BY BERT BURNETT
Let’s face it: this was never about finding a lost habitat or restoring a balanced ecosystem. It was never about bringing back the wildcats or the sea eagles for their own sake. No – somewhere along the line, genuine conservation got hijacked. What we have now is a carefully manufactured machine designed to make the public feel guilty, pass the blame onto whoever happens to be in their sights, and funnel easy money into the pockets of unscrupulous wildlife charities, conservation quangos, and a government only too happy to exercise more power while eyeing your wallet.
The spectacular collapse of the Scottish Government’s £2 billion “world-leading” Nature Investment Partnership – now quietly reduced to precisely zero private investment – should be a wake-up call. But don’t expect the usual suspects to learn anything. They’re already hunting for the next headline, the next grandiose announcement, the next way to make you feel responsible for the peat bogs.
Let me be blunt: even if that £2 billion had materialised, it would have been a monumental waste of money. Most of it would have been swallowed up by rewilding consultants, conservation quangos like NatureScot (whose budget has already ballooned by 60% in one parliament), and charities with opaque outcomes and even murkier motives. Very little would have reached the ground – and what did reach it would have actively harmed the very wildlife they claim to champion.
Our most endangered and vulnerable wildlife would have been put in more danger, not less. You don’t help ground-nesting birds – thousands of which are already being displaced from traditional breeding grounds – by covering the uplands and productive agricultural land in dense tree plantations. That’s not restoration. That’s destruction dressed up as virtue. And turning perfectly good land into flooded ponds in the name of carbon capture? Have they stopped to calculate the methane coming off those stagnant waters? Flooded bogs give off methane – a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO₂. How much more of that would we have generated in this fevered rush to virtue-signal?
And here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the environmental lobby wants to discuss: covering the hills in trees is unlikely to capture any more CO₂ than the original land management was already doing. In many cases, it will make things worse. But when has evidence ever got in the way of a good moral panic?
Meanwhile, the public is left paying the bill. Local government is cut to the bone, councils can’t fulfil their own environmental ambitions, and yet hundreds of millions are found for tree-planting schemes that benefit landowners’ bank balances and quango salaries. The public needs that funding for hospitals, schools, roads, and genuine community resilience – not for dubious rewilding experiments with unproven outcomes.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the SNP have had a lightbulb moment. The £2 billion fantasy is dead. Aberdeen has pulled out. The private finance titans have gone elsewhere. And all that remains are wasted years, wasted money, and lost opportunities for genuine reform.
But don’t hold your breath. The guilt industry never closes down – it just rebrands. Tomorrow they’ll be back with another scheme, another target, another reason why you must pay and they must be trusted. My advice? Keep your hand on your wallet and your eye on the small print. Because the only thing truly endangered here is the truth.
Bert Burnett is a retired gamekeeper of more than fifty years’ experience.