Right-to-buy MADNESS
A tiny island of just six people. A £4.65million community buyout bankrolled by the taxpayer. And why the heartbroken owner’s story – and the SNP’s role in it – will make your blood boil...
IT was Thursday, June 21, the longest day of the year, as they gathered formally by the ferry slip of the tiny island of Ulva, less than eight square miles of rock, bog and loch off the west coast of Mull.
Fine words were said, politicians preened and a red ribbon was cut in celebration of the island’s passage into community ownership – that of the North West Mull Community Woodland Company – at final cost, largely from the public purse, of an eye-watering £4.65million.
All that for an island with no car ferry connection, no school, no amenities, no metalled roads, hardly any bridges – anyone rattling along Ulva’s main highway has to ford nine burns – and a total population of six.
Among the six people looking on as the ribbon was severed was Jamie Howard – 61 last year and painfully widowed – whose family had owned Ulva for three generations and who had hitherto lived on the island all his life.
It was costing him £50,000 a year to keep the island going even at a minimal care and maintenance level and, without his beloved Jean, Mr Howard’s heart was no longer in it.
He was no absentee landlord, and had invested much of his own money in holiday cottages, tourist walks, renewable energy and even a widely praised restaurant.
After putting Ulva on sale, Mr Howard had fast engaged the interest of a potential purchaser with ‘fantastic credentials and a lot of money’. Then, from out of the blue, a community group on Mull sprang forth and declared its interest.
The first he heard of its official blessing from the Scottish Government – amid a quiet October evening last year tending his cows – was when his daughter incredulously rang to say Nicola Sturgeon had just announced it to the baying faithful at the SNP’s annual conference.
As Scots Law now stands, Ulva had immediately to be pulled from the open market and Jamie Howard thereafter could but stand helplessly by, quite ignored and never consulted. Ulva’s new owners have never chosen to meet him, and he has had to hand it over without being able to give any advice to them. WORSE, as was pointed out last week in a Howard family statement on the official Ulva website: ‘Legislative guidelines (as published by this Scottish Government) were cast aside, with key mandated deadlines mendaciously ignored by ministers and Scottish civil servants in order to coincide with keynote party speeches by the First Minister, and to facilitate the acquisition of Ulva regardless of the fiscal viability of the community plans.
‘In this respect they entirely ignored their elected duty to be even-handed to all Scottish constituents.’
It went on: ‘Local Nationalist MSP, Mike Russell, perhaps could have communicated with, and acted as mediator between ALL his constituents rather than indulging in ubiquitous and tedious SNP partisan soundbites.
‘I’ve never been asked where the stopcocks are,’ he mused subsequently to an Edinburgh journalist, ‘the arrangement for the liferaft on the ferry boat, that sort of thing.’
Mr Howard has left Ulva. It is unlikely he will ever set foot on it again. It is hard not to wonder if the island’s doubtful new era will justify the heartbreak of a decent man.
Since 2003 – under a Labour administration in Edinburgh – communities in rural Scotland have had the right, and with preferred-bidder status, to acquire the estates on which they live and at agreed market value, with financial backing from the Scottish Land Fund and other sources.
Indeed – though it has yet to be put to legal test – they could even, as the law is phrased, force a sale whether or not the laird wishes to dispose of his acres.
There were forerunners. Stornoway has been in community ownership since the 1920s. In 1993, the North Assynt Estate in Sutherland was acquired by a consortium of local crofters and, after a succession of incompetent to dreadful lairds, the Isle of Eigg was acquired by its people in 1997.
The entrenchment of community buyouts in law, though, was only encompassed after a generation radicalised in the 1970s and 1980s was finally able to assume power after New Labour’s triumph in 1997. Most vocal was Brian Wilson, founder of the West Highland Free Press and who would cut his ministerial spurs in what was then the Scottish Office.
The drive then, and to this day, for ‘land reform’ is fuelled by three things.
