marquises, and again the proportion of Scots is high. Scotland in 1992 had only 9% of Britain's population but it had more than 25% of its Marquises, these being Aberdeen and Temair, Ailsa, Bute, Huntley, Linlithgow, Lothian, Queensberry, Tweedale and Zetland. Of the five women who are Countesses in their own right four are Scots: Dysart, Loudon, Mar and Sutherland. Of the 16 women in 1992 who were baronesses in their own right, five held Scots titles.

Their ancestors murdered and stole their way to a fortune in medieval times. The inheritors of this stolen wealth have continued to prosper under capitalism. The small landed clique has in their time held absolute power. The courts were packed with their lackeys, and their class sat in judgement over everyone else. In church, the hand-picked ministers sermoned from the pulpit, about the "rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate" and of how god "made everyone and ordered their estate".

Under their despotic rule Scotland's miners were enslaved along with their families until the end of the 18th century. Not only did they oppose trade unions, their tame Judges hanged and sentenced trade unionists to transportation for life. With their off-spring in the House of Commons and pater in the Lords they opposed every progressive measure, decade after decade. They made their peace with the aspiring Victorian capitalists and together they turned their fire on the working class. The new capitalist class soon acquired titles and land of their own. Marrying their sons and daughters into the nobility. Their descendants receiving a dash of the old blue blood.

This, landed elite, now provide a useful cover for today's robber barons that control the market system. With their romantic ancient titles, fancy robes, court ritual (most of it made up in the last century by the Victorians) and public school accents, the Monarchy and the Aristocracy are supposed to provide the glue that binds the nation together. They are the guardians of our heritage. An historical pageant of heroes, battles and daring-do. It's all a lie, a great big historical con-trick. The monarchy and their landed hangers-on are a parasitical class. Descended from murderers, thieves and rogues. For a thousand years they have used and abused the land for their own purpose, pleasure and profit. The lands that their descendants hold today are stolen property. Acquired, by theft and fraud. Their title deeds are murder, massacre and rape. The vast wealth of, Buccleuch, Cawdor, Atholl, Bute and their, ilk. was created, in the first place, by a medieval brigands.

The Atholls trace their line back to a murderous Flemish pirate called Freskin. The family, have a great fondness for plunder.

The "sly sleekit" Campbells in their various guises, are a family who have supplied some of the biggest rogues ever to disgrace Scotland. You name it they've done it. Treachery, theft and murder are just some of this mob's specialities. Nothing stopped this gang of thieves. They grabbed the lands of Cawdor through kidnap and child molesting. In the early 16th century the chief of the Argyle branch of the tribe had his son kidnap and marry the 12 year-old heiress to the land's of Cawdor.

The Scotts of Buccleuch have moved on from being cattle rustling reivers to the dukes. The original Scott was one Richard, a traitorous character who signed the infamous 'ragman's roll' and sold out to Edward the First. This family of bandits achieved their Dukedom not by so called noble deeds, but by marrying a young child off to a son of Charles the Second.

The Stuarts of Bute are descended, like the present head of the Windsor clan, from an illegitimate daughter of the first Stewart King Robert the Second. This character was a useless nonentity. The Stewart's were a dysfunctional lot. James the First was murdered by members of his own family. His grief-stricken widow had the perpetrators roasted over an open fire. James the Third was stabbed to death after a family feud, when he was defeated by his own son. The Stewart's brought ruin on Scotland time and time again. One of them betrayed William Wallace for £100 worth of land. It all came to a sticky end at Culloden, when the not-so-Bonnie Prince Charlie fled the field, and left his troops to the tender mercies of Butcher Cumberland

John the 3rd Earl of Bute had a great fondness for money, other peoples. He wangled himself the job of his dreams as First Lord of the Treasury. This 18th century upper crust wide-boy had very sticky fingers. He managed to steal a fortune before he was found out and driven from office by popular demand. The bold John had looted enough though to build himself a large mansion in London stuffed full of art treasures. The present 7th Marquis, also Earl of Dumfries (John Bute as he prefers to be called) the former racing driver, inherited a fortune of £110 million, needless to say he never offered to re-pay what his ancestor stole.

