The auld Highland sport of toff-bashing

Ever since John Major announced that Britain was a classless society and his soul-mate Tony Blair became a living, velvet-suited embodiment of the same idea, class prejudice has been enjoying a spectacular revival. We live in an age of blandness, and the presence of goofy, unworldly nice-but-dim types in our midst frequently offers amusement, while the cut-glass vowels of the frightfully well-bred can cut through the dreary hum of everyday intercourse in an entertaining way.

So a sweet, unexceptional person like Tara Palmer-Tomkinson becomes famous as the nation's favourite bit of posh totty. Will Young, a public schoolboy with a nice smile and perfect manners, wins the first of the new generation of talent contests, Pop Idol. Any documentary, reality TV show or edition of Blind Date becomes more fun when a member of the upper class is on show. Even faintly bogus toffs – Brian Sewell, Joanna Lumley, Lord St John Stevas – are generally regarded with affectionate indulgence.

Yet, because snobbery is a complicated business, toff-bashing is also increasingly popular. It is at the heart of the hunting debate. It is there whenever poor old Prince Charles tries to articulate his views in public. While the singing butler Paul Burrell can make a good living out of royal tittle-tattle, Major James Hewitt only has to hint at doing the same sort of thing – admittedly in a rather cack-handed and half-baked way – to become a most universally loathed love-rat.

At first glance, there would appear to be a strong element of toff-bashing in the Land Reform Act that has just become law in Scotland. Two-thirds of the country's 19 million acres are owned by 1,252 people – indeed 22 per cent of Scotland is in the hands of 66 landowners. A roll-call of the great lairds, led by the Duke of Buccleugh (130,000 acres), the Duchess of Westminster (120,000 acres), and Captain Alwyn Farquharson (125,000 acres) scarcely suggests they are representative of classless Britain. Add to the list the names of arriviste types such as Mohamed Fayed, Peter de Savary and Sir Tim Rice, and one begins to understand why Scottish MPs so cheerfully passed their new Bill by 101 votes to 19.

The Scots are chippy about most things, but class and the English seem to upset them most. For centuries, there has been resentment that all but a handful of moneyed people, many of them non-residents, have control and access to most of the land. For this reason, legislation that would cause serious alarm elsewhere in the United Kingdom has been passed without significant controversy. Not only does the Land Reform Act provide a universal public right to ramble and offers local communities first refusal on any land that comes on the open market but, most remarkably, it will force a landowner to sell land, with its fishing and mineral rights, if the local crofting community decides at any time that it wishes to take possession.

It is all very well for the Scots to have a bit of fun giving Sir Tim Rice and the Duchess of Westminster a bloody nose, but it does seem distinctly odd that compulsory land purchase, based not on an alleged national needs – a new road or runway – but on the desires of deserving citizens, has become enforceable by law.

For a start, the new law poses a practical, environmental problem. Most of the land under discussion is heather and rock and has negligible farming value, yet requires upkeep. Deplorable as it may seem to right-thinking people, the best way to maintain the landscape is to earn income from fishing and shooting, something only the richest can afford to do. It seems doubtful that the landowners will continue to contribute if, at a stroke, their property can be taken away from them.

What then? Will the Scottish Parliament vote millions of pounds to support a land fit for ramblers? Where will the local crofting communities, in whose interests the law was passed, find the investment? If crofters are anything like small farmers in the rest of the UK, their first reaction on gaining new pockets of land will be to seek planning permission for new buildings and naff barn conversions. This may be deemed desirable by the egalitarian Scottish MPs, but will hardly help the landscape.

There has been much scoffing at those who have compared the Land Reform Act to the appropriation of farmland by Robert Mugabe but, apart from the fact that Scottish war veterans are unlikely to be marching on their nearest castle, it is difficult to see the moral difference. Either we live in a property-owning democracy or the state now has the power to redistribute land as it sees fit: there is no middle way. While it may be amusing to upset tweedy old dukes and upwardly-mobile celebrities while easing the feelings of hurt and class rage in Scottish breasts, the arguments behind land reform in Scotland set a dangerous precedent for the rest of us.

terblacker@aol.com