Author: Iain McWhirter, The Herald

WHEN the obituary of neoliberal capitalism is written – as I’m confident it will be within the next decade or so – Royal Bank of Scotland will merit a chapter all on its own. Up to its neck in sub-prime mortgage lending in the US, it was a major figure in the 2007 financial crash, during which its toxic balance sheet was found to be larger than the GDP of the entire UK.

Then, after RBS had been bailed out with taxpayers’ money, it continued to give capitalism a bad rep, ruthlessly exploiting the small businesses who were suffering from the post-crash recession it had helped create. This was confirmed last week in a revealing internal RBS memo from 2009 which urged managers to let struggling small businesses “hang themselves” so that the bank could pick up their assets at rock bottom. The now notorious RBS Global Restructuring Group was condemned in the Commons last week for “the largest theft anywhere”, and for ruining thousands of viable companies.

The current RBS chairman, Sir Howard Davies, says that the Public Finance Initiative was a “fraud on the people” and he should know because Royal Bank was one of the biggest names in PFI in the noughties. A National Audit Office report last week confirmed what readers of the Sunday Herald have long known, that the PFI contracts for building and running schools and hospitals are around 40 per cent more expensive than orthodox public procurement. This means around about £200bn in public funds is being diverted to pay for the houses, cars, private schools and investment portfolios of managers and shareholders of the various PFI schemes. Enthusiastically adopted by Tory and Labour governments since the 1990s, these public private partnerships have been revealed as an ingenious scheme for enriching the business elite by diverting money that should have gone into public services.

No-one should be surprised at this. It is how business has learned to behave in the era of what some have called “turbo-capitalism” – the unregulated, low-tax, bandit capitalism of the last 35 years. A succession of scandals – the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, PPI, endowment mortgages, private pensions – has fatally undermined capitalism’s moral claim to be the fairest and most efficient economic system. But the very visibility of these fraudulent activities now constitutes a real and present danger to the future of the capitalist system as we know it.

Take the privatisation mega-corp, Carillion, which was also heavily involved in PFI and has been one of the leading agents in the “outsourcing” of public services. It has now gone bust putting at risk the welfare of some 40,000 dependent businesses and their employees. Effectively an arm of the state, Carillion represented the most blatant form of toxic collusion between Government and the private sector. The managers of Carillion, who paid themselves inflated salaries and bonuses even when the company was effectively bust, were just doing what comes naturally. Money is its own justification. Most have salted away their fortunes, and moved on – but the public, who paid the price, have not.

It is not just public sector outsourcing but the entire neoliberal policy – religion almost – of privatisation that has been exposed. Look at the state of the railways in the UK, privatised in the 1990s when it was naively assumed that private capital would, almost by definition, run things better than the state. Utilities like rail, gas, water and electricity, are essentially natural monopolies. State monopolies are often inefficient, but the promises of privatisation have simply not materialised for consumers, as they realise every month when they open their energy bills. Most voters now want utilities such as rail taken fully back into public ownership.

Capitalists focus relentlessly on the bottom line, so it is ironic that they have signed their own death warrants. But there’s nothing so blind as human avarice. Our degenerate business class seems incapable of understanding why voters are so incensed at their behaviour. They persuade themselves that they are “wealth creators”, when it is patently obvious that they’re simply syphoning off wealth created by society as a whole.

Some entrepreneurs are arguably wealth creators. For the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution, capitalism was the most innovative and productive economic system in human history, as Karl Marx observed. Even today, capitalists like Elon Musk of Tesla or the late Steve Jobs of Apple, bring great products to market, though in both cases they were heavily underpinned by direct and indirect public investment. But the people manipulating Libor rates in the City, setting up hedge funds, selling sub-prime mortgages, running PFI schemes etc are simply parasites. Britain’s managerial class today is about as entrepreneurial as Homer Simpson. They’re mostly dull-witted accountants who’ve sat on their bottoms for 20 years.

Even as they were creating the greatest financial crisis in a century, City bankers persuaded themselves that they were worth every penny of their absurd remuneration. They still do, having learned nothing. Neoliberal capitalism has been defined by globalisation and the growth of a plutocratic international elite which has tried to cut itself off from the rest of society. Soft larceny has become an entire management culture. Even university vice chancellors and public sector bureaucrats have taken to paying themselves ridiculous salaries on the grounds that they too must be “worth it”.

Well, here’s the news: they aren’t, and everyone knows it. These are no captains of industry; they are pirates in suits who’ve been tolerated far too long. The UK economy is in a terrible state, even without Brexit, and wages have been stagnant for over a decade. The housing market, which is both a consequence and a cause of gross inequality, is a national disgrace. It has become a Ponzi scheme to enrich the lenders by bidding up the price of housing while artificially restricting supply. London property has meanwhile become a bricks-and-mortar bank in which the management plutocrats stash much of their loot.

