20 October 2016
Broad Kilts
Storm clouds over the Scottish Highlands?
by J R Thomas
This is a wonderful time to be in the Scottish Highlands. The heather is black and brown now, so even in October sunshine the hills are dark shaded, but the leaves are turning gold on the beech trees in the valleys below; the sun is hot, the light exceptionally clear, and the North Sea coast can be seen twenty five miles away.
That nervously wild bird, the grouse, has finally learnt what the appearance of Land Rovers and men dressed in the colours of the hills means. They sit tight, clucking, so that a man and dog may pass within five feet of a covey, and know not to move until the sporting party has passed. Then they erupt out of the heather and wheel away, skimming the slope – in the opposite direction. And to add a sense of primeval danger, the rut has started among the red deer, stags steering their herds across the mountain sides, roaring at any rival – whether from their own herd or another – who might even suggest the possibility of a challenge.
Idyllic, you might sigh, making a note to soon book the sleeper to Fort William or Inverness and a highland hotel, or even to work harder, so that one day you too might come to own a slice of this romantic remoteness.
Our host was of that mindset; a successful businessman of impeccably Scottish descent; his forbears farmers and businessmen from lowland Scotland. When the main estate in the glen was broken into three pieces for sale some years ago, he had done well enough to buy the middle section. He has a few sheep but it is a sporting and recreational estate, a modest (by Highland standards) spread of under five thousand acres. Nor was he lumbered with some great damp-rot riddled Victorian shooting lodge -that had gone with one of the other ridings, so he was able to build a modern stylish insulated house with magnificent views to the hill behind and the glen floor and river below.
“Lucky lucky bloke”, you might well be thinking, and he acknowledges that he is. But increasingly he wonders how long his luck will hold, and what the endgame might turn out to be. The rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party from being a joke ragbag of eccentrics had surprised him, as it did many Scots; but what brought home to him that Scotland was becoming a different place was a personal event. Our host, though as mentioned of impeccable Hibernian descent, was educated in England, as upper middle and upper class Scots were (not any more, in most cases). He has the English accent of his lineage, with a slight Scottish twist to it. He presented a show on BBC Scotland for some years; about fourteen years ago he was abruptly sacked, and enquiring why, was told that English voices were no longer appreciated on Scottish radio.
Now the Scottish National Party is well ensconced in power in Scotland. The Conservative Party (which in the 1950’s had a majority in Scotland) has long been a fringe party, reduced to a couple of seats. At the last election the Labour Party followed the Tories into oblivion; incredibly, each party hold one seat, as do the Lib Dems; the SNP hold fifty six (two technically independent, held by SNP members who are suspended by the party). Across Scotland in local government and in the Holyrood Assembly the SNP is dominant. In fact, Scotland has become in many ways a one party state. What has really made the SNP a political grouping to be taken seriously is the replacement of the lightly mercurial figure of Alex Salmond, who built the party up, with the more earnestly determined modernist techno-political skills of Nicola Sturgeon. Ms Sturgeon has confidence, guile and considerable presence; so far she has barely put a foot wrong. But she does have to maintain a difficult balance. Most large political parties in modern democracies are inevitably coalitions of political activists, who want to head in the same direction, more or less. (Mr Corbyn and the Labour Party is the exception that at some point will further prove this rule.) The difficulty with the SNP is that it is, or until recently has been, a very broad coalition indeed; Mr Salmond managed to get some very disparate interests under his voluminous kilt, and Nicola is doing as much as she can to keep them there.
That is not easy; what unites the SNP is the urge for independence, and what tripped Mr Salmond was the failure of Scotland, even with a clear majority of voters supporting the SNP, to vote for the party’s principle objective when given the opportunity in 2014. There have been endless theorisings as to why the answer was “no thanks” (or more formally, Better Together) but it seems that what did it was the dire state of the Scottish economy. The Scottish Assembly is a big spender wherever it has spending powers, but Scotland – looked at as a tax base – has decaying income sources, especially (but not limited to) oil revenues. Scottish electors could see that, even if their government was prepared to turn a blind eye to the theoretical contents (lack thereof) of a Scottish bank account. Scotland, the voters knew, needs the cash infusions from south of the border.
But now Ms Sturgeon is at it again. She is moving new legislation to hold a new referendum, using as her excuse the Scottish EU referendum results, where a large majority voted to Remain. Now, you may think it is more than a little odd to want to stay as a small fringe country in a large economic grouping but at the same time leave the friendly partnership with the family next door, who so kindly pay your bills. And so it is; especially as none of the conditions which brought about the result of the last Scottish Referendum has changed. One wonders how carefully Ms Sturgeon has thought this one through. (It should be affirmed though that the lady is no fool at the devious great game, and may, playing chess with the lady in Downing Street, be moving her referendum pieces for other reasons than intent to actually close her southern borders.)
We may now return to our worried laird in the Highlands, and see why he is worried. It is what is under the First Minister’s broad kilt that is the threat. There were, no doubt at all, a lot of former Scottish Conservative voters who in the 1980’s made their way to the SNP – the SNP’s early successes were all in winning the Tory Scottish rural seats. Then the Liberal strongholds fell, then Labour. And it is the former Labour activists who now run the SNP (or those who would have gravitated to Labour – the SNP has a very young age profile among its activists).
Ms Sturgeon has to keep her odd coalition together, especially as those ex-Tory voters are starting to drift out. The Scottish Conservative Party is growing; it is now the second largest party at Holyrood; it has a new leader in Ruth Davidson, a funny and clever modern leader in a sort of Cameron mould. The Scottish middle classes are getting nervous, they don’t like the big spending SNP government, they don’t like the increasingly left wing thrust of SNP policy; they are nervous about the “Scottishness” tests that job and government contract applicants increasingly are informally put through; and they don’t like what might happen to Scottish tax rates if the First Minister gets extra tax-raising powers. So Ms Sturgeon has to try to keep her broad church together; one angle is nationalism; the other is bashing the rich.
And the Scottish landowning rich are one very easy target: visible, owners of what sounds like ludicrous acreages (though they would be better off with a couple of acres in Surrey) and best of all, they don’t sound Scottish. Nationalism starts at this point to shade into something rather more distasteful; a minority is being singled out for its economic position, mostly on grounds of supposed (often erroneously) nationality. Scottish land prices have fallen recently; various sporting estates have become difficult to sell; large Scottish houses in particular are a real drag on the market. Nobody is yet loading their Land Rovers with their choice possessions and driving south for the border – but there is a noticeable tendency in the border counties that house prices are going up on the English side and down on the Scottish side. Maybe, any lairds among our readers, just keep the Landy fuel-tank well topped up and the family silver at the front of the safe.
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