bellacaledonia.org.uk | £3

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contributors appeal

Isobel Lindsay is Vice President of Scottish CND and member of Women for Independence.

Lucy Conway is one of a large team of volunteers who have led the Isle of Eigg’s £1million bid in NESTA’s Big Green Challenge. She is a Director of Comas – a community development agency working in Scotland and Sri Lanka – and a member the Technical Advisory Panel for Distance Lab – a creative research organisation working on the theme of distance.

Dougald Hine is an author, editor and social entrepreneur. He co-founded School of Everything and the The Dark Mountain Project, of which he is Director at Large. He also founded the Spacemakers Agency that brings together artists, architects, activists, thinktankers and squatters and the Institute for Collapsonomics that studies and charts decline and re-emergence.

Mike Small is the editor of Bella Caledonia.

Andy Wightman is an author and researcher and Scotland’s leading campaigner on land ownership and community buy-outs.

Douglas Stuart Wilson is a translator, writer and film-maker. He lived in Spain for twenty years where he worked at various times as a teacher, film development executive, independent producer, screenplay writer, freelance story-editor, journalist and translator.

José M. Ramos is an editor with Action Foresight magazine and the Journal of Futures Studies and Co-founder: Plug in TV, Melbourne Social Forum.

Kevin Williamson is a writer, publisher, and activist originally from Caithness. In 1992 Williamson launched a literary magazine called Rebel Inc and through its pages was one of the first publishers of such Scottish writers as Irvine Welsh, Laura Hird, Alan Warner, and Toni Davidson. His published work includes “A Visitor’s Guide To Edinburgh” (co-written with Irvine Welsh in 1993), and “Drugs and the Party Line” (1997).

Lesley Riddoch is a writer, broadcaster, campaigner and force of nature. She founded feminist magazine Harpies & Quines in 1992 and has been contributing editor of the Sunday Herald and assistant editor of The Scotsman. This year she has published ‘Blossom, How Scotland can flourish’ (Luath Press).

Iain Mackinnon is a Gaidheal from the Isle of Skye. Key research questions include the nature and origins of crofting as part of deeper questions of how the land, spirit and power of the Gaidheal of Scotland has been colonised; and of ways in which we may bring about decolonisation.

Fraser Macdonald teaches historical geography at the University of Edinburgh. He blogs at Modern Lives Modern Landscapes. He tweets @JAFMacDonald.

Cat Boyd is a trade union activist and member of Radical Independence Campaign and International Socialist Group (Scotland)

Elaine Morrison is a Research Associate at the Centre for Remote and Rural Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands and a part-time PhD student at the University of Dundee. Her key interests are social and environmental justice dimensions of energy, particularly fuel poverty and re-distribution of energy wealth; community ownership of energy generating assets; and ‘just sustainability’. She is a member of the Scottish Green Party.

Robin McAlpine is the editor of Scottish Left Review and director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation

Special thanks to Patrick Small for editing and proofing and Kieran McCann for design and layout.

Closer was edited, designed and commissioned by Bella Caledonia.

Bella Caledonia is an online magazine (launched in 2007) exploring ideas of independence, self-determination and autonomy.

Nobody owns Bella. For the most part our writers collective contribute material for free. But we do have costs when we produce print issues like this one.

We’d like to do more issues of Closer to combat the inherent bias in the mainstream media. If you’d like to support our work by making a donation to our work by sending donations by cheque payable to ‘Bella Caledonia’ – email us at bellasletters@yahoo.co.uk for details.

Or pay by transfer into:Lloyds TSBSort: 876892A/C: 75945360

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CLOSEREditorial

In one year’s time we’ll be given the opportunity to decide our own government. It’s a modest goal in the 21st century. But with the

past decades littered with the democratic failures of the British elite, from Fallujah to Dundrennan, from Dìomhair to the Panda Politics of Westminster, it’s a prize worth winning.

Sovereignty is within our grasp. Self-determination is about bringing formal democracy closer to home, but that’s not enough. How do we bring housing, child rearing, food, transport, land, peace-building closer too? How do we transform that democracy in the process so that it’s both tangible and meaningful, both everyday and special? The challenge is to throw o! decades of self-doubt and ‘learned failure’ about Scotland, Scottishness and the Scots, and to simultaneously throw o! – or rather overturn – a deep cynicism about political change.

Our writers were invited to respond to the challenge of imagining a new Scottish democracy. What changes will help transform Scottish society when we get the powers to control our own a!airs? How can we get closer to democracy, closer to land, closer to nature, to a way of living that isn’t so distorted by the economics of exploitation?

Contributors were encouraged to start afresh – looking at each issue as if coming to the problem with fresh eyes. Sometimes the incentive was thinking about the reality of having complete control of legislation and policy, more often this new era will, we hope, engender a sense of adventure and stepping beyond entrenched behaviour into a more experimental mind-frame, open to bold new thinking.

We don’t apologise for energy being tackled twice, first by Lucy Conway who takes the model of community controlled energy on the Isle of Eigg and asks us to completely re-cast how we approach energy ‘needs’ and ‘demands’ as a social, not a commercial transaction and second by Elaine Morrison who imagines a future of energy justice for all.

Andy Wightman explores how we can extend the decentralisation process beyond Westminster to Holyrood and down to a regional scale, retrieving older models of self-governance still common in much of Europe.

Fraser Macdonald challenges the myths of Scottish wildness and wilderness that touches on culture, environmental policy, housing and land management.

Iain Mackinnon writes on the need for unity and embracing the multicultural and multinational in Scotland’s history and future.

Isobel Lindsay asks simply: what would a demilitarised Scotland look and feel like? We need to face the reality that ‘We have the greatest concentration of nuclear fire-power of any part of Europe outside of Russia and it’s based just twenty miles from Scotland’s biggest city.’ Dougald Hine explores the value of the hacker ethos and DIY counter-culture to a new country. Lesley Riddoch asks what will it take to make Scotland blossom? She answers: it will take fresh confidence and

localised control over decision-making – because that’s what the issue is: where power lies.

Kevin Williamson looks to Brazil and India for inspiration for a new digital democracy. Douglas Stuart Wilson looks to Europe for ideas of cultural renewal citing Milan Kundera’s ‘maximum diversity in minimum space’. Cat Boyd places the debate in the context of the workplace and examines the idea of getting closer to economic justice, while Robin McAlpine explores the idea of moving away from an economy based on low income low skilled jobs, closer to an economy as if people mattered. Jose M. Ramos explores the new eco-system of collaboration and the new peer to peer practices that are shaping a new politics.

The themes that jump out are confidence and internationalism, an eclectic surge of innovation all tuned to social justice. For a journal that encouraged reverie and utopianism, the ideas are all markedly practical.

The stand is against the clear tactic of the No campaign (including the Scottish and British mainstream media), to consistently frame the independence referendum in terms of a political contest between Alex Salmond, or at best the SNP, and the British political parties. Instead we see ideas that come from beyond party tribalism or even political structures and speak directly to people’s experience.

It’s this disobedience that stands out – a disobedience to want to continue a politics that so any are so disillusioned with.

As the referendum gets nearer, ideas are becoming stronger, the urgency clearer, the opportunity more inviting.

1000 people still own 60% of Scotland. Urgent problems in health, housing and basic poverty remain unaddressed. A chronic lack of ambition pervades much of Scottish political life.

We are exploring what Vuokko Jarva calls ‘close democracy’. Means and ends, grounded in the everyday but not bound by it.

There will be those who argue this is policy ephemera. Daydreaming. I’d recall Patrick Geddes, who remarked in 1917:

For the discouraged reader, whether he smile or sco! at these youthful hopes, let me recall an oft told tale; that of the prisoner, who languishing long years in the dark and solitary dungeon, concentrated on his own thoughts of the past, and despairing of liberty. Till one day, and in anger rather than hope, he shook its massive door – which straightaway fell Out! – for lock, bar and hinges had alike rusted away; and he was in open daylight once more ...

We’ve got a parliament, now we need a democracy. As we get closer to the referendum we invite you to help us imagine what we do with it.

Mike Small, Editor

The opposite of dependence isn’t independence it’s disobedience – Jay Gri!ths

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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL 3 Mike Small

LIFE DURING PEACETIME 5 Isobel Lindsay

THE FAIRLY BIG SOCIETY 6 Dougald Hine

YOU’VE GOT THE POWER 7 Lucy Conway

ALTERED STATE 8 Mike Small

CULTURE CLUB 11 Douglas Stuart Wilson

PEOPLE GET REAL 12 José M. Ramos

DIGITAL DEMOS 14 Kevin Williamson

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME 18 Lesley Riddoch UN-WILDING SCOTLAND? 20 Fraser Macdonald

LARGE SCALE SOLIDARITY 21 Iain Mackinnon

NEW LABOUR 22 Robin McAlpine

MOVE ON UP 24 Cat Boyd

REGIONAL DEMOCRACY 26 Andy Wightman

ENERGY JUSTICE 28 Elaine Morrison

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LIFE DURING PEACETIMEIsobel Lindsay

The many dividends of living in a non-nuclear Scotland would include genuine security, democratic accountability and massive savings in costs.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”President Eisenhower, 1961

“The first advice I’m going to give to my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinion of military matters were worth a damn.” President Kennedy in a private comment to Ben Bradlee.‘JFK’s Last Hundred Days’ Thurston Clarke Penguin 2013

In response to the question “Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?” Michael Portillo said, “No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent,

because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent …It’s a tremendous waste of money. It’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige and at the margins it is proliferation.”

An independent Scotland could do worse than take the advice of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Portillo. But why are so many politicians with defence responsibilities unable to tell the public the truth until they have left o"ce? Former UK Defence Secretary Des Browne is another example. He ‘s been a frequent critic of nuclear policy since leaving government. Politicians get constrained by the web of conventional wisdom created by senior military, civil service and defence industry leaders. This is strengthened by the bellicose nature of most of the press. Scottish independence o!ers us great opportunities but only if we introduce fresh- start thinking and don’t go along with the stultifying ‘continuity’ argument.

All defence policy should start with the question of what threatens security. In the recent Wings Over Scotland survey carried out by Panelbase, the sample of 1015 Scots were asked “ Which of these do you think represents a significant threat to Scotland in your lifetime?”

The results were:

Conservative Governments elected by the rest of the UK 52%Being attacked by terrorists 34%Being attacked by North Korea 7%Being attacked by Iran 5%Being attacked by space monsters 4%Being attacked by China 4%Being attacked by Russia 3%None of the above 24%

They were then asked “Which of these threats do you think the siting of nuclear weapons at HMNB (Faslane) provides Scotland with a practical defence against?”

Being attacked by North Korea 18%Being attacked by Iran 17%Being attacked by terrorists 16%Being attacked by Russia 14%Being attacked by China 12%Conservative Governments elected by rest of UK 8%Being attacked by space monsters 5%None of the above 58%

So by far the greatest threat to Scotland’s security is perceived as political – being controlled by a Westminster government opposed to Scotland’s values and priorities.

Threat of attack by the ‘bogeymen’ states is only seen as realistic by a tiny number and a majority sees nuclear weapons as not relevant to the real security threats that Scotland might face.

They‘re right. State-on-state attack has become rare, especially if you exclude the actions of the US and the UK. Wars have been shown to be very expensive and unlikely to be successful even if with great technological advantage. Also so much economic power and rivalry is concentrated in corporations with cross-national interests. Given how much money the Chinese have invested in the US, it would be counter-productive to bomb it.

That Scotland has for decades been used as a military convenience gives us a special opportunity not just to change Scotland but to make a major international contribution to nuclear disarmament. We have the greatest concentration of nuclear fire-power anywhere in Europe outside Russia based just twenty miles from Scotland’s biggest city. The whole UK delivery system is at Coulport/Faslane. The SNP, Greens and socialist groups have supported the inclusion of a clause in the new Scottish constitution prohibiting nuclear weapons on Scottish territory. If Westminster was required to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland, this would mean the end of their nuclear programme since finding an appropriate site in England plus the huge cost of infrastructure would take around fifteen years. SCND has done a detailed analysis of this (Trident – Nowhere to go) which has not been disputed by defence experts. And we could achieve the removal of nuclear weapons quickly. Within a few months the Scottish Government could require the removal of warheads from the missiles. Coulport has the storage facilities for these and Westminster would have to create new storage facilities. The warheads could then gradually be transferred over a two-year period. (Disarming Trident, SCND). We would hope that the logic for the rest of the UK would be to dismantle these. This would give Scotland the moral status to play a significant role in promoting international nuclear disarmament at a time when many of the signatory states to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are becoming frustrated by the lack of disarmament progress by the nuclear powers.

Scotland’s defence policy should be developed in the context of a Human Security approach. Traditional models of defence are based on the belief that their purpose is preventing attack from the armed forces of other states or protecting overseas interests. This is not our contemporary reality, given Scotland’s position with well-defined historical boundaries. Our biggest problem is having a major nuclear base on our territory. What are the more likely serious threats that could undermine our citizens’ basic human rights and life chances? A nuclear accident, major environmental degradation or a deadly health epidemic would be examples of top-tier risks. Serious organised crime, an economic slump, an authoritarian government which removes civil liberties, the collapse of energy services – it is in the context of these risks to our security that we should form a policy on the role of military resources. Protection from invasion is part of this but a very low risk. Protection of resources and infrastructure to which we have a legitimate right is part of this. But independence would give Scotland the chance to step out of the imperial military/industrial complex. We should not be involved in the kind of aggressive expeditionary role that has dominated UK policy and swallowed so many billions of military resources that could have been used to build international goodwill through development aid. We could try to do what Cuba has done with its medical aid, perhaps building up international teams for education development. This would not be disengagement from internationalism but the chance to increase our internationalism.

Scotland presently pays £3.3 billion annually towards the UK Defence budget. Various estimates of adequate defence expenditure for Scotland would provide a saving of between almost £2 billion and £800 million a year. Think what could be done with that annual bonus. We could begin to address other security issues – food, energy and economic security. The 52% of Scots who saw Conservative Governments as the most likely threat would have the reassurance that for ever more, it would be voters in Scotland who would decide who was in government.

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Whatever became of the Big Society? It still gets mentioned, sometimes, as a joke: its humourless punchline, the lengthening queues at volunteer-run

food banks. At Westminster, the Tories forgot their flirtation with social capital, localism, community organising and got down to the business of cutting, privatising, outsourcing, fracking and inflating a new housing bubble. So David Cameron’s one-time big idea gets written o! as a warm fuzzy makeover for the Thatcherite desire to shrink the state, the kind of neoliberalism from which an independent Scotland might hope to liberate itself. Yet this obituary misses what is worst about the mess that was the Big Society. The Tories did not simply invent a half-baked cover story, they took other people’s ideas for a joyride, then smashed them into the dead end of their own ideology. The challenge now is to salvage what is worth saving of those ideas from the wreckage.

The suggestion that there is anything worth saving will probably be met with scepticism. The first hurdle against which the Big Society fell was the inability of even its supporters to explain it. Tony Blair’s Third Way had been many things, but not incomprehensible: it stood for a merger of market choice and state provision; a pragmatic compromise, according to which the old positions of right and left had become an anachronism. The Big Society was more puzzling; rather than propose a new deal between market and state, it insisted on the importance of something which was neither one nor the other, and which it could not define in terms which would explain its importance. In the absence of such an explanation, it was left enthusing over an easily-parodied mixture of the Women’s Institute and Wikipedia.

The paradox of the Big Society is that it could only have made sense in the light of an admission that was surely beyond the imaginations of those responsible for it: the admission that we are already in, and headed inexorably further into, an historical moment defined by the failure of both the market and the state. It is in such a context that forms of social production which lie beyond the grasp of market and state may well take on an importance that they have not had for generations.

Underlying this argument is a take on our situation which many will find troubling: that we are caught in a web of crises that have been exacerbated by – but cannot be reduced to – the consequences of neoliberalism. For any of us who have felt the destructiveness of those consequences – the upward redistribution of wealth, the dismantling of public institutions, the abandonment of whole communities, the narrowing of any sense of the social good – this sits uncomfortably, since it seems to let those responsible o! the hook. The point is not to mitigate for them, however, but to recognise them for the opportunists they were (and are). The destruction is real enough, still ongoing and to be resisted, and yet it does not follow that, in their absence, we could have sustained something resembling the social democratic settlement of the post-war era – still less, that we could reassemble anything resembling that settlement, starting from the mess in which we find ourselves.

