The gannets are circling Scotland

Before you ask yourself who has that kind of money, ask yourself who hasn’t. Then, if you’re feeling adventurous, ask yourself (possibly not for the first time) what separates the former from the latter. Luck, inherent virtue, talent, a nice smile, and praying really hard should form no part of your answer. But we’ll get to that.

Ailsa Craig is for sale. Foolishly, I had not realised that a historic Scottish landmark, actually unmissable in large parts of Ayrshire, was just a counter on life’s great Monopoly board. I should have known better. If you subtracted the swathes of Scotland held in private hands from the rest, five million of us would be left to huddle at Harthill services, arguing over house prices.

But that’s what they call context. Is the Craig really so dear? These days it’s barely the price of a couple of posh Edinburgh addresses. Paddy’s Milestone may be lumbered with 40,000 gannets, it is true. But I’ve been around gannets (a long story) and I’ve been around people who live in posh Edinburgh addresses. The differences are more apparent than real. A gannet will at least spare you an argument about the politics of envy and house prices.

Those have fallen again, you may have heard. Or rather, the great majority of people, those liable to worry over evaporating virtual wealth, have taken still another knock; a small minority have no such concerns. Last year, sales in Scotland of houses priced over £1m increased from 102 to 148, giving rise to the belief that 3200 Scottish properties are now valued in seven figures. That is, however you do the sums, a lot of gannets.

If you believe everything you hear, it should also be counter-intuitive. These are hard times, surely, and aren’t we are all in them together? Someone forgot to tell the £1m nest-builders or the rock stars who think owning the likes of Ailsa Craig allows them to put down “roots” (as pot plants do). They forgot to tell the deluded peasants who drool over “rich lists”.

Half of the sales of million-plus “homes” now take place in Edinburgh, where it is amazing how little you can get for that kind of money. Few of the transactions have anything to do with anyone who is locally born, or even Scottish. The capital is currently regarded as a prime target by people the Herald has termed “London investors and overseas speculators”. There’s a reason for that.

While average house prices in England and Wales have also fallen, parts of London might as well be sitting behind a raised drawbridge. Within that redoubt, £1m for a house is commonplace. Such a sum might buy you something very agreeable in Edinburgh but it wouldn’t get you cat-swinging room in the desired parts of the English capital. So the gannets – closely related to the boobies, I’m told – head northwards.

Who are these people? The rich lists don’t help much. They may mention the occasional slightly-talented young singer who’s just had a hit album and become wealthy-on-paper. They may suggest that the 1000 richest people in Britain – those who had not hidden the loot, their identities, or both – saw their wealth “grow” by a third during the worst of the recession. But they never give simple explanations. Useful words like crook, thief, fraud, evasion, bonus and scam are always absent.

Instead, great wealth is presented as its own justification, and offered, like shining virtue, for our admiration. In a world in which money is celebrity, celebrity is money, and each is taken to mark status and worth, we have returned to authentic Victorian values. A poor individual is a morally defective individual. Anyone who got rich is a superior kind of being simply because of the money. To prove it, and to garner a little more of that well-deserved adoration, they throw a bit of spare cash at a good cause now and then.

We should start a new unit of currency, just for them. “He’s worth 30 Ailsas, you know,” we could say. It would at least establish a boundary between two realities. While the rest of us struggled on with our rapidly depreciating pounds and pence, our tax rises, shrinking wages, unemployment, diminished services, and tiresome class politics, those in the Ailsa zone would know where they stood. Presumably, as far away as possible. On a private island. Chatting to the gannets about tax strategies.

We are not supposed to talk in this manner, of course. If I believe what I read, Annabel Goldie spent part of the recent, much-missed election campaign dedicating the Scottish Tories to the fight against socialism and nationalism. They bother me, too. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering what became of them. Then I grasp Ms Goldie’s point. Unless we’re careful, some churl who isn’t asking how rich-list members came to be “worth” hundreds of millions will be asking who is buying all the £1m houses in these austere times.

It is Ms Goldie’s party, after all, or at least its London head office, that tells us constantly about all the things the country can no longer afford. They don’t say why it is that in straitened times the very rich have become very much richer. They certainly don’t mention a simple answer. This: to save the banks that spin the wheels for the super-rich, the peoples of the Western world allowed the biggest transfer of wealth from public hands to private in human history. In gannet terms, we gave them a ton of free fish. The banks swallowed the money, but won’t regurgitate.

In that sense, private islands are (to mix a metaphor) the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn’t pick out Ailsa Craig, necessarily. In cash terms, that’s old money. Its price is next-to-nothing for those “London investors and overseas speculators”, for the rock stars tired of other toys, or for the people who would spend £2.75 million on a London lease.

But property – the idea of ownership – is self-explanatory, whether the object is a lump of rock in the sea or a New Town address. It asserts possession and exclusion: mine, keep out. It claims more of the world, as though by right, than is granted to the rest of us. And the rest of us are trained to believe that this is admirable, the natural order.

Gannets know all about that. They are not the world’s most adorable birds, but at least they earn their fish.