Charles Moore

Who owns Scotland? The people who most commonly ask this question believe that the land has been wrested from ordinary Scots by evil lairds and rich foreigners (by which they chiefly mean the English). Now the Scottish government is bringing out a report on how to correct this alleged injustice. It may recommend extending community ‘right to buy’ powers and allowing tenants to buy their holdings even if the owners do not want to sell.  This would have the unintended effect of ending all new tenancies. But the SNP’s misunderstanding of the situation is even more radical than that. It believes that big Scottish landowners are rich because they own the land. For a long time now, it has been the other way round. They own the land because they are rich.

There has naturally been plenty of unfavourable comment on how the Revd Paul Flowers, the ‘crystal Methodist’, was allowed by the Financial Services Authority to become chairman of the Co-op Bank. But the story does not reflect very well on the media either. If you look at Robert Peston’s BBC blog on the subject, for instance, there is a lot of ‘I am told’ and ‘according to the Manchester Evening News’. Is there no one in the BBC’s enormous staff who could have done a bit of work years ago on the Revd Mr Flowers?

The most extraordinary thing about the scandal of Unite at Grangemouth and in Falkirk is how long it took the outside world to notice. Partly, this is an effect of devolution: almost nothing Scottish is now considered news in London, even if it is of kingdom-wide importance. Partly, it results from the loss of media and political attention to trade union affairs. So successful was Mrs Thatcher in taming union political power that newspapers laid off the labour correspondents who, in the 1970s and early 1980s, had been the aristocrats of the news room. As for the Tories, they have forgotten the Cold War arts of keeping dossiers on subversion.

Jimmy Savile and I were both born on 31 October, though separated by 30 years. Sir James would be 87 this week. While he lived, I must admit, this fact did not give me much fellow feeling with the famous disc jockey, knight and member of the Athenaeum (proposed for membership by Cardinal Hume); but since he has died, I have been distressed that absolutely no one will speak in his defence. What bothers me is the sense that no one knows fully what he did, and few have tried seriously to establish the facts. Operation Yewtree, conducted by the police and the NSPCC, would barely admit that it had not actually investigated individual testimony against Savile. The current inquiry into Savile’s behaviour in NHS hospitals is being much more conscientiously pursued.

As I write, the World Islamic Economic Forum is opening in London, the first time it has been held in a non-Muslim country. David Cameron boasts that investors will now be able to buy sharia-compliant British gilts. If the forum helps Muslim countries share their commercial expertise with one another and the rest of us, well and good. But should modes of global commerce be defined by religious allegiance? What would the conspiracy theorists say about a World Jewish Economic Forum? How would Saudi Arabia — or even Dubai — react to the suggestion of a World Christian Economic Forum taking place within its borders?

I do not know whether the Greek gypsy couple accused of abducting a girl called Maria are guilty, but I am surprised by how the media, even the politically correct outlets, have seized on the story, grabbing the pretext of Madeleine McCann. Why does it matter that Maria has blonde hair and blue eyes? If she had been abducted and had dark hair and brown eyes, would that have been less objectionable? Now a similar case has come up in Dublin. Are news desks unaware that stories about gypsies stealing children are staples of mob-inciting propaganda, like accusations in Pakistan that Christians are flushing Korans down the lavatory? In eastern central Europe, hatred of gypsies is a major factor in political and social life.

A friend has exhumed instructions issued to Daily Mail journalists by their editor, Mike Randall, in the mid-1960s, about how to behave (below). The first three items read: ‘1. No member of Daily Mail staff intrudes or is called upon to intrude into private lives where no public interest is involved. 2. No ordinary member of the public is lured, coerced or in any way pressed by a Daily Mail representative into giving an interview or picture which he is clearly unwilling to give. 3. It remains our duty at all times to expose the fraud and reveal the mountebank wherever the public interest is involved.