In historical terms, the neoliberals did not inherit a fully-functioning version of the post-war model: the rising and broadly-shared prosperity of its golden decades had given way to stagnation and inflation, the crisis of the 1970s that would be their opportunity. Having seized it, their ideological attachment to the market blinded them to the primary function of the state: to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies. Even where it acts to constrain the immediate interests of capital, the state is not so much the enemy of the market as its life-support system. Lacking any feel for

this, their policies succeeded in destabilising both. All the more reason, some would argue, for a return to social democratic sanity: except that reason alone was not the basis for the achievements of the post-war era, they were underwritten by the power of organised labour, and it is far from clear today what could constitute an equivalent source of power.

It is in this context that it makes sense to speak of a failure of state and market, not as an apocalyptic prediction, but an attempt to describe a reality that has been playing out in the lives of more and more people and communities for decades. Neither side is delivering on its promises, as we have slid from societies of mass prosperity to societies of mass precarity, with no route back to the future that once seemed to be on o!er.

As this slide continues, however, another element comes into play, because the state and the market share a common weakness: they have rarely been able to draw on what is best in us. The truth of this is contained in the old saying, ‘One volunteer is worth ten pressed men.’ Yet this truth has been diluted, since the language of volunteering now suggests selflessness and ‘doing good’ for others, so that we are in need of another term to express the power that comes when we act out of our own free will. For there are reserves of enthusiasm, dedication and deep pragmatism which people draw on when they come together to do things for their own reasons, rather than because they have been paid or told to do them – reserves to which neither the state nor the market generally has access.

The worst thing about the Big Society is that – in its half-baked, more-than-half-cynical way – it sought to draw on these reserves, and risks to have poisoned the well instead. Its failure could extend the life expectancy of a model of politics which frames society in terms of the axis of state and market. Yet if it is true that we are now in a situation where neither the state nor the market can secure the kind of mass prosperity they once seemed to o!er, then a flourishing of new forms of social production – many of them voluntary in the older, deeper sense of the word – may be our best hope of having societies worth growing old in, a generation from now.

On the edges, at the grassroots – among the geeks and hackers, but also where people’s memories are longest – clues to what such a society might look like are starting to come together. It was to some of these edges that Cameron’s advisors came, scouting for ideas – and if what they came back with seemed half-baked, that was true. There is not a ready-to-go plan for how to reorganise a society along these lines: rather, these ideas are still forming, born out of people’s attempts to improvise responses to the ongoing failure of the market-state duopoly in the places where we find ourselves.

Quite how existing public institutions, scarred by a generation of neoliberalism, begin to engage constructively, on a large scale, with ways of working that are at odds with many of their assumptions – this is a question that none of us will answer alone. It may well take a rupture on the scale of starting a new country to allow the room for the imagination required to embark, collectively, on such a project. It will require a renegotiation of ideas about work and a willingness to relinquish the safety of professional identities. Above all, it will require an attention to how people feel about their situation, to their sense of meaning and justice, that becomes uncommon in environments shaped by the power of the state or the power of money – for the society worth working for is one that is not just big, but fairly big.

THE FAIRLY BIG SOCIETYDougald Hine

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YOU’VE GOT THE POWERLucy Conway

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Privatised energy brought only fuel poverty and obscene profits for vast, distant corporations. But successful projects in Scotland and Denmark highlight how small-scale, locally owned

renewable energy can save money, cut pollution and enhance democracy.

Energy will be essential to the future of Scotland, whether independence is secured or not. Much of the debate has focused on how the golden geese of oil and

renewables might shape the economy. But if an alternative political future is possible, perhaps it’s time to look at reshaping the finance of fuel?# What would Scotland look like if, instead of big business, politicians or economists being at the centre of energy production and distribution, it was the people who live here and use it?

The community-owned Isle of Eigg is not connected to the mainland electricity grid. Nowadays, Eigg’s 48 homes and 22 businesses run on electricity from solar, wind and water power generated by the island’s own electricity company Eigg Electric. But it wasn’t always like this. Before Eigg Electric was switched on just five years ago, each household had to make its own electricity. For most homes this meant a generator. Diesel to run generators would be delivered in bulk by ferry, decanted into oil drums, transported across the island to be decanted again into still smaller vessels to make the process of filling the generator easier. At around 65p per unit, the luxury of electricity on demand was hard, dirty, smelly and expensive. Some homes had a battery system, charged by generator and used until it ran out, heralding the generator’s relentless thud, thud, thud some twelve to 48 hours later. A small number of homes had micro wind or hydro systems, but their output and e"ciency were dependent on the right kind of weather. Whichever method was used, electricity on Eigg was generally limited and unreliable.

Today, 85 to 90% of Eigg’s electricity is from renewable sources, the rest coming from a back-up diesel generator for maintenance periods or when demand is more than renewables can meet. Now islanders can be sure of clean green, quiet, cheap electricity on tap, 24/7. While at 21p per unit Eigg Electric is about 30% higher than the mainland, it is a fraction of what it cost previously.

Eigg Electric has won awards for its innovation – it was the first time in the world three renewables and diesel back up had been brought together in one system. The Eigg community has also been recognised for its energy saving and carbon reduction projects. But perhaps the most radical achievement is not how Eigg Electric works technically, but how it works socially or culturally.

24-hour power had been a priority for the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust since the community buyout in 1997. Various options were considered, including laying a cable from the mainland, dismissed on cost grounds (£4-5m). In 2004 a design for what became Eigg Electric was agreed. Wind, rain, and sun would provide energy whatever the weather, but a vital part of the design process was consultation with the community. Whatever the size of the system, the amount of energy it could generate would always be finite. Just as on the mainland, unless a scheme was built capable of generating many times more than the average demand, if everyone needed a lot of power simultaneously, there might not be enough. A simple system to manage demand was needed.

One way to do this might have been by price; customers would pay a low price per unit up to a certain amount, and thereafter pay more. This scheme was rejected. If you could a!ord it, or when the occasion was more important than thrift (e.g. cold weather or Christmas), demand would quickly outstrip supply. Instead, a proposal to cap the amount of power people could use at any one time to five kilowatts (kW) for homes and ten kW for business was voted for by 100% of residents. This choice shaped the final design of the system and secured its success. It provides equal access to electricity for all and ensures there is always enough for everyone. The five/ten kW cap was determined by the size of system the community could a!ord to build and the estimated demand of consumers, based on the existing and predicted infrastructure.

While the population and the number of connections have risen since 2008, demand for electricity has not grown significantly. Eigg residents are very energy aware.#An energy monitor and everyone knowing how much electricity appliances use means living within the five or ten kW limit is very easy. As well as the cap, a

tra"c light system helps manage demand further. On dull, windless days with no rain, an email is circulated and a red light comes on at the community hub asking people to reduce their electricity consumption if they can. This conserves energy and reduces demand by as much as twenty per cent. The back up generator comes on less frequently, saving cost and carbon emissions.

Eigg Electric works because it was well designed and managed professionally. But beyond the technical expertise, the real success of the system is how the island works together as a community: understanding the constraints and recognising that if everyone uses the resource fairly and equally, there will always be enough. Part of that understanding comes from living in a small place, where taking care of those around you is part of daily life. It’s also about knowing how the electricity is made, that when the wind blows or the sun shines, the community owned scheme is producing electricity for everyone to share.

Over the five years since it began, the average renewable contribution to the system is 85%. With the recent addition of a further 40 kW of solar photovoltaic it is expected to rise to 90% or more.# Eigg Electric and the Eigg community continue to innovate, looking to add a small tidal or wave generator to reduce the need of diesel to an almost negligible amount.

On another island, Samsø in Denmark, local communities own shares in the island’s eleven land-based wind turbines which generate one million watts of electricity. An additional ten o!shore wind turbines contribute a further 2.3 million watts into the system. Together they provide more than enough power for Samsø’s 4,000 people. Excess power is sold to the mainland, which in turn provides electricity to Samsø if wind generation is low. 70% of Samsø’s heating is provided by four renewably-powered district heating plants. Outwith that network, many households have replaced or supplemented oil heating with solar, ground source heat pumps and wood pellet boilers.

It would be naive to say that either island solution could be simply transferred to provide a Scotland-wide answer. But each provides enticing ways to explore a new or di!erent way to manage and exploit Scotland’s energy resources. Both enable energy’s end users to understand, be connected and have control over how energy is made and shared. By using renewables in a collective way, they can shield their communities from the vagaries of international fossil fuel prices. On Eigg, energy production and distribution is completely localised and very small scale. While Samsø is bigger and includes larger scale industry, it is still small by comparison to Scotland. However, despite many questions to be addressed around the scale of demand and the infrastructure needed to meet it, the thinking behind both examples could provide important lessons for how Scotland’s energy future might be managed.

Imagine if everyone in Scotland knew how much power was being generated at any one time. That they knew how much electricity they needed, what they were using and where it had come from. That energy was thought of as something we owned collectively rather than corporately, a resource to be conserved and shared responsibly between everyone.

The people of Eigg and Samsø had electricity in the past, but they found a new, better way of providing a!ordable energy to their communities using renewable technology and a collaborative approach. Both communities have created jobs and built expertise, establishing themselves as centres of innovation and visited by people from all over the world looking for new ways to develop an alternative energy infrastructure and methodology.

Scotland has the means of providing power to its citizens using both renewable and non-renewable resources. Arguably the latter may run out one day, or at the very least be increasingly too expensive to access. With careful planning, demand management and a greater sense of trust and stewardship of resources, energy – however generated – can be fairly and equitably distributed amongst us all.

8

Closer to what? Closer to the chance for people to have political choices that make a di!erence. Closer to being able to elect our own government.

For this to be possible we need to work against the tide of cynicism and disillusionment and the common experience that your voice will not be heard, your opinion is not valid and you have no power. We need to move away from the designed exclusion to an architecture of participation that creates structures that encourage people to be included in society rather than one that renders people as passive consumers and good British subjects.

There’s a funny game that’s going on, it’s a game where people (of left and right) say ‘of course this isn’t really independence’ or ‘there’s no such thing as real independence these days’ or bemoan the lack of a clause to remove the monarchy in next years poll. Of course as you watch the British establishment scrabble desperately to prevent any changes happening using all the powers they can muster, you quickly realise that something very substantial is at stake.

Like the French chef who can make beefsteak out of a leather glove, Alastair Darling has done well with his Better Together campaign. There was – up until now – no need for a mass campaign, a grassroots organisation, nor any need for creative thinking. The message was simple (against everyday experience from food bank to Bedroom Tax): “everything’s fine.”

It remains the world’s first manifesto for mass-inertia. The world’s shortest political programme, that can be distilled into four tiny hopelessly limiting letters: ‘UK:OK’.

It is an appeal to the conservative, the cautious, the wary, and who isn’t all of these in times of stormy economics, in what I think we’re still rather coyly calling ‘the recession’?

This outlook – we can call it the Politics of Jubolympics – or the Keep Calm and Carry e!ect – aims at muting discontent not by denying it or suppressing it but by appealing to a spirit of the Blitz. Explanations for the success of the Great British Bakeo! back up this theory. Times are hard, let’s get serious about scones. It is, we’re told, a quintessentially British response to tough times, and in telling us that, we feel better, redoubtable in our Be-Ro-specked pinnies. It’s a retreat into the comfort of passivity, the warm embrace of nostalgia and a safe and steady assured decline.

occupy scotlandIt may seem distant from the softly-softly talk of continuity, crowns and social union but the reality is that the Yes vote is just the trigger not the bullet. It’s the Big Yes but only the first of a million Yeses needed.

We need to re-occupy our own country, from depopulated glens to media forums stupefied, dumbed down and under-resourced. From football clubs run by businessmen-gangsters and landed-estates run by the first-born clutching at Euro subsidies for doing nothing but sending a cheque to Barbour.

This is a psychological as much as a cultural process. It’s about a process of shedding a deep-seated in-built attitude of do-nothing/risk-nothing. This is the bind. We can’t get beyond this without a big risk – yet we’re wrapped up in a massively risk-averse culture. We need to take a leap of faith, but its a standing jump from shaky ground.

We have other challenges. We remain oddly absent in our own country. As George Rosie wrote in 1989:

“It seemed that almost every institution into which I was peering universities, scientific research institutions, charities, colleges, theatre managements, art galleries, new towns, municipal bodies, health boards etc – was being run by people who were born, brought up and educated furth of Scotland. This was clearly a syndrome which was widespread, growing fast, and needed to be looked into. I also realised that this was an issue which went straight to the heart of Scotland’s ambivalent constitutional position. The essence of what the writer Ian Jack called Scotland’s role as “a nearly country’. On the one hand it seemed absurd – churlish even – to complain about one’s fellow Britons taking jobs and buying land and property in their own country. But on the other hand it seemed equally absurd that so many important Scottish institutions should be run by non-Scots, by people brought up in a di!erent education and culture.”

Fast forward twenty four years and Lesley Riddoch asks the same question: ‘Is there a disproportionate number of non-Scots in top jobs, particularly in culture and the environment?’:

“Can Scots confidently bring their ‘whole selves’ into the limelight – and particularly into the highly contested domains of arts and the environment where ‘proper sounding’ people abound? … Before devolution, the average Scot stood on the sidelines and watched for decades – maybe centuries – as people with di!erent habits, accents, vocabulary, cultural references, reading material, university backgrounds and presumptions about life got almost all Scotland’s top jobs ...”1

Two award-wining writers a quarter of a century apart making the same observations. Writing in 2011 AL Kennedy wrote:

“The famous Scottish Divided Self, our Jekyll and Hyde complex, often simply involves a swing between riotously emphatic tartan cliches and real self-doubt. This is hardly surprising. Scots and their culture have long been kept apart. It’s di"cult to overemphasise the importance of having role models and inspirations that come from within your own community as well as beyond it.”

So at best there’s a hinterland of self-doubt, at worst a reservoir of self-loathing. Re-inhabitation, reunification and rehabilitation are what we are going through but we’re only in up to the toes. The prize is worth winning as Kennedy suggests:

“Encourage cultural literacy in a nation bent on rediscovering itself after centuries of being silenced and you could end up with an electorate that’s confident, outspoken and energetic.”

opening up opening outSo how do we create systems, structures and forums where people can have their voices heard, but where this discussion is also meaningful? How do you allow people to be confident, outspoken and energetic? The basis for open participation and co-creation is (technologically) there for the taking, we now need to understand why this is important and work to deliver it.

A lot of this is happening already. Despite the e!orts to portray the movement as ‘narrow

nationalism’ based on ‘separatism’ a quick glance across the country sees a new mood developing that is running side by side with the shift for self determination.

As the group behind ‘The Art of Hosting’ puts it:

“Scotland is awakening. If we are to seize the opportunities emerging in communities across the country, now is the time to be brave and do things di!erently. We must explore new paths so we can achieve the fundamental changes needed to realise our potential together.”

The independence movement can be seen as part of a wider movement of transformational change and democratic renewal. When you look across the country you can see a remarkable upsurge of new forums and projects emerging all aimed at renewing a more participative grassroots politics.

They are all exploring the same question: How do we create the conditions for deep systemic change in Scotland?

Some deal specifically with constitutional issues, some focus on gender or food or social policy, some take the process and need for innovation in how we talk to each other and reach decisions as they key. Means and ends. All are vital. None of them will have real lasting impact unless they are combined with sovereignty at a national level and without a transformation of economic relations. But joined up and radicalised they could be part of an essential process of re-education and revitalisation.

From the Scottish Commonweal – ‘a vision for a better Scotland’ based on the conviction that we will get better outcomes for both society and individuals if we

ALTERED STATEMike Small

“It may seem distant from the softly-softly

talk of continuity, crowns and social

union but the reality is that the Yes vote is just the trigger not the bullet.”

9

emphasise mutuality and equity rather than conflict and inequality, to the cultural imagination of the National Collective aims to ‘imagine a better Scotland’ by bringing together artists of all forms to create inspiring visuals and events. The collective have – perhaps more than any one group – brought a sense of innovation to political campaigning in the last year. Their successful opposition to attempted bullying and intimidation over the Vitol scandal of funding the No campaign was inspirational.2

The Art of Hosting – ‘the Art of Participatory Leadership through Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter.’ An amazing new group that helps people host, share and communicate better. I like these two questions that they see as being central: How do we create the conditions for deep systemic change in Scotland? How can we help the emergence of a new way of living by listening to the voice and spirit of the people?3

A number of books published in the last couple of years pick up this theme, with Andy Wightman’s The Poor Had No Lawyers a contemporary classic on land ownership, and just out in 2013, Blossom by Lesley Riddoch attempts to span issues of culture, gender, democracy, power and psychology in understanding the democratic deficit in Scotland. Pat Kane has described it as: “Blossom is like inhaling fjord air after being trapped in a sweaty backroom. Just brilliant.” Unstated edited by Scott Hames collected 27 essays by Scottish writers on independence. James Robertson wrote:

“I understand about not frightening the horses – but actually I think it would be good to see a few wide-eyed sidelong glances and hear a nervous clattering of hooves.”