The beneficiaries of this kleptocratic capitalism are hiding in plain sight. And I believe their time is nearly up. In the 19th century, plutocrats could protect their wealth behind laws largely drawn up for the benefit of the wealthy. The poor had no lawyers. But today the poor have the vote, and lawyers, and there is no way this kind of structural inequality can survive in the 21st century, short of the extinction of popular democracy. Eventually, people will vote for change: for a society in which wealth is spread more equitably, and in which public services are run in the interest of the people who pay for them.

I don’t know if Jeremy Corbyn is going to be the agent of this change; I suspect he is too old. But behind lies an entire generation of educated young people who have no stake in the system as it stands. Their parents accepted regulated, post-war capitalism because it offered them secure jobs, pensions, cheap houses, free higher education. Millennials have seen all that swept away as corporate capitalism’s thirst for profit became insatiable. They will be the grave-diggers of the system, and while it may take a decade or so to be buried, this era of capitalism is already a dead parrot.

Author: Kathryn Welch, VAS

There are more than 10,000 volunteer-run creative groups in Scotland, from choirs and amateur drama groups, to sewing circles, poetry slams and ukulele bands. The individuals who lead these groups give their time and energy to bring vibrancy to communities and joy to so many of our lives. BBC Radio 4 presenter Sheila McClennon put it simply and effectively: “These are the people that are the cultural backbone of the United Kingdom”.

At Voluntary Arts Scotland, our role is to celebrate, champion and support volunteer-led and community-based creative groups. This week I met with people who lead such groups, and asked how it feels to run them. They shared how rewarding it is, making them feel connected, useful, privileged, joyful and energised – but also what hard work it can be, leading to feelings of uncertainty, exhaustion and anxiety.

The Scottish Government is currently writing a culture strategy for Scotland; a pertinent moment to highlight the impact of community-led creative groups, and champion national-level policy to help their activity thrive. To help us understand what this vibrant, but often overlooked part of the voluntary sector needs – and feed back those needs to policy makers – Voluntary Arts recently launched the ‘Big Conversation’.

People have been telling us how important it is that we protect and prioritise spaces for groups to gather. Community centres and village halls have long been affordable and accessible places where people can meet, but are increasingly neglected, privatised or forced to raise hire costs to survive. Meanwhile, however, traditional lines between charities and businesses are blurring, with social enterprises and community-minded companies offering new possibilities for meeting spaces. The so-called ‘night time economy’ offers opportunities for groups to use commercial spaces out of hours. And some grassroots groups have found imaginative, ambitious ways to create the spaces they need.

In East Ayrshire, I met the Cumnock Area Musical Production Society, who in 2015 took over the use of Barrhill Community Centre, becoming the first community organisation in the region to successfully complete a Community Asset Transfer. Under their careful stewardship, the venue has become a thriving hub for all kinds of activity, from a volunteer hub and first aid classes, to children’s drama, a floral art club and an creative group for adults with mental ill-health. They are a thriving example of how community-led venues can support and empower a wider ecosystem of local activity.

What is needed from the Scottish Government is investment in, and recognition of the importance of, community venues. This includes prioritisation of community ownership (and straightforward legislation to make that happen), alongside a more radical reimagining of what ‘community space’ is, via initiatives to realise community access to public, private, out-of-use, vacant and night-time spaces.

Secondly, we need support and consideration for the capacity of volunteer-led community groups. Creative life in Scotland thrives thanks to the time and energy of volunteers. They do it for the love of their community, the people around them and their artform. But volunteers tell us that much of their energy is drained by legislation which wasn’t designed with them in mind:

‘[We need] better recognition from authorities that we do not work magic with small pots [of money], we put in hours of in-kind time to make things happen and work’… ‘[What would help is] recognition of the hard slog volunteers do to keep the organisation running’.

We need a Government commitment to simplify legislation and strengthen local democracy to allow greater leadership at community level. Groups tell us about the value of locally-managed grant funding in making appropriate investment in communities; as one group told us: ‘it currently feels like a mountain to climb for just one application’. Similarly, there is a pressing need for support to help groups navigate the sometimes impenetrable structures of local government. Clearer access to local decision-makers would enable a wider range of groups to make their voices heard.

Finally, there is a need to acknowledge how cultural activity is connected to so many aspects of our daily lives, from education to health. It is vital that all Government policy – not just its cultural strategy – considers how our lives are influenced by ongoing access to creative activity.

