“Privatize everything, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize justice and the law, privatize the passing cloud, privatize the dream, especially if it’s during the day and open eyed. And finally, for the embellishment of so many privatizations, privatize the States, surrender once and for all their exploitation to private companies through international share offering. There lies the salvation of the world…” – José de Sousa Saramago

(This blog post previously appeared in The National. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

“Natural capital is our geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals.”

Remember that definition, for it is the one the Scottish Government uses to introduce their “Market Framework for Natural Capital”, which they are consulting on at the moment.

Not content with their previous attempts to privatise nature in Scotland (see their “PFI For Trees” scandal last year and their “Green Investment Portfolio” a few years before that), the Government now wants to expand the remit of potential privatisation to all aspects of Natural Capital:- our geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals.

The principles set out by the market framework betray a Government that is bending over backwards to make Scotland the easiest place they can to extract profits from. This isn’t hyperbole – they say it quite plainly in the documents. Yes, they say, nature should be “enhanced” by the investments, but we must also take into account “the need and expectation for a financial return on investment”. Investment should be “responsible” but the governance side of things merely carries “expectations” – which could well be read as a government willing to allow the investors to write their own governance rules. The Government promises to develop a “pipeline of investable projects” and is also going to set out “the benefits from private investment in natural capital” – which suggests that we who live on the geology, breathe the air and drink the water just don’t know how good things are going to get if we allow them to privatise the lot.

Scotland is already one of the most foreign-owned economies in the developed world and already has some of the most concentrated patterns of private land ownership in the world (according to Andy Wightman, the third largest landowner in Scotland is now Gresham House, a London-based asset management firm owned by New York-based investment firm Searchlight Capital). We have a long history of public assets being “developed” by private companies (hence why the term PFI is so toxic) and campaigners around Scotland (such as those fighting to protect St Fittick’s Park in Aberdeen – the last freely accessible area of greenspace in Torry – from private development) are well aware of the stakes if we allow private companies to develop Scotland’s assets for their own benefit rather than the benefit of all of us.

The climate crisis is one that must go well beyond “Net Zero” (which, under current Scottish Government targets, is a promise that Scotland will continue to cause climate damage until 2045 and then promise to clean up exactly as much damage as we cause every year from then on without promising to fix the damage we’ve caused up till that point) and must consider a true Green New Deal that doesn’t just consider our natural capital as a sink for carbon credits, a profitable return on private investment, a way to “achieve product diversification” (read: a way for fossil fuel companies to greenwash their pollution) and some green points for billionaire philanthropists but as a place for all of us (including the plants and animals) to live sustainably on this planet together. One of the questions in the consultation reveals the Government’s thinking all too clearly. Question 4 asks “How should public investment work alongside and enable private investment?”. This is, of course, entirely backwards and inside out. Public investment shouldn’t be used as an accelerator for even greater profits but should be the main driver of climate transition – potentially funded by taxing polluting companies rather than selling them carbon credits to allow them to keep polluting.

Common Weal will publish our response to this consultation ahead of the deadline on July 12th and we encourage everyone to submit their response too (you can find the “Developing a natural capital market framework” survey at consult.gov.scot) but that brings us to a final point of objection in the way the Government are handling this topic. Regular readers will know how important government transparency is to Common Weal, as attested by our campaigns for stronger Freedom of Information laws and our highlighting of the absurd loopholes in the Lobbying Register, and that nerve was struck again in this consultation where the Government said that, unlike every other public consultation we’ve taken part in, the responses to this consultation will not be published. Why not? My suspicion is that they don’t want the public to see the responses from the private investors who stand to profit from this market framework as they tell the government how wonderful it would be if they were allowed to profit from our Natural Capital as they make even more money by exploiting our geology, soil, air, water, plants, animals…and us.