They represent a collective longing, a barely expressed desire for participative change. But this is only partially expressed through text. The outpouring of blogs, and film and photo projects like Blipfoto (based in Leith) and Northern Lights, the collective film project, are perhaps other examples of this new direction.

Alongside these Women for Independence, the Radical Independence Conference and Democracy Max, are exploring ideas like citizen’s assembly, openness and transparency in information and deliberative ‘mini publics’.

So Says Scotland inspired by a process used in Iceland, and supported by a bevy of collaborating partners and volunteers, say: “We are daring to drive people power, through facilitating collaboration, consensus and collective action. Imagining Scotland as a Hub of Democratic Innovation. A Scotland – a world – where everyone has a say!”4

All of this has some momentum but the cynic would ask: Why is this any more than liberal chatter?

Because it’s based on an emerging consensus about a shared set of values and because people have got their hands on some tools. Because of the wider context this is emerging from: there’s been a realisation about the institutionalised inadequacy of Westminster and a growing consciousness that the Feeble 50 lives in a newly articulated spasm of uselessness.

austerity unionismAs the inequality chasm widens and the opportunities for progressive radical action at a UK level appear permanently eclipsed, an openness to change through breaking the British State seems natural, easy, obvious.

Andy Wightman has published this remarkable graph (created by Faiza Shaheen of the New Economics Foundation) which shows the average net property wealth for each 1% of the income distribution.

Wightman writes:

“Over the past two decades, a rapid expansion of private debt-based money, created by private banks, has led to a land bubble in the housing market. Not only has this had catastrophic consequences for countries such as Ireland and Spain but it has contributed to growing levels of inequality as illustrated in this frankly unbelievable graph.”(fig 1)

It shows ‘the top 1% of the population has net property wealth of £15,040,000 whilst the bottom 33% has nothing. The top 1% own more net property wealth than the rest of the 99% combined.’ That’s incredible.

Why is this any more than liberal chatter? Because it’s driven by the reality of a brutal Austerity Unionism.

The debate about where we go in Scotland in the years ahead needs to be

“Like the French chef who can make beefsteak out of a leather glove,

Alastair Darling has done well with his Better Together campaign. There

was – up until now – no need for a mass campaign, a grassroots organisation, nor any need for

creative thinking. The message was simple (against everyday experience

from food bank to Bedroom Tax): “everything’s fine.”

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6000000

4000000

2000000

0

Aver

age

indi

vidu

al n

et p

rope

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Percentile

Top 1%

95 99

fig 1

10

situated in this context. The reality is that this (Westminster) government is inflicting the#longest and deepest economic slump since the 1870s; more than £50bn has been cut from workers’ wages every year since the start of the recession in 20085; and almost £30bn is being slashed from social security for the poorest and most vulnerable; and that half a million people are having to rely on food banks to get by.

It’s a process and an experience that’s been charted by playwright Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F***ing, 1996):

Let’s say it again – because still it somehow doesn’t seem quite real in our bubble of existence – capitalism has experienced its biggest economic crisis since the 1930s depression, a depression which brought us genocidal dictatorships and world war. Our world, in ways that we can’t yet understand, is totally di!erent from the one we were living in six or seven years ago. The paradigm has shifted and new ways of living and behaving are going to be needed if we’re going to make our way forward. There’s no possibility of pressing a restart button and going back to – when exactly? What about 2005? When it was all really lovely and that nice New Labour were in power and the economy seemed to doing splendidly and the arts were really, you know, valued. That’s a false memory, of course, and we’re not going back there. Any party that gets in to power in Westminster at the next election will be committed to the ideology (and plain wrong mathematics) of austerity.

Where did this world come from?Reading Tony Wood in the New Left Review we can note that the mirroring we’ve

seen by Johann Lamont and Ed Miliband on ‘the end of s something for nothing culture’ this last year is nothing new:

Even before entering o"ce, Brown had pledged to stick to Tory spending levels for three years, as proof of Labour’s economic discipline. The pursuit of ‘credibility’ in the eyes of the markets was the guiding principle, to be achieved through three key policies: first, fiscal prudence; second, retaining the Tories’ inflation-targeting regime, but removing it from government control. The Bank of England was given charge of monetary policy, to act as a ‘bulwark against short-termism’, as embodied by elected politicians. The third move was to institute what Brown and his advisors triumphantly called ‘light-touch regulation’ – e!ectively allowing banks to regulate themselves. This brought a phenomenal expansion in the role of finance, as funds poured through the City in search of super-profits. Ramped-up flows of capital meant that Balls could boast in 2006 that London had ‘70 per cent of the secondary bond market, over 40 per cent of the derivatives market, over 30 per cent of foreign-exchange business, over 40 per cent of cross-border equities trading and 20 per cent of cross-border bank lending’.

A magnet for shadow banking and opaque financial engineering, the City became ‘Wall Street’s Guantánamo’—a place where us operators could do abroad what was not allowed at home.

The rest we know. After (Labour) Government measures to sustain the illusion of normality, including £950bn worth of bank bail-outs, asset guarantees and ‘quantitative easing’, had blown a gaping hole in public finances, and Gordon Brown was blown out of o"ce by a hostile English media and a disastrous gift for self-immolation, in came the Tory government nobody elected.

Although the banking crisis – the one where we all stand astonished but apparently impotent – seems to have just become like so much more cultural wallpaper for us to gawp at. Another look should refresh our sense of moral outrage. This isn’t about a few very talented top people. Over 500 bankers earned more than £1million at RBS and Barclays in 20126, with 50 paid between £2.5 million and £5 million. HSBC paid 204 bankers more than £1 million7, with its five highest paid sta! receiving between £3.9 million and £7.5 million.

This is degenerate. I don’t believe that a new nation based on a di!erent set of values wouldn’t and couldn’t do better starting by creating and shaping new institutions ‘fit for purpose’. I don’t believe that we can’t do better, and for all those waiting for an alternative within the British Union, I don’t believe any of the politicians have any intention or resolve to create and deliver a progressive, never mind a radical alternative. They have been captured and are unlikely to escape.

It’s in this context that the independence movement lives and breathes today. The issue remains Raploch not Bannockburn.

why and how would we do any better under independence?Critics of this view – that Britain is a country distorted by institutionalized levels of inequality – will at this point point to the lack of alternative from the SNP, arguing that what you will get is just a small-state version of Westminster, a sort of Little Britain. No real change.

But both actual existing policies refute this as do concrete commitments to enshrine equality in a written constitution. This isn’t about some futuristic constitutional spin. The reality is this year the Deputy First Minister promised to enshrine the rights of young people in a written constitution. Though denounced by Labour as gesture politics, it’s exactly the sort of thing you could imagine a semi-enlightened Dewarite Labour Party to have conceived of.

Addressing the End Child Poverty Coalition at the National Museum of Scotland, Sturgeon said the opportunity to address the current growth in the problem was one of the “big prizes” of independence. She highlighted the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child8, saying this could be incorporated into a future written constitution to force policymakers of the future to put the rights of young people at the heart of decision-making.

Previously legislation which aims to e!ectively end homelessness in Scotland by the end of this year has been passed by MSPs. The change entitles anyone finding themselves homeless through no fault of their own to settled accommodation.

It meets Scotland’s historic 2012 homelessness commitment. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was Europe’s “most progressive” homelessness legislation. The change, passed unanimously under the Homelessness (Abolition of Priority Need Test) (Scotland) Order 2012, will give an estimated 3,000 more people a year the right to settled accommodation. That isn’t posturing it’s policy.

There is nothing guaranteed about a new Scotland, but on entering it we enter the realm of possibility and close the door on enshrined, constitutionally guaranteed privilege.

These promises have been made alongside the idea of embedding the right to local government into written form.9 There’s a trajectory here and it’s intended – as it does very well – to mark out a real di!erence between a Britain where rights and standards seem to be constantly under assault10 – and a future Scotland where rights and standards and values are upheld by law.

When taken with the abolition of PFI, the abolishment of the Right to Buy in 2010 and the re-nationalisation of previously privatised hospitals, we can see a clear demarcation of direction. The provision of free personal care, prescriptions, dental check-ups and eye-tests for all in Scotland, along with the protection of tuition fees are not minor details, they are essential polices that are defensible only with a Yes vote. When this is taken with the idea of a written constitution and the democratic centrifugal forces of the wider independence movement and the likely post-indy resettlement we can begin to see a landscape beyond the Austerity Union. Let’s go there.

Closer to what? Closer to having a voice that’s heard and shared. From loyalism to being true to yourself. From an enshrined deference to a new reality of responsibility. It’s time to get above ourselves.

references1 Blossom, Lesley Riddoch, Luath Press (2013) p. 2772 Go here to be inspired: http://nationalcollective.com/3 More details here: http://www.aoh-scotland.org. See also: http://www.artofhosting.org/4 More details here: http://www.sosayscotland.org/5 http://pcs.org.uk/en/news_and_events/news_centre/index.cfm/id/5E952460-5E11-4C8B-8049A74DF8EA756F6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-217151677 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/mar/04/hsbc-pay-top-earners8 http://www.unicef.org.uk/UNICEFs-Work/Our-mission/UN-Convention/9 http://www.lesleyriddoch.com/2013/03/community-empowerment-on-the-agenda.html10 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21732790

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In an article which first appeared in The New Yorker magazine (Die Weltliteratur*, Jan 8th, 2007) Milan Kundera recalls how he formed his own ideal of Europe back

in 1989, when the communist block disintegrated, and so many stateless nations regained their former sovereignty. For Kundera, this ideal could be summed up as “maximum diversity in minimum space”. Not much later, the EU would go on to make “Unity in Diversity” the o"cial motto of the European Union, in the year 2000. For its part, UNESCO, the United Nations organization dedicated to culture, education and science, has long since argued for and acted in defence of cultural – and particularly linguistic – diversity, explicitly comparing fragile and vulnerable cultures to endangered ecosystems in nature, defending a philosophy not unlike Kundera’s ideal of Europe itself.

I like the ideal of maximum diversity in minimum space in Europe, and the prospect of an independent Scotland which would revel in its cultural di!erences too: in its three indigenous languages – Scots, English and Gaelic – and all the cultural, geographical and topographical distinctiveness of Lowlands, Highlands and Islands: from the Celtic west coast, to the Norse traditions of Orkney and the Shetlands in the north, to all the myriad varieties of Lowlands of the south.

Our cultural landscape has a European configuration, and no matter the outcome of the independence referendum, we would do it much better service to think of Scotland as fundamentally a European nation, rather than a northern outpost of UK plc., which so many in our arts quangos seem to mistake us for today.

This European vision of ourselves is important, because Scotland’s cultural diversity is highly vulnerable, more so than almost any other in Europe it seems to me, for the simple reason that London is one of the most powerful centrifugal forces of globalization in the world today, one of the three coordinates – along with LA and New York – which make up the Bermuda triangle of the Anglosphere, into which so many cultural di!erences have disappeared without trace over the years.

By highlighting and engaging more with our long-standing European cultural tradition, our duties to European cultural diversity in Scotland will become all the more apparent to us. Promoting Gaelic or defending the use of Scots is not the idealistic, cranky, fad of a few romantics in woollen jumpers, but the embodiment of a principle held dear by some of the world’s leading international organizations and forums, like UNESCO. In addition, a European focus will also help to prevent the danger of conceiving of Scotland in too narrow a sense, which is to say, in relation to England alone; the European context guards us against parochialism, and thinking of ourselves in a reduced and sterile way.

Scotland’s European tradition has deep roots, going all the way back to the Celtic Church and the monks and scholars of the Middle Ages, like Duns Scotus, resident at the court of Charles the Bald in France; Michael Scot, at the Toledo school of translators under Alfonso the Wise in Spain, or later, the Latinist George Buchanan, “the great Scottish poet”, in the words of Montaigne, himself the father of the European Renaissance.

In more modern times, the tradition encompasses philosophers like David Hume, writers like R.L Stevenson, and intellectuals like Patrick Geddes, all of whom spent much of their lives outside of Scotland. Needless to say, this relationship with the continent always flowed in both directions; it was Voltaire who said he looked to Scotland for his ideas of civilization, and it was David Hume who awoke Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.

This Scottish tradition contrasts markedly with that of Anglo-British culture, which has long boasted of its “splendid isolation”, and has tended to be suspicious and even disparaging of Europe. As Oxford University professor, Norman Davies, puts it in his monumental work of synthesis, Europe: A History:

“the English majority are apt to perceive all cultural gradients sloping steadily downhill from the Himalayan peaks of Oxford or Hyde Park Corner to the ‘Celtic Fringe’, the ‘Scotch mist”, the “Irish bogs” and the “Channel fog”.

Davies goes on to remark in a paragraph which touches on the Union of Parliaments of 1707 that,

“a new “British” nationality was to be superimposed on the older nations of the island. Modern British identity derives from this time. English traditions were to be revered. Memories of Scotland’s separate history were to be subverted”.

This historical, political and culture force-field is the context in which the recent controversial appointments of a number arts administrators with no prior knowledge of Scotland or its culture to top arts jobs here should be understood. The board of Creative Scotland and other quangos like them have shown loyalty – not to the artists of Scotland, certainly – to the same ideological hegemony of the Union of 1707. This subservience may be conscious or not, but its e!ects are equally deleterious for Scottish and European diversity, for the two go hand in hand. It can hardly be a coincidence that none of the controversial appointments have gone to Europeans either, certainly.

As the poet Don Paterson puts it in Writers: Unstated.

“Regardless of their expertise, how can anyone who has not lived here for some time, who does not know our complex history, who has no first-hand experience of the psychological make-up of our citizenry, who is not familiar with the work of our leading artists and writers, possibly react to our cultural biosphere in a way that will not caricature it, elide it, or reinvent the wheel?”

The cumulative e!ect of these appointments can only be demoralizing for the nation’s artistic and cultural communities. Can anybody imagine the Law Society of Scotland accepting that 80% of the top legal jobs in our country should go to professionals with no training in Scots Law? How would grassroots Scottish politicians feel if, at the next general election, 80% of candidates running for Scottish seats were parachuted in from outside Scotland without ever having set foot in the constituency beforehand?

The fact is that Scotland’s creative community has little voice or control over its own destiny. The voice of Scotland’s artistic community, so instrumental in keeping the idea of Scotland alive over the centuries, would be heard so much more clearly if an Academy of Letters, or some similar organisation, was established to defend its common interests and to provide a political voice.

I find it hard to see how Scotland’s cultural biosphere and Kundera’s principle of maximum of diversity in minimum space can be e!ectively defended while the Union remains intact. But no matter the result of the referendum, a fundamental change in the model of Scotland’s arts agencies is urgently required.

We need to put arts management by unelected quangos in the past. It seems like an anachronism that, in 2014, the age of internet and broadband technology, that we are beholden to a group of men and women, most of whom have few or no obvious cultural credentials to their name, who make decisions in an expensive o"ce about arts funding in the name of the country at large. Arts quangos belong to another age, or maybe just another country; the concentration of unelected power they embody goes against the grain of Scotland’s democratic tradition, in Kirk, universities and our constitutional history too, where the people of Scotland are sovereign.

Arts bodies should be brought as close to the people whose lives they a!ect as possible; well-intentioned open days and consultation processes are no substitute for that. Most importantly of all perhaps, we need an arts policy imbued with a European sensibility, one which values the principle of maximum diversity in minimum space, and which sees in Scotland’s shattered linguistic communities of Gaelic and Scots, in the cleared highland glens of the north and bleak industrial deserts of the south, a chance, an opportunity, and an escape route; a way leading back into the flow of European history.

We need an arts policy which empowers people who approach culture in the same way a loving gardener does her plants, making no discrimination between this shrub which blooms more loudly, and that one which is in need of more care; a gardener, in short, concerned with growth, with life itself, and with the whole garden in all its diversity.

CULTURE CLUBDouglas Stuart Wilson

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At first it was just a trickle, then a torrent. At first only a few experimented with carving our#social life outside the dominant industrial system. But as the system

began to capsize on the#rocks of ecological and social ruin, it became an exodus. Necessity was the mother of#invention, and people began to find their power by co-creating new ways of being and#living, relating and transacting. People became new producers in an eco-system of#collaboration: cultural, political and economic. They began to join this new movement#and create and demand the innovation of a multitude of deeply democratic social processes#and institutions for the protection and production of the commons. “Another World is#Possible” was no longer a slogan, but increasingly created in our life worlds, from the#personal to the political.

