Author: Callum Macleod's blog - Beyond the Horizon

In January 2014 Charles Moore shared his insights on Scottish land reform via a mercifully short Spectator blog. Its hackneyed title – How is Alex Salmond like Robert Mugabe? – suggested that Mr Moore was less than enamoured with the prospect of communities owning the land on which they live. Quite the opposite in fact because according to him:

“Without philanthropists, megalomaniacs and serious sportsmen pouring cash in to maintain these difficult places, their communities, and so the environment, would suffer. You can see this happening already in the islands where crofters’ rights have been exercised”.

It’s not immediately clear which Fantasy Islands were populating Moore’s imagination in his portrayal of benevolent private lairds gallantly stepping in to protect otherwise enfeebled and helpless communities with their limitless largesse. They can’t possibly have included the Western Isles where I come from and where I spent a couple of days earlier this week working with the communities of Great Bernera and Barvas in Lewis, each of which are investigating the feasibility of buying the privately-owned estates they call home.

Now in one sense it’s perfectly plausible to call the Western Isles’ “difficult” in terms of distinctive challenges their remote-rural geography present. Some of these challenges are demographic and relate to aging and declining populations in parts of the islands, leading to social exclusion and pressure on essential services. Others relate to key infrastructure gaps such as the dearth of decent broadband and the absence of an interconnector to the National Grid to enable the islands to fully tap into their formidable renewable energy generation potential. Life is hardly made any easier by energy surcharges faced by islanders (and Highlanders) for the privilege of electricity supply. Then there is the scandalous disgrace of 71% of Western Isles householders languishing in fuel poverty(the comparable figure for Scotland as a whole is 27%).

All of these challenges are writ large in Fionnsbhagh (Finsbay) in the bays of the eastern seaboard of Harris where I grew up. As with many settlements along that seaboard, the township evolved under the shadow of the Clearances. Fionnsbhagh and the surrounding areas were mainly first settled in the 1790s as part of the fishery schemes set up by Captain Alexander MacLeod of Bearnaraigh, who had bought Harris in 1779. The Captain died in 1790 but as Harris historian and genealogist, Bill Lawson, recounts, by the late 1830s the estate factor Donald Stewart and his successors, working on behalf of the Captain’s son, (also called Alexander), “had cleared the crofters out of every piece of worthwhile land in Harris, and sent them to Cape Breton in Canada, or among the fishing villages that the Captain had set up along the East Coast Bays of Harris”.

Not a great deal of philanthropy in evidence there.

Let’s be clear that while the islands have been no strangers to the odd serious sportsman and occasional megalomaniac, the philanthropic input of the lairds who have owned great swathes of the Western Isles has been pretty negligible ever since Captain MacLeod’s ill-fated fisheries experiment. You might want to argue that Lord Leverhulme’s ownership of Lewis and Harris in the aftermath of World War 1 provides an historical exception to that rule but that’s another story; one brilliantly told by Roger Hutchinson in The Soap Man, his account of Leverhulme’s slightly surreal time in Lewis and Harris.

On the whole, however, the pattern of private landownership in the Western Isles might most charitably be described as one of benign neglect. Many of these Lairds may have been perfectly affable but they’ve tended to run their estates as private playgrounds rather than the alternative localised welfare system Mr Moore and his ilk would have us believe. There’s a big difference between passive ownership and proactively ensuring that an estate meets its full development potential for the benefit of the community. The latter is in essence the case for community land ownership.

Let’s be equally clear that despite the pressing socio-economic challenges outlined above, the Western Isles has enormous assets in terms of culture, environment and quality of life with which to build a sustainable future. Significantly, community land ownership is already playing a major part in helping to build that future.

As long ago as 1923 the Stornoway Trust became the first community landlord in the Western Isles. It has been joined by many others; all of them committed to improving the sustainability of their communities in various ways. On the west coast of Lewis the Galson Estate Trust oversees distribution of income generated by the estate’s wind turbines via its newly launched community investment programme. In the North Harris estate the community landlord has facilitated much needed affordable housing near Tarbert and operates a community recycling facility in partnership with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

Affordable housing, repopulation and renewable energy also feature heavily in the plans of the West Harris Trust further along the machair coast of Harris from where over 200 years ago the tenantry made their unwilling way over the hills to the lunar landscape of the island’s eastern side. Meanwhile, Stòras Uibhist, the community landlord for Benbecula, Eriskay and South Uist is taking the leading role in the multi-million pound, multi-partner Lochboisdale regeneration project amongst many other activities.

Other communities in the Western Isles seem eager to follow suit or at least explore the possibility of doing so. The Carloway estate on the west coast of Lewis has recently been transferred into community ownership. That increasingly well trodden path may soon be followed by the Barvas, Great Bernera and the Bays of Harris estates when their feasibility studies regarding community buyouts are completed. It’s a privilege to be able to provide assistance to some of these communities as they decide whether to take a leading role in shaping their own destinies.