If we are to recognise the diversity and scale of culture in Scotland, we must celebrate the ways that creativity extends far beyond the boundaries of the professional and publicly funded arts sector. We must ensure that policy is designed to enable grassroots groups to thrive, so that they can continue to bring vibrancy, joy and connectivity to communities across Scotland.

The culture strategy for Scotland consultation process has now ended and a report is being compiled for release in 2018. For more information see the Scottish Government website.

Author: Andy Wightman, The National

A FEW days before Christmas, Scottish Ministers issued a decision letter approving the construction of a film studio and power station at Damhead in the greenbelt to the south of Edinburgh.

In a brilliant circular argument, the development was deemed to be of national importance by Ministers, thus justifying its incorporation into the local development plan which was then used by Ministers to justify their decision.

For this development to go ahead, a smallholder whose family has enjoyed a secure tenancy for a century will have to leave. The landowner has no interests in the film industry and neither, it appears, does the applicant. It appears this application has been about little more than land speculation.

Along with other applications determined by Ministers, such as the luxury housing and tennis academy outside Dunblane, which was given approval despite the opposition of the local council and of the public inquiry, local democracy is increasingly being subverted by the political interests of Ministers. Planning is meant to reflect the needs and interests of communities and provide a process for democratic decision-making about how land is allocated to different uses.

Yet, over the past 10 years and more, planning has been increasingly framed by Ministers as a service to business and investors to stimulate economic growth and as a means by which to support the vested interests of the speculative volume housebuilding industry.

A new Planning Bill is designed to strengthen local development planning, improve public engagement and provide better support for infrastructure provision. The Government claims there has been a breakdown in trust in the system and I agree. The Bill seeks to facilitate greater participation and upfront engagement in preparing plans and that is welcome. But it does little to rebuild trust in a process which, for too many communities, remains complex, confrontational and open to abuse.

Applicants can appeal planning decisions to Scottish Ministers, whereas those who have to live with the consequences have no such right. How can trust be built in such a process if applicants, having seen their plans rejected, are able to go straight in the back door to seek the support of ministers in overturning democratic decisions?

There is nothing in the Bill to reform rights of appeal but there is increasing support for doing so. By abolishing much of the existing right of appeal (particularly in relation to applications that breach the local development plan) and introducing a limited right for communities to challenge those same breaches, everyone involved could invest time and effort at the beginning of the process confident that it will not be corrupted and perverted at the end.

The other key weakness of the Bill is its unquestioning embrace of a model of housebuilding that the rest of Europe has rejected. It might seem normal but the dominance of the speculative volume housebuilding industry has distorted and corrupted the planning system for decades. Nowhere else in Europe are new houses built this way.

Indeed, in 1947, when the planning system was first introduced, it was designed to allow public authorities to lead the development process by acquiring land at a price reflecting its existing use.

Very quickly, however, developers saw how planning consents inflate the value of land a hundred-fold or more and lobbied to end the public right and allow landowners to capture the uplift in land values that flowed from the granting of planning permission. In 1959, they succeeded and since then, development has been driven in the main by private speculators rather than the public interest.

Given the scale of the housing crisis and the need for a wide variety of new homes for different types of households in different areas, it makes sense that local government should play the lead role in development, masterplanning and infrastructure provision, as it does throughout most of the rest of Europe. By acquiring the land at its existing use value, serviced plots can then be sold at a fraction of current prices to co-operatives, individuals, housing associations and developers to create the kind of integrated, high-quality places we know are possible.

So-called self-procurement of housing by those who will actually occupy it drives up standards of design and quality.

The Scottish Parliament is given the opportunity to reform the planning system once a decade. Without substantial changes, this Bill will do very little to return planning to the central role it should have in delivering places designed with people at its heart. Instead, it will perpetuate a corrupted system designed to promote the vested interests of private developers.

The Local Government Committee of the Parliament is seeking written views on the Bill by February 2. If you want to see a planning system fit for the future, please let the committee know your views.

Author: Lesley Riddoch , The National

TIS the season to be jolly – so how about some goodwill from the Church of Scotland? Surprisingly the Kirk has been acting like a veritable Scrooge in 2017, blocking urban communities who want to take over old churches it wants to sell to the highest bidder. Even though community right-to-buy legislation means the Kirk would get full market value for its old churches. Even though the Kirk has all sorts of progressive policy about community empowerment. Even though former Moderator Alison Elliott chaired the Land Reform Review Group. And even though any reading of the New Testament suggests the church should be on the side of local people not spivs and speculators.