Peer-to-Peer practices are the modus operandi# for the development of larger#collaborative movements for change. They create and extend forms of citizen collaboration that allow people to build new cultural, political and economic systems. This is the essential process of deep democracy, where people are actively engaged in the creative unfolding of their potential in co-articulating and co-creating new ways of being and living, relating and transacting. Equally, collaboration can and should incorporate the Daoist principle of non-action, and the Gandhian principle of non-cooperation (Schell, 2003,pp. 129-131). Braidotti describes non-action as the ‘negative polarity’ of creative engagement:

People can either buy a product because it is certified as environmentally friendly#(the positive polarity) or boycott a product deemed problematic by informal#information networks (the negative polarity). The former can be described as an action; the latter as a non-action. (Braidotti 2007, p.55)#

Peer-to-Peer practices, by allowing for the constitution of new forms of#productivity (cultural, political, economic), provides a means by which dominant capitalist forms of production can be substituted by new forms based on an ethos of the commons. This form of ‘living outside the system’ has been described by some as an ‘exodus’ (Hardt, 2004), and is consistent with the idea of non-action. In Gandhian terms, it means cessation of support for the systems and structures that are intrinsic to the pathology. It is by no means just a personal process, it is highly coordinated and strategic in its approach to non-cooperation. The formation of collaborative networks of Peer-to-Peer based collectivities is central to the formation of a system-within-a-system that can both sidestep participation with a dysfunctional capitalist system, and sustain itself in the face of an incumbent global capitalist political economy hostile to alternatives. As we connect across our di!erences and conscientize a common humanity, we will be increasingly able to form ‘strategic coherences’, which enable actions and non-actions – to both create new ways of living and to bring those yielding power-with-impunity to account.

participatory democracy and the global movementOne of the critical issues which thematically weaves together current global movement(s) for change is the struggle for participatory democracy. The Occupy uprisings were an anti-capitalist expression: both as a symbolic adbusting confrontation to the Wall Street – Washington complex, but as well an experiment in generating new forms of Peer-to-Peer production (cultural, political and economic) which hold participatory democracy as a core organizing logic and ethos. In hindsight, the Occupy movement was spectacularly successful as a pre-figurative expression of both endogenous peer-production, and as an exogenous challenge to corporate privilege and power. We need, however, to situate Occupy in a broader struggle. The anti-globalization movement from the 1980s contested the undemocratic nature of#powerful institutions. Protesters in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation, which linked ‘Teamsters and Turtles’, saw WTO agreements as fundamentally undermining national legislation aimed at protecting labour and environment alike (Kaldor, 2000). Earlier, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment –

defeated by a coalition of NGOs – would have enfranchised investor rights above#basic democratic processes (Goodman, 2000). The World Social Forum, which gave rise to a global process of social fora that have spanned almost every country on the planet, emerged with a deep commitment to participatory democracy. The first forum was indeed inspired by the participatory economic decision-making process in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The overarching direction of the WSF is the radical democratization of major spheres of life: the governance of economy, culture, politics, and ecology (Ponniah, 2006). Together this implies bringing social goods (economy, culture, politics and ecology) back into a commons-based systems of governance, through its radical democratisation. An important aspect of the alternative globalization movement has been pre-figurative innovation, people and groups inventing and innovating new social forms. For over a decade, the hetero-topic spaces represented by social forums, occupations, and other temporary autonomous zones (TAZs) have allowed for#the emergence of new collaborative networks (Juris 2004; Ramos 2010). In the forum process, participation is not shallow, via passive attendance at events, or#even representative voting, but rather is about the deep engagement with peers in deconstructing and reconstructing the way we live, our consciousness,

our#behaviour, our institutions and social systems, at every level, from the political to the cultural and the economic – fundamentally about building Another#Possible World with diverse Others. More recently the Arab spring has challenged the deeply nepotistic, cronyistic and corrupt political leadership in the Arab world. Likewise, in Europe, the Indignados of Spain and resistance in Greece have challenged the legitimacy of#the undemocratic imposition of austerity programs under Eurocratic governance processes. The Occupy movement, a variant on these citizen uprisings, did its part by challenging the Wall Street – Washington power nexus. These uprising are at once examples of challenges to unaccountable and undemocratic political systems, while at the same time their methodologies of insurgency share an important feature: they used diversity as a resource and wove deep solidarity across di!erences. These movements by virtue of this methodological strength practiced the endogenous

innovation of new forms of participatory democracy, while calling for dramatic democratic changes in their political-economic systems.

a micro-scenario for deep participatory democracyThe many challenges we face have provoked and inspired citizen movements around the world, what sociologist Ulrich Beck named the ‘sub-political’ (Beck,1999), and popular environmentalist Paul Hawken referred to as a planetary ‘autoimmune’ response. And yet our institutions of governance are struggling to cope with even basic demands by citizens to be more involved, engaged and creative in constructing the day-to-day ways in which we live our lives. While modern-day democracies struggle to maintain a basic sense of democratic integrity, as with the Citizens United#case involving Political Action Committees in the US, both the possibilities and the practical needs for deeper democratic empowerment and enfranchisement have increased. Therefore, in tandem with defending older forms of democratic enfranchisement, e.g. representative democracy, we must simultaneously create new forms of democratic empowerment, and this is in the face of strong anti-democratic trends in many countries. Deep participatory democracy, in which individuals and communities are engaged in envisioning and creating new cultural, economic and political forms and practices, is needed at many levels: from finding ways to create sustainable living locally, to envisioning and collaboratively creating global governance institutions and processes, fostering adaptive capacity and resilience. Perhaps a scenario in which deep participatory democracy is real may look something like this: Imagine a person, call her ‘Sally’. Sally’s workplace, a furniture cooperative, includes her in decisions about the operation and direction of that enterprise. This

PEOPLE GET REALJosé M. Ramos

Across the world, citizens’ uprisings are drawing strength by embracing deep democracy to challenge austerity capitalism. Scotland can be next.

“Deep democracy is a holistic opening and convergence of the many talents,

aspirations, values and needs held by a diversity of people.”

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is because that organisation is a hybrid form that includes employee ownership schemes. For every additional year she works at the co-op, she gains slightly more political clout, but not too much to ever overwhelm her peers and out of proportion to others, but enough to acknowledge her service and experience in an equitable way. Because it is her factory in a sense, she cares about the strategic direction it takes. She knows that the executive management have embarked on an ambitious expansion that required financial leveraging. She is keen to keep an eye on whether the strategy has traction. She and her family’s future depends on it. Imagine that Sally is, further, politically engaged through a number of other#projects: she is engaged in a global project of governance and change. A group of#Open Source activists teamed up with South Pacific nations to found the Oceanic Conservation Organization (OCO). At first it was an open platform that allowed people from around the world to imagine and conceptually co-construct the organization. A well-orchestrated crowd-funding campaign allowed it to raise a staggering $150 million over a half-year. Sally was very happy to contribute to the design of aspects of the organization, and then gave a $150 donation toward the launch. Sally is now involved in running an aspect of the operation. From her home country in Australia she lobbies politicians to accept and ratify a key OCO brokered treaty that will put severe limits on industrial fishing in the south pacific. Sally is also engaged in local level decision-making about the allocation of#resources in her local council toward community projects. Every year community members come to a council-run planning process that allows (and expects) citizens to propose new projects and decide which ones they consider most important to fund. The proponents of di!erent projects get to set up a small stall where they can tell citizens about the project. Residents then fill out a budget prioritization form.

With a group of friends she has started a local internet TV channel that curates interesting content from around the world, interviews locals and broadcasts this to a local audience via TV transmission and an online video content channel. The TV transmission is still illegal but it is so popular that the state legislature has already decriminalized it and it may become legal soon. Sally is of course part of#this legal campaign! In this scenario, Sally is not simply a passive recipient of programmed institutional meaning making: what is ethical or unjust, ugly or beautiful. Rather#she is engaged with others, local and non-local, in constructing meaning, new institutions, cultural production, new systems of governance and economic subsistence. All of these examples are variants of what already exists and what is being developed by millions of people across the world, documented extensively by Michel Bauwens and others from the Peer-to-Peer foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net.#

a time of transitionsThe neo-colonial institutions of capitalism, where industrial modes of production are prevalent, are wreaking destruction upon the Earth. Look no further than our oceanic biomes, where industrial fishing is laying waste to fishery after fishery in a mindless pursuit of profit and ill defined ‘wealth’ (Mitchell,2008). Other areas, our forests, agricultural base, water sources etc. are all under#attack in di!erent ways from large scale industrial activity that has short term capital/corporate investment as its source. At its very worst, aspects of life that are part of the common heritage of humanity – genetics, culture, scientific knowledge, water and land – are privatized, commodified and appropriated by the very few (Shiva, 2000a, 2000b, 2002). Whether it be a global commons such as our atmosphere or digital content, or a local commons such as a rivers, attacks on ecological commons are equally attacks on the people that rely on these commons. Not withstanding post-war social democracies, where power has had some semblance of accountability to popular votes and a rough consensus on human rights, communism (under Stalin, Mao and many others) was equally destructive toward ecological and social life. Having failed to create a viable and life-a"rming alternative to capitalism, communist regimes in Russia and China have succumbed to the worst excesses of capitalism through the rise of oligarchs and prince lings alike. In this context the world’s ecosystems are pushed beyond their limits. Great stratifications of wealth and power have created a world of haves and have-nots. Vast sums of money, in the trillions upon trillions of dollars, have been taken from the public purse, to recapitalize the faltering capitalist project. A minority have illegitimately appropriated vast land, resources and privilege. The state as a mediator for justice and equity is failing.

In order to address the myriad challenges we face, we must embark upon a radical course of innovation. Unlike the communist and capitalist projects, where ends justify/ied means, these great transitions must be defined by humanizing and life-a"rming means and ends alike. The great transitions underway are under girded by collaborative networks of social alternatives, connected in complex ways, simultaneously through local and non-local solidarity and exchange systems. From the shift toward cosmopolitan global governance, to projects in re-localizing economies, or large scale sustainable development projects, and the awakening of planetary consciousness and spirituality, citizen insurgencies and globe-spanning interlinked social movements… they all rest on our ability to recognize the presence, value and dynamics of the greatest movement the world has ever witnessed.

First and foremost is the re-constitution of democratic accountability and power over our#diverse commons at scales appropriate to the governance challenges we face. And secondly a new separation of powers that cuts the influence cycle between politics and business, business and media, and media and politics.

deep democracy for the commonsDeep democracy can be distinguished from participatory democracy and representative democracy. In representative democracy, as in Australia today, a person is legally obliged to vote. In most democracies, however, voting is not a legal obligation, it is su"cient for someone to simply exist and accept the powers that be. To the extent that powerful moneyed interests dictate political policy, even

representative democracy is meaningless. In participatory democracy, such as that promoted through the pink revolution in Latin America, communities are given the opportunity to engage in deliberation over the governance and allocation of taxed resources. The Porto Alegre experiments in economic democracy are exemplary. The idea of deep democracy takes this one step further. It implies a deeper engagement for citizens, in which people are active in co-creating new democratic and commons-oriented economic, cultural, and political institutions, organizations and social constructions. This is not meant to sideline or subsume other concepts or dimensions of democracy, but to add a layer to our conception of what it means. Deep democracy, as discussed by Mindell, is a holistic opening and

convergence of the many talents, aspirations, values and needs held by a diversity of people (Mindell, 1992). In creating social alternatives we come face-to-face with the power dynamics within political, cultural and economic power formations. For communities to resist the impositions of global capitalism, collaborative networks must be nurtured, fostered and developed. These collaborative networks of social alternatives allow a dual movement: an internal movement (exodus) by which the autonomous production of social life is made increasingly possible (and non-cooperative with dominant capitalist systems), and in an outer movement which can muster resistance and strike at the heart of power. The power of Occupy was its embodiment of this dual inner and outer movement in a single instantiation, and it’s rhizomatic replication into other contexts. To learn from and build upon Occupy requires honouring its pre-figurative significance but understanding that it#belongs to a longer legacy of bringing our commons into the democratic fold.

referencesBauwens, M. (2006). The Political Economy of Peer Production. Post-Autistic Economics#Review#(37). Beck, U. (1999). World Risk Society. Oxford: Polity Press.Boulet, J. (1985).#Action-Theoretical Reflections for Social and Community Intervention. University of

Michigan, MichiganBraidotti, G. (2007) Innovating Responses to Crisis: Exploring the Principle of Non-Action as a

Foresight Tool, Journal of Futures Studies, November, 12(2): 53 – 68Goodman, J., Ranald, P. (Ed.). (2000). Stopping the Juggernaut: Public Interest Versus the##Multilateral

Agreement on Investment. Annandale: Pluto Press.Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2004b).#Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. NewYork

Penguin Press.Hawken, P. (2007).#Blessed Unrest. New York Viking.Juris, J. S. (2004).#Digital Age Activism : Anti Corporate Globalisation and the Cultural Politicof

Transnational Networking.#UC BerkeleyKaldor, M. (2000). ‘Civilising’ Globalisation? The Implications of the ‘Battle in Seattle’. Journal of

International Studies, 29#(1), 105--114.Mindell, A. (1992). The Leader as Martial Artist: An Introduction to Deep Democracy. SanFrancisco: Harper.Mitchell, A. (2008). Seasick: The Hidden Ecological Crisis of the Global Ocean. Pier 9.Ponniah, T. (2006). The World Social Forum Vision. Clark University Worcester.Ramos, J. (2010).#Alternative Futures of Globalisation: A socio-ecological study of the World#Social

Forum Process. Queensland University of Technology Footscray, Vic.Raskin, P. (2006). World Lines: Pathways, Pivots, and the Global Future. Boston TellusInstitute.Schell, J. (2003). The Unconquerable World. London: Penguin.Shiva, V. (2000a). Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge,Mass.: South

End Press.Shiva, V. (2000b). Tomorrow’s Biodiversity. New York: Thames & Hudson.Shiva, V. (2002). Water wars#. New Delhi: Indian Research Press.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Frank Fisher, the most deeply democratic soul I#have ever encountered. May your legacy be woven into our common and everyday#transcendence.

This article was first published in Finnish journal Futura (a publication of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies).

“For communities to resist the impositions of global capitalism,

collaborative networks must be nurtured and developed.”

14

T he Life and Death of Democracy by Professor John Keane is a mighty tome. Epic, informative and opinionated, it takes democracy as its subject, weaving together

a historical narrative of the hows, whens and wheres. The ancient Greeks set the ball rolling and from the streets of Athens the idea has slowly taken root.

It has been a slow and often painful process. At every twist and turn in the road political elites have done everything in their power to resist the spread of democracy to the poor or to women. Democracy has always been considered a dangerous idea. Such was its threat there was a point in 1940 when only eleven nominal democracies were left in the world.

Professor Keane’s book is an unusual one. Published in 2009 the book’s advance publicity stated it was the first general history of democracy to be published anywhere in over a hundred years. If we agree that democracy is a necessary component for any civilised society it is remarkable that so few histories of democracy exist.

Since Keane’s book appeared a handful of titles have been published on the subject, which is encouraging, but it still begs the question why the history of democracy has been ignored for so long. Democracy is after all the key which opens the door to the garden of Eden.

On Thursday 5th May 2011 I set o!, polling card in hand, from my home in Wester Hailes. As folk who know me will testify/complain I tend to walk quite fast. It took me about five minutes to reach the polling station. For a normal human being that’s about a ten minute walk. For pensioners perhaps a little bit longer.

It was raining much of the day which meant voters in my area faced a 20 minute return trip to the polling station, with a possible soaking thrown in for good measure. Dumbryden Gardens has some acute social problems so you can guess the rest. Su"ce to say the turnout from areas like mine was much less than the national average of 50.4%. In an age of smartphones and superfast broadband for democracy to be a!ected by such things as the weather or the distance to a polling station is absurd.

As the votes were announced and it became clear the SNP had achieved the one thing that no one believed was possible – a majority government – Scotland slowly awoke to the enormity of what happened and what it meant: we were going to have a referendum on Independence. The people would decide.

It could be argued that this unexpected turn of events proved that democracy in Scotland was in good shape. The people were being trusted to make the biggest decision in any of our lives. In one sense this is true. Irrespective of where you stand on the Yes-No divide, debate around Scotland’s constitutional future has reinvigorated politics here. Instead of the usual stramash of political parties trying to sell you their wishy-washy wares a battle of ideas has begun. Politics has become more complex and the ideas gaining credibility are ones that have more substance than conservative manifestos or simplistic sloganeering.

