"The buggers are out to get us."

On first glance, it sounds like a wee thing. A technical thing. On page ninety-two of Nicola's new Programme for Government, under the heading of land reform, the dry civil service prose notes:

"As part of this modernisation the distinction between movable and immovable property would be removed to give children, spouses and civil partners appropriate legal rights over both forms of property. This should ensure a just distribution of assets among a deceased’s close family to reflect both societal change and expectations."

I can feel your eyelids drooping, but the implications of this dreary little sentence are eye-popping -- if you happen to own great tracts of land and wish to bequeath them to your beloved son and heir. It'll have the Tatler class in the Borders and the Highlands buckled in grief. Ragged strips of tweed, the only remains of a popping laird, will be fluttering over rural Perthshire. But to see why, you have to know a thing or two about the Scottish law of succession as it stands. 

When you feel the cold hand of the Reaper feel your collar, or sense him hovering near, you have a few options. You can scribble up a will, setting out how you'd like your property and assets to be distributed after your death. Alternatively, you can leave the distribution to the law of intestacy, which sets out rules about who gets what after you are under the clod. Generally speaking, if you write your will, effect will be given to your testamentary wishes. Uncle John's gold watch will go to wee Jimmy, who always loved its ticking so. Your bungalow will transfer to the cat and dog home, to keep the nation's unloved moggies in the manner to which they have become accustomed. 

But you don't have limitless freedom under Scots law. Your close relatives - your spouses and children - have certain legal rights over your property. They can forswear whatever legacy you grant them in your will, and claim their legal rights from your estate instead. But here's the crunch. At present, these legal rights only extend to your moveable property - money in the bank, gold bullion in the shed, shares and so on. They don't extend to heritable property - to land and the houses built upon them. At least, not yet. 

If you wanted to be a cruel, cold-hearted Scottish patriarch, and to write your hated spouse and children out of your will, you had to drink the profits while alive, or invest them in land. But if you maintain a healthy surplus in your bank account, and try to exclude one child from inheriting any of it, they can override your will and claim their legal rights from your estate. Nicola's plans kibosh those aspirations. And these legal rights aren't paltry sums. A single child whose mother survives is entitled to claim a full one third of his father's moveable estate. That may amount to six bob and a pickled egg, or hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

The exclusion of heritable property from the bairn's part has obvious consequences: it allows large, landowning interests to keep their estates together, generation to generation, by immunising testamentary intent from legal challenge. It gives the dead landowner the final word on where their hunting estates, and farms, and stately homes end up. Second sons and daughters don't get a look in. If they are unhappy with the generosity of their legacies, they can claim their legitim rights, but the land itself is exempted. Which is why Nicola's proposals today, despite their untrumpeted delivery, have real radical potential.

If introduced, those disgruntled second sons and daughters would have the right to have land - potentially very large tracts of land - factored into their legal rights, whatever the deceased's will had to say about it. Perhaps these siblings would want to honour their father's wishes, and for the eldest boy to inherit the title and the property -- but I dare say others would want to vindicate their legal entitlements in the teeth of dearly departed's desire to disinherit them. If those making wills know that their wishes will not and cannot be enforced against their children, that too is likely to encourage changes of behaviour, and the gradual erosion and division of the country's biggest estates.

There are doubtless canny corporate workarounds and expensive trust work which could defeat the simple logic of the Scottish Government's policy here -- but extending legal rights to land is more than just a technicality. It strikes at the heart of the legal system of succession which is instrumental in upholding and maintaining landownership in its current form. Before the referendum, "one of the country's pre-eminent dukes" fretted in Tatler that "the buggers are out to get us." When His Grace chews through the implications of today's announcement, I dare say he'll be confirmed in his opinion.