Yet several cases suggest the Church of Scotland has become an unco-operative and obstructive landowner, at a time when communities all over Scotland are being encouraged to wrestle back control of buildings and parcels of land after centuries of disempowerment.

One example is the London Road Church at the top of Easter Road in Edinburgh.

The Church of Scotland closed it on January 31, 2017, against the congregation’s wishes, and suggested they merge with the congregation at neighbouring Meadowbank. An inaugural public meeting attended by 110 people was held at the end of April, but though the church knew about this and an associated Facebook campaign they put the building up for sale in May. The newly formed In:Spire East End group asked the general trustees of the Church of Scotland to withdraw the kirk from the market while the community bid progressed. Its request was refused.

So the group pressed on with an application to register its interest in a community buyout bid. Their case was simple. The Calton/Hillside/Easter Road/Abbeyhill area of Edinburgh is home to 11,000 people but there is no community centre. There are buildings and local churches with rentable space but almost all are fully subscribed. Any land that does become available is snapped up for student accommodation. So the sale of the London Road kirk presented a rare opportunity for an urban community keen to recreate its own new social and economic heart.

But that didn’t happen. The application to register interest was turned down by the Scottish Government in November after months of local effort because the community’s bid was apparently too “late” – folk hadn’t started organising to buy the kirk until they knew it was actually up for sale. That would hardly seem “late” in everyday parlance – communities would have to be semi-psychic and unbelievably motivated to organise round the clock on the off-chance a big project was just round the corner.

To register an interest, a community must form a company, appoint directors (who could be personally liable if the undertaking goes belly up), create a business plan and get signatures of 15 per cent of the eligible population to move forward. Think about it. An entire Westminster Government has been unable to produce any tangible plans surrounding Brexit, despite having a mass of civil servants at their command. But bureaucrats expect un-resourced communities to get all their financial, managerial, democratic and technological ducks in a row hyper fast – and that’s particularly difficult in urban areas with less social cohesion than the tightly-knit rural communities where buyouts have generally occurred to date.

Anyway, the application by In:Spire East End effectively froze the Kirk’s efforts to sell the church, but the knockback by the Scottish Government unfroze it again. In:Spire was advised that only an interim interdict would give them a realistic chance of appeal, but that could leave them liable for up to £100,000 in lost value, should the community lose.

So they have given up.

A Church of Scotland spokesman said: “The Church of Scotland will work with any community group that has the backing of the Scottish Land Fund, and in this case we met with the group and extended the deadline for offers. However, Scottish Government ministers rejected the application so the community group was not in a position to purchase the building. The appeal period has now expired and the building is now under offer.”

Nice.

The Church could have decided to sell directly to the community, but didn’t – which raises two big points.

The first is that the public expects better from the Kirk. The Community Empowerment Act means the onus is now on every local authority, health service or other public body to explain why the community shouldn’t have any asset it wants to take over. Shouldn’t the Church of Scotland adopt at least the same standards?

The second is that those rules about “late applications” must change or there will be next to no more successful community buyouts in urban Scotland.

According to Green MSP and land reform campaigner Andy Wightman, the relevant section of the 2003 Land Reform Act is deeply problematic. “I’ve gone round communities telling them to register an interest in any parcel of land or building that might conceivably be useful – just in case it suddenly comes on the market and they don’t have time to get organised,” he said. “But that’s a very tall ask – the level of detail needed is huge and if a community is interested in 12 buildings that means 12 separate applications.”

Of course some communities have managed it. Action Porty in Portobello recently completed the community buyout of Bellfield Church, but only because they had a full year’s notice of the Kirk’s intention to merge congregations and sell buildings. Even then, a direct offer to buy Bellfield was also rejected by the Church of Scotland – baffling when that would have ensured a fair market price. But Action Porty pressed on to register an interest, apply for financial support, fundraise and put a business plan together before the sale was announced, and it became Scotland’s first urban buyout in May of this year. Quite an achievement – but if the Church of Scotland had moved directly to a sale, as they did with London Road, the Action Porty folk would have been stymied too. Ironically, Bellfield was originally built by money raised locally (not by the Church), so the community have effectively had to pay for it twice.

Author: Geoff Mulgan

A popular argument of the last 20 years – repeated in many books, op-eds and talks – claims that power has dissolved thanks to the combination of digital networks and globalisation. In one version power has been replaced by unpredictability. The bosses who once dominated great hierarchies are now timid servants of forces beyond their control. In another version power has been radically decentralised and passed out to us, whether in our roles as consumers, citizens or netizens.

