The Australian Greg Coffey, the financial sector comet who so galvanised the City of London that he was dubbed ‘The Wizard of Oz’, has submitted a new set of plans for a golf course he wants to build on the Ardfin Estate on Argyll’s Isle of Jura, which he bought a few years ago.
This submission to Argyll and Bute Council follows the closure of his first such application, which had been consigned to limbo for the consideration of a series of details.
At issue again is whether this is to be private golf course or whether Mr Coffee will open it to the public.
It is reasonable to say that Mr Coffee probably regarded his investment as being in a private facility.
This gives rise to a series of questions about wealth, privacy and social responsibility.
Mr Coffee has also closed the well known gardens at Jura House which had previously been open to the public and were a major attraction for visitors to this celebrated island – rich in scenery and short of permanent residents.
It’s very easy to hammer landowners but fairness requires a more sophisticated analysis.
Access to the gardens at Jura House would compromise the privacy of those in residence at the house. Access to a golf course could be seen as another invasion, affecting the privacy of the person who had spent a fortune to acquire just that.
The old landed families, many aristocratic, have over time developed an embedded lifestyle which opens much of their private amenity to local residents for the common good, often at no cost.
Take Inveraray – where the Dukes of Argyll effectively provide the village with maintained walks and access to a glorious landscaped parkland – year round and for nothing,
Members of a family like this inherit its assets and its liabilities – which include a life of restricted privacy. Most of the rest of us would hate this but they have also inherited the attitudes and strategies to accommodate it. They have ways of carving out for themselves, in varying degree, the mental and physical space necessary to any sentient being.
This ought not to mean that residents of an area surrounding an estate are entitled to expect access and privileges.
We all feel territorial about our own space. It is our personal sanctuary.
People whose wealth differentiates them from the rest of us are no different. The scale of what one owns does not make one any less instinctively territorial.
Many members of the old landed families are born into a context of community access already laid down by their forebears – one which perhaps lays upon them a sort of schizophrenic existence where there is a greater gulf than with most of us between the public and the private persona.
They cannot enjoy the lack of privacy – many have to accept it and even promote it in order to maintain the property – but they expect to have to deal with it.
However, where a gifted but not initially privileged individual earns a lot of money through effort and ability and invests substantially in creating a private personal sanctuary, the dynamic is very different.
This is a greenfield investment in privacy, not an inherited territory already shared by others. And if a deed of sale does not include obligations, why should a new owner’s imagination expect limitations on personal privacy?
Where people become stable residents and grow comfortable and familiar with a place, they may, later, wish to share some of it. They are psychologically unlikely to wish to do this straight up. They’ve not had time to get accustomed to it on their own.
If Mr Coffey never opened up any access of any kind to his property, Jura would still benefit from his presence in the economic impact of employment and spending by a landowner actively interested in improving his property.
If any of us had bought a place to be private in and others started telling us what we should and should not do with it, it would feel invasive, claustrophobic and far from being a sanctuary. Currently MFr Coffey is seeing the local MSP for Argyll and Bute making public offers in the press to play a part in a wider discussion of Mr Coffey’s plans for the future with the wider community.
To express this inelegantly – whose nose would that not get up?
The trouble is that, philosophically, our society is trapped in a no man’s land between capitalism and socialism, between ‘I paid for it. It’s mine and I’ll do what I like with it.’ and ‘The land belongs to the people’.
The reality is much more complex than either; but respect for privacy, our own and others’ – and the right to privacy, are fundamental tenets of civilised life.
If any of our relative poverty is seen as conferring a right to access the facilities of the better off, there will always be someone poorer than us who will defensibly claim the same right to access what we consider ‘ours’.