None of the above is to suggest that community land ownership is a panacea for all the development challenges facing the Western Isles or anywhere else in Scotland for that matter. At least some of the infrastructure gaps referred to above are in the gift of Government to address if there is the political will to do so. How can it be politically or socially acceptable that in the 21st century 71% of the inhabitants in one of Scotland’s local authority areas are experiencing fuel poverty?

There will also be situations where communities in Scotland are perfectly satisfied with existing landlord arrangements, whether their landlord is of the private or public variety. In such cases, any attempts to foist alternative arrangements on such communities would most likely prove counter-productive.

That said, if most of Scotland’s political parties are as committed to genuine community empowerment in the public interest as they claim, then their vision for land reform following publication of the Land Reform Review Group’s report on ‘The Land of Scotland and the Common Good’ must be bold. In the apparently restless brave new dawn of Scotland’s post-referendum politics anything less would seem dispiritingly like business as usual.

Author: Borders Telegraph

BACK in 1996, Ettrick Park, the home of Selkirk FC, was sold to Scottish Borders Enterprise for £17,500. The deal was struck by outgoing Borders Regional Council and ratified by the incoming Scottish Borders Council.

Although the football pitch, on what is now Riverside Industrial Estate, was part of Selkirk’s Common Good, that fund received no financial benefit from the sale. Instead the cash went straight to the club, helping it relocate elsewhere in the town.

It was a land disposal which did not go down well with local GP Dr Lindsay Neil, at that time a member of Selkirk’s community council. Dr Neil recalled this week: “The decision to sell Ettrick Park may have been the correct one, but it was taken without consultation with its beneficial owners – the people of Selkirk – and that was just plain wrong. The fact that just a few years ago part of the site was sold for £60,000 by Scottish Enterprise which assumed ownership on the demise of the local enterprise company network, shows, in my view, that Selkirk’s common good was not best served.”

Since then, Dr Neil, now retired and a member of the Selkirk Regeneration Company, has been convinced that the way common good funds in Scotland are controlled is undemocratic and should be reformed to bring decision-making closer to the people.And last week, he was at Holyrood encouraging MSPs to ensure that new legislation will redress what he considers an imbalance – and effectively wrest power from local authorities like Scottish Borders Council.

Since SBC’s inception, disbursement and investment decisions relating to the funds of Selkirk, Galashiels, Jedburgh, Lauder, Hawick, Kelso, Peebles and Duns – with combined net assets of nearly £10million – has rested with local working groups, comprising only SBC ward councillors.

Last year, it was agreed that one community representative – in Selkirk’s case community councillor Tom Combe – should sit on these groups which meet in Newtown. Although these meetings are open, members of the public who attend are not allowed to participate. Dr Neil believes that there should be at least as many community representatives on these bodies as councillors and that they should have the power to veto decisions if they feel they are not in the best interests of their communities.

Last Wednesday he was called to give evidence to the cross party Local Government and Regeneration Committee which is refining the content of the Scottish Government’s new Community Empowerment Bill.

If enacted, that groundbreaking bill will allow certain bodies to buy abandoned or neglected land, to allow councils to vary non-domestic rates and, crucially as far as Dr Neil is concerned, “to make provision for registers of common good property and about disposal and use of such property”.

“The section of the bill dealing with common good funds will play a major part in restoring their local status and community relevance,” he told MSPs.

“I hope it will address the legal shortcomings and sloppiness of previous legislation and marked improve hitherto unsatisfactory outcomes in the administration of these funds by local authorities.”

Dr Neil said he wanted the bill to clarify that councils do not “own” the common good funds they administer.

“Local authorities may own the title to common good funds, but it’s the burgh inhabitants who are the beneficial owners,” he stated.

Dr Neil called on the MSPs to ensure the new law exerted “much tighter scrutiny” on how councils spend common good money. He said SBC had charged Selkirk’s common good around £20,000 in the two years from 2011-13 simply to administer the fund.

He cited “several examples of profligacy” since the Ettrick Park sale, notably when last year the fund was charged £718 to set up a £50 a year lease for the Selkirk Angling Association to fish on the “town” section of the Ettrick Water.

“Such incompetence is intolerable and local common good beneficiaries have had no say in the matter and no powers to prevent such occurrences of common good fund raiding,” said Dr Neil. “For this reason a clause or amendment [in the bill] subjecting such charges, before they are debited, to independent assessment would stop this nefarious practice.”

Author: David Ross, Highland Correspondent, The Herald, 28 October 2014

 It was known as the Forbidden Island, where people lived only to manage and study nature, but residents of Rum are putting down roots symbolised by the completion of near £1 million bunkhouse. The initiative also confirms they have turned the corner in their relations with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), which owns the island, and will help achieve their aim of doubl-ing the population of 40.

