DEPENDING on your upbringing, there are two typical cartoonish versions of a Scottish landowner.

If you were brought up Tory, a Scottish nobleman typifies good breeding and effortless charm, as comfortable outdoors on his sporting estate as indoors in his ancestral drawing room regaling companions with tasteful quips.

For just about everyone else, the Scottish landowner is an strange anachronism, only surviving thanks to an absurdly generous legal system.

Both pictures, though, are misleading. Don’t get me wrong, Scotland’s land inequalities are immoral and frankly a national disgrace. But our landowners aren’t simply throwbacks. Increasingly, their business tactics are thoroughly up-to-date.

Some face chares of making their money through disreputable forms of contemporary capitalism.

Scotland’s third biggest private landowner, Anders Povlsen is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, the sole inheritor of the snazzy Danish fashion label Bestseller, a conglomerate with eleven premium labels including Jack & Jones and Selected Homme/Femme. Povlsen is a model for the business style that many in Scottish politics would like us to emulate.

He’s Nordic, he’s hip as hell, he sells to Urban Outfitters, he bangs on about ethical business. He’s a brand leader of “flat white capitalism”, a hipster entrepreneur rather than some musty old pensioner in a crumbling castle.

Povlsen is also a big investor in the online fashion retailer Asos, whose labour practices have come under fire from the GMB union and Labour leadership contender Owen Smith.

Among the many abuses reported at Asos’s warehouses, we could list intrusive use of “big brother style security surveillance”, a bullying targets regime and a “flexible” working system where staff are given just two hours’ notice to turn up for work.

Most shockingly, GMB claims that staff have limited access to toilet breaks and washing facilities.

Vice News recently reported: “Those whose job it is to select orders from the factory’s stock push heavy trollies across five floors and walk miles per shift, with as little as half an hour’s rest.”

Povlsen, who owns 170,000 acres of Scotland, is one of those landowners criticised in a recent report for Global Justice Now, a super-rich global elite who become large private landowners in Scotland.

Another continental European family, the de Spoelberchs, own huge estates in Scotland.

They are the people behind Stella Artois, and a large part of the world’s largest brewing chain AB Inbev, a firm that dismissed hundreds of workers in Mexico for forming an independent trade union.

Other big Scottish landowners include Saudi royalty, oil oligarchs, Russian steel tycoons, and a host of North European billionaires fleeing from stricter land ownership regimes.

Our truly “Scottish” landowners, meanwhile, also play the game of global capitalism. Many “Scottish owned” estates are actually registered in Caribbean tax havens.

The Duke of Buccleuch is a classic example, but he’s hardl unique. The Panama Papers recently offered a glimpse into the true state of land in Scotland.

It’s believed that £100 million of Scottish land is registered in places like the British Virgin Islands and Grand Cayman.

And let’s remember, many Scottish landowners have a strong global capitalist heritage. The Keswick estate in southern Scotland comes from the fortunes of the Jardine Matheson company, who made their historic wealth by forcing the Chinese to open up their markets to opium.

Some people see our land inequalities as a peculiar Scottish backwardness. That’s understandable, because other countries perform much better than us. But for me, our landowners stand for current global problems rather than ancient Scottish ones.

Scottish estates are like English football clubs. They are status symbols and playthings for the world’s billionaire rulers, a class who grew rich with government support and have more money than any human being could ever possibly physically spend.

These leisured elites and their families have no democratic accountability.

They expect nothing less than the red carpet treatment wherever they go, and they get it.

However, as the European Championship highlighted, English football hasn’t necessarily blossomed under billionaire rule. And while billionaires at least bring investment there, in Scotland, we see little of it.

Indeed, some estate owners cry foul when investments like windfarms come, fearing that unsightly green energy will ruin their dream of “wilderness hunting”.

When we’re pushing for land reform, our opponents will plead “tradition”. Personally, I’m against lots of traditions, from rickets and witch-burning to Christmas pantomimes starring the Krankies and John Barrowman.

But that’s besides the point here.

There’s nothing traditional about our landowners. They move with the times, some of them absorbing the worst of contemporary capitalism into their ranks.