One is dank, dark history. The Highland Clearances are a much more involved and complex event in Scotland’s story than most grasp. But that they happened is incontestable and Ulva itself is testament.
In 1841 (including the adjacent island Gometra) it was home to 849 people. There were 16 villages, boasting between them shoemakers, wrights, boat builders, merchants, carpenters, tailors, weavers and blacksmiths.
But a new laird was already in charge and Francis William Clark soon set about evicting islanders, personally firing many thatched roofs himself. BY 1841 there were only 150 residents on the two islands; by 1889 only 53 lived on Ulva. The Clark family owned it until 1945. By 1981, Ulva’s population was under 20. The ghostly ruins of the cleared townships still stand.
The second motor of land reform is the vague, right-on sense that for so much of Scotland’s land to be in the hands of relatively few people is manifestly unfair.
As the SNP’s Paul Wheelhouse – then Minister for Rural Affairs – thundered in 2014: ‘I doubt anyone would design a system where you ended up with only 432 people owning half the private land.’
And with these words he
boldly committed the Scottish Government to the target of a million acres in community ownership by 2020, as we were left to seethe at the thought of 432 be-tweeded squires owning half the country and enjoying sweet Downton Abbey grandeur.
In fact, the minister was less than candid. These 432 lairds – as of 2014 – possessed but half of the privately owned Scottish countryside. Great swathes of it are, in fact, possessed by assorted bodies on behalf of the Scottish Government – chiefly, Scottish Natural Heritage – and such outfits as the National Trust for Scotland, the RSPB, the John Muir Trust and even the Ministry of Defence.
Nor is it generally understood just why most Highland estates, especially in the West, are so enormous. It is because acres of heath and mountain are economic only for deer-stalking (which, to be run safely and profitably, requires vast range) and two million acres of the Highlands and Islands in any event are under crofting law and ‘common grazing’, by which a laird’s liberties are heavily curtailed.
Only a handful of lairds – Mohammed Al Fayed at Balnagowan, or the Queen at Balmoral – have riches sufficient to support the retinues of servants and gracious living of popular imagining.
In fact, as Sir Michael Wigan, laird of Borrobol in Sutherland, has argued, sporting estates are nearly all run by their proprietors as businesses and ceased to be the pleasure palaces of lairds, their friends and families many years ago. He enjoys his life. What it is emphatically not is Downton Abbey.
It has been in the baronet’s family for 70 years. He and his wife live there and their children attended local schools. He has an 80-acre farm, employing two people, raising sheep and cattle. There is besides an – inevitably seasonal – Christmas tree business. There is shooting, stalking, fishery, forestry, and they let three holiday cottages.
These houses are readied each weekend by Lady Wigan herself; there are no domestic servants. In all, annual turnover return ‘is around £340,000’, he confides. ‘Profit and Loss shows that Borrobol Estate steadily marks up a small profit or a small loss. There is approximate break-even.’ The vast majority of lairds are like Sir Michael; they have both an intimate love of their land and a profound sense of personal responsibility.
Few indeed are seriously rich. Most live modest lives and most do a great deal of the hands-on work themselves – laying hedgerows or even waiting at table when paying guests come for the country house weekend experience.
Simon Craufurd, young laird of 600 inherited acres in Ayrshire, is an unpretentious chap. He clears ditches, fixes plumbing and does the odd repair to the castle roof. ON the Gairloch Estate, Johnny Mackenzie has planted a million trees. Glenfeshie, Killiehuntly and Gaick Estate belongs to an amiable Danish clothing tycoon, Anders Holch Povlsen – a keen environmentalist, an ardent conservationist and who doesn’t even shoot. In 2014 alone, he invested £10million in buildings and improvements.
But the land reform movement, regardless, is driven largely – and with some justification – by rather recent memory of bad lairds.