The Douglas, Hamilton and Home clans have rampaged across the centuries. These three dynasties are, linked, by a thousand threads. Its hard tell were one lot ends and the other begins.

The late Duke of Hamilton is Scotland's premier Duke and has more titles than you can shake a stick at. He is also a descendent of the Douglas clan.

The Douglas's are another tribe, which has that rascal Freskin the pirate in its lineage. Their most famous historical figure was the 'Black Douglas'. Portrayed as a Scottish hero, he was nothing of the kind. In reality he was a bloodthirsty psychopath. One of his so-called heroic deeds was to massacre a group of unarmed soldiers on their way to church on a Palm Sunday. He rose to prominence under Robert the Bruce.

Bruce like the rest of his kind knew how to play both sides. This Norman whose family had long held lands in England (his father was Edward the First's governor in Carlisle) put the interests of Bruce before anything else. He even fought alongside Edward against the Scots. He grabbed the throne after murdering another claimant 'Red' John Combine in a Dumfries church. Comyn not the brightest of a very dim bunch turned up to meet the noble Robert on his own and Bruce stuck the knife in. After defeating the English based Norman's and their local Norman allies at Bannockburn, Bruce carved up the country amongst his Norman pals.

As for the poor Scottish peasants, life went on as before. It was nasty, brutal and short.

The founder of the glorious Hamilton bloodline was a Norman robber baron Walter Fitz-Gilbert. This thug bolted north after murdering a bandit with a bigger gang than him. His passport, to the big-time came, through an act of betrayal. The bold Walter had sworn allegiance to Edward the First and got fixed up with a nice little job -keeper of Bothwell castle. On hearing the result from Bannockburn, it was make your mind-up time big style. He flew the English standard and welcomed all those fleeing the battle. Quickly turning his coat, he handed the lot of them over to the Bruce. This one act of betrayal made the families fortune.

The Hamilton's piled up a fortune from mining before nationalisation. Whilst the miners of Lanarkshire sweated in the bowels of the earth the Hamilton's sat back and counted the royalties. Such was the greed of this crew that they allowed their stately home Hamilton Palace to be undermined. It had to be demolished in the twenties.

The third leg of this noble treble is provided by the Homes. They claim decent from an old Scottish King called William the Lion. This individual's nickname was a huge exaggeration. The Homes turned murder theft and treachery into a fine art. Over the years they feathered their nest well with mining royalties. Douglas-Home who was a Tory Prime Minister in the sixties was the 14th Earl of Home.

The Drummond Castle Estate lands in Perthshire has been passed down the generations to Baroness Willoughby, daughter of the last Earl of Ancaster. The Ancaster’s acquired the land by marrying into the Drummond family. The Drummonds were gifted much of these vast estates by courting the favour of Robert the Bruce and then Robert II. The first Earl of Moray was the illegitimate child of James V and given numerous titles by his father. The Moray family’s estates were stolen from the Church. Much of this land still remains under the control of the current Earl whose late wife was the elder daughter of the 7th Earl of Mansfield.

The Earl of Airlie and The Marquis of Huntly are but two minor aristocrats in terms of landownership, and yet their position as landowners in their respective localities brings with the title certain forms of symbolic and ceremonial power.

The Earl of Airlie is reputed to own 37,300 acres of land north of Kirriemuir in Angus. The Earl is in many ways the quintessential Scottish aristocrat, living in the royal county of Angus alongside the Queen and the Earls of Strathmore, Southesk, Dalhousie and Woolton. His principal residence, Cortachy Castle, is set in heavily wooded land beside the River South Esk. Educated at Eton, and having served with the Scots Guards, he remains well connected with the ceremonial establishment. Like past Earls of Airlie who owned land in Glenisla, the Earl of Airlie's patronage gave him control over the proceedings of the Gathering of the Glenisla Highland and Friendly Society, a Gathering which dates back to 1852.
The Airlie family are illustrative of the fact that networks and family connections play a key role in preserving and supporting the landowning interest. Networks in conjunction with organisations such as the Scottish Landowners Federation help to sustain a core body of beliefs and attitudes with regards to preservation of sporting estates, the sanctity of private property rights, and exaggerated claims concerning the contributions which rural sports make to both the local economy and rural employment. Such connections and indeed the sporting season itself provide insights into the heart of the British and Scottish establishment. The late Queen Mother was the daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore (Glamis in Angus). The Queen (land in Angus and Aberdeenshire) herself has a cousin, the fifth Earl of Granville (North Uist Estate) whose daughter is married to Jonathan Bulmer (Amhuinnsuidhe Estate in Inverness-shire) whose brother David also owns Ledmore Estate in Sutherland. The second Earl of Granville's daughter was the mother of John Granville Morrison, Lord Margadale (Islay Estate). The Queen is also related to the Earl of Airlie (Airlie Estates) through his brother, Sir Angus Ogilvy who is married to Princess Alexandra of Kent. The Countess of Airlie is also Lady to the Bedchamber of the Queen. The Queen's aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, is the third daughter of the seventh Duke of Buccleuch whose widow was the daughter of the 13th Earl of Home. The current Duke of Buccleuch's sister is the Duchess of Northumberland (Burncastle in Berwickshire).

