Tally ho and two fingers to Holyrood

Published on Sunday 23 October 2005 00:23

TO SOME he is an eminent military historian and a distinguished former editor of one of Britain's most blue-blooded newspapers, who was knighted for his services to journalism. Others view Sir Max Hastings as the kind of arrogant, toffee-nosed, self-regarding, would-be aristocrat who gives gun-wielding, fly-casting Englishmen abroad in the Highlands a very well-deserved bad name.

Those in Scotland who subscribe to the latter view are about to get their prejudices reinforced. A new book by Hastings with the anodyne title of Country Fair: Tales of the Countryside, Shooting and Fishing contains an extraordinary attack on the Scottish Parliament, which he accuses of "declaring war" on landowning interests and "indeed on field sports" through its recently passed Land Reform Act.

Few north of the Border escape the grapeshot from Hastings' blunderbuss on the subject of communities being given the right to buy land, often aided by public money, when sold by private landowners.

The largely central-belt based land reformers, he says, "are socialists of the purest kind" who assume an "almost infinite willingness by the state to fund utopia".

The purpose of measures to provide public access to privately owned lands - the so-called 'right to roam' - he asserts, is to "punish the private landowner, rather than to profit the citizen with wanderlust".

Although no one should blame Scottish politicians for "acting in support of their own interests, asserting their own nationhood and culture", the challenge is to resist a temptation to indulge mere spleen against the English in a way that must harm Scots themselves, argues Hastings.

Above all, he contends, Holyrood should not use the Land Reform Act to exact revenge for the perceived injustices of the 19th-century Highland Clearances.

"While the legislation attracted bitter criticism from the sporting community and thousands of people employed on moors, forests and rivers, it was passed with little noise from anybody else up north," Hastings writes. "Scots seemed chiefly preoccupied with the folk memory of the Clearances."

It would be easy to dismiss Hastings' barbs as a desperate cri de coeur from a class of country sportsmen fearing for their future under a political elite with its roots in Scotland's urban communities. But the book will refuel the debate over whether the Land Reform Act is the most enlightened piece of legislation passed so far by the Parliament, or merely a symptom of the class vendetta being waged by a majority of city-based, left-wing politicians.

Hastings, the first journalist into Port Stanley when British forces retook the Falklands from the Argentinians in 1982, concedes he is open to ridicule, counting himself among the "Piccadilly Highlanders" who head north every year to shoot and fish.

"Yet if some sporting activities in the Highlands represent a charade... it seems a harmless one, which has brought a great deal of money to the north," he says. Yet he adds he has loved the Scottish countryside from an early age through his enthusiasm for country sports.

It is that way of life Hastings perceives to be under attack from a Parliament hell bent on culling private estate owners and replacing them with a new class of Highland small-holders.

And the weapon used to put landowners in their place has been the 2002 Land Reform Act, which gave local communities the right to buy local estates up for sale, gave unlimited public access by day and night to almost all private land, and offers crofting tenants the right to buy into adjoining fisheries.

"There is an instinctive distaste in some circles for anything that smacks of what used to be called a 'toff' and of the traditional pleasures of 'toffs'," Hastings writes.

Yet, he argues, almost the only genuinely self-sustaining activities in many Highland areas are field sports. "Rich proprietors and visitors are willing to pay large sums to shoot grouse, stalk deer or catch salmon. Far from exploiting Scottish natural resources to achieve profit, such people are subsidising jobs and the environment on a substantial scale."

Very few landowners make money, Hastings contends, citing a study of four Highland estates in 1999 which found that on average they were losing around 100,000 a year.

"If such estates ever fall into public ownership, or are diverted to local communities, not only will the cash injections of rich proprietors be lost, but subsidy will be required from the public purse to replace them," he claims.

Hastings dismisses Scottish land reformers as "zealots" and "shameless class warriors." But Rob Gibson, the Highlands MSP and SNP spokesman on land reform, said: "To most people the idea of creating more people as owners of land is a good one. It's noticeable that with land buy-outs sanctioned through the Act, people have been able to buy land that they would never have been able to buy from the big estates."

Community buy-outs, many assisted by the Scottish Land Fund, set up under the Act to finance purchases with millions of pounds of national lottery money, are now part of Scottish folklore.

Assynt started the ball rolling but Eigg, Gigha and North Harris have continued the trend. Some crofting communities are now attempting 'aggressive' buy-outs against landowners not wanting to sell their land.

Gibson dismisses the charge that land reformers are all city-bound socialists. "I have been a land reformer in the Highlands for 30 years so I suppose that makes me a socialist in Max Hastings' eyes," he said.

"I am a social democrat and the social democrat majority in Scotland well understands what we are doing."