Fingers crossed. Amid a declining, even disintegrating, natural world, Britain should be about to complete its most spectacular snatch of triumph from wildlife disaster. It is already a rare success story – and one in which the Observer has played a part.
Experts at a Unesco conference opening in Delhi today are expected to grant conservation’s highest accolade, world heritage status, to Scotland’s boggy but beautiful Flow Country. Yet, not so long ago, this unique ecosystem, much the biggest and finest of its kind globally, was being destroyed by celebrities secretly avoiding tax.
The rapid destruction of this haunting expanse of peat and pools, stretching across a million acres of Caithness and Sutherland, was judged Britain’s biggest habitat loss since the Second World War by the official Nature Conservancy Council. It is home to a proliferation of rare plants, insects, fish, mammals and birds and its peat – which has been accumulating for 10,000 years – stores more than twice as much carbon as all of Britain’s woodlands combined, providing a vital buffer against climate change.
All that was being lost under dense rows of alien conifers, obliterating the landscape and smothering rare species. This cultivation was fuelled by an intricate ecosystem of tax breaks, totalling tens of millions of pounds annually, which paid up to three-quarters of the cost of planting the trees and enabled the wealthy to make big tax-free profits on selling. Such unwonted generosity drove the destruction on to land unsuitable for forestry, like the Flow Country. By the late 1980s, one sixth of the vast area had been destroyed, despite being protected by four international treaties. Wildlife plummeted, and the disturbed peat emitted 3.4m tonnes of carbon.
Credit for ending this state-sanctioned scandal belongs to many, from radical Scottish conservationists to that climate activists’ bogeyman, Nigel Lawson – and even this newspaper. The identities of the rich and famous for whom money really did grow on trees were kept confidential, but – we discovered – could be divined by closely examining the little-known register of sasines for Scotland and the Scottish Record Office. George Rosie, the investigative Scottish journalist, spent months identifying the secret beneficiaries – including Terry Wogan, “Hurricane Higgins” and Shirley Porter, then leader of Westminster council.
He and I contributed an exposé to the Observer Magazine documenting names and what they were getting (Wogan, for example, netted £400,000 from the taxpayer) in February 1988. The next month, Lawson, then chancellor, abolished the tax breaks largely – Treasury officials told us – as a result. Former environment minister Baroness White told the Lords: “We owe a debt of gratitude to the Observer,” and former MSP Andy Wightman, author of a definitive work on Scottish land ownership, believes the publicity proved a powerful deterrent.
At any rate, Flow County afforestation stopped, protections were introduced and work began to remove the plantations and restore the bog. If all goes well, Unesco will soon rank nearly half a million acres of it with the Galápagos, the Great Barrier Reef and Africa’s Serengeti, making it the first peatland world heritage site. That is likely to be worth £400m and hundreds of jobs, not least through sustainable tourism: the celebrity tax bonanza benefited only few.
• Geoffrey Lean is a specialist environment correspondent and author