I don’t buy into the idea that the referendum debate so far has been of a poor quality. Some important markers have been laid down. The Common Weal project, facilitated by the Jimmy Reid Foundation and founded on the idea of a Nordic/Scandic model of social democracy, has gained influence and credibility and is perhaps best placed to be at the heart of an intellectual struggle for a more equal and just Scotland post-UK. The Radical Independence Conference of 2012 brought together almost 1000 activists to discuss ideas for Scotland post-Independence. Recent idea-books by authors such as the late Stephen Maxwell, Andy Wightman and Lesley Riddoch bring fresh perspectives and new ideas to Scotland’s political discourse.

Yet throughout this political re-awakening, this national soul-searching, this re-imagining of Scotland, what has been noticeable by its absence from the very heart of the current debate is how exactly the Scottish people are to be engaged in our brave new democracy.

I’d like to put the case here for a re-examination of the accepted parameters of what we call democracy and propose that the fundamental infrastructure of British democracy, as it stands, including our devolved parliament in Edinburgh, is not fit for purpose.

Most critiques of British democracy so far have focussed on constitutional anomalies incongruous with living in a modern 21st century democracy: the absurdity of a hereditary Head of State, the anti-democratic nature of an unelected second chamber, the discredited system of First Past The Post voting, the absence of a written

Constitution and/or a Bill of Rights. And quite rightly so. British democracy is not the envy of the world. It is structurally incapable of reflecting the will or opinions of its own people. Using whatever criteria you choose, whether at local or national level, the UK is one of the least democratic countries in Europe. The people of Scotland deserve better than this. As do the good people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland for that matter.

It is likely that the Scottish Government’s Independence White Paper (to be published this November) will challenge some of these democratic deficits and map out a potential path to a new, modern and distinctly Scottish democracy.

We can assume that at the core of this White Paper will be the proposal that an Independent Scotland should have a modern written Constitution. This is vital and is not negotiable for most people who support a Yes vote. How this Constitution will be drafted, amended and finalised should become clearer after November.

All of this should generate a new wave of discussion, argument and no little excitement. As indeed it should, for if Yes wins the train leaves the station, a brand new nation state is born, and everything is up for grabs.

Yet even a cursory examination of the democratic infrastructure we have at present should have the warning lights flashing. The democratic process as it stands allows the people limited access to decision making. Joe Public gets to put a cross in a box every 4-5 years and that’s our participation over and done with. This cross is supposed to represent the sum of our hopes, desires, aspirations and ideas. This is Democracy Lite. Its a pale shadow of even what the Chartists fought for two hundred years ago.

For instance we have no right to recall elected members who fail us. The case of the odious wife-beater Bill Walker comes to mind. Nor do we have any right to trigger a vote of no confidence in an unpopular government. We have no right to veto legislation going through parliament. We have no right to propose new laws and then put them to the people.

These ideas may sound radical to ears conditioned by British prejudices against popular democracy but most of these ideas have been tested. The electorate in US states can formulate and then vote on new State laws. Swiss cantons can go much further and even directly elect Government Ministers. Some of these ideas can be traced back to the polity of Athens and the ancient Greeks. But here, in Britain, in Scotland, everything is left to an elite of professional politicians drawn from the political party system. We, the people, are simply persona non gratis and not to be trusted.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It can be argued that politics and decision-making is way too important to be left to career politicians. If left to professional politicians behind closed doors they’ll surrender power to the highest bidder. It would be a foolish person who tried to argue that the UK government has control over the banks and corporations rather than the other way around.

The British political system has never hidden its distaste for referenda. The idea of consulting the people is anathema to British political elites. Only twice in modern times has Westminster called a national referendum. In 1975 there was one on whether to continue as a member of the EEC. In typical British style it was a consultative referendum. As it happened it backed the government of the day’s position. Then in 2011 a half-baked fudge of a referendum was called on electoral reform, which in reality was little more than a cosmetic exercise in democracy to buy the support of the Lib Dems in the Coalition government. Another is being discussed on EC membership for sometime after 2015.

Scotland has had two further constitutional referenda in the post-war period. The first was the notorious rigged one of 1979, followed 18 years later by the vote which reconvened the Scottish parliament. Fast forward another 17 years and the Independence referendum will be our third.

From a purely practical perspective organising a national referendum once every 17 or 18 years is not so problematic. The same clunky system used at national elections can be wheeled out: 4 million printed ballot papers, thousands of big wooden boxes, a national network of primary schools and community centres seconded, plus an army of paid workers are hired. It is a laborious time-consuming process. And costly too. The Independence referendum has been costed at £13.3m of which £8.6m will go on the physical running costs.

We need to ask ourselves: if we are serious about invoking the sovereignty of the

DIGITAL DEMOSKevin Williamson

15

people, and actually involving the Scottish people to create a new democratic state, can this archaic system – designed in the 19th century for an electorate of just a few million well-to-do people – be utilised?

If the Scottish people are to be genuinely involved in the drafting or amending of a constitution it will need a much more sophisticated mechanism than we currently have available. As will the vote to pass any finalised Constitution.

A democratic nation should learn to love and embrace referenda. They are an invaluable way of breaking the stranglehold that political elites have on democracy. They encourage and educate the people to take greater civic responsibility for their own society.

We will need referenda post-Independence. There is the question of whether we join the EC or not. That will need to be ratified by a referendum. There is the thorny question of which currency we use. I suspect that the clamour for a Scottish currency will grow as soon as the Bank of England make a decision that undermines a Scottish government’s economic strategy or priorities. That too will need a referendum. The British Queen will be 90 years old when the first election is held to a self-governing Scottish parliament. It is unlikely she will survive that first term of government as Head of State. Support for a vote on a Republic once Prince Charles becomes Head of State may be unavoidable. The list of potential referenda could be quite long in fact.

This prospect will horrify political elites who are used to keeping people disengaged from decision-making. But this should be welcomed as a fledgling democracy finds its feet and seeks to do things di!erent. Scots may actually want to be directly involved in governing themselves once their appetite is whetted.

The unavoidable practical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the old system of wandering down to a local primary school to put a cross in a ballot paper is hopelessly dated for a modern 21st Century democracy. Even more so when regular referenda or any form of direct democracy comes into play.

With this in minds the Scottish government, as a priority, in consultation with the people, will need to create a viable alternative. The most obvious solution is an electronic or digital democracy where people can vote at home, work, or wherever they happen to be. The hardware is already available via home computers, the internet, smartphones and interactive TV. Its up to the Scottish Government to begin now in gathering the technical expertise together to create a robust secure electronic or digital voting system. For the country that invented the steam engine, the telephone and the TV, a secure voting app should be a doddle.

It is worth noting in passing that Brazil became an electronic democracy in 2000. India, with the world’s largest electorate of around 630 million people at the time, became an electronic democracy in 2004. These were the first tentative steps to embrace new technology and their electronic voting machines haven’t malfunctioned the way the clunky voting system did in Yorkshire in 2010 when people were e!ectively disenfranchised.

Once a simple secure electronic voting system is put in place consulting the Scottish people becomes a relatively straightforward matter, it also becomes relatively inexpensive, and can be arranged at short notice if necessary. The sovereignty of the people would become a practical reality rather than a lofty ideal.

For decades democracy has been withering on the vine as people are turned o! by career politicians, hollowed-out political parties, plus their own sense of disempowerment. Now we have a chance to do things di!erent. Following a Yes vote Scotland could challenge the antideluvian practices of British democracy and pioneer a radical new approach that re-invigorates participation in the democratic process. A question hangs in the air: are we democratically-minded enough to give it a try?

Therein lies the root of so many problems, some of which a fledgling democracy will have to navigate.

Bernard Crick wrote a condensed primer on the subject: ‘Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (2012)’. Brian Roper has written a leftist take in his recent ‘The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation (2012)’.

“Throughout this political re-awakening, this national

soul-searching, this re-imagining of Scotland, what has been noticeable by its absence from the very heart of the current debate is how exactly the Scottish people are to be engaged in

our brave new democracy.”

From One Hundred weeks of Scotland – a photography project updated weekly with images starting 100 weeks before the referendum on Scottish Independence takes place and continuing until the week after the vote will happen. By Alan McCredie, www.100weeksofscotland.com

At over 5000 years old the Fortingall Yew is widely recognized as the oldest living thing in Europe.

Water Tower, Garthamlock, Glasgow.

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Scotland’s sprawling local government is the least democratic in Europe, leading to stasis and alienation. Drawing on stunning local successes both here and abroad, Lesley Riddoch calls for radical decentralisation.

When we are young, life is completely local. Adventure is the little wall you finally have the courage to walk along alone. Nature is the small patch of

dandelions halfway home from school. Huge is the Goliath crane. And loud is the sound that wakes you from sleep in the middle of the night. OK – my early ideas were deeply coloured by growing up in Belfast. But that’s the point. That’s the power of locality. It creates a sense of normality – even in abnormal situations – through deep, subconscious attachment.

People are increasingly understanding the power of early years in shaping children and their lifelong outlooks and capacities. By the age of three, children have acquired (or failed to acquire) half their adult vocabulary, learned teamwork, negotiating skills and bonded strongly with the people and ways of life around them. They do that – or fail to do that – in particular places. If Jesuits believed they owned a young life by directing it until the age of seven, how much more powerful is the place that forms us until our late teenage years? And yet ‘normal’ life in Scottish places disempowers local communities and denies citizens an e!ective and organised way to pour energy into that most important place – their own backyard.

Why? Because Scots have the biggest councils with the lowest levels of local democratic activity, the biggest and most remote landowners and the weakest community councils in Europe. The land we see, the streets we walk on, the rivers we walk beside, the problems we witness – they’re all there for someone else to fix, somewhere else to tackle. It’s why we pay our council tax, isn’t it? For someone else to bag problems and take them away? Except they can’t.

The average population of a Scottish council is 163,000 people. Most of our European neighbours have county councils this size. But they also have a smaller, more loved, and more vibrant ‘delivery tier’ of community-sized local councils. Scotland’s 32 enormous councils try to do everything – the strategic co-ordination work of a county council and the truly local delivery work of a parish council. It’s an impossible task and the community level su!ers. Genuinely local simply doesn’t exist in Scotland – except where hard-pressed, determined, unfunded voluntary groups have decided to act and pump life back into their communities.

How does this picture square with the Scotland of a hundred Highland Games, several dozen Feisean (Gaelic learning festivals), night schools, sports clubs and folk nights? Surely Scotland is full of particular places – distinct, fiercely defended by their inhabitants and loved. All true. But it’s true despite the o"cial structures – not because of them. Even the keenest volunteers who make life vibrant and interesting don’t run the places they light up – ‘local’ units of governance are too large, election is too dominated by political parties. Towns, villages, islands and communities are all run by council hqs in larger settlements elsewhere. And it’s been like that for a while.

The democratic heart of ‘small town’ Scotland was ripped out in 1996, when 32 unitary authorities replaced 65 old style councils – nine regions, 53 districts and three island councils. The big local downsizing had already occurred. In 1975, more than 400 counties, counties of cities, large and small burghs were swept away and before that in 1930, 871 parish councils axed as democratic structures.

The smaller system severed the vital link between people and place in Scotland. This is where the ‘best wee country in the world’ is currently run – somewhere else. In Norway, Finland, Denmark, France, Germany and Belgium, towns like St Andrews, Saltcoats, Kirkcaldy, Fort William, Kelso, or Methil and islands like Barra, North Uist, Westray and Unst would have their own councils because our neighbours fought to remain localised. Scots inhabit the least locally empowered country (perhaps) in the developed world and tend to look higher (to national policy) or lower (to micromanaged families) for solving problems – even when the answer is genuine local control. Its absence is Scotland’s enduring blind spot.

* * *

Wick used to be one of the largest herring ports in Europe, the county town of Caithness (sorry, Thurso) and a royal burgh. Now it’s run from council headquarters

a three-hour rail journey away in Inverness. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles further north sits Hammerfest – the world’s northernmost town. In 1900, Wick and Hammerfest were both busy North Sea ports. Today both have around 9,000 inhabitants – but one is thriving, one struggling.

Hammerfest was the first place in Northern Europe to have street lighting powered by river hydros and funded by a local tax on beer in 1897. Townspeople went on to experiment with that turbine technology in the fast running straits at nearby Kvalsund. Years of relatively hassle-free access to their own waters helped the local energy company Hammerfest Strom become experts in tidal turbine technology and now the company is providing the kit for Scottish Power to make Islay the world’s first tidal-powered island in 2015. The Hammerfest firm now called Andritz Hydro Hammerfest – has also won the tender to exploit the mother of all tidal stream sites o! Duncansby Head in the Pentland Firth – sixteen miles north of declining Wick, which lost its o"cial port status a decade back.

It’s the ultimate irony. Wick’s inhabitants survived centuries of pummelling by the North Sea aboard fishing boats, lifeboats, oil supply boats and pilot ships. But Wickers didn’t have easy access, local control, cash, investment or su"cient local belief to turn their intimate knowledge of a cruel sea into energy harnessing technology. Today the ports look very di!erent – one is constantly busy, the other very quiet. One has been raising its own taxes and deciding how to spend them for centuries. One hasn’t. I’ll grant you, other factors are also at play. But the Wickers’ frustration at being forced to tackle decline with both hands tied behind their backs is palpable. And Wick is not alone.

A few years back, I was asked to speak at a Rotary event in Fort William. As the crowd gathered in the reception area, conversation was downbeat. High rates meant shops were closing. Boarded up windows, Poundstretcher chain stores and a legion of charity shops had begun to dominate the High Street. The ring road meant most people bypassed the town. The crumbling 1960s facades of many buildings needed repair and, despite the innovation of the Mountain Film Festival, mountain biking, the ski lift at nearby Aonach Mor and the enduring natural spectacle of Ben Nevis, Fort William itself seemed shabby.

Once spoken about, it was a situation that plunged the entire banqueting suite of retired town planners, retailers, secretaries, shop owners, lorry drivers, council o"cials and civil engineers into gloom. So I ditched my speech. Asking for a show of hands to demonstrate the level and range of expertise in that room alone, I suggested they had more than enough experience, commitment and a!ection to resurrect Fort William themselves.

The mood lifted. There was a momentary buzz. Folk looked around like chefs planning a complicated, ambitious menu. Yes – all the raw ingredients are to hand. Yes, we could easily work together and put the time in. We could fix everything here. We could raise money, hold ceilidhs, get the young folk involved and… then something visibly knocked the wind from their collective sails. It’s not our place to do this. We aren’t councillors. Anything we do will be against some rule. And there’s no love lost for well-meaning amateurs. The moment passed.

* * *

If self-determination is good enough for Scotland, it’s good enough for Scotland’s communities too. If power and responsibility can renew Scotland, then a democratic stimulus can also give a leg up to capable, active communities. Instead they are being micro-managed badly from on high while politicians bemoan punter apathy.

In the absence of truly local councils, development trusts have become the most e!ective vehicles for communities that want control of their destinies. There’s a legal question mark over community councils owning assets. So development trusts have been set up to own and manage orchards, housing, land buyouts, pubs, libraries, bridges, libraries, community centres, wind turbines, shops, transport – and in the process a very practical, capable and focused set of people has been gathered.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOMELesley Riddoch

19

Some of the poorest Glaswegians worked together to restore Govanhill Baths – a decade-long campaign to retain a swimming pool against the wishes of Glasgow Council. The project has produced much more than a beautiful set of Victorian Baths – the people of Govanhill are now purposefully organised in their own development trust and are taking on responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. The more services that can be channeled through this popular, community-driven vehicle, the better.

And yet the vast bulk of social and welfare spending in Govanhill and elsewhere is channeled through local o"ces of large councils whose paid sta! often live elsewhere. The present council setup delivers a clear message to local, active, capable Scots. Your job is to stand still while we fix you. Happily most folk in development trusts aren’t listening.

West Kilbride in Ayrshire is another sparkling example of successful, community-driven regeneration where conventional ‘top down’ policy had drawn a blank. This nineteenth century former weaving town su!ered from high unemployment and competition from out-of-town shopping centres. At one point, half the local shops were boarded up. In 1998, the West Kilbride Community Initiative was set up by locals with one craft shop opening on the High Street. Other skilled crafts people took over derelict shops and profits were ploughed back into the town. In 2006, West Kilbride won the Enterprising Britain competition. Now eight artists’ studios, an exhibition gallery, a delicatessen, a clock and watch repairer, a bridal shop and a graphic design business have opened and the existing butcher, baker and greengrocer have been able to stay put. None of this is formal council activity. If local people had not decided to take action in a voluntary development trust, West Kilbride might today be dead as a dodo – or as lifeless as many neighbouring towns without the same level of community control.