These arguments were particularly well expressed in Moses Naim’s recent book The End of Power, which was loudly praised by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

His endorsement confirmed an odd pattern. The argument that power is disappearing is particularly popular amongst very powerful people. A couple of decades ago the argument appeared regularly in the speeches of Rupert Murdoch and the writings of Bill Gates, to name just two, at a time when both were immensely powerful and becoming more so.

So is the argument right? And why do powerful people like the argument that power has disappeared?

Let’s start by asking how convincing it is to suggest that power has diminished. Unfortunately there is no simple index of power concentration. It’s true that US presidents have less power than they did, especially when faced with a hostile Congress (though past ones couldn’t send drones at will to the other side of the world as President Obama can). But at a global level there are surely more, not less, strong leaders now than a generation ago. President Xi is the most powerful leader China has had for decades. Vladimir Putin in Russia and Narendra Modi in India stand out relative to their predecessors. Angela Merkel is the most powerful leader Europe has had for several generations. Contrary to many optimistic predictions, it remains all too possible to be a despotic dictator, just as it remains all too possible for them to stop their citizens accessing challenging material on the internet.

In business the disappearing power argument is equally tenuous. The average tenure of corporate CEOs has shrunk, as has the life expectancy of businesses. But seen in the long view there is probably now more concentration of power and wealth in business – particularly in the digital industries – than at any time since the late 19th century, when a previous generation of dominant firms grew to great wealth on the back of a previous wave of technological change. Estimates of the turnover of the top 1,000 companies worldwide, for example, show that they have a significantly larger, not smaller, share of world GDP.

These patterns have many causes. But the most obvious mistake made by advocates of the view that new communications technologies automatically promote decentralisation is that in reality technologies simultaneously strengthen both hierarchies and networks (I wrote a whole book on this 25 years ago, Communication and Control: networks and the new economies of communication). This is one of many reasons why Egypt is run by a strong-man, not by the social media savvy protesters of Tahrir Square, and why Wallmart and Amazon dominate US retailing and have huge power over their suppliers.

Network power

In many of these examples corporate and government hierarchies exert power within networks – and exercise new kinds of networked power. In the economy, network technologies enable economies of scale of a magnitude unimaginable in the industrial economy – the market dominance of a Microsoft or Google is of a different order to that of GM or GE in the 20thcentury. Easier use and combination of data tends to benefit the big and broad more than the small and narrow, even though both can gain. They also allow what economists call ‘economies of scope’  – the ability to achieve savings, and profits, by linking neighbouring fields through the same platforms (which is why Uber may come to dominate driverless car systems as well as taxis, just as Amazon has come to dominate so many fields of retail and software).

In all of these cases quite extraordinary concentrations of power become possible in networked economies. Entrepreneurs don’t usually seek this power, but they gain it as a byproduct of their core activity. And for those interested in power there is the chance to amplify it still further by using it to straddle different fields, linking business, finance, media, politics and philanthropy (as the careers of Berlusconi, Gates, Bloomberg and others have shown).

I’ll write in due course some thoughts on how these unprecedented concentrations of power can be harnessed for the common good. But here I just want to ask why the thesis of disappearing power is so popular, and particularly amongst the rich.

I’ve heard two, very opposite, explanations. The cynical answer is that today’s powerful want power without the responsibility. By claiming that any concentration of power is at best temporary, they disarm potential regulators, campaigners and legislators who might otherwise try to rein them in. If power really has been dissolved, who can reasonably hold them to account for any of the ills of the world? The intellectuals churning out books along these lines become the equivalent of what Lenin called ‘useful fools’, providing the ideological space for the powerful to do what they want.

A more benign explanation is that we would all like to believe in a world where power is distributed more equally, and today’s new rich, particularly the ones in digital land, are just hopeful idealists who are as vulnerable to wishful thinking as the rest of us. Many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were very democratic in spirit, and suspicious of hierarchy and rules. They may have started out intertwined with big government, big business and the big military, but soon added an opposite ethos of hacking and opening up. It’s not surprising that many hoped that history was on the side of decentralisation, distributed power and flatter structures.

A similar optimism could also explain why so many people who aren’t powerful want to believe the argument that power is dissolving away. It’s not just that they’re gullible, though they may be. It’s also that the sight of huge concentrations of power in politics and business so offends our hopes and assumptions that we just want to wish them away.

Author: TSIs

As CEOs of TSIs we welcomed the clarity offered by Scottish Government’s endorsement on the future of Third Sector Interfaces.  We look forward to working together and with Scottish Government to affirm TSI’s strategic roles as local ‘change agents’. However we must express our disappointment at the tone of Robert Armour’s article 20th December and specifically with the comments made regarding VAS Chief Officer Allan Johnstone.  

Whatever opinions your organisation has of VAS or VAS role historically within the TSI network, a distasteful personal attack on an individual is demeaning to all those who took part in its publication.

