The instinctive socialism of many MSPs has created a climate in which big businesses are reluctant to invest in Scotland. The financial services industry in Edinburgh flourishes, but not much else is. Glasgow is suffering hard times. The city for years possessed a reputation for economic and cultural energy. This has now faltered. The collapse of Silicon Glen was a sorry blow to regional self-confidence. Glasgow has a lower business start-up rate than the rest of Scotland, together with the worst 3-year survival rate for new companies, and an exceptionally high insolvency rate. Many clever young Glaswegians are packing and leaving. A survey by business consultancy Grant Thornton show that the number of companies in Glasgow has fallen by 17.4% over the past 20 years, while those in Edinburgh has risen by more than a third. Glasgow’s population has fallen by more than 125,000. Scottish population levels are being maintained only by the doubtful aid of England’s pensioners- the country has become a destination of choice for southern retirement settlers in search of tranquillity rather than commercial activity. If there is one thing Scotland emphatically does not need, it is more tranquillity.
Grant Thornton lays considerable blame at the door of governments which have tried to replace dying local industries with big overseas employers. The report says baldly: ‘The spirit of entrepreneurialism in Scotland is not what it was’. New business is also being drawn to Edinburgh rather than Glasgow, because of companies’ belief that they may profit from proximity to the Scottish parliament. Overall, a new company in Orkney is more likely to survive than one on the mainland of Scotland. New businesses in Scotland are less likely to survive their first three years than those of any other region in the UK.
Local business leaders blame lack of investment in infrastructure and high business taxes. Yet it was old-fashioned destructive trade union militancy which caused Ford to abandon car-making in Dundee in favour of Spain. Scottish politicians and trade unionists fought a fierce battle to maintain steel-making at Ravenscraig, when it was plain to any sensible person that this was doomed. The Global Entrepreneurial Monitor based at Strathclyde University, which surveys 37 countries, placed Scotland 5th from bottom of its index of entrepreurial activity. There still seems a reluctance, strongly expressed in the Scottish Parliament, to accept that the old days when companies could be compelled or bribed to relocate in Scotland, as was Hillman to Linwood with such disastrous ultimate consequences, are long gone. Investors must be wooed against fierce competition. They can no longer be bludgeoned.
For many years, Scotland boasted the best education system in the British Isles. Yet today, it is recognised that public education north of the border is in worse shape than down south. 23.6% of Edinburgh parents opt for private education. The comparable figure for Aberdeen is 13.5%, for Glasgow 12.2%. This is not because parents in these cities are rich, but because they are desperate. Today, there is a recognition among thoughtful Scots that the old tradition of Scottish socialism, the gut belief that the state must and will solve all problems, has failed them. Yet paradoxically, among vast numbers of Scottish people, there is an anger about their economic and social predicament, for which they still regard the state as scapegoat. All political parties in Scotland put the economy at the centre of their manifestos, and promise support for small companies. Yet a change of public mindset seems more necessary than one of public policy. In short, Scotland faces more serious difficulties than any other part of mainland Britain. Scots are thoroughly aware of this, but remain deeply divided about how best to address it. For sure, investment is needed, but so too is an outward-looking spirit, a determination to address the world in contemporary terms- as the Irish have learned to do with such success- rather than to perceive life through the narrow prism of local prejudices and a historic legacy of grievance which is of scant interest to anyone else in the world, when making hard-headed judgements about where to put their money and business.
Scotland’s fortunes will always be determined by what happens in the Central Belt, focus of population and economic activity. On paper, the fate of the Highlands is marginal. Yet Scotland’s wildernesses exercise a symbolic influence, and occupy an emotional place in national thinking, out of all proportion to the numbers of people who inhabit them. The Scottish Parliament has devoted immense time and energy to the Land Reform Act which it finally passed in 2002. This promises local communities rights to buy estates which are offered for sale; grants unlimited public access by day and night to almost all private land; and gives crofting tenants rights to buy into fisheries adjoining the land they occupy. The economic importance of land reform is slight. The number of people directly affected by it is small, at least in the short-term. Yet it remains a potent image, in the minds of those who perceive Scotland’s history as a story of English exploitation and condescension. The land reform controversy brings together two deeply emotional issues- alleged English misappropriation of Scotland’s heritage, and a class-based distaste for field sports. The latter sentiment, indeed, has gained a grip in modern times both north and south of the border. There is an instinctive suspicion in some circles, and especially among the young, of anything that smacks of what used to be called a ‘toff’, of the traditional pleasures of ‘toffs’. There is a gut dislike of the idea that large areas of the Highland landscape are owned by rich foreigners, who shoot, fish or stalk there. Some of you may be familiar with an influential book entitled ‘Who Owns Scotland ?’ written by a very angry young man named Andy Wightman, and published in Edinburgh in 1996. Wightman wrote: ‘The sporting estate in reality is an indulgence by wealthy people who like hunting. They are uneconomic because they were never designed to be economic. No rural development programme anywhere in the world advocates the sale of land to a few wealthy individuals who will then support the rural economy by injecting cash from outside which will in turn support a few jobs…As James Hunter recently observed when it was suggested that landowners might feel threatened by the developing debate about land ownership: ‘The more they feel threatened in my view the better. They need to feel threatened and they should feel threatened because there can be no future in Britain in the 21st Century for a rural economy dependent on tweedy gentlemen coming from the south to slaughter our wildlife’.
