Fordyce Maxwell: The highest bidder wins – whatever their nationality

AS A small-scale landowner – I have approximately 0.6 of an acre, which sounds slightly more impressive than 0.243 of a hectare – it doesn’t do to get too upset by the activities of large-scale owners and buyers of land.

True, there was a time when it troubled me more, mainly the dubious inequity of how much of Scotland’s land was acquired long ago by the large-scale owners in the first place by sucking up to royalty and trampling over the peasantry, and how some of them, large or small, treated their tenants. But now I find that, as the famously irascible actor George C Scott said when asked if he had mellowed with age, “I’m the most mellow sonofabitch you’ve ever met.”

That is, I’ve accepted that the urge to hang on to land if you have it, or acquire as much of it as you can while you can, is one of the most basic human instincts. The Bible, among many other books such as A Scots Quair, Zola’s The Earth or Gordon Williams’s under-rated From Scenes Like These record the range of human emotions involved in acquiring or losing land and the depths some stoop to in doing so.

Thankfully, most land sales go through the necessary legal channels with nothing more murderous than a regret here, elation there, and relief all round when the formalities are completed and the handover money is in the bank. Rather like buying a house for most of us, although on a bigger scale.

What puzzles me is why the nationality of the buyer should cause so much angst. A willing buyer needs a willing seller and if some landowner in Scotland decides to sell to the highest offer, an offer in a recent case that happens to be from a Danish businessman, why should that cause so much resentment?

I used to think the same when there were moans about the British fishing fleet being bought almost wholesale by Spanish, and other Continental, businesses. If British fisherman felt so strongly about that, why sell to foreigners? Why not sell to a British fisherman making a lower offer?

Call me naïve, but I think I can see why. The same applies to land. When a landowner or owner-occupier farmer decides to sell for whatever reason – debt, drink, divorce, decrepitude, no heirs – then whoever makes the biggest offer is likely to be successful. In the recent sale of 50,000 acres of Scotland that has attracted publicity and ill-feeling in about equal measure, the successful buyer was a Danish businessman worth an estimated £4 billion.

That sort of money gives a potential buyer a bit of clout, as in: “And what made you decide to sell your 50,000 acres to multi-billionaire Anders Hoch Povlsen?”

So would a Scottish, English or Irish buyer of 50,000 acres have been any more acceptable? As a friend used to say “Them as has it, gets it”, recognising that life isn’t fair and that money used successfully can beget more money and whatever the owner wishes to use that money for. Surely someone, anyone, investing several million pounds in Scotland, with a probable trickle-down effect for the local economy, should be seen as a good thing?

Businessmen who have made money in other occupations are keen to become lairds, large or small. We had one in our area who started buying three decades or so ago with a stated ambition to farm from the Cheviots to the sea, and with a series of farm purchases he almost made it.

City money, as well documented, took so much land a few years ago that for the first time they out-bought farmers trying to expand.

Farmers who own land try to buy more of it. Many tenant farmers want to be owner-occupiers. A dozen years or so ago a firebrand leading light in pursuit of a fairer deal for tenants stepped down abruptly when he got a chance to buy his farm. The possible introduction of compulsory right-to-buy for tenants continues to be a running sore for worried landowners, yet at the same time some of the biggest estates are selling to tenants to fund off-estate ventures such as shopping centres.

The sale of 50,000 acres is news because it is a lot in one transaction. But over the past 30 years large estates have changed hands quietly to the oil-rich and many transactions of a few hundred acres at a time have seen Scottish farms bought by Irish and English farmers. Irish buyers dominated at one time because of the difference in land values; in the balmy days 100 acres sold in Ireland could buy at least double that in Scotland.

In parts of England, Dutch and Scandinavian farmers have bought land at prices British farmers decided they could not compete with.

In short, selling and buying land is a free market with prices produced by supply and demand. Who offers most is the successful buyer. I don’t think that their nationality makes any difference, especially when we consider the history of who owns most of Scotland already.