We have already touched on Eigg’s unfortunate history. In 1973, the West Highland Free Press joyfully exposed a cosy scheme between the owner of North Harris – Sir Hereward Wake – and the chairman of Inverness County Council’s roads committee, Lord Burton of Dochfour, to have Amhuinnsuidhe Castle in North Harris bypassed at the expense to the public purse of some £1million in today’s values.
Sir Hereward would thus be spared vulgar commoners motoring through his front garden. When it emerged that he and Lord Burton had attended Eton together, the proposal collapsed amid public outcry and a joyous squib by food broadcaster Derek Cooper: ‘About this by-pass, Burton, Here’s something for the kitty, A handsome cheque for forty thou’ To help things through committee,
Floreat Etona, See you in Brooks,’ old swell –
God helps those who help themselves – and help us jolly well.’
But it is Dr John Green of Raasay who is most recalled with a shudder. The retired Home Office pathologist, of Hove in Sussex, never actually owned the island. It has belonged to what is now the Scottish Government since soon after the First World War – and no one has ever satisfactorily explained how, through the 1960s, Edinburgh officials happily sold Raasay House and just about every other property on the island that mattered to ‘Dr No’.
Dr Green was soon universally known by the nickname when, in 1973, he refused to sell a quarteracre of foreshore in Churchton Bay to allow the construction of facilities for a desperately needed car ferry. It turned out that even the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) had not sufficient powers of compulsory purchase, and the service had finally to operate to a much more exposed and unsuitable terminal a mile to the south.
It was the current century before a terminal was finally built where it should have been, more than 30 years after the HIDB had finally (and at gulping cost) recovered Raasay House from Dr Green.
But the island could still embarrass the SNP. In February 2013, furious Raasay crofters learned that its sporting rights – which they had managed efficiently for many years – had been sold behind their backs by Scottish Government officials, and without consultation, to a commercial stalking concern in Ayrshire.
The responsible minister was Paul Wheelhouse, who flailed, blamed civil servants, somehow clawed the sporting rights back, and hastened to Raasay with the air of a missionary handing out strings of beads, summoning residents and urging them to start a community buyout.
There was uproar. Hardly anyone on Raasay wanted to own the place, least of all its crofters. Indeed, a startling number of communities have weighed it as an option and thought better of it – Dalmore Estate on Lewis; Tanera Mor in Loch Broom; North Uist. Wheelhouse beat a hasty retreat.
Some who did seize the opportunity have done very well.
For the first time in six decades Eigg now boasts a population of more than 100. Gigha has likewise prospered. North Harris has made the most of opportunities in affordable housing, enterprise and renewable energy.
Others, such as South Uist – torn, nowadays, with incessant and bitter feuding – have been less successful. FOR some, you feel, the chance has come too late. When Kenneth MacLeish visited Ulva in 1974, executing a major Inner Hebrides feature for National Geographic magazine, he found a Highland, Gaelic-speaking community most sorry he could not linger: ‘There’s not a house on the island wouldn’t put you up for the night.’
That Ulva has gone – and could not a great deal more have been done to help it, like proper roads and a little car ferry? This neglect seems all the odder now that the powers-that-be happily sanction a buyout to the tune of £773,000 per head of population.
In truth, Ulva’s new status – in callous disregard for its former laird’s feelings – is but rare limp land reform virtue-signalling by an SNP administration that has very little interest in the rural periphery and, the length of the country, has neutralised or dissolved forces that could challenge its authority.
‘Public figures who challenge the authority and judgment of the Scottish Government are no longer wanted,’ says Brian Wilson, ‘because the politicians are no longer big enough to tolerate thorns in their flesh. The watchwords are control, control, control; Scotland, Scotland, Scotland. My own view is that Highlands and Islands Enterprise should be far more focused on the needs of its peripheral areas, where fragile communities are still losing population.’
Where the folk live who actually know where the stopcocks are. For his own part, a dazed Jamie Howard is still getting his head round it all after months of sustained humiliation. Only now, he says quietly, can he start thinking about the appropriate wording for Jean’s gravestone.