Andy Wightman blamed the situation where only sporting uses were profitable on ‘lack of investment in productive land uses and enterprises…compounded by the narrow outlook of successive proprietors’. He argued that ‘much of the poor land in Scotland is poor not solely through inherent constraints such as soil quality and climate but as a result of abuse and failure to exploit its full potential’.
Much of this is tosh. Throughout history, good men and rich men and many public bodies have poured money into efforts to galvanise northern Scotland. They failed not because will or cash was missing, but because contrary to the fanciful beliefs of zealots such as Wightman and Hunter, it is incredibly difficult to make things work, or pay, in the remotest corners of Britain. Field sports are the only activities which are self-sustaining, environmentally friendly, and funded entirely through the enthusiasm of rich men. They fund the stewardship of Scotland’s great wildernesses, at no cost to its public purse. Land reformers seem socialists of the purest kind, because they assume an almost infinite willingness by the state to fund utopia. Their belief in successful community ownership, and indeed in successful ongoing community husbandry, flies in the face of all historic experience, and of the reality that small farming is nowhere in Europe a profitable activity without public subsidy.
Yet the movement which inspired the Scottish Land Reform Act must be taken seriously, because of the strength of the emotions which underpin it. It is interesting to compare Scotland’s experience of land ownership with that of Ireland. Through centuries of English rule, probably the greatest single grievance among the Irish people was the fact that agricultural land was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of absentee landlords. It is often assumed that big Irish estates were broken up and surrendered to their tenants following compulsory purchase legislation passed by the new Irish government in 1923, after independence. In reality, however, it was the British government which passed a succession of laws designed to transfer land-ownership from big landlords to their tenants, in the last years of the 19th century and the first of the 20th. By a remarkable paradox it was the Conservatives, who fought so bitterly against Irish Home Rule, who sought to make continued British hegemony tolerable by giving Irish tenants access to the land they craved. Moreover, public money was provided to facilitate tenant purchases. That arch-Tory A.J.Balfour wanted to make land transfers compulsory. He described the landlord system as ‘essentially and radically rotten’. Amazingly, liberals and home rulers opposed him. The last and most important of Irish land reform measures, the so-called Wyndham’s act, was passed by a Conservative government in 1903, almost 20 years before Irish independence. Before its passage, there were still over half a million Irish tenant farmers. By 1909, more than 270,000 had purchased their land from landlords with the help of the British Treasury, while a further 46,000 purchases were pending. Only 70,000 tenant holdings were left after Irish independence. Balfour could challenge the new Irish government with some justice in the 1920s, saying: ‘What was the Ireland the Free State took over ? It was the Ireland that we made’.
I hope you will forgive that brief diversion into Irish history, because a comparison is interesting. It demonstrates that the Scottish parliament could claim a precedent within these islands for introducing measures designed to transfer property from big landowners to small ones. This was done a century ago in Ireland by British Tories far more conservative than any politicians in these islands today, to address historic bitterness about the pattern of land ownership in a country where land hunger ran deep through the Celtic soul.
Hereafter, however, historic parallels vanish. Ireland a century ago was an overwhelmingly peasant rural society, dominated by agriculture. The land which lay at the heart of the Irish reform process was tillage, ground worked for corn and potatoes, or grazed by cattle. Most of the land which excites Scottish reformers today offers not the smallest possibility of yielding profit, save through subsidy. Most fishings which come within the horizons of the Land Reform Act require relentless financial support from their owners, rather than offering a prospect of significant income. Such fishings which have so far fallen into community ownership have languished sadly. The world has moved on a long, long way since the Highland Clearances or even since Irish land reform. Agriculture is only a profitable activity on high-quality land, almost none of which is at issue in the Scottish Highlands. The Irish land reform process was designed to provide a new economic and social dispensation for an agricultural people. Scotland is no longer an agricultural society. Moreover, the measures in the Land Reform Act to provide public access to privately-owned lands are so far-reaching that it is plain their purpose is to punish the private landowner more than to profit the citizen with wanderlust.
