AWAY THE LAIRDS

Alice Thomson on the fate awaiting

Scottish landowners at the hands of a devolved Parliament

NEW Year's Eve at a ceilidh in the High- lands. On the dance floor a few men wear- ing kilts were flinging their women around, but the locals weren't participating. The dancing was for the lairds and their dinner party guests. The stalkers, hoteliers, forestry men, shopkeepers and teachers had more pressing issues to discuss. As they stood around the edge in their jeans, eating sausage rolls and downing whisky, the talk was all of reforming this beautiful, midge- ridden kingdom, empowering the people and disposing of their feudal overlords.

`They won't be here much longer,' said one shopkeeper, who has migrated from Devon, pointing to the swirling kilts. 'We'll all be rangers soon,' replied a ghillie from a nearby estate. 'The pay will be better then anything we get now, and you'll not have to wear knickerbockers,' said a stalker from Pitlochry. The English-bred hotelier wanted to see ramblers allowed to roam more freely over the Scottish hills. 'Let's get those kagoules out on the moors and into my pub at the end of the day. We need lavatories and campsites, carparks and signposts,' he said. Another stalker explained how his absentee Italian boss didn't even bother to say he wasn't coming up for the stalking sea- son. 'Get the foreigners out first,' he said. The Scots and English laughed together and discussed which estates they would turn into National Parks.

Later that week at a pub in Edinburgh's New Town, estate agents and land agents were meeting for a late Christmas lunch. `It's going to be like the land clearances in reverse,' warned one. 'Landowners are sit- ting ducks in a devolved Scotland. The new Parliament will put up their taxes, and regulate everything they do.'

We can already slot together most of the pieces of Scotland's devolution jigsaw. We know the Parliament will be next to Holy- rood Palace in Edinburgh and there will be 129 MPs. We even know that Donald Dewar aims to become the de facto Scot- tish prime minister of this inevitably left- leaning Parliament. The one question that wasn't properly discussed during the sec- ond reading of the Devolution Bill this week was property rights.

Yet land reform is going to be one of the few issues that the frustrated socialist Scottish Parliament will be allowed to tackle. Ever since the Jacobean uprising and the Highland clearances, many Scots have been itching to get their revenge. Everyone deserves a 'wee bit of hill and glen', they say. Increasingly, voters are complaining that 80 per cent of Scotland is owned by the 4,000 members of the Scot- tish Landowners' Federation. Why should Scotland be used as a backyard by mem- bers of London clubs such as White's and Pratt's? Books, including Who Owns Scot- land? by Andy Wightman and Who Owns Scotland Now? by Auslan Cramb, have fuelled the debate. Like banning fox hunt- ing in the south, the new Scottish MPs could easily see this as an eye-catching opportunity to nob-bash, with the potential for headlines like 'Vassals Freed at Last'.

But this Celtic Parliament may hope that, unlike any ban on fox-hunting, hound- ing lairds could raise some money. If West- minster insists its Scottish cousins can only raise income tax by an extra 3p in the pound, they will be desperately short of funds for their grandiose plans. A sporting tax is the most obvious first step; after all it was only abolished in 1994. A Scottish Par- liament could levy a tax on salmon caught and stags shot which would cost the aver- age estate £15,000 a year. A heftier proper- ty tax could help give the Parliament more powers. But if they really want to irritate the plus-fours brigade, they could intro- duce more stringent environmental regula- tions, while at the same time increasing access to private land. Then we would see warfare between the kagoules and the tweeds.

The ease with which passions are aroused is well illustrated by the support given to the campaign by 63 residents of Eigg to raise £1.5 million to buy their island last year. In pubs all over Glasgow they pooled their coins for the crofters, the urban uniting with the rural.

One partner in a firm of land agents in Edinburgh said, don't want to frighten landlords, but they must realise that they are just as vulnerable as the crofters, who are nearly extinct despite massive subsidies. The Scottish Parliament is bound to be frustrated when it finds out how little power it has; laird-bashing will be one way to vent their grievances. Of course, in the longer term, property prices will fall and landlords will stop putting money into their estates.' With no Tory MPs left north of the bor- der, it is unlikely that there will be a large Conservative contingent to come to the landowners' aid in the new semi-circular Edinburgh talking shop. There won't even be the safety-valve of a revising chamber.

