The Outcome IV

Caithness
Photograph by Islay McLeod

A winter of discontent in May

George Gunn

On the day that Gordon Brown resigned it snowed in Caithness. For the following 24 hours the lamb-killing blizzards blew in from the deep north-west Atlantic turning the brown ploughed parks a wintry white. The previously gambolling spring calves stood still beside their mothers, tucked hard in where they could against the flagstone fences and dry-stane dykes, their rears turned in sensible and habitual defiance to the prevailing wind. So the worst and longest winter in 50 years, in both weather and politics, continues and it is up to each one of us to decide in which direction we position our derrieres.
     Besides the crazy weather one gets the feeling that everything is broken. Walking the week before the election up and around Braemore, between The Maiden's Pap and Morven, in the ancient clan-lands of the Gunn's, I was aghast to find amongst this stunning, empty and mountainous beauty the decomposing carcasses of dozens of deer.
     Ranging from skin and skeleton to bloated and sickly smelling bags of death this gory spectacle represented the price paid by this species for five months of snow and ice. Slowly rejoining the bog-land where they fell, these animals starved and froze to death within bellowing distance of Braemore Lodge and two rectangular legions of Sitka spruce. The Langwell and Braemore estate is world famous for its deer shooting. Before me, in the manic toothy grin of death, was the macabre evidence of a dubious animal management policy which keeps deer numbers artificially high and without natural cover when nature, in the form of Arctic weather conditions, comes a-calling. The results are appalling. Talking to someone who used to work on a similar Highland estate I was told that deer numbers, after this winter and throughout the Highlands, will be down a third.
     The native human population of the Parish of Latheron, in the straths around Braemore and north of Kildonan, is down 95% from the time the Duke of Portland purchased the place in 1878. Their skeletons have long gone and only a few antique stones and green swathes which indicate agriculture bear witness to their presence. Clearance, eviction and war have emptied the inner straths for the super-rich to sport and play. The signature tune to this activity is silence.
     
A similar silence emits from the political classes on the question of wealth and tax. They are far too busy, at present, rearranging the deckchairs of HMS Westminster as she steams, inevitably, to the iceberg of democracy. It does not need dead deer littering the flow country to indicate that landownership is wrong; neither should it be accepted, no matter how often we are told by whoever wrestles into power, that the huge and savage cuts in spending on public services are inevitable. The native people of the Highlands paid the price for the creation of sporting estates through violence and disinheritance and similarly it is the ordinary people who are going to carry the can for the financial meltdown which they neither created nor engineered.
     Figures recently released by the Office for National Statistics (which has mind-blowing numbers on everything from earnings and retail sales, to employment and immigration) show that the UK annual output is £1.4 trillion. This is slightly more than the £1.3 trillion of tax payers' money the UK government gave to the bank bail-out. The total wealth in Britain amounts to £9.1 trillion. According to these figures 44% of this, some £4 trillion, is 'owned' by 10% of the population.
     If this 10%, instead of having their 'wealth' taxed at the present measly 0.5%, had it raised to 5%, which is reasonable under any regime as it would leave this super-rich sector with 95% of their lolly, this would raise some £200 billion for the new chancellor of the exchequer, if he or she were so brave. This would surely be enough to stabilise the deficit, negate the need to slash and burn public services, and even to improve them.
     As the 'rights' of landowners get fogged up in the public mind by some semi-mystical remnant of Jacobite-lite 'divine right', usually promoted by Tory apologists and estate managers, similar hocus-pocus is put forward by financial 'markets' to disguise greed and financial short-termism and is used by politicians to validate all transfers of pubic wealth to the private sector. This transfer is what is actually meant when politicians insist upon cutting back the public sector. Those voices who shout loudest for this are the same voices who sang sweetly for the toxic debt obligations and the other pin-striped cons of the 'market' which brought the financial system to its knees in 2008. This howling is just another form of silence and like the pibrochd of Clan Gunn it will, given time, blow as forlornly amongst the eagles which circle the twin peaks of Morven.
     As it never enters the mind of landowners that the Highlands would be better served if the straths and glens were repopulated, similarly it never occurs to our political masters that the transfer of wealth can work in the opposite direction: from private gain to public good. Why should a justified and needing UK chancellor stop at a 5% tax on the super-rich who can so obviously afford it? Could it be that they would ensure that he or she would not be chancellor for very long? As is well known – in silence you can hear everything.
     
Our local MP, John Thurso as he is known on the ballot paper, may have hoped that Nick Clegg ended up playing with neither of the big boys. All that talk of 'change' must have upset his sense of Caithnessian political continuity. His grandfather, Sir Archibald Sinclair, owner of 100,000 acres and the pre-war Liberal leader, secretary of state for air during world war two and Dresden bomber, held Caithness and Sutherland until 1945 when Gander Dower took it for the Tories only to be succeeded, after some chicanery, by Sir David Robertson, who ended up falling out with the Conservative Party and standing as an 'independent Unionist'.
     It was won back for the Liberals in 1964 by George Mackie, who in turn lost it in 1966 to Robert MacLennan for Labour, mainly due to the 'Dounreay vote', who completed the reincarnation back into Liberal-land when he held his seat as an SDP member at the 1987 election and since the 1988 political merger as a Liberal Democrat. Lord MacLennan of Rogart, as he now is, made way for the new Viscount Lord Thurso, the present Liberal Democrat MP, John Thurso, or Sinclair. So we end up in 1886 not 2010.
     When politics gets broken the pieces roll away in every direction; as get blown banknotes when they are thrown out of the window of a runaway train. Broken politics and a broken economy we have to live with and can do something about, theoretically. But broken weather?
     As the planet earth stubbornly and methodically goes about its business of cooling itself, the ash keeps pouring out of the Icelandic volcano and there is nothing we can do about it. Human ingenuity is finding it difficult to cap a blow-out from an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico that human diligence could have avoided. So what the peedie lambs think of snow in May is anyone's guess. We can blame it on Iceland or on global warming.
     These broken politics we can only blame on ourselves. Now that David Cameron is to be the new UK prime minister, to paraphrase Carol King, it might as well snow until September, or even until October when we may have to go through this sorry semi-democratic dog-dance again.

George Gunn is founder and artistic director of Grey Coast Theatre Company, based in Caithness, and is well known for his playwriting.