Meeting of the Parliament 20 September 2023
What we are holding the SNP-Green Government to account for this afternoon is its relationship with big capital. Under the Green Finance Institute—“backed by Government, trusted by finance, led by bankers”, we are told—it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Hampden & Co, a private bank for high-net-worth clients; Lombard Odier investments, an asset management company that offers
“investment capabilities spanning an innovative spectrum of major and alternative asset classes”,
whatever that means; and Palladium International, the transnational corporate private outsourcing consultancy.
So, what we are witnessing is the fusion of venture capital, private equity groups, sovereign wealth funds and the state, and it is all being overseen by a minister who tells us that she is proud—proud—to hand over Scotland’s nature recovery to the grasping hands of these asset managers. This process is not bottom up; it is top down. It represents the entrenchment of privilege rather than its removal.
It is a redistribution of power and wealth, but it is a redistribution of power and wealth that is going in precisely the wrong direction. It is a system of commercialism that ushers in not simply private profit but private advantage. So, I say to the minister: whatever happened to the idea of the earth as a common treasury? What about the common good and the commonwealth? This private extractive capital is not remotely compatible with the Government’s stated aims of land reform, just transition and community wealth building; it is the polar opposite.
The Government’s slogan is “equality, opportunity and community”, but, in this plan, it has abandoned the goals of equality and community in favour of opportunity for the speculators. The Government has turned its back on an economy
“of the people, by the people, for the people”
and has put in its place this grotesque alternative. Our nature is being colonised for nothing more than wealth asset growth, turning it into a financial commodity to be bought and sold and—worse—to be marketed as a vehicle for the avoidance of tax.
Under its market framework for investment, mentioned in the programme for government, are we even to be told who these investor clients—those who will use our land, our trees and our peatlands to greenwash their cash—are? Will we get full disclosure of all the investors? Will we ever be told how much of the money comes from secretive offshore trusts paying no tax in any jurisdiction? Those are not abstract questions; they are questions about what is happening in Scotland today. If we want the radical change that the nature and climate emergency demands, we must not accept the limits of power and money in their present form. We must change those limits, rebalance that power, widen those horizons and build up the confidence of the people.
A century ago, Tom Johnston declared:
“Our old nobility is not noble.”
Well, there is nothing noble about this new nobility either. The Scottish Government needs to understand why there is anger out there about it, why there is impatience for change and why the people who elect us are crying out for a real, responsible, democratic, ethical, socialistic alternative.
15:23