By far the most productive, in some cases the only genuinely productive activities in many Highland areas are field sports, reflected in the fact that rich people are willing to pay large sums of money to shoot grouse, stalk deer or catch salmon. Yet once again, very few landowners are turning a profit even where they let all their sport. A few years ago four estates in the Tomatin area, typical of their kind, opened their books to public inspection, as part of an effort to induce politicians- and the public- to adopt a more rational view of Highland affairs. These accounts showed that on average, each owner was subsidizing his property to the tune of about £100,000 a year. I know a Highland sporting estate whose owners have invested £8 million since they bought it 15 years ago, every penny spent in the area. How many backpackers or right-to-roamers would need to visit such an area to bring the same sort of injection of cash to local people ? If such properties ever fall into public ownership, or are diverted to local communities, not only will the cash of such rich men be lost, but significant annual subsidy will be required from the public purse to replace it. Contrary to the land reformers’ propaganda, the modern record of many large landlords in Scotland is benign, and indeed generous. It was deeply dismaying that the Edinburgh Parliament on this issue showed its determination to ignore all objective submissions of evidence, sometimes with studied rudeness, and to act solely on the basis of gut sentiment, of a kind Lenin would have warmed to immediately.
It is impossible to accept the assertions of Andy Wightman and his socialist visionary friends, that Scottish sporting estates can be turned into viable hill farms, if only the political will exists to dispossess their existing proprietors. The question for the Scottish parliament, and indeed for the Scottish people, is whether they dislike large landowners, foreign landowners and yes, frankly, traditional sporting activities so much that they are prepared to act against the direct economic interests of the region, for symbolic political purposes. Despite the contrary assertions of Mr.Wightman, James Hunter and others, it is impossible to imagine any transfer of land to local communities, or shift of principal purpose from sporting to other agricultural or commercial activities, which will offer a prospect of viability, or of providing comparable employment. Nor is it always possible to take at face value the militancy of Highland communities in which the most strident voices are often those of incomers, not infrequently English people who have moved into the area far more recently than the local landowner. English incomers are among the most vigorous protesters against traditional patterns of land ownership. A friend who owns an estate in the north of Scotland and finds himself at odds with some of his tenants about crofting rights describes himself, not unjustly, as a resident landlord litigating with absentee crofters.
It would be naïve not to recognise how deep run some of these visceral grievances towards the English, and towards large landowners; the power of historic myths fuelled by such well-known Scots as Mr.Mel Gibson; the distaste some modern Scots feel for ‘Piccadilly Highlanders’- yes, that could include me- who cavort about their hills in plus-fours with guns, in a fashion that evokes a fierce emotional response. Many local Highland people maintain their long tradition of offering visitors a warm welcome in their hills. But to some residents of the Central Belt, English sporting visitors are anathema. Here, a parallel with Irish experience must be recognised. For at least half a century after independence, the land policies of successive Irish governments were driven overwhelmingly by a determination to distance themselves from the English, and where possible to spite them. It is only in the past 30 years that Irish governments have belatedly begun to operate rational environmental and conservation policies, after decades in which Irishmen merely asserted a determination to flaunt their freedom from landlord rule at any cost, even to their own landscape.
The most extreme example of an obsessional Irish commitment to separateness was, of course, absention from the Second World War. Think of the price Ireland paid for its neutrality. If De Valera had entered the war even in December 1941, when the Americans joined, he could have been confident of being on the winning side. The economic harvest for his country would have been stupendous. The United States after 1945 would have showered gold on an Ireland which had chosen to number itself among the allies. Instead, the cost of neutrality, the price of its determination to distance itself from England- even to the point that President de Valera personally visited the German Embassy in Dublin on May Day 1945 to offer condolences upon the death of Hitler- was that Ireland languished economically and socially for a further quarter of a century before achieving economic take-off.
Even if the issues in Scotland today are less dramatic, I suggest that there is a message for the most ardent Scottish nationalist: however powerful your emotions, however great your sense of grievance towards the English, do not allow sentiment to stand in the way of self-interest. In this age of the global economy, do not seek to wall yourselves in a self-created prison. When traditional socialism is discredited even in the Soviet Union, it seems madness to seek to keep its spirit alive in the governance of Scotland. This applies to land reform, and to many other matters. I said earlier that I remain optimistic the Scottish parliament will grow into its role. I believe the practical damage done by the Land Reform Act, the scale of take-up by local communities, will turn out to be far more modest than the doom-mongers fear. There is absolutely no reason to oppose the notion of local people buying land when it is offered for sale, if they wish to do so and can themselves sustain it financially thereafter. The caveat must be about the use of public money to fund experiments in social engineering, to undo the consequences of the Clearances two centuries ago. For the sake of both Scotland and England, we should hope that the learning curve of the Edinburgh legislature will be steeper than that of Ireland after its independence. We should never blame Scottish politicians for acting in support of their own interests, asserting their own nationhood and culture. The challenge for them is to resist a temptation to indulge mere spleen against the English, in of a kind which must penalise the Scottish people themselves in the end. Is it a sensible or imaginative ambition, in the 21st century to seek to restore a peasant class in the Highlands ?