Connected, powerful communities – based on the kind of dynamism demonstrated by development trusts – could generate energy, supply district heating, find work for unemployed young people, tackle local flooding problems, fix derelict buildings, build and manage housing and keep an eye on old folk, helping them stay out of hospital and the personal care budget stay under control. This kind of social transformation is already happening via the development trust that runs the island of Eigg – and the West Whitlawburn housing co-operative.

There’s a lesson and a challenge here for the Scottish Government. As councils face the task of saving millions from budgets, hundreds of land and wind-energy rich community development trusts are deciding how to spend their dividends. Should they treat the cash as ‘extra money’ – providing window boxes, tra"c-calming or other marginal improvements when roads are pot-holed, energy costs are through the roof, old folk need carers and young parents need a!ordable child-care? Or, if they spend money on core council services, will they prompt local authorities to pullout altogether and end up as diy communities where residents pay council tax for next-to-nothing? The solution might be to transfer some council tax income to self-governing communities. What’s the alternative? Do we just pat successful communities on the head and continue to fund municipal failure?

There are around 200 development trusts in Scotland – community led, multiple activity, enterprising, partnership oriented and keen to move away from reliance on grants. Could they help run Scotland? They already are. Cost-cutting councils are already closing libraries and village halls. The SNP government does not appear to smile upon our over-large councils. Nor does it want community-sized councils to take over. Development Trusts may seem to be an ideal intermediate solution. But can this ad hoc situation work in the long term when all involved are un-elected volunteers and councils still expect council tax bills to be paid regardless of local service provision?

* * *

I visited the small town of Sey$isfjör$ur in northeast Iceland (population 668) and was impressed to see gangs of youngsters mending fences, mowing grass, and

painting walls at the local hospital. ‘Yes, the municipality decided to pay them a small amount to fix the town every summer. The older kids guide the young ones, they don’t get bored, they learn to earn money, work as a team and we get everything ready for the tourist season.’ It made so much sense.

Later, in snow so deep it would have brought Scotland grinding to a halt, I visited the Medas Outdoor Kindergarten in Arctic Norway. The national Norwegian government had called for farmers to diversify and for children to have at least one full day outside per week. So the local municipality backed a bright idea by local farmers – a farm kindergarten where the children feed and care for the animals, make hay, grow vegetables and sell eggs and tomatoes in local villages at the weekends

to raise funds for school trips. There are now 100 similar farm kindergartens across northern Norway. Did health and safety people from Oslo have concerns? ‘No, I think we are all happy here. Why would outside agencies get involved?’

Now it’s true that many communities at present are not mini nirvanas. Too often, in the absence of real democracy, gatekeepers and cabals have taken over. There’s no clear idea of what community development is for since it seems to duplicate what councils should be doing. And whilst Development Trusts are thriving, they make huge demands on time and voluntary resources.

Local is haphazard because it exists in the nation’s collective blind spot. The answer is more structure, more democracy, more functions, more expectation, more asset transfers, more connection, more grassroots integration and more power – not less. Government leaders and distant bureaucrats cannot act endlessly as our absent mentors and proxies. Communities need to do some light, medium and eventually heavy lifting ourselves. But no athlete ever started a long race without a warm up. Currently communities who want a share of the action must run

the equivalent of a democratic marathon after decades struggling to run for the bus. Scots have such a slender grasp on local power that participation in the community often means no more than buying a paper.

Of course, there would be problems with radical decentralisation – we’re all out of democratic practice. But the evidence from development trusts and other countries is that we can pick up the ropes pretty quickly. It’s time for the Scottish Government to admit that scale hasn’t ended the scourge of poverty and disadvantage – it’s just meant decision makers don’t have to bump into it.

In Scotland, places are dying because of remote governance despite being full of human talent, capacity, problem-solving energy, history and natural resources. Yet place is revolutionary because place is where people are. Empowerment and self-determination are principles for everyday life – not just the independence referendum.

This is an edited extract from Lesley Riddoch’s new book Blossom – what Scotland needs to Flourish.

Blossom is £11.99 & can be bought in bookshops, online at www.luath.co.uk/blossom.html. Or send a cheque for £11.99 to Lesley Riddoch at the address below for a signed copy (post and packing free & include the words you’d like written. Please allow 10 days for delivery) or on kindle http://t.co/0A0J52IP1R#www.lesleyriddoch.comAnother Side blog: www.lesleyriddoch.co.ukThe Nordics: www.nordichorizons.org#Feisty ProductionsJamesfield Farmhouse, Newburgh, Fife, Scotland KY14 6EW@lesleyriddoch

“Scots inhabit the least locally empowered

country in the developed world and

tend to look higher to national policy or

lower to micromanaged families for solving

problems – even when the answer is genuine

local control.”

20

In the final years of the last century I elected to live for a while on the island of North Uist. From the moment of my arrival I was absorbed by the landscape as if by a

realist novel of depth and character, with a sinuous plot that wound, like a hill track, across five millenia. As an academic geographer, the idea of ‘reading the landscape’ has long since come in and gone out of fashion. And yet it well describes the desire I had to know this place. In Uist, I discovered a kind of practical curiosity about how – culturally, visually, ecologically, economically – the landscape had taken shape.

What struck me first were the birds and – oddly – the machines of the machair. The cacophony of corncrakes, lapwings, skylarks and curlews was like nothing I had heard. More intriguing, was the fact that these birds were often to be found skulking in fields in and around the rusting remains of Massey Ferguson and Fordson tractors, Bamlett threshers, Bamford reapers, Cockshutt ploughs, as well, of course, as the more ubiquitous skeletons of Land Rovers and Mini Metros. The whole history of modernity, it seemed to me, could be seen in this series of lichen-encrusted exhibits.

As it turned out, my alertness to things ornithological and mechanical was by no means unique. A former RSPB warden, Philip Coxon, once described in his memoir how in Uist ‘almost every croft house stood at the centre of what looked like a used car lot. Some of the vehicles were skeletons of rust, others more recently abandoned and intact, used as hen-houses or dog-kennels … I felt I was touring Britain’s junkyard’.

Coxon experienced the Uist landscape as a contradiction – wonderful birdlife, irresponsible locals – without seeming to recognise that the machair was itself the hybrid accomplishment of crofters and wildlife and that the birds thrived here because of, not inspite of, crofting agriculture.

Had Coxon not died young, he would have been pleased to learn that these wrecks have now largely been cleared away. Indeed, under the ‘Environmentally Sensitive Area’ agreements, crofters have had little choice other than to tidy up in the name of visual amenity, leaving behind a more ordered landscape but one with fewer signs of the human labour that was invested in its transformation.

For the best part of two years, my time in North Uist was spent in a thatched cottage beside the postcard perfect sands of Vallay Strand. One luckless tourist, so diverted by the beauty of the scene, once nose-planted his car into the ditch. On another occasion, I found myself in an animated discussion with a BBC wildlife cameraman about the placement of my wheelie bin which – he made clear – was disrupting his footage. I obliged, eventually, by moving it.

I was reminded of all this when following recent debates about ‘wild land’ in Scotland. My memories of Uist impressed on me how much background human labour goes into making a picturesque scene. All that editing, moving, cropping and tidying up.

This, too, is the paradox of what we call wildness – that while it promises an ideal of pristine nature, one that is philosophically anterior to culture, it can only be realised through much imaginative and material ‘work’ of humans. Wildness is only brought about through a great deal of human intervention.

So here’s a proposition: that wildness is an attribute that we ascribe to landscape not a quality that inheres in landscape. It is a cultural ideal, and one which has its origins in the European Enlightenment, with its long taproot into the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are, in other words, no wild places before we insist on their wildness, a status that can only be sustained through suppressing our knowledge of the extent of human intervention in the landscape.

Most of Scotland’s conservation bodies acknowledge that we have no ‘wilderness’ in the classic sense of the term; and that our landscape has been subject to human

management for millennia. But this muttered concession in no way discourages their retention of the cultural and rhetorical frame of wildness as a way of talking about much of Scotland. And this wider frame, it seems to me, always overwhelms the hesitant acknowledgment of human labour.

John Muir, patron saint and poster boy for the Year of Natural Scotland 2013, embodies the problem: his conception of wilderness as ‘a refuge from society’ left little room for the indigenous peoples he encountered on his travels. Now, his devotees in the John Muir Trust are campaigning to enshrine wild land as part of the planning system. Their drive to make Scotland wild may yet succeed.

I’ll be frank and say that I tend not to like ‘wildness’. It is not that I dislike places that are deemed wild, far less do I want to see them inappropriately developed. As a birdwatcher as well as a geographer, I relish time in Scotland’s less populous districts. My problem is that the specific cultural lens of ‘wildness’, with its fixation on predominantly visual attributes at the expense of other meanings, stories and histories, tends to obscure more than it reveals. It is precisely because wildness emphasises an external agency – an abstract, pristine Nature that aparently precedes humans – that it ends up rendering human history, labour and experience as marginal.

The challenge is to find a new vocabulary of nature that does justice to the myriad ways in human history and natural history are entwined. There is a great irony in the fact that although Scotland has produced more than its fair share of fine environmental thinkers, we have devoted our attention to the wrong ones. If only Patrick Geddes – with his synthesis of place, work, folk – was given the same acclaim as Muir.

Nature conservation in Scotland is now in desperate need of conceptual renewal, having rarely been subject to the sort of philosophical challenge that is routine in other disciplines. Insights from the humanities and the interpretative social sciences – the idea, for instance, that wildness is a social construction – are conspicuously absent. So it would be a welcome development if some of the creative intellectual stirrings that are being catalysed by the independence referendum might find application in our approach to the environment.

It is not just that we need to act di!erently, we first need to think di!erently. Can we find ways of celebrating a nature that has always been resolutely cultural? And can we do so without seeing this as a loss of something pure that has become compromised by the social world?

I am sympathetic to the sorts of visions that are discussed under the rubric of ‘re-wilding’, most recently in George Monbiot’s Feral. Enchantment is a great starting point for thinking about a more intimate involvement in the natural world. But I worry, too, that ‘re-wilding’ signals a reprise of a concept that, at its heart, disavows human agency. We might need to un-wild before we can re-wild. And if this feels like futile word play, it is an obvious truism that how we talk and think about the world is indivisible from how we can change the world. We should certainly be concerned about the quiet rise of instrumental conceptions of Scotland’s nature such as ‘ecosystem services’. Appeals to landscape value expressed as an object of capitalist accounting are not just dispiriting; they also set the terms for what kind of world is possible.

I feel something similar about the recent wagon-circling defence of wildness. We need a di!erent approach: one that can allow us celebrate the ways in which our landscapes narrate the hybrid labours of humans and non-humans. Stop worrying, in other words, and learn to love the rusting tractor.

UN-WILDING SCOTLAND? Fraser Macdonald

21

One jarring conversation in a Highland town this summer led me to reflect on the nature of a Scottish national identity and on what would constitute a just

sovereign order in an independent – or, indeed, non-independent – Scotland.I was speaking with a Glaswegian who had lived in the town for nearly half a

century and become a prominent citizen there. When we spoke about language he told me that Gaelic is “superfluous”; it is not a modern language and is useless. He felt it was better for children to learn French and German in primary school, but maybe those who wanted could learn Gaelic in secondary school.

He said he had worked with islandmen who didn’t know how to sign their names, implying that Gaelic had made them ignorant. However, he added: “It wasn’t their fault – I looked after them.”

When it came to crofters, he told me: “They’re lazy. Nobody keeps cattle anymore. There’s no crofters. Throwing a few sheep on the hill – that’s not crofting.”

Each time I asked about the structural conditions in which crofting and Gaelic were declining he responded with what to me was invective, concluding: “People say that if you are anti-Gaelic you are anti-Scottish, but that’s not true.”

It brought to mind another uncomfortable conversation, this one with a lady from Edinburgh a few years ago. She was criticising the fact that there was a Gaelic-medium-unit at a school in the cit, asking: “Why are they forcing our young people to learn Gaelic?” (The answer is that ‘they’ are not.)

The man’s claim that one can be anti-Gaelic without being anti-Scottish reminded me of the lady’s use of the language of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

In debating the consequences of independence, Bella Caledonia has not shied away from the di"cult issue of Scottish identities, repeatedly posting articles which are superficially about the Gaelic language but which, in fact, draw out some of the assumptions and prejudices that come with our messy cultural inheritance. During the commentary on an article discussing the absence of Gaelic from the referendum debate one poster appeared to want to close the whole topic down because it was, they claimed, anti-independence.

However, another poster, called ‘mrbfaethedee’, outlined why he felt that many people seemed to be struggling with the issues that the article had raised:

large numbers of Scots don’t see gaelic as being as particularly relevant to them while the gaelic community obviously and rightly do…Sitting here in Dundee I don’t feel that gaelic makes up a great deal of my ‘culture’, and that its depth and infuence over on the east coast is grossly overstated, historically as well as currently. So when it’s touted as Scotland’s true language and culture by others, it simply ignores the fact that we’ve been ‘mulit-cultural’ for a long time, and the lingua franca has long since moved on.

On the same thread Stewart Ingleby had posted:

As a lowlander I could actually get equally angry about the whitewashing of my own cultural history with the arrogant and inaccurate assertion that gaelic is the universal native language of Scotland.

Here, Ingleby argues that assertions about the Gaelic language are being used to present Scotland as having one culture. His argument represents a concern that this universalising cultural force could wipe out the ‘cultural history’ of the Lowlands to which he belongs. It is possible, I think, that he can be understood as invoking a kind of Lowland nationalism – this is what the claim of a ‘cultural history’ for a people (‘lowlanders’) in a territory amounts to.

From a di!erent Scottish perspective, the Hebridean scholar Dr. John MacInnes has written in nationalistic terms of the historical experiences of the Gàidheal in Scotland, concluding that “during the last two and a half centuries processes of decline have produced what can only now be regarded as the detritus of a nation”. Yet while the historical decline of the Gàidheal as a nation is real enough, in his important recent book ‘Voicing Scotland – folk, culture, tradition’ Dr. Gary West of the School of Scottish Studies can still contrast the singers of what he calls ‘Gaeldom’ with the singers of ‘Scotland’.

If we think of a nation as being what the 19th century French philosopher Ernest Renan called “a large scale solidarity” formed fom a “rich legacy of memories” held in common, then I would argue that the examples above demonstrate that a notion of

Scottish nationhood is not straightforward. Renan famously wrote that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle”. He added:

Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.

In these terms, the soul of Scotland is doubly divided. It is divided not only in terms of the debate on how we consent to live together in the present. This is the independence debate; a debate on political ‘issues’.

No, the soul of Scotland is also divided at its ‘origins’: there are radically di!erent senses of what being Scottish means, and these di!erences have reached the present from far, far back in our messy, long-contested past. Whereas one stream of national memory might recall the dates of 1603 and 1707 as the years when a sovereignty was lost, another stream might invoke the years 1266 and 1493 to the same end.1

In our past and in our present these mighty streams of cultural memory divide us, and when a sovereign Scotland is being collectively imagined the assumptions and prejudices carried in each stream can meet and clash, creating division and anger.

It might help us to understand and come to terms with these powerful feelings of division and anger if we consider the possibility that Scotland is more than one nation; that is, if we begin to think of Scotland as a multinational society as well as a multicultural one.

According to the Canadian political philosopher James Tully, a multinational society is one “that includes more than one ‘nation’, or, more accurately, more than one ‘member’ of the society demands recognition as a nation or nations”. This recognition includes a right to self-governance.

Tully describes Canada as a multinational society on the basis of the claims being made by the government of the province of Quebec and by Aboriginal peoples to be recognised as nations. The same argument has been made for the present United Kingdom on the basis of the claims being made by the four nations that constitute it.

However, Tully points out that within Quebec itself there are 11 Aboriginal peoples demanding recognition as First Nations. He concludes: “A member of a multinational society that demands recognition as a nation may itself be a multinational society”.

In this regard it may be telling that the Scottish islands, the areas most closely associated with ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Nordic’ Scotland’, have already sought and, through the Lerwick Declaration, won the promise of greater powers in an independent Scotland.

