Scotland's green Lairds have turned environmental politics into a trophy game

Power and ownership in rural Scotland has never been so undemocratic after 17 years of Scottish Government neglect. Time to put land reform front and centre again.

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Power and land ownership in rural Scotland is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few. Early devolutionary hopes of community buy outs have stalled after 17 years of Scottish Government neglect. Time to put land reform front and centre again, and realise SNP- ‘Green’ policies have served to make corporate greenwashing a profitable industry at the expense of rural Scottish communities.

Voluntary Carbon Market and the corporate rush

For those unaware, VCM represents a decentralised market where private actors voluntarily buy and sell carbon credits that represent ‘certified’ reductions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere.

Big corporate giants such as Microsoft, Google or airline firms make public commitments to achieving carbon neutrality. In order to achieve this - or at least be able to publicly claim to be doing so - they ‘carbon offset’. Thus, VCM.

To take a concrete example, Virgin Atlantic sought to pay a Scottish facility money in order to boast their carbon was ‘offset’. This Scottish facility would theoretically ‘suck’ the carbon out of the atmosphere for Virgin Atlantic, for a handsome fee. In this case the plan involved building a huge facility for Storegga with Japanese firm Mitsui helping construct the air carbon capture facility. Virgin airlines can continue to pump out C02, pay a fee to the facility in Scotland and theoretically an agreed ‘X tons’ of carbon is sucked from the air and dumped down into the depleted oil wells under the North Sea.

Naturally some environmentally aware folk pointed out how theoretical all of this really is, arguing to instead stick to fixing the issue at source (i.e. innovating technologies to make aeroplane engines cleaner)

But that example of air extraction via a facility is still largely up in the air. In the meantime big corporate polluters instead prefer to greenwash their brands via carbon sequestration in forests.

Now, to capture one ton of CO2 emissions you would have to grow approximately 50 trees for one-year. That’s the mathematical reality of what our policies driven from Holyrood face as the Scottish Government pushes hard on reforestation policies (subsidised via the taxpayer).

However, a consequence of Scottish Government reforestation policies combined with the rise of VCM - and a rolling failure to tackle landownership - has produced a troubling reality for Scots.

The real voluntary carbon market (VCM) is valued at around $2 billion. Amid the scramble to greenwash dirty corporate brands there is a scramble to buy Scotland’s countryside.

In 2020, beer maker BrewDog unveiled their plans for ‘ecotourism, reforestation, and peatland restoration’, purchasing a more-than-9,000-acre estate in the Highlands. Later in September 2021, financial-services giant Standard Life grabbed its very own chunk of rural Scotland, seizing their own Highlands estate, pledging ‘carbon capture’. They were angling for a head start against rising decarbonization costs.

Not three months later and we witnessed, Aviva—another financial-services company—announce a similar plans.

Scotland already has the most concentrated land ownership in the western world, where devolution era land reforms only marginally improved ownership patterns.

Scottish Government’s Just Transition Commission itself explains, as a result of VCM and the rush to reforest, “without careful design and meaningful engagement there is a risk that benefits may flow mainly to large landowners and opportunities for community benefit will be missed”.

Community Ownership hopes fade

Dreaming back to when Donald Dewar formed the first Scottish executive, one of the big topics as Scotland entered its home rule era was a burning desire to finally tackle the spectre of feudalism. The absentee lairds and their vast estates were to be challenged.

Under the Lib-Lab era government, with a Scottish Green Party still interested in such things, progress had been made. Community ownership was pushed, for the first time the peasants earned the right to purchase the land of the absentee laird.

Depressingly however the Scottish ‘Green’ Party subsequently lost interest. Andy Wightman and Robin Harper were pushed out in favour of culture warriors like Ross Greer. Land reform, sustainable development alongside equality of access and ownership of rural Scotland was out of date. The ‘Greens’ under the 15 year rule of Patrick Harvie prioritised gender and pronoun obsessions instead. And the Scottish Government was taken over by nationalists more interested in engineering constitutional bun fights with Westminster.

What quietly happened was a loss of momentum in the fight of greater fairness in land ownership. All while lazy and disinterested Scottish Government policies worsened ingrained land inequalities.

According to land-rights campaigner and former minister in the Scottish Parliament Peter Peacock

“Land prices at the minute are escalating so rapidly that buying land in Scotland is one of the safest and most lucrative markets you can get into,”

“And that’s got all sorts of consequences … Only large, wealthy buyers can buy, because prices are so high, and that means communities are getting more and more squeezed out.”

Things have become so bad as the corporate rush to buy up Scotland that the Scottish Government has finally pledged a fresh round of land reform. After 17 years, they’re finally getting focused amid rumbling unhappiness in rural Scotland at the rise of the new ‘green lairds’.

Andy Wightman, formerly an MSP before being purged by the Scottish ‘Greens’ for heresy on Gender Recognition Reform, continues to speak out passionately on land reform and ownership.

“The governance of land on our planet is fundamental to everything,” he told The Atlantic. “It’s where we live, what we eat … It is everything, so it touches on everything.”

It’s quite depressing then if we listen to Hamish Trench, the chief executive of the Scottish Land Commission. According to Mr Trench, who leads the public body created by the Scottish government to advise on land policy, we should actually be welcoming our new corporate overlords.

He insists “corporate ownership is not, by definition, a bad thing,”, adding “There’s no reason why a corporate owner of land can’t be a good landowner.”

So you really don’t need to be concerned that community ownership hopes are fading amid a surge in corporate land purchasing. That faceless corporations - with little connection to the rural land itself - are purchasing and profiting from SNP ecopolitics is fine. The rise of the ‘green lairds’ is apparently not a bad thing.

Who owns Scotland?

Despite Mr Trench, the reality is that land prices are escalating due to VCM, carbon sequestration and Scottish Government eco subsidises concerning reforestation etc. Rural Scotland is never been such a hot commodity, and power is still being concentrated in the hands of the few.

These escalating land prices have measurably now began to force smaller players such as communities out of the market. Even being a millionaire now isn’t enough to get you in the landownership game in contemporary Scotland.

And the net result of this SNP complacency is a decline in diversity in Scottish land ownership. Power has been kept in the hands of a few, green politics reinforcing old patterns of privilege and installing fresh ones with corporate green lairds.

A report by the estate agency Strutt & Parker revealed a stunning 30 per cent increase in farmland for sale in the Highlands and Islands in 2021 compared with the five-year average. It just so happens the jump in price is farmland most suitable for afforestation. Valuation methods now account for carbon-capture and rewilding potential of land, according to that report.

So who owns Scotland? Increasingly not the communities living on it. Scotland’s largest private landowner is Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish billionaire who made his fortune in the fashion industry. He lives in Denmark, and is the epitome of the absentee laird which early devolutionary land reform and community ownership efforts had tried to tackle.

Sadly under this SNP government not only are we missing environmental targets, efforts which have been made have buttressed and reinforced the undemocratic land owning patterns. Under the SNP and his gender-obsessed ‘Green’ party sidekicks times have never been better if you’re a corporation seeking to greenwash your reputation. It’s just coming at the expense of rural Scots.

If only we had a Scottish Green party which gave a damn about this. Alas no. Perhaps this is why Robin Harper, the first Scottish Green MSP has officially backed Scottish Labour in Edinburgh? He realises his old party no longer cares, in fact are enabling the green lairds to profiteer and greenwash.

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Alternatively why not make a one-off donation? All support is appreciated