The Marquis of Huntly remains in charge of Aboyne Castle Estate Trustees and yet perhaps the significance of the position is more symbolically displayed at the Aboyne Highland Gathering, a Gathering at which a nominal unity sometimes conceals the fact that at the same event there co-exist different seating arrangements, different styles of dress, different social codes and prescriptions, all of which serve to unite and segregate different social groups. At Aboyne the ceremonial display of flags is but one small indicator of the social spaces which different people occupy. At the opening of the Gathering the Royal banner or flag is the first to be raised, shortly followed by the banner belonging to the Marquis of Huntly, who fulfils the dual roles of feudal superior and local patron to the Aboyne Highland Gatherings and Games. Subsequent banners, raised on either side of the two flags, tend to provide not just a galaxy of colours but also an insight into the upper circles of power and social structure within the district, the Highlands and Scotland.

Ever since 1603 when James the Sixth moved the Scottish Court down to London, the Scottish elites have taken their cue from London. The process continued all through the 18th and 19th centuries as Scotland's 'Noble' families joined the Anglican Church, sent their children to English public schools and universities, married their English counterparts, and used their Scottish estates to fund their social life in London. This has had a profound anglicising effect on the influential upper reaches of Scottish society. To some extent the Scottish upper classes have become nominal Scots, Scots in name only. They are Scots who speak with English accents - or at least that variety of English accent which has become the language of power and influence. They are educated in English public schools like Eton College, Winchester and Harrow or English-style public schools like Fettes, Glenalmond and Gordonstoun which happen to be in Scotland. They prefer the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the universities of Scotland. They also have a distinct tendency to marry their counterparts south of the border, who, very often inherit their land and property. Which is one of the reasons so much of rural and highland Scotland is owned from addresses in the better-heeled parts of the Home Counties and the West Country.

There are nine Scottish Dukes; Abercorn, Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch, Fife, Hamilton, Montrose, Roxburghe and Sutherland. Six of them were educated at Eton, and only two in Scotland - The Duke of Argyll at Glenalmond and the Duke of Fife at Gordonstoun. And these schools while in Scotland have nothing to do with the Scottish educational system. There are sixteen 'Knights' of the Thistle, Scotland's highest order of chivalry. Only three were educated inside the Scottish system. There are 31 Queen's Lords Lieutenant in Scotland and there are There are 32 Queen's Bodyguard in Scotland, again most came from the same anglicised, social milieu of English public schools. The Scottish upper class - the social elite - is now more or less totally anglicised.


http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/mccrone.htm
http://www.redflag.org.uk/articles/issix/is6noble.html
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/tjohnsto.htm
http://www.siol-nan-gaidheal.org/englishing.htm

A sharing, caring Scotland

A total of 2,025,400 people had put their names forward for the NHS Organ Donor Register as of 31 March - almost 40% of the population. Across the UK, the number of people on the organ donation register stands at 30%.

Three people in the UK die every day because of a lack of access to organs. The Scottish government also said the number of people who died while waiting for organs fell from 38 in 2010-11 to 36 in 2011-12. The tragic fact is that more than 600 people in Scotland are still waiting for a life-saving transplant.

RECESSION? WHAT RECESSION?