Your “analysis” is no more than an unpleasant, inaccurate and unfounded personal attack.  As Chief Officers of our TSIs we neither recognise nor support the assertions made in your article.  We very much regret that comments made are alleged to have come from individuals within our own network. In our view it is to their extreme discredit that they elected to take part in such a disgraceful public attack on an individual.  Over the coming months our TSIs will continue to work with VAS and to support the excellent staff at VAS in every way we can.

Edinburgh TSI Partnership

Glasgow TSI Partnership

Stirling TSI

Aberdeen TSI

Inverclyde TSI

Moray TSI

Perth and Kinross TSI

Orkney TSI

Shetland TSI

South Lanarkshire TSI

Argyll & Bute TSI

Dundee TSI Partnership

North Ayrshire TSI Partnership

Clackmannanshire TSI

Scottish Borders TSI Partnership

Author: Severin Carrell, Scotland editor, Guardian

Moving to a tiny island off the west coast of Scotland may sound like an idyllic new start, but despite a worldwide competition attracting the interest of hundreds of people, the population of Canna is still stuck at 15.

Now the people living on one of the smallest inhabited islands in the Hebrides have been handed control of the efforts to attract new residents, with the hope that a new approach will finally start to boost the numbers.

More than a decade ago the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), which owns the tiny island south of Skye, launched a global recruitment campaign to find new families to settle on Canna, the most westerly of the Small Isles, a cluster of islands south-west of Skye best known for the memorably named Eigg, Rum and Muck. Canna measures 4.5 miles (7.25km) long by a mile (1.6km) wide.

That appeal made headlines across the world, and 350 people applied, but the initiative has been dogged by repeated rows. Many of the families and couples attracted there quit the island, complaining of poor, dysfunctional management and broken promises by NTS.

The latest row flared up in early November after one couple, whose four children were the only pupils in Canna’s primary school, left for the mainland and threatened legal action. That again left its population hovering at about 15.

Confronted by yet another defeat to a strategy conceived at their base in Edinburgh, NTS officials have told the Guardian they have now abandoned that approach entirely. “We have to move beyond a paternalistic model,” said Dominic Driver, head of natural heritage at NTS. “We need to support the local community to develop itself.”

They have handed control of Canna’s regeneration to a development trust run by residents, many of whom are Gaels who trace their history on the island to ancestors who settled there during the Jacobite rebellion nearly 300 years ago.

In a deliberate break from the NTS approach, the Isle of Canna Community Development Trust will no longer prioritise keeping open the island’s tiny single-room school, which is now mothballed, and has not set a target for exact numbers of new residents.

Armed with £100,000 in funding, their objectives are more pragmatic and mirror the highly successful switch to an off-grid green energy system pioneered by the neighbouring island of Eigg.

They are erecting a wind turbine and solar panels to end the island’s round-the-clock reliance on inefficient and polluting diesel generators, in a £100,000 project jointly funded by the NTS. A tidal causeway that links Canna with its tiny sister island of Sanday will be upgraded to make it accessible all day.

A development officer will be employed, said Geraldine Mackinnon, the development trust chair and a member of the Gaelic-speaking family with the deepest roots on Canna, to help implement a new strategy focused on upgrading the island’s housing, improving visitor facilities and creating new job opportunities.

In an interview by email, Mackinnon said the trust’s long-term aim was to have “a stable, increased and vibrant population. [A] small development trust such as ours can only achieve so much and we need to be aware of not facing ourselves with too many projects”.

She added: “Although it would be good to have the primary school open, it is not a priority at the moment. There are no pre-school children on Canna.”

Despite its difficulties, NTS insists the island’s facilities are secure: a couple are moving to Canna in the new year to take over its guesthouse; the seasonal gift shop and cafe are still being run, as is a small community shop; and two other people are moving in early 2018 to work as NTS rangers in a job share.

For many incomers, Canna’s isolation – it has no doctor and only three ferries a week during winter, and the long, stormy winters are challenging in themselves. Many Scottish islands wrestle with depopulation but critics say Canna’s difficulties are exacerbated by strict property ownership rules on the island.

Although a few crofts are owned by its original inhabitants, incomers are not allowed to own land or build houses on Canna, and tenancy agreements are capped at 20 years. Some families who quit say those restrictions made it far harder to commit to the island.

Camille Dressler, chair of the Small Isles community council, who lives on Eigg, said NTS had often behaved with great insensitivity to its residents. “This change is coming at the right time,” she said. “If had not changed, Canna’s population would dwindled hopelessly.”

