Hundreds of fans turned out at Hibernian Football Club on Wednesday to honour Sir Tom Farmer, the man who saved the club and owned it for 30 years, despite the fact he wasn’t a football fan himself.
He did it to support the local community in Leith where he lived for most of his life. He was one of the small group of Scottish businessmen who have followed in the tradition of Sir Andrew Carnegie and have used their wealth to benefit society.
Tom began selling car tyres in his early 20s. In five years he’d earned his first half-million and was off to America to learn how they do business there. He came back in 1971 and founded Kwik Fit, the tyre and car repair business which grew to be the largest independent chain in the world with 2000 garages in 18 countries. He sold it to Ford in 1999 for £1billion. But he didn’t rest on his wealthy laurels, he went on to found Farmer’s Autocare with 21 garages across central Scotland.
His insight was that a business needs to earn the trust of its customers and to send them away satisfied each time. Staff training was an essential part of the business model. He left paper-work to others but concentrated on development and enthusiasm. And that, in a way, led to his philanthropy. He supported causes close to his native Leith, like Hibs Football Club, the purchase of Inchkeith Island as a wildlife sanctuary and his support for the new Queen Margaret University.
He put his success down to marrying the right girl, Anne Scott, who died in 2023 after 57 years together. He was a devout Roman Catholic and was honoured by the Pope for his good works. I suspect though that his early success was due to good luck, like all business success, or at least luck combined with hard work and talent. And I suppose his philanthropy was a way of re-paying those gifts.
We have other business philanthropists in Scotland, like the sportswear entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter and the oil baron Sir Ian Wood, who are not only supporting charitable causes but also advising us on how to achieve economic growth. They suggest a “venture philanthropy” system in which their donations are matched with new business investment. They also suggest lightening the burden of tax on business and making a big effort on training young people. That would mean the government losing tax income and spending more. But the gap could be filled by the philanthropists themselves or by a wealth tax.
There is a growing campaign in Britain for a wealth tax, led by a group calling themselves Patriotic Millionaires. They calculate that if a 2 per cent tax were levied on the 20,000 citizens with more than £10 million of assets, it would raise £24billion a year, roughly equivalent to the “black hole” the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is trying to fill by all her welfare cuts. The group argue that this could rise to £60billion if other changes to the tax on wealth were made.
It’s remarkable that this debate is at such an early stage when set against the spending needs shown up by the rest of the news this week. Scotland’s economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in February and again by 0.2 per cent in March, partly due to government austerity. The teaching unions have been complaining about the lack of classroom assistants to deal with the increase in classroom disruption and violence. The police say they can’t do much about the rise in knife crime in Glasgow and Edinburgh without more resources. And there have been the usual stories of long waiting times in the NHS. Over 5,000 patients have been waiting for over two years for out-patient appointments.
At least the government will not have to find the money for a new National Park in Galloway. The plan has been dropped because of local opposition. The park would have stretched from the outskirts of Dumfries, though rolling farmland and forests to the cliffs and beaches of the south west coast. It would have been Scotland’s third national park, after Loch Lomond and the Cairngorms. A third park was promised when the SNP were in coalition with the Greens but now it appears they don’t have the environmental energy to push the plans through against the wishes of farmers and land-owners.
It seems that wildlife and landscape conservation is being left to the environmental charities like the RSPB, the Wildlife Trust, the John Muir Trust and a handful of philanthropists.