We are supposed to be living in an economic depression but this does not affect large sections of the owning class. More than 200 real estate brokers and lawyers, filed into an Off Broadway theatre last month to discuss a real estate boom. "While the brokers sipped wine and nibbled cheese, a panel of lawyers and a banker reviewed some of the biggest sales made to Russians, including the $188 million spent on properties in Florida and New York by trusts linked to Dmitry Rybolovlev, who made billions from potash fertilizer; the $48 million that a composer, Igor Krutoy, paid for an apartment at the Plaza Hotel; and the $37 million spent by Andrei Vavilov, a former deputy finance minister, on a penthouse at the Time Warner Center. .... Over the past four years, Russians and other citizens of the former Soviet Union have signed contracts to buy more than $1 billion worth of residential real estate in the United States, according to estimates from lawyers and brokers." (New York Times, 3 April) As the number of billionaires in Russia and Ukraine has more than tripled since 2009, to 104, according to Forbes, it is far from a depression for them. RD

TAXING YOUR INCREDULITY

A study by HM Revenue and customs found that the extremely rich are using avoidance schemes to reduce their income tax rate to an average of 10 per cent - less than half the level paid by the average Briton. The Chancellor personally studied the "anonymised" copies of the tax returns submitted by some of the country's wealthiest citizens which showed some people are able to avoid paying income tax entirely. "Mr Osborne told The Daily Telegraph: "I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it's within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don't think that's right. "I'm talking about people right at the top. I'm talking about people with incomes of many millions of pounds a year." (Daily Telegraph, 10 April) For a Chancellor of the Exchequer to be "shocked" and "don't think that's right" is indeed incredible. Millionaires protecting their property is the very basis of capitalism. RD

Scots Land?

In Scotland's feudal system of land tenure all rights of ownership are vested in the Crown as Paramount Superior. All rights of land ownership are deemed to derive from the Crown which is the ultimate owner in Scotland. However, it is hard to believe in an advanced industrialised democracy that a natural asset as basic as land can still be largely controlled by a small band of aristocrats. Yet in modern day Scotland a system of land ownership which is feudal and hierarchical has remained substantially intact since the 11th century. A mere 579 private landowners own 50 percent of all land north of the border, giving Scotland the narrowest concentration of land wealth in the whole of Europe. Even in industrialised parts of the area such as the "Mid-Scotland and Fife" EU parliamentary constituency, a small group of private landowners and aristocrats still control much of the land. The aristocrats of the houses of Argyll, Buccleuch, Home, Roxburghe, Stair, Airlie, Lothian, Montrose, Hamilton, Moray, Westminster, Burton, Cowdray, Dulverton and others still control about 13% of Scotland. The private ownership of land has allowed a tiny minority of people to control economic and social activity in Scotland, a small number of people are able to disproportionately influence the lives and environment of others.

Tom Johnston in his 1909 book Scotland’s Noble Families wrote: “Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen by either force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues… A democracy ignorant of the past is not qualified either to analyse the present or to shape the future and so, in the interests of the High Priests of Politics and the Lordly Money-Changers of Society, great care has been taken to offer us stories of useless pageantry, chronicles of the birth and death of Kings, annals of Court intrigue and international war, while withheld from us were the real facts and narratives of moment, the loss of our ancient freedoms, the rape of our common lands and the shameless and dastardly methods by which a few selected stocks snatched the patrimony of the people."

He denounced the Scottish aristocracy on the grounds that three-quarters of them were descendants of foreign freebooters who forcibly took possession of our land after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

“Your land, eh?”, asks the miner.
“Yes”, replies the laird, “and my grouse and my deer.”
“And who did you get this land from?”
“Well, I inherited it from my father.”
“And who did he get it from?” the miner insists.
“He inherited it from his father, of course. The land has been in my family for over 400 years,” the laird proudly declared .
“OK, so how did your family come to own this land 400 years ago?” the miner asks.
“Well....actually.... they fought for it!”
“Fine,” replies the miner. “Take your jacket off and I’ll fight you now for it.”

If it was only that easy but the story demonstrates is not that all land is illegally held and so it can justify seizing land by force but that historically, legal and political systems have acknowledged rights to land on the basis that the ownership is already properly established. Historically, such claims can be relatively easily disputed and it is only the existence of an agreed code of law that prevents rival claims being entertained. Rights in land are entirely dependent for their legitimacy on the wider agreement of the society upon whose legal system such rights rest.

Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), Advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History wrote in his Scotch Legal Antiquities,
“Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable - the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter - is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors - clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it came to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”

Not only did the poor have no lawyers. They spoke no Latin either and were not in the habit of traveling to Edinburgh on a regular basis to examine the title deeds of the nobility. In Scotland, indeed in the whole of Britain, centuries of enclosure and eviction created a vast class of displaced people whose only recourse was to migrate to the industrial centres. This proved quite a convenient source of labour for the emerging industrial owners, who frequently converted their growing wealth into political power by purchasing land. This power was also reinforced through the provision of tied housing for their landless labourers.

Appealing to such concept as the "national heritage" allowed the Lords and lairds to insinuate their own histories and that of their families into that of the nation. They can present themselves not simply as the owners of appreciating economic assets, but as the "keepers of the nation's soul", the phrase used by the National Trust for Scotland. Scotland's lairds have sought to convert their own histories into that of the nation, so that, by implication, one cannot abolish one without the other. In recent years, landowners have also adapted their claim to authority not only based on their legal claim, but on the view that they are the proper managers - stewards - of Scotland's "natural heritage". It helps this claim that purchasers of land often view land as a means of consumption rather than production, that they have bought land for reasons of status conferment and consumption, rather than or as well as for its economic potential as a tradable commodity. In other words, they are making use of forms of what academics called cultural capital (rather than material/financial capital) to position themselves in the field. When they are most successful in doing this, management science conservationists have to work around and through them. They are involved in "objectifying" Scotland's natural heritage in such a way that assumes the rightness of the social order.

This "capture" of Scotland's heritage is an important weapon in class survival. The landowning establishment among Scotland's elite continue to have their links into financial and money-making circles, as well as considerable cultural power. The "mighty magnates" of 19th century Scotland - the men (and some women) who headed the great houses - were essentially a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial class, making their money from rents and investments. They were sufficiently astute to invest in the new industrial capitalism which ran Scotland economically and politically for so long, while being strongly represented on the boards of the major banks and finance houses. At the turn of the century, The Marquess of Linlithgow, for example, was a director of the Bank of Scotland, and Standard Life; the Duke of Buccleuch, of the Royal Bank, Standard Life and Scottish Equitable; the Earl of Mansfield, of the National Bank, and Scottish Equitable; and the Marquess of Tweeddale, of the Commercial Bank, Edinburgh Life, and Scottish Widows. Such hegemony has, of course, eroded significantly with the decline of indigenous Scottish capitalism and its replacement with multinational corporations. Nevertheless, the banks and finance houses still find it useful to have titled property represented on the board. Economic power in Scotland is an amalgam of old and new wealth, the individual and the corporate, the indigenous and the foreign, the private and the public. Commenting in the late 1970s, one journalist observed that Scotland's elites "all know each other - a tight circle of politicians, businessmen, civil servants, lawyers, trade unionists, churchmen, academics, and a nostalgic sprinkling of titled gentry" (C.Baur, The Scotsman, 18 September 1978).