In announcing the SNP’s commitment to self-determination within Scotland, Alex Salmond said:

We believe that the people who live and work in Scotland are best placed to make decisions about our future – the essence of self-determination, therefore we support subsidiarity and local decision making. It follows, therefore, that any government committed to that policy should listen to the views expressed across all of Scotland – as we are doing here in Lerwick

In this article I have suggested that the territory of Scotland contains a multiplicity of nations. If this is the case, and if it is the case that these fundamentally di!erent senses of the Scottish ‘nation’ can lead to divisiveness and anger when each claims ‘Scotland’ as its own, then it seems to me that this principle of self-governance should be applicable beyond the basis of localities within a homogenous Scottish nation.

The principle of Scottish self-determination should also recognise the deep diversity of Scotland’s cultural histories and in doing so seek to respect and to nurture the multicultural and multinational nature of Scottish identities. Then we might be able to acknowledge ‘us’ and ‘them’ without being anti-anyone.

1 1266 is the year the Treaty of Perth was signed between Scotland and Norway. The treaty transferred sovereignty over the Hebrides from Norway to Scotland. The terms of the treaty made the islands a Scottish ‘dominio’ [dominion] rather than part of the ‘regne’ [kingdom] of Scotland.1493 was year of the the final forfeiture by the Scottish Crown of the title ‘Dominus Insularum’ [Lord of the Isles] which appears to have been first created by the Hebridean leaders of Clan Donald, without the Scottish Crown’s authority, in the 14th century.

LARGE SCALE SOLIDARITYIain Mackinnon

22

There is an economic debate taking place in Britain which is inexplicably hidden from view. There are millions engaged in this debate and it takes place

everywhere. Except in politics.In the last week alone I have heard this debate outside the gates of the school

when I drop o! my daughter, in the pub, in my local supermarket, on the street and in workplaces everywhere. The debate is about our relationship to our jobs and it is a debate that is carried out in passionate voice.

Why doesn’t my boss take me seriously?Why don’t I ever seem to have time with my family?How is it I work 40 hours a week and still struggle with my bills?Why don’t I get any say in how my workplace is run?Why doesn’t anyone invest in improving my skills?Does my job really have to be so boring?Why can’t I find work?

Our relationship with work is one of the biggest relationships in our lives. It is a relationship which matters much more to us than I suspect many realise. We say “oh, it’s just a job” or “I work to live not live to work”. But we know that’s not really true; if it was we wouldn’t be talking about it all the time.

Now switch on the telly. Sit in front of it for hours. Watch all the current a!airs programmes you can. Listen carefully. Where is this debate? Why does it seem to be missing completely from national life as mediated by those at the top of society? Because the irony is that in my experience many of those with the most to say about their work are from the top end of society – “I never see my children”, “I’m always on call”.

Or even more tellingly, watch proceedings at Westminster. We hear them all drone on and on and on about jobs in the aggregate terms of “a thousand” or “ten thousand” or “a hundred thousand”. And this is the failure; can’t politicians see that the only people in all the land who care about 1,000 jobs are them. For everyone else, we care about just one good job.

This is of crucial importance; if we are to have a national debate about work and we make that debate quantitative and not qualitative, it excludes all those who care about one job. It speaks only to those who stand and fall by national statistics, excluding those who wake and fall asleep to the rhythm of a working life.

How have we created such a variance between what citizens talk about and what their elected representatives talk about? Well, would it surprise you to find out that it a result of neoliberal capitalism? One of the key principles of neoliberalism is that all that matters is the bottom line, it being a profit and loss analysis of the cosmos. So long as we are talking about means of increasing profit we aren’t talking about the interests of people. While neoliberalism has sought to conflate the interests of the individual and the interests of the corporation, this is a mendacious lie.

For some corporations the quality of sta! is vitally important – if you work as an engineer or designer for Apple or Google, you really matter to your employers as an individual because you have specific skills they need. For the rest, you have only generic skills that they need, skills they can quickly and easily acquire elsewhere with little e!ort. For supermarkets, you could not matter less. Capable of stacking a shelf? Willing to work for what you’re given? That’s the spirit...

A political agenda which engages with your experience of your job beyond counting that you have one is a threat to the current economic order. If we were allowed to ask why it is that we have some of the lowest pay, longest hours, poorest conditions and lowest level of investment in training of any comparable nation, the CBI would implode in apoplexy. Even the recent conversion of some in the Tory Party to the conclusion that our desperately low-pay economy isn’t in our collective interests has been met with the usual arrogant scorn from the City Boys – “it’ll crush the recovery if we have to pay you” they say.

But now for some reality. Look at the evidence of the relationship between economic performance and pay rates in developed economies. Far from discovering that the high-pay economies are economic basket cases, the reality is that the nations at the top of the economic competitiveness league tables are mostly high pay. And these are produced by neoliberal institutions like the World Trade Organisation,

the IMO business school and the World Economic Forum. It should not surprise you to discover that they also have much higher satisfaction ratings, higher levels of productivity, shorter working weeks and more holidays. Not for the first time we should cry out “why is what we are told is true in Britain not tally with what is shown to be true everywhere else?”.

For those who don’t instinctively realise why high pay works, a very little basic economics. Despite the British rhetoric, wealth is created neither by the owners of enterprises nor by the managers of enterprises but through the labour of people working in enterprises. Michele Mone may claim to be a wealth creator, but the value that is added to the products she manufactures comes from the transformation of threads into cloth and then of cloth into clothing. That value is then realised in the process of selling the clothes (by the people who drive the vans to get the merchandise to the shops, by the people in the shops who sell the merchandise to the public and above all from the money in the pockets of the members of the public who have earned wages through their labour). In the modern world, even the capital to establish the venture in the first place probably comes from the capital the banks hold in your current account, made cheaper still by the policy decisions of the state you elected.

The problem is that the value (in this example) is created in a developing economy far from here, realised out of our own pockets and finally transferred to the owner class who generally export it through purchase of expensive foreign goods and so on. In a high wage economy, the value is created by the higher skill levels of the educated population of workers. Their higher skills (perhaps they are creating computer code or involved in advanced engineering) create much more value per hour worked than a Chinese teenager stitching push-up bras. Value added per hour is a rough way of saying ‘productivity’. Higher productivity creates higher outputs per input, which is to say more profit generated from each hour of work. That makes you more competitive and it also makes you pay more wages. A high wage economy is not a low wage economy with higher rates of pay. It is a better economy.

This doesn’t matter if you’re in the business of low-margin, high-volume sales. Tesco doesn’t need its employees to be any good, it just needs to sell us a few more cans of beans each year. It is profitable for the corporation but makes for an unimpressive economy. In the case of the insane trade in financial derivatives that neither the buyer nor the seller properly understands (better known as the financial services sector), it doesn’t even bother to add any value at all. It just keeps gambling and hoping no-one notices it’s not real.

So we are not allowed a debate about our jobs because to open up that debate would be to question the whole purpose and structure of the UK economy. In a high pay economy, bankers, property speculators, retailers and marketing men need to work for their money while in Britain we just give it to them.

That’s why in my lifetime there has never been a single, serious, national attempt to put in place a strategy for improving the quality of jobs or increasing rates of pay. In fact, Gordon Brown made sure we did quite the opposite, implementing a tax credit system for the sole purpose of subsidising low-pay employers who could otherwise not sustain a workforce on the wages it pays. The UK in-work benefit system is not a benefit to those receiving the payments but to those not paying them a survivable wage.

And so, let us think about what that would look like. The City Boys tell us about the economic catastrophe that would be the ‘golden dustmen’. The golden dustman is a character from William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere. He is a dustman, but living in a society which does not value goods for their own sake and where people are equal. He is not richer, he is not more important, he just likes the colour gold more than his colleagues. The point is that he isn’t rich, but the political right want us to believe that high pay is largesse expended on the useless.

That is not what a high wage economy is about. It is not the same as a low wage economy but with everyone getting paid more, it is an economy which has been directed away from the low-investment, low-pay, low-margin, low-skill, low-productivity, high-volume enterprises that dominate Britain. The aim is not to create a nation of high-pay shelf-stackers but to create a nation of many fewer shelf-stackers in the first place. As we move to a productive economy which high-skill employment and serious industrial output, people become richer as they create more value out of their higher skills. This measurably does not leave the rest behind; as wage rates increase

NEW LABOURRobin McAlpine

so does tax take. And the provision of generous public services through collective taxation levels out variations in pay. Again, the nations with high pay also have the lowest levels of income inequality.

There is no room here to describe the industrial strategies that would be needed to get there – this will form a core part of the Jimmy Reid Foundation’s Common Weal project. And it is silly to think it will be easy or quick. But it is always worth thinking about what it would mean if we can succeed. Firstly, as wages rise, public finances greatly improve, partly because tax revenues go up and partly because the subsidy cost of low pay rapidly recedes. Secondly, as work quality becomes important, employers invest in sta! skills and provide them with opportunities to contribute directly to the direction of the company (high skill sta! are listened to by their bosses in a way low skill sta! are not). They feel much less alienation in their life. And thirdly, once we break in to the virtuous circle, many good things come, not least the fact that more pay in the economy means more economic activity (more eating out, more spending on entertainment). The multiplier e!ect really kicks in.

But then, once the rubicon is crossed, we can start to think bigger still. Instead of a debate about the iniquities of zero-hour contracts we can debate our collective relationship to work. Hypercapitalism is built on the assumption that humans are always ‘profit maximising beasts’ – given two options we will always choose the option that makes us richer. Of course, this has repeatedly been shown to be false. Removing other factors, when humans have achieved a certain quality of life, and as long as the quality of life is reflective of those around them (i.e. there isn’t great income inequality), in fact they choose more time with their families, more time to realise their private hopes and dreams. It is the unrelenting logic of hypercapitalism that this human tendency to seek happiness in company must be overcome through the unrelenting barrage of advertising, forcing them to attempt to seek happiness through acquisition. That is an illusory happiness; it leads only to the need to pursue more and more things.

The alternative, if we reclaim our economy and our society for citizens, can look di!erent. In France, despite the propaganda, the reduction of the working week to what was basically four and a half days had some remarkable e!ects. Many people chose to work slightly longer days four days a week and took extended weekends. Internal tourism boomed; people appear to have expended their time dividend not to increase their wealth through taking a second job but – breathe in – by living their lives.

If we could only make high-wage employment a strategy, we could take a serious attempt at ending poverty. It would certainly be the way to end income inequality. And of course, by definition, it would be the sign that we’d created a more virtuous, more productive economy.

And then, with the boot of subsistence living o! our necks and the gun of status anxiety removed from our temples, we could start to ask what we really want from our lives. If the great debate taking place in our streets, pubs and schools is anything to go by, the answer isn’t going to be alienation and separation from our loved ones. It would be a new attitude to work and life across our society.

Robin McAlpine is Director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation

23

“...in my lifetime there has never been a single, serious, national

attempt to put in place a strategy for improving the quality of jobs

or increasing rates of pay. In fact, Gordon Brown made sure we did

quite the opposite, implementing a tax credit system for the sole purpose

of subsidising low-pay employers who could otherwise not sustain a workforce on the wages it pays.”

24

MOVE ON UPCat Boyd

To represent their members’ interests and realize the vision of a fair society built on decent wages and socially useful work, trade unions must join forces with a grassroots Yes campaign.

Britain is the fourth most unequal society in the developed world and the fifth richest nation in the “rich” world. Continuing with neo-liberal economic policies

will mean more misery and despair for ordinary people. More of the same is not an option. An independent Scotland would be a positive step towards establishing economic democracy and justice. These are core values shared by progressive trade unionists and the reason why we must be at the heart of the broad Yes movement.

The majority of trade unions have not taken the side of the “Yes” camp, but nor are they backing Better Together. As austerity bites harder and harder, the lack of economic democracy that workers have not had in Britain becomes more exposed. Economic justice must be on the agenda during the independence debate. While many in the trade union movement remain unconvinced that independence is the best way to achieve economic justice and democracy, for others at this point in the referendum debate, it’s the only way to make gains for ordinary people in Scotland. Trade unions must take the side most likely to benefit the class they exist to represent.

Neo-liberalism has created vast inequalities. Represented by the unbridled greed of the City of London, this model is not fit for the demands of the 21st century; climate change, welfare provision, housing and much more. The current economic model is a dictatorship of the rich and powerful. Ordinary workers, who create the wealth for these small elites, do not have a say in how their workplace is run nor the power to radically change it. Britain is bound to its finance capital. The City of London, one of the “great international finance capitals”, is driven by an accumulation of wealth, dependent on its own profits. This financial accumulation can only gainfully employ a much narrower section of the population, and as such does not require a broad workforce, as a “productive economy” would. It dominates the structure of the economy under the current constitutional arrangement, and will continue to do so after the referendum if Scotland votes No. We have seen the misery that austerity, a key part of this economic and political framework, is causing. More of the same is not an option.

An independent Scotland would represent more favourable terrain for economic reform in the interests of people and not profit – but the trade union movement must be willing to take this on board and become a key part of the broad movement for a Yes vote. There’s a much larger proportion of workers employed in public sector industry than in the private sector. One in four people in Scotland are employed in the public sector. Levels of trade union membership in the public sector far outweigh the non-unionised private finance and service industries. These private industries are where increasing numbers of young people find work. In fact, they’re a key battleground for trade unions today, and should be prioritised as an opportunity to build membership density and new militancy for the movement.

When newspapers cover youth unemployment and under-employment they speak of a generation who have had their bright futures snatched away. Since Thatcher’s calculated destruction of the trade unions, represented so vividly by the crushing of the miners’ strike in the 1980s, the modern workplace has come to represent a new type of pit created by Thatcherism, marred by despair. Many young graduates will find themselves on zero hour contracts, in call centres with chronic low pay, poor terms and conditions, and no hope of advancement. The shift to this type of industry will leave millions trapped in a downward spiral of despair. With union representation in these industries at around 25%, there is little hope in the future of those languishing in these workplaces. The nostalgia of the “great working class organisations” across Britain is a memory bearing little resemblance to our reality. The concept of “alienation” has never been more real as it is in these private industries.

For socialists in the referendum debate, of course, we cannot simply argue for economic reforms or a more productive economy, rather for economic democracy. It

is the duty and historic purpose of the trade unions to be at the front of the battle for economic democracy. In this debate, an argument must be made, not just for jobs, but for socially useful jobs and not just for reforms as a solution to the current economic crisis – rather, because the creation of more socially useful work and industry would help reconstruct the power of the working class. The reconstruction of working class power is the key to economic democracy. There has to be voices arguing for reforms to the economy which rationalise it from a social perspective, as opposed to economic reforms which boost short-term profits and provide jobs for a very small section of the population. This voice must be the voice of the trade unions and its associated bodies. This change in economic structure will help to rebuild the working class, and produce concrete demands for better wages, wealth redistribution, pension rights and free access to public services.

With a high percentage of public sector workers, the picture of the Scottish economy is di!erent from UK. This di!erence o!ers potential for progressive economic and social change. There is little potential under the current constitutional arrangement to rebuild a productive economy that would o!er socially useful jobs and

a higher level of employment. The finance capital, so intensively represented by the City of London, is far less dominant (although still in existence) in Scotland. The point here is simple: a more favourable terrain for economic democracy lies with an independent Scotland, free from City of London-rule.

Westminster politicians from all parties are happy to accept the neo-liberal model and allow themselves to benefit from it. Following the Falkirk-Unite debacle, it appears clear that strong currents within the Labour party want nothing to do with the trade union movement. At the current time, there’s no space at Westminster for the voice of the trade unions to make their demands heard. Surely the great plan for the trade unions cannot simply be to get the Labour party into power at Westminster come the next general election? The Labour Party is not anti cuts. It is pro-austerity. It continues to triangulate to the right, o!ering no clear alternative to more cuts. It does not represent the interests of ordinary people. In Scotland, particularly, the Labour Party’s dedication to neo-liberalism has lead to open attacks on universal benefits, encapsulated in Johann Lamont’s “Something-for-

Nothing Culture” speech. Trade unions need to be a voice for real social and economic change. There are opportunities in Scotland for this to become a voice to be reckoned with if the unions are ready to break their links with Labour and join forces with broad, grassroots campaigns.

The trade unions have of course been weakened by economic change since 1970s and by links with Labour. As well as a greater relative proportion of public sector employment in Scotland than the rest of the UK, there is a remaining social democratic consensus in Scotland. This is a huge opportunity for the left. However, as social democracy in Scotland has come to be represented by the SNP and more public sector workers are voting SNP than ever before, a gulf has opened up between the traditions of union membership and Labour party support. In the run up to the referendum and from the basis of a desire to establish economic democracy, we can use this gap at the grassroots and drive a wedge into it, arguing for disa"liation from Labour as a way to strengthen the movement. Unions have reacted badly to the government’s austerity agenda: we are no further forward in defending ordinary people than we were at the March for the Alternative in 2011.