Foreigners are the easiest prey, not the sort that block the A9 with their camper- vans, but the Mohamed Al Fayeds, Euro- pean frozen gateau kings, Malaysian businessmen, Middle Eastern princes and Norwegian shipping magnates. Unlike Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany, the Scots have no land register, so for foreigners buying property is an easy way to stash spare cash out of the way of their national taxmen.

Some foreign barons behave badly, as they always have. Despite Scottish law allowing walkers to amble over private land, they put up threatening signs warning 'High velocity rifles in use, keep out'. They illegally kill golden eagles to boost their grouse bags. They overgraze the land with sheep, neglect their forests and refuse to cull their deer. But for every such parasite, there are men like Paul van Vlissingen, the Dutch Calor Gas magnate, who owns the exemplary Letterewe Wilderness and helped build the local swimming-pool.

Many landowners remain optimistic that they can maintain the status quo. They point out that even the SNP is toning down its 'nationalise the whole lot' rhetoric. They argue that New Labour, with Gordon Brown as Chancellor, would never release the money to buy up whole tracts for the people, and point to the Access Concordat most owners signed in 1996 which allows people to walk over estates as long as they recognise that it is a working landscape.

But they have obviously never read the Scottish Secretary's introduction to his department's pamphlet published last autumn. In Towards a Development Strate- gy for Rural Scotland, Mr Dewar says he wants to move the debate on National Parks into a 'positive arena'. He has start- ed by promising to establish a National Park for Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. Mr Dewar writes: 'A Scottish government will empower the Scottish people, includ- ing those living in rural Scotland.' When I asked a civil servant what that meant she told me to read the pamphlet. It makes even stronger reading. 'Rural Scotland is characterised by inequalities in wealth, sta- tus and power,' it states. It calls for a 'grass roots, bottom-up approach,' removing the rights of feudal superiority and encourag- ing crofting. 'Animateurs' will be employed to find out what the people want.

The junior minister, Brian Wilson, is an even stronger supporter of land reform. He said he was deeply disappointed when the Glenfeshie estate was sold to a foreign owner last November, and is sympathetic to calls from the Ramblers' Association for the government to exercise its powers of compulsory purchase. Michael Ancram, the opposition consti- tutional affairs spokesman, whose family own land in Scotland, has hung back from the debate. But Liam Fox, the junior con- stitutional minister with the broadest accent, said, 'It is a contentious area, no one yet knows how far the new Parliament will be able to go.'

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, one of the most conscientious landowners in Scotland, is more blunt. 'The Highland clearances did take place, there are still strong feelings. But if they get rid of us they will end up with sociology students with studs in their noses, dreaming up madcap schemes and returning to the city before they can see the damage. Landowners support 15,000 people on their estates. There are bad apples but we are a diverse bunch, and we are here because we love it. The government says it wants more entrepreneurs in the Highlands but that's what many of us are. Take Ann Gloag, the bus conductor's daughter, who recently bought the Lovat estate.

David Heathcoat-Amory, the shadow Treasury minister, and another owner of a Highland estate, said, 'It is a myth that we all make money out of these estates; most run at a loss. I sometimes think the best thing we could do would be to open our accounts.' Most landowners are already too nervous to speak out publicly. A Perthshire landlord, whose family bought the estate in the last century, said, 'They can either bribe us to do more or penalise us, mess around with our agricultural grants, and insist on us having Portaloos everywhere. If they do that I will just lock the gate and withdraw my permission for people to drive up here. The Cairngorms are already beginning to look like Disney- land. I couldn't bear that to happen here. '

His neighbour, a young co-owner of a small estate, disagrees: 'Landowners will have to be more pro-active, they can't blast away at so-called trespassers, but will have to accept sensible access, maybe even employ rangers to show walkers the routes. But National Parks aren't the answer either. Government and charity run schemes in the Highlands have an extremely low success rate. There just isn't the money to keep them going, and there are too many conflicting interests between the conservationists, tourism, the moun- tain bikers, the wildlife lovers and the townies who also want their little plot.'

The Scottish Highlands, so the saying goes, are a good place to make a small for- tune, provided you start with a large one. Few places in the world benefit more from the rich pumping in cash with little expec- tation of any return on their investment. I don't have to rely on my Scottish blood to recognise that this is a good deal, and the new parliamentarians in Edinburgh should be careful to avoid killing the absentee geese that lay such golden eggs.

The author is deputy comment editor of the Daily Telegraph.