The power and influence of thosed landed magnates has long been identified as one of the key features of landownership in Scotland. By and large there has been little movement in the Top Twenty chart of landowners in Scotland for more than a century. The mighty magnates of the 1990s such as the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Argyll, the Farquharsons of Invercauld, the Duke of Westminster, the Earl of Seafield, the late Duke of Atholl, and the Countess of Sutherland owned great acreage in 1875, the last occasion when a comprehensive land register was compiled. The 1871 official enquiry into landownership in Britain was designed to show that land was far more equitably distributed than the radical critics of the day made out. What it actually revealed was a pattern of monopolistic than almost any other country in Europe. In 1872, the 1500 largest landowners in Scotland held over 90% of the country, a figure which had only dropped a percentage or two thirty years later. A small group of landowning families has remained relatively stable throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such have witnessed the arrival and departure of various people who might fit more easily within any nominal notion of a capitalist class or business elite.
Those whose ownership of Highland estates has not been dependent upon old hereditary wealth or have been part of a traditional labouring aristocracy have been joined at various points throughout the 1990s by the nouveau riches such as Philip Rhodes the property developer, Ann Gloag owner of the Stagecoach bus company, Peter de Savaray, Malcolm Potier, Keith Schellenberg, Mohammed Al Fayed owner of Harrods, Professor Maruma the German spiritual artist, and Fred Olsen the Norwegian shipping magnate. Undoubtedly, the mighty magnates have also been joined in the 1990s by a number of corporate lairds and trusts such as the Bocardo Société Anonyme and Ross Estates Ltd, the Co-op Wholesale Society Ltd, Eagle Star, Gallagher Pensions Trust Ltd, Midland Bank, the John Muir Trust, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Church of Scotland and the Assynt Crofters Trust. The State itself through the Crown Estate, the Ministry of Defence, the Forestry Commission and Scottish Natural Heritage still owns vast tracts of land. Yet what is significant is not so much the decline and fall of a landed elite or a traditional aristocracy, or even the extent to which changing patterns of wealth behind estate ownership emerged, but rather the stability of landownership and in particular the enduring nature of Scotland's magnates and those members of a British aristocracy who own land in Scotland.

Scotland's landed class has to an astonishing degree survived almost a century of change. Survival strategies have included marrying into new money, setting up trusts, carving out a niche in the city, letting out sporting rights, promoting family and heritage and selling off fractions of the estate. Despite the cost of maintaining huge estates and crumbling castles, inheritance taxes, hostile governments, calls for land reform and public access to land, Scotland's magnates and those members of the British aristocracy who own land in Scotland remain remarkably resilient.

Take the reported exchange in the Westminster's voting lobbies between the Tory MPs Tim Sainsbury of the supermarket dynasty, and Nicholas Soames, a descendant of the Duke of ­Marlborough, when the latter was dressed in his hunting gear. “Going rat-catching, Nick?” asked Sainsbury, to which the noble Soames is said to have replied: “F**k off, you grocer. You don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.”

The aristocracy may be in decline, but their fall is some way off yet !

Top 20 aristocratic landowners in Scotland 1995
Owner Acres
Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry 261600
Capt AAC Farquharson of Invercauld 120500
Earl of Seafield 101000
Duke of Westminster 95100
Crown Estate Commissioners 94015
Countess of Sutherland 83239
Viscount Cowdray 76600
Sir Donald Cameron of Locheil 76000
Duke of Roxburghe 65600
Baroness Willoughby de Eresby 63200
Duke of Argyll 60800
John A Mackenzie of Gairloch 56900
Earl of Cawdor 56800
The Queen 55270
Marquess of Bute 53990
Sir Ivar Colquhoun of Luss 50000
Lord Burton 48000
Earl of Dalhousie 47200
Lady Anne Bentinck 45000
Earl of Stair 43674
Total 1,554,488
% of Scotland - top 20 aristocratic estates 8.01%
Total Acreage above 5000 acres owned by aristocracy 2,554,399
As a % of Scotland's total land mass 13.16%
http://www.scottishaffairs.org/backiss/pdfs/sa19/sa19_Jarvie_Jackson_and_Higgins.pdf

Scotland 19,068,631acres 100%
Urban 585,627 acres 3%
Rural 18,483,004 acres 97%

Of the rural land, 2, 275,768 acres are in the ownership of public bodies
and 16,207,236 are in the ownership of private bodies.
Of this privately-owned rural land:
One quarter is owned by 66 landowners in estates of 30,700 acres and larger
One third is owned by 120 landowners in estates of 21,000 acres and larger
One half is owned by 343 landowners in estates of 7,500 acres and larger
Two thirds is owned by 1252 landowners in estates of 1 ,200 acres and larger

Two thirds of Scotland is owned by one four thousandth (0.025%) of the people!
http://tipiglen.co.uk/property.html

REGION
Fife
325,865 area in acres
41 number of owners
111,300 acreage held by these owners
34.5% percentage of region
Central
666,007 area in acres
92 number of owners
331,336 area in acres
49.7% percentage of region
Tayside (part)
377,979 area in acres
23 number of owners
201,376 area in acres
53.3% percentage of region
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/documents/leonard.pdf