Moreover, there is a strong economic case to be made for restoration of trade union rights and the positive impact that could have on the economy as a whole. Since 1979, anti- trade union laws have become progressively harsher. This indicates a trajectory for trade union abilities, which on a long enough timeline could prove fatal. The continual fall of the value in real wages since the 2008 economic crisis

“Without a decent wage, demand in the

economy must be “topped up”

by credit, creating today’s situation of triple dip recession, growing inequality and a narrative of

inevitable austerity.”

25

shows that without a decent wage, demand in the economy must be “topped up” by credit, creating today’s situation of triple dip recession, growing inequality and a narrative of inevitable austerity. Thatcher crushed the collective bargaining power of unions that allowed the increase of wages across sectors. The case must be made that the powers of trade unions should be restored in order to create a balance of forces in the economy. The problem remains again however that there is no space within British political structures to make these demands. Independence can provide the space for this debate. The rights of workers to organise freely must therefore be at the core of progressive demands for Scottish independence. All trade unionists can champion this argument, not just those based in Scotland. Scottish independence can benefit workers in the rest of the UK by challenging and repealing that legislation, undermining it in the rest of the UK, and opening up new ground to challenge these laws elsewhere.

Our task as trade unionists, regardless of borders, must be to restore the rights of trade unions to act in the interest of the working class and simultaneously be engaged with grassroots campaigns, as part of the broad Yes movement to argue for a reshaping of the economy.

Without the break-up of the British state, neither of these things are on the horizon. If we fail – not in terms of a delivery of Yes vote, but to make these arguments heard load and clear – ordinary people will be set back decades – in terms of work, welfare and education. We cannot expect them to forgive us for our failure.

A Yes vote in 2014 will not instantly give power back to the unions, nor will it automatically lead to economic democracy and fairness. Economic reform, with a view towards economic justice, will not be handed down from above from any parliament, regardless of how centre-left the party is. With no current united Scottish left, these demands must come from a broad grassroots movement, like the Radical Independence Campaign, with the core values of trade unionism at its heart. We must be able to hold any government of an independent Scotland to account on economic justice, Trident and on the rights of unions to organise. We must be able to pressure any government to make these changes – a society run in the interests of the millions not the millionaires. The trade union movement must be able to create broad links outside of workplace walls, to demand the repeal of the anti trade union laws – creating a sense of workplace democracy, political democracy and economic democracy.

To vote or agitate for a No vote will put a motor behind the downward trajectory of trade union rights, of wage equality, of wealth redistribution and of workers ability to fight back. A Yes vote interrupts this path. That is undeniable. The Yes movement, which transcends party membership, needs to campaign for a socially egalitarian vision of an independent Scotland, at the grassroots – not just via the policies of mainstream parties. If trade union agendas are not within that, then any outcome in 2014 will fail to represent the working class. Let’s project our positive vision of change that upholds the values of solidarity, democracy and equality – and look towards having this voice represented and elected into the parliament.

“Scottish independence can benefit workers in the rest of the UK by

challenging and repealing anti-union legislation, undermining it in the rest of the UK, opening up new ground to

challenge these laws elsewhere.”

The Yes campaign invites supporters to sign the Yes declaration with these opening words.

“I believe it is fundamentally better for us all, if decisions about Scotland’s future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland, that is, by the people of Scotland.”

As an argument for independence, it’s compelling. It emphasises a democratic rather than nationalistic dimension to the decision to be taken next year. When the Yes campaign was launched in May 2012, I published 196 tweets in which I asserted:

“I believe that it is fundamentally better if decisions about Auchtermuchty’s future are taken by the people of Auchtermuchty #yesauchtermuchty”

My point was simple. Just as it can be argued that the people of Scotland are best placed to make decisions about the country’s future, so too are the people of Auchtermuchty best placed to make decisions about their own a!airs. So too are the people who live in Scotland’s other 195 towns whose town councils were abolished in 1975.

Any argument for greater democracy and autonomy should not stop in Edinburgh. Scotland is an incredibly diverse country where rich, varied and distinctive cultures thrive in close proximity to one another. Yet Scotland has the least democratic governance arrangements in the whole of Europe where localities lack the political institutions that, in countries like Denmark, France, and Germany, provide the basis for genuinely local government.

In the context of the referendum, people in Scotland are suddenly being expected to think about the prospect of governing themselves as a nation when for decades their local institutions have been systematically erased. They might be forgiven for appearing somewhat bemused at the thought.

It ‘s a common complaint that the public are switched o! and disengaged. Turnouts at elections are derisory. Politicians are regarded with contempt. In response, politicians establish inquiries to find ways of encouraging greater participation in the democratic process. They wonder if electronic voting or Saturday voting

might make any di!erence. But the reason for the decline in engagement is simple. Folk don’t think that their views and votes will make much di!erence. Barely 50% of the electorate bother to vote in Holyrood elections. In Scotland’s local government election in 2012, turnout was 39.8% – the lowest since town councils were abolished. Why do we care so little about how and who governs?

Research over the past 30 years has shown that people have little interest in local politics, don’t think voting will change much and that local government is so weak that voting makes little di!erence.

Scotland’s local government is now not local nor does it govern. The decline did not go unchallenged. Jimmy Reid, in his famous rectorial address to Glasgow University in 1972 on the theme of alienation, remarked that,

“The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision making in the political institutions of society......

“Local government is to be re-structured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to local communities. Instead the proposals are for centralising local government. It is once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked “Where do you come from?”, I can reply “The Western Region”. It even sounds like a hospital board.”

Such a cavalier attitude to local democracy is not evident in the rest of Europe. In Iceland, a country of 321,857 people there are 74 municipalities. They raise 82%

of their own income. Over the last four decades, participation has, as the Association of Local Authorities in Iceland puts it, “been rather steady” with an average turnout at elections of around 85%. In some municipalities it was 100% – every single person on the electoral roll turned out to vote.

Right across Europe there are higher turnouts, greater participation and more local democracy than in Scotland. Indeed the McIntosh Report in 1999 which laid the framework for local government in the devolution era was very clear.

“It could be said that Scotland today simply does not have a system of local government in the sense in which many other countries still do. The 32 councils now existing are, in e!ect, what in other countries are called county councils or provinces.”1

More recently, the Christie Commission noted that

“If we look at other European countries with comparable populations (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc.), they have at least 3 times the number of councils we have, and in some cases more than 6 times. As importantly, these small councils are running a complex array of services (community health, social care, schools, local policing) and often raising the bulk of their income through local taxation.”1

Countries such as France, Denmark and Norway, municipalities enjoy a range of powers, raise the majority of their own finance and attract a level of participation in elections that exceeds the turnout of the Scottish Parliamentary and Westminster elections. When you meet your elected representatives in the school playground, the supermarket or on the football pitch on a Saturday, you are looking at the person entrusted with spending the income tax you paid last week. As a result, you tend to take an interest, use your vote and participate in decision-making.

In the Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2011, both the SNP and Labour promised that, if elected, they would freeze the council tax. This conveniently ignored that fact that the Scottish Parliament does not set the level of the council tax. Local autonomy was sacrificed for the electoral convenience of national politicians.

In the German elections in September, had Angela Merkel tried to curry favour with the electorate by making promises about the level of local taxes in her home city of Hamburg, she would have been hauled before the supreme Court for violating Article 28 of the German constitution which guarantees the autonomy of municipalities.

In May 2013, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities published their vision for the future of local government in Scotland in which they argued:

“Scotland is one of the most centralised countries in Europe. It is no coincidence that our European neighbours are often more successful at improving outcomes, and have much greater turn out at elections.

“We cannot hope to emulate the success of these countries without acknowledging that they have more local councils, local elected councillors represent fewer people, and that these councils and their services are constitutionally protected and their funding secured by law, even with regard to national policy making.

We should seek the same benefit, and the same independence that local government has in most western democracies.”

The debate about the future of Scotland provides an opportunity to redesign Scotland’s infantilised democracy where the people cannot currently be trusted to govern themselves as autonomous regions and municipalities. For too long, political elites have systematically undermined the existence and powers of local institutions. If self-government is to mean anything it should mean the re-establishment of a scheme of governance rooted in autonomous local government with the fiscal and legal powers to shape the future of communities according to the democratic will of the people.

references1 McIntosh Commission, 1999. Moving Forward Local Government and the Scottish Parliament.2 Christie Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Service, 2011. para 7.37

REGIONAL DEMOCRACYAndy Wightman

26

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!"#$Another Scotland Is Possible 

28

It’s 2016. The progressive green-left coalition is into its first term as the government of an independent Scotland. The seeds of change it promised are beginning to

take root.2016 is the year that the devolved governments of Scotland had set as a distant

target for ending fuel poverty. They failed to come close. Energy prices spiraled in the hands of private utilities with energy policy set in the hands of Westminster. Piecemeal programmes to insulate people’s homes put much more money in the accounts of ‘delivery agencies’ than was saved in energy bills en masse. Investment in solar power was encouraged through a subsidy that benefitted the rich and encouraged greed at the expense of the poor. Investment in large scale renewable energy was hindered by a lack of real commitment to anything other than big business (especially those with their sticky mitts in the black, black oil) and a lack of access to land for most communities to do it for themselves.

Those of us who worked in the green energy sector were split into two camps. The ‘get rich quick and onto the next bandwagon’ brigade and the rest of us who felt the soul being ripped from what we believed to be a progressive way to reduce energy bills and tip the balance back in favour of a healthy planet.

But it’s 2016. Fuel poverty hasn’t been eradicated but in the space of a year the new confidence and fresh thinking post independence is bringing it closer. From hope springs a new reality.

Early actions included establishing a co-operative energy utility to develop, own and operate all future base-load energy generation. Private sector energy developers are required to contribute to a Scotland-wide fuel poverty fund and a ‘polluter pays’ carbon tax has been placed on all fossil fuel extraction and use in energy generation. The grid infrastructure is in the throes of being taken into public ownership as is the only remaining Scotland-based energy utility which has been subject to a number of hostile takeover bids in recent years. The state has taken control of the Crown Estate in Scotland to make inshore and o!shore assets available for publicly developed renewable energy schemes ranging from mid-scale hydro electricity to large-scale marine renewables.

The Government has o!ered every household in Scotland a solar thermal or solar electric system depending on best fit. The caveat was that these systems had to be manufactured in Scotland and installed by local contractors. This promise is resulting in a major upscaling of existing solar thermal manufacturing in Forres and a new solar PV plant in Dundee finally o!ering high value jobs for the city’s redundant micro-electronics workers. Demand is high and all the stops are being pulled out to ensure it can deliver. The trade o! (or the ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ small print) is the introduction of a universal personal carbon budget. The penalties for over-spending on the carbon allowance is high, the benefits of being canny make it well worth the e!ort. Energy awareness education has become a core part of the school education system and workers from the old delivery bodies have been redeployed to o!er genuine free in-home energy management advice rather than sitting at the end of a phone telling people to ‘only fill the kettle as much as they need’ and to ‘go easy on the accelerator in the car’.

The fuel poverty fund, carbon tax and progressive taxation policies are being used

to roll out a range of initiatives. These aim to enable a genuine balance to be struck between meeting enhanced climate change targets whilst achieving energy justice for those previously excluded from participation in green energy initiatives due to low incomes and lack of access to knowledge.

They include a sustainable energy action plan for all of Scotland’s towns and cities to maximise the use of combined heat and power and district heating networks using a mix of hydrogen (generated from o!-peak on and o!shore wind, pump storage hydro and wave and tidal turbines), solar thermal panels, local woody biomass where appropriate with a small input of natural gas as part of a transitionary arrangement. Major insulation retrofitting alongside smart meters and smart grids help with demand management. Local authorities are encouraged to develop Danish style energy co-operatives and residents are given the options to buy a stake in the co-operative through the use of credit union finance. They are also required to produce and report on management plans to prevent exploitation of common-pool resources – the land, trees, rivers and atmosphere on which renewable energy generation depends.

Building standards for new and refurbished buildings insist upon measures to optimise solar gain, such as proper sunspaces (not heated conservatories), thermal mass in the built form and the use of solar thermal systems with inter-seasonal heat stores.

Rural communities are being aided to make best use of their natural advantage through a rural resilience development fund in which they are adopting the ‘Gigha+ Model’ of using income from energy generation to invest in improving the energy e"ciency of housing, developing local infrastructure and enabling a reduced rate of electricity for low income households. Scotland’s islands and peripheral communities have become the gatekeepers to base-load electricity generation and are using land reform legislation to ensure that influence delivers tangible benefits for the local economy. An early result of this has seen rural populations increase, young people having the hope to return home to work and raise their families and a general reversal in the decline in resilience bemoaned for decades pre-independence.

There is no doubt that this is the beginning and that inroads to achieving real energy democracy will take time. The theme of hope runs throughout these bold measures and is demonstrated in the apparent willingness of citizens of the new Scotland to embrace change. It could be viewed through a cynical lens in that people wonder what there is to lose as they were catapulted into a land no longer part of Britannia. But this wee land of few people were brave enough to listen to their hearts, to think enough of themselves and their neighbours to mark their cross where it mattered.

With fuel poverty anticipated to be eradicated within 6 years the progressive green-left coalition has their work cut out for them, but for now the tide is in their favour. Taking a stake in how energy is generated and used is empowering quite literally. It engages every citizen in being part of the change that is necessary to prevent runaway climate change whilst at the same time creating an economy that functions equitably at all levels. You don’t need to use terms like ‘energy justice’. Give power for the people by the people and it’s inevitable that the lightbulb stays alight and glowing proud.

There is hope. Change is happening in front of our eyes.

ENERGY JUSTICEElaine Morrison

Blossom is an account of Scotland at the grassroots through the stories of people I’ve had the good fortune to know – the most stubborn, talented and resilient people on the planet. They’ve had to be. Some have transformed their parts of Scotland. Some have tried and failed. But all have something in common – they know what it takes for Scotland to blossom. We should too… 

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by Stephen Maxwell RRP: £9.99 

Bella Caledonia is a non-profit, online magazine from Scotland. It’s collectively and independently run by volunteers.

Bella is named after a character in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992). Like Bella we are looking for a publication and a movement that is innocent, vigorous and insatiably curious. Bella is aligned to no one and sees herself as the bastard child of parent publications too good for this world, from Calgacus to Red Herring, from Harpies & Quines to the Black Dwarf.

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National Collective was founded by a small group of artists and writers based in Edinburgh in 2011. Since then it has grown significantly across Scotland. It is the non-party movement for artists and creatives who support Scottish independence.

We’re a generation that has no fear over wrestling powers from the Westminster political machine.

Our organisation was founded with the aims of arguing the positive case for Scottish independence and imagining a better Scotland.

We have local groups growing in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Stirling, Inverness and Aberdeen. Yet we hope to reach every Scottish city, town, village and community before September 2014. Our local groups provides National Collective members with the opportunity to meet each other, collaborate, organise events and to contribute creatively to the wider Yes campaign.

In April 2013 we rose to notoriety after we stood up to the world’s largest oil trading company, Vitol Group, when they and No campaign donor Ian Taylor threatened to take legal action against us in an attempt to silence us.

They backed down.

We support independence because of the opportunity that comes with the ultimate creative act – creating a new nation. And we believe that to get there, we need to inspire and engage the people of Scotland in a way that has never been seen before.

From small beginnings, the National Collective website had over 80,000 visitors in April. It has the potential to inspire a tidal-wave of change, confidence and creativity across Scotland.

With your help our movement will grow.

We invite you to join us.

Cuts in welfare. Cuts in services. Cuts in jobs. It’s time to cut something else.

For Scotland the Westminster

system isn’t working.

The UK is the 4th most unequal

country in the developed world.

And that’s why so many of us

struggle to make ends meet.

Westminster welfare

changes are hitting 1 million

households, pushing more

and more families into

financial hardship. Austerity

is leaving thousands of Scots

without jobs. And all from a

government most people in

Scotland didn’t vote for.

We know, from over 30 years

of experience, that alternating

Tory/Labour governments

at Westminster won’t create

the fairer, more prosperous

Scotland we all seek.

Scotland is wealthy enough

to be a fairer nation. With

Scotland’s future in Scotland’s

hands we can choose a

different path.

A Yes in 2014 will help cut

out inequality in the Scotland

of the future.

We think that’s worth voting

for. What do you think?

If you’d like to discover more reasons why an independent Scotland can be a fairer and better place, or to get involved in the Yes campaign, go to YesScotland.net

S C O T L A N D 2 0 1 4

S C O T L A N D ’ S F U T U R E I N S C O T L A N D ’ S H A N D S