So says an estate agent having just sold a beautiful looking estate in Perthshire, Scotland - to a foreigner.
Landowners make small fortunes by allowing wind farms to be built on their estates. The fact that they ruin the place doesn't bother them - as most of them live somewhere else. They don't care about the locals or the scenery.
The locals protest and are overruled by the faceless bureaucracy of the nationalist party at present controlling the Scottish government.The nationalist leader Alex Salmond, has decreed that wind farms are a good thing.
But his government have also set-up an investigation into land use in Scotland. This review - with streaks of pure communism - has announced that no one person should be allowed to own too much land. This is how he plans to attack the big traditional landowners such as The Duke of Buccleuch - the hated toffs.
And yet - being SNP - they want the Scots to own their own land.Yet they are encouraging every tin pot foreigner with a bit of money to buy up the beautiful wild countryside and make their fortune building wind farms on it. He is effectively giving away the most beautiful parts of Scotland to foreigners, who will desecrate the land and with no benefit to the locals. In fact - it is the locals who have to pay for it with increased bills for their electricity.
Perhaps in a few years - after they have got their independent Scotland and brought it to its financial knees, the nationalists will behave like Portugal and decree that all land bought less than 150 years ago now belongs to the Scottish government.
Hey- watch out all you foreign buyers
From an English perspective, when I read what is happening in Scotland, I find it hard to understand why the Scots want independence, particularly with the SNP in government. They already seem to be running quite a totalitarian regime totally ignoring local views and this seems to be one more example of their government by diktat.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere I read of the "Children and Young People (Scotland) Act " where every child is to have an named person who will follow their upbringing and take action, possibly against the parents' wishes, if they feel it is necessary.
I certainly feel that I would not want to live in an independent Scotland under the SNP; where, unlike at Westminster, there seems to be no proposal for an Upper House, however imperfect, to provide the checks required with any government.
Personally, I favour a federal arrangement fo the UK, much as in the USA, where England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales would all have their own parliaments with identical powers, an Westminster dealing mainly with defence and foreign affairs. But one can only dream of such things, and for the sake of all Scots, I hope independence is also just such a dream.