To Touch the Impossible

TO TOUCH THE IMPOSSIBLE: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

All Highland sporting estates are the creations of surplus wealth accrued during and after the Industrial Revolution of the 18h and 19th centuries. Much of this wealth was derived from investments in Caribbean slave plantations, then recycled to create the vast patchwork of human emptiness we recognise today as the Highlands.  This is a landscape we think of as normal. It is far from normal. As David Alston demonstrates, in his seminal book, “Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean” (Edinburgh University Press) how the extent to which middle-class families, in and off the Highlands, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as English industrialists and landed gentry, were involved in the enslavement of Black Africans and the extent to which this involvement was accepted as part of everyday life on the north of Scotland. Alston’s book is expressly detailed in the ways that Caribbean plantation ownership and Highland sporting estate ownership birthed the gruesome co-existence of enlightenment and oppression.

 

As well as having their hillsides stripped bare by over-grazing from sheep and deer, the muir-burning of heather to encourage grouse for shooting, these lands were stolen from the native inhabitants, sold and resold by various foreign owners and paid for in African blood. Those who benefit from this blood-money say that dismantling the landed estates and redistributing the land to the people is impossible, that it is a dream. But if we are to move into the fullness of our nationhood, to independence, it is necessary to touch the impossible in order to achieve anything and to step out of the dream world. 

There is no possibility or impossibility in dreams – only impotence. To be conscious of this impossibility – of what those in power say cannot be achieved – forces us to long continually to grasp for what cannot be grasped in all that we desire, know and love. This is the narrative of oppression. Yet if we are to embrace justice we must make the effort to grasp the impossible because it is necessary, because change, as the world moves into 2026, is vitally necessary. 

Being Scottish – being human – we will make mistakes and errors as we strive to secure our county’s future and however bitter they may be our mistakes and errors are a source of positive energy. Landownership – nor the Union with England – is not the divine right of money. The rich always confuse the relative with the absolute. Landed estates are created by rich men not by the forces of nature. To overcome the assumptions of the rich we have to keep our attention and intention focused on the so-called  impossible – which is land redistribution, the break-up of the sporting estates and the nationalisation and taxation of all the land in Scotland. 

The only thing which is impossible is purity. So the process of wealth redistribution will be, by necessity, flawed in its beginning. But by harnessing the positive energy created by mistakes and errors we can – we must – accomplish it. If we do not, then soon, living and working in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland will be impossible. Land redistribution will be the expression of what was once thought inexpressible. That is the poetry of change: nothing is impossible.  

Despite devolution, despite the SNP being in power for almost two decades, in the Highlands the landowners still receive rewards and the people, of Caithness and Sutherland especially, receive punishment. Because of landownership and because of power companies unregulated relationship with acre-rich rentiers we have a renewable energy system in the far north of Scotland that is pure troimh-chèile, or confusion. There are plans to site a 231-turbine windfarm around the village of Rosehall in Sutherland. 13 of these structures will be 250m tall which is the hight of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. There are already 38 turbines in operation around Rosehall with a further 37 having been given consent with an additional 156 in the scoping or planning stages. These will be operated by SSE Renewables, RWE and the German company EnergyKontor. The land they will sit on is part of the Reay Estate, which consists of 38,365 hectares owned by the Trustees of the 4th Duke of Westminster. A hectare is 2.47105 acres. In this one instance is the problem.  

Scottish Government figures for 2024 show that Scotland generated 38.4 TWh, 86% generated by wind power. In 2023 electricity consumption was 21.8 TWh, which was 74% less than in 2005. In the middle of this year Scotland generated 17.7 GW. The total worth of all this renewable energy in 2023 was £43,775 million. The fact is that Scotland produces far more electricity than we need. We are a significant energy exporter. Where we export it to is England via the failing National Grid, now NESO. Because there is no local or regional grid system electricity users in the far north of Scotland have to “buy back” electricity, generated locally, at hugely increased prices. Prices that will only go up as evidenced by the recent announcement by the Westminster government that £28 billion will be added to consumer energy bills to pay for “vital  energy grid upgrades” by which they mean the construction of nuclear reactors at Sizewell and Hinkley in England, a risky power source Scotland obviously does not need. 

