That said, nature costs money. Over the centuries, this marvellous wilderness has been preserved by old money and by new. It has always been easy to make a small fortune in the Highlands. You just have to start out with a large one. But the Nats and their allies cannot bear private ownership. They are determined to destroy it, whatever the consequences. So they are proposing land reform, which would break up the large estates, plus an adjustment of inheritance law along French lines. A Scottish “Code Napoleon”, enforcing equal distribution of inherited property, would finish off anything that land reform had allowed to survive. No one would be willing to invest money in the Highlands. As the Scottish economy crumbled, a government of urban socialists would be running out of cash to spend on welfare. Anyone naive enough to believe that it could replace the beneficence of the Highland lairds would be complicit in an ecological disaster.