Highland sting

There is no party in Britain quite as fake as the Scottish National Party. The SNP, now entrenched in its dominance of Scottish politics, imagines itself a revolutionary force for change. Its mission to break up Britain bolsters that impression. But if the SNP campaigns with zeal, it governs with caution. These are the most conservative revolutionaries on the planet.

On health, education and taxes, the SNP stresses continuity. The party saves its radicalism for issues the public considers trivial. One is Trident. Another is land reform.

According to an opinion poll earlier this year, just 3 per cent of voters consider nuclear weapons one of the three most important issues facing Scotland. Just 2 per cent think that of land reform. Yet the SNP pledges to bring about a nuclear-free country with a transformed pattern of land ownership.

On land reform, ministers now enjoy the power to force a sale ‘where the scale or decisions of landowners are acting as a barrier to the sustainable development of communities’. How that is to be defined remains a mystery.

Still, land distribution is an atavistic problem and one that allows for any amount of demagoguery. As Mike Russell, SNP MSP for Argyll and Bute, says, a landowner is ‘able to do whatever he likes on his property’. This is intolerable.

The SNP’s proposals might be more ‘radical’ but for the constraints of the European Convention on Human Rights. There is an irony in the fact that the SNP, a staunch opponent of Conservative proposals to withdraw from the convention, finds its hands partially bound by the system it defends in other circumstances. This too is intolerable or, as Russell argues, the convention ‘was never meant to be a tool to protect the rich against the poor’.