NTS insists it is legally bound by the bequest from its former owner John Lorne Campbell, a Gaelic folklorist and historian whose house on Canna is home to a remarkable Gaelic cultural archive. Land reformers say that situation could be remedied if the desire was there. There are concerns, however, that allowing newcomers to own and build homes could lead to speculative investments in seasonal holiday homes, which would undermine attempts at repopulation.

Mackinnon said the disputes between NTS and previous residents had been distressing. “Negative press coverage is not pleasant or fair on the community and has a detrimental effect on attracting new residents, but we must look forward and concentrate on all the good and positive things that are happening in our community here on Canna,” she said.

Author: Alan Kay, Social Audit Network

In connection with business and the economy we hear a lot about ‘growth’. Economists argue that the economy has to grow year on year. Investors claim that businesses have to continually grow as the alternative is for them to stagnate and get overtaken in an increasingly competitive market. Even social enterprises are being pressed into ‘growing their business’ – usually in business terms such as increasing turnover, improving profits, increasing staff and, generally, expanding market share. It would appear that the winners in the pervading and traditional economy are the enterprises that are growing and, if you are not growing, you join the losers.

I want to challenge that idea when it is applied to ‘social and community enterprises’. I shall argue that social economy organisations are different from mainstream businesses as their core ‘business’ is achieving an essentially social or community goal. Therefore, they should operate differently – making different decisions for different reasons – and ultimately judging their success or failure, not in terms of growth, but in terms of positive, qualitative social change. I suppose what I want to say about ‘growth’ is not particularly new. Barack Obama has said…

Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favours the few, and not the many.

He was talking fundamentally about sustainability. Interestingly, this contrasts significantly with Benjamin Franklin one of the Founders of the USA, who several centuries previously, stated…

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. Indeed, the context was quite different in Franklin’s time and the world was not hurtling towards climate change and potential environmental Armageddon. Thus, the historical context matters in how we consider concepts such as ‘growth’.

In 2009 Tim Jackson wrote Prosperity Without Growth: the transition to a sustainable economy. The second edition, Prosperity Without Growth: foundations for the economy of tomorrow was published this year. In it, Jackson sees enterprise as a ‘form of social organisation’ with work representing participation in society where money should be used for the ‘social good’ – reducing inequality and supporting ecological stability.

This appears to me to be very close to what the pioneers in the social enterprise movement talked about. There has to be an alternative way of looking at the economy which is inextricably linked to notions around creating zero waste through re-cycling and working towards a more ‘circular economy’.

I know of a number of social and community enterprises that responded to the urge to grow. They have tended to assess their success in increased turnover, improved surplus or profit, and in recruiting more staff. These are ways in which a traditional business measures their success and quantifies their achievements. But what of improving the quality of the social change that happens as a result of what they do? Is that to be side-lined in the drive for business success?

With community enterprises in particular, growth can be difficult. They are community based, often operating within a particular locality, and with no intention of growing through domination or expanding into other areas. They are often owned by the community to create community benefit on behalf of that very same community. They want to get better at what they do, and make a difference to local people by working closely with local residents.

The Scottish Government published its Social Enterprise Strategy earlier this year. I was interested to see that it recognises the wide community-based nature of social enterprise in Scotland – often operating in financially perilous waters. To its credit it does not bang on about ‘growth’ and in terms of ‘scaling up’ social enterprises. It states… In increasingly competitive and uncertain markets, scale can be a weakness as well as a strength. For social enterprises, it may become increasingly preferable to scale capacity and impact through partnership rather than pursuing an organisational growth strategy. Collaboration, franchising and replication will all come into sharper focus. The last sentence in this quote is crucial. It highlights the need for collaboration – implicitly in place of competition; and the role of looking to replicate practices in another place.

However, there lies a danger in both of these: collaboration is difficult to foster when funding and investment is usually distributed through highly competitive structures. Similarly, replication is problematic due to varying contexts – what works in one place will not necessarily work in another, or certainly not in the same way.

Within the social economy, I believe, we should be doing enterprise differently and one example of this is that collaboration should be encouraged to replace overt competition. Admittedly, this is a controversial notion and difficult to achieve but it is central to working together for the common good.

Another area where we should be doing things differently in the disputed arena of ‘social impact’ Social and community enterprises trade in exchanging goods and services. They do this to achieve a central aim of improving people’s lives; not adversely harming the environment; and in changing behaviours or influencing cultural norms for the betterment and well-being of all.