What we are getting in the Highlands is the industrialisation of our landscape, the degrading of our environment, as the “grid system” is upgraded by SSEN on the cheap, and extortion through pricing. Much of the “investment” ends up in the pockets of foreign-owned power companies, and results in the impoverishment of our population due to higher energy bills and the extractive nature of the renewable industry in the far north. This is asset stripping. The only winners, financially, are landowners. Rents pour in. Wealth is accumulated. 

There is a solution: a publicly owned Scottish energy company. In the 1970’s the posters said “It’s Scotland’s Oil”. Thatcher’s government made sure it was not. It was then, as Venezuela is finding out now, America’s oil. Now the posters read “It’s Scotland’s Energy” but that is mere sophistry. In Caithness and Sutherland we know it is SSEN’s energy. In January of this year the Scottish Government informed us that it was “not possible” to bring renewable energy into public ownership. Even though over 80% of the Scottish population, when polled, thought the opposite. Why is this? 

The Scotland Act (1998) established the devolved Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government, granting them power over specific “devolved” areas like health, education, and justice, while reserving powers such as defence and foreign policy to the UK Parliament. Energy is one of those “devolved” areas. The Scotland Act is our unacknowledged constitution. It prohibits the Scottish Government from owning electricity-generating, storage or transmission assets. The very things which are being constructed in Caithness and Sutherland, in Orkney and Lewis. Which is strange, because Caledonian Macbrayne and Scotrail are exactly that: publicly owned assets. There is nothing stopping the present Scottish Government getting around this anomaly as far as energy is concerned. Yet it chooses not to. What is lacking is the political will to do so. Except something is stirring. Just this month the SNP published yet another of their great unread documents. This one acknowledged the need for a national Scottish energy company and, it proclaimed, Scotland will have one. But only after we are independent. As Craig Dalzell of Common Weal so eloquently asked in the Sunday National (14.12.25) 

“Can’t we use our publicly owned energy to help win back our independence, rather than claiming more weakly that we can use independence to win back our energy?”

The same logic applies to landownership. Without owning the ground beneath your feet you have no purchase on land use, the economy, housing, social services, planning the future or democracy. What the Scottish people need is for their elected representatives to be the champions of democracy, rather than the managers of mediocrity, which is the status quo. A demonstration of political will would mean that the parliament in Edinburgh would undo the shackles of the Scotland Act and begins to legislate on behalf of the people. As it sits right now the lobbyists are dictating policy. It is time, before it is too late, to reach out and touch the impossible. The owners of Highland sporting estates, and landowners in Scotland in general, view nature and the environment down the barrel of a gun. Their interests have slaughtered all the native fauna including the human population, which were removed and sent overseas. Land ownership is the great untaxed beast of modern Scotland. 

Although it is the opposite of modern. It is out of the pages of Plato’s Republic from the 5th century BC. In Book Six of the Republic Plato writes that, 

“To adore the “Great Beast” is to think and act in conformity with the prejudices and reactions of the multitude to the detriment of all personal search for truth and goodness.” 

If you search in the thin hopeless pages of The John O Groat Journal and all the way through to The Sun and The Daily Record you will not find truth and goodness. You will find the Great Beast. The status quo, which landlordism depends upon, is advocated as an absolute. In this world there is no hope to touch the impossible prospect of freedom. In these gormless editorials, the absolute has no opposite. How can it? It would not survive if the truth were let out. In every Highland gathering, whenever and wherever they occur, there will always be an apologist for the landlord. But the relative argument of the apologist is not the opposite of the absolute. It is a non-communtative distraction. White-tailed eagles go missing. Golden eagles cease transmitting from their electronic collars. The BBC report this as “mysterious” when everyone knows that they have been poisoned, shot or worse. Houses on estates from Durness to Dumfries are bought up, let out as holiday homes whilst the locals go homeless.  

As David Alston said in an interview with the Edinburgh University Press:

“You do not truly understand the history of the Highlands unless you understand this entanglement with enslavement and the brutality which it involved.”

This is as true in relation to slavery and the evolution of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century as it is true of landownership today. The needless industrialisation of a fragile and irreplaceable environment for corporate gain, the wealth extraction that it represents and the continual impoverishment of our population through untaxed landlordism, and the de-population that goes with it, is evidence of weak governance. Our politicians are shadows, not bodies. They manage the mediocre. The impossible, the future, belongs to the people of Scotland. The Great Beast may presently surround Rosehall, but it is a half-dead cadaver looking for somewhere to die. When it is buried we will grow potatoes and sing. 

©George Gunn 2025