So how do they know whether or not they are successful? The Social Audit Network (SAN) has been working in this area of impact and subsequent accountability for a long time. It believes that social enterprises should report on their social and community achievements on a regular basis. At the same time, social enterprises should check on their internal aspects or social enterprise credentials. In summary, these credentials are: being good to their staff and volunteers; being accountable through appropriate governance; not making individuals wealthy at the expense of the wider society; ‘washing their face’ financially; being environmentally responsible; and helping the local economy along…

SAN also believes that social reports should not be used primarily for marketing and that they should be subjected to some form of audit that checks facts and interpretations made in these reports.

Some form of social accounting and audit (SAA) is required urgently by the social enterprise movement. SAA is an alternative way of doing things – recognising that working towards social change is a different aim, and cannot be measured in financial terms or in terms of business growth.

Social accounting is not about money. It is, crucially, about how a social or community enterprise can be accountable – and importantly – held to account for what it is trying to do and what it is trying to be, in social, environmental and cultural terms.

In conclusion, I have always believed that in the end, the future of social and community enterprise will come down to how accurately they gauge their success and how they report this differently, but not entirely differently, from traditional business.

We have to not only create a new way of seeing the world’s economy (as referenced in Prosperity Without Growth), by getting in place more appropriate mechanisms that suit an alternative way of doing business. That includes social funding, social management, social accounting, social capital, social enterprise planning and so on…

So, ditch unqualified growth and get busy at doing things differently. A possible New Year’s resolution?

Author: Scottish Rural Action

The announced closure of 62 RBS branches across Scotland in the last week has kicked off debate from village shops to Holyrood and was also raised at Prime Ministers Questions in Westminster.

We will be representing views at the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster on 17 January 2018 – so it’s really important we get a wide range of responses to our survey.  It should only take a couple of minutes to complete.

Emma Cooper, Chief Executive of Scottish Rural Action said

Since RBS was bailed out by the British tax payers in 2008, we own 71% of the business. RBS should be acting in the interest of our communities, not just for making profit for its bosses.

Scottish Rural Action is undertaking this research to find out what the impacts will be on our rural communities and their high streets.  Some suggest it may be a good thing as it will free up shop units for other types of businesses, whilst others argue it will drive away business.  We expect the survey to show complex results with a range of impacts.

Scottish Rural Action will take full range of views collected to an evidence session at Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster on 17 January 2018, so it is important we are able to fully represent rural Scotland.

We know anecdotally impacts of these planned branch closures will hit rural communities the hardest, and it will be the elderly and those who rely on public transport that will be disproportionately affected.  Island communities and villages in the Highlands and Borders may have to do round trips of several hours to do their cash banking.  We know that many rural communities do not have reliable high speed broadband or mobile signal to use the digital solutions on offer for a limited number of services.

TAKE THE SURVEY NOW

Author: BBC

A Scottish village has become plastic straw-free after a campaign by school pupils.

Ullapool believes it may be the first village in the UK to halt their use in all bars, restaurants and cafes.

Pupils launched the campaign due to concerns over the environmental impact of plastic straws.

Fourteen businesses in the Wester Ross village have either gone straw-free or are using alternatives to plastic, including paper straws.

The campaign was run by pupils from Ullapool Primary School and Glasgow’s Sunnyside Primary, who were on a field trip to the village, along with help from the Scottish Wildlife Trust.

Ullapool pupil Caillín Erin Patterson, 11, said: “There’s no need for plastic straws.

“If you do use a straw it shouldn’t be a throwaway one. We’re killing our seas with single-use plastic and it’s just not necessary.”straws are frequently found on beach cleans

Pupils from the Glasgow school visited Ullapool in September, where they joined local children for a trip to uninhabited Isle Martin in Loch Broom.

They found thousands of plastic straws among marine pollution during a beach clean.

The success of their campaign has been welcomed by the Scottish government.

Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said: “Congratulations to the Ullapool community for recognising the problem of plastic straws and taking action.

“This is an example to communities across the country of the bold steps they can take to protect our marine environment.”from a Glasgow school helped to campaign for an end to the use of plastic straws

Noel Hawkins, an Ullapool resident and the wildlife trust’s Living Seas communities officer, added: “This achievement is wholly down to pupil power.

“The children from Sunnyside Primary School have done a great deal to raise awareness within Glasgow and their enthusiasm rubbed off on the local kids when they came to Ullapool in September.

“The pupils went door to door to speak directly to businesses, and this has clearly had an impact. I’d like to thank everyone involved for taking action after listening to the concerns of these youngsters.”

He added: “Living on the coast means we constantly see the impact of a throwaway attitude to plastic, both on our beaches and in our seas.

“Finding plastic drinking straws during beach cleans is particularly frustrating because there alternative products are available.”

The initiative is being promoted on social media with the hash tag #NaeStrawAtAw.