The key has been the Scottish Government decision that SNH should transfer ownership of 270 acres of land in and around the village of Kinloch to the Isle of Rum Community Trust (IRCT). This began in 2009 and was completed the year after. It meant the community hall, village shop and tearoom, campsite, boat-house, designated croft land and other land came under community control.

Rum had been owned by government agencies as a nature reserve for the previous 50 years which had effectively prevented people from building a life for them and their families on the island, although it had always provided them with salaried jobs. It consequently won a notoriety as the place where scientists met visitors on the pier and demanded to know why they had come, hence The Forbidden Island.

But community trust director Nic Goddard said the community had now developed “a strong and positive relationship” with SNH. She said the agency still owned most of the island and was a significant employer, providing four community members with full-time employment, “and also several zero-hour contracts for work in the SNH hostel, castle, energy supply and for maintenance and reserve works”.

However she said since the transfer possibilities had opened up for community controlled jobs and businesses which now more than matched SNH.

She said the trust and its trading arm, Rum Enterprise, now provided 3.5 full-time jobs, as well as maintenance contracts linked to housing, water supply and roads which are also now owned and managed by the community

Self-employed islanders included a shopkeeper, piermaster, crofters, craft and firewood workers, B&B’s and an IT consultant. New businesses include Rum Venison which employs four people part-time in venison processing and sales. How­ever she said the community’s crowning achievement had the raising of funds to build the state-of-the-art Rum Bunkhouse, which can sleep 20 people. It was made possible by funding from the Big Lottery Fund of £679,776 from Growing Community Assets fund and by £219,436 from Highlands & Islands Enterprise.

At present 10,000 people visit every year, but only 3,000 stay one night or more. Lochaber councillor Alan Henderson who chairs IRCT is confident further progress will be made with the bunkhouse operating. He said: “Income from this community business will contribute to our principal goal of effecting a substantial increase in housing provision on the island. We want to double the island’s population of around 40 resident adults and children.”

He said a range of possible housing sites have been agreed in what is a heavily designated landscape around the A-listed Kinloch Castle and within a National Nature Reserve.

A COMMUNITY garden that could dramatically transform “an ugly piece of land” into a local asset could also provide the home for trailblazing “shedders” in a Ross-shire village.

The Strathpeffer plans for a men’s shed — which could provide a multi-use focus for older members of the community — come on the back of a growing worldwide movement established in countries as far flung as Australia.

A residents’ association in Strathpeffer was introduced to the concept by Ross-shire Voluntary Action (RVA) with a well-attended initial meeting, addressed by speakers from RVA and ROC (Reshaping Care for Older People), convincing supporters there was enough interest to go ahead with the project.

Concerns were raised about the lack of a suitable site for the shed and funding.

Strathpeffer Residents’ Association (SRA) secretary, Val Moffatt, believes a solution may be at hand. She said: “The site problem may be resolved by next year. SRA was set up in 2012 in response to local concerns about an area of derelict land in the village.

“The area, just beyond the Strathpeffer Primary School playing field, is covered in rose bay willow herb which at this time of the year, when it seeds, is a great nuisance to people living in the vicinity. Not only that it is a wasted resource.

“At the turn of the year SRA got a grant from the Big Lottery to fund a Feasibility study into the possibility of turning this ugly piece of local land into a useful community garden which will be an asset to the village.”

She added: “SRA have already consulted the community about the facilities they would like in the garden.

“On Wednesday, November 12, with the help of David Graham of Craignish Design, the company carrying out a feasibility study for SRA, there will be a public consultation day to discuss the proposed community garden in the Strathpeffer Community Centre. SRA is assuming that the feasibility study will show that the garden will be a brilliant development.

“So all being well, by spring 2015 the Shedders will have a site for their shed and we should have secured some funding for the actual shed and of course the whole community garden by then.”

Author: David Ross, The Herald 27 October 2014

COUNTRYSIDE communities are gearing up for the launch of Scotland’s first Rural Parliament which has been called to provide them with a cohesive voice for the first time.

Hundreds of people from small island outposts in the north and west to villages and communities in the central belt and the Borders will converge on Oban for the launch of the three-day event from November 6 to 8.

The Rural Parliament is modelled on a system launched in Sweden 25 years ago. The new assembly will aim to establish the priorities for the million-plus people who live in rural areas. It will break new ground in the UK.

There has been a growing movement for better representation of country areas across Europe for some years. This has established similar parliaments in Sweden, Netherlands, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, and Slovakia, and others. Some like Sweden’s meet only every two years.

The first European Rural Parliament (ERP) was held in Brussels in November 2013, with delegates drawn from 30 countries and more than 70 rural organisations

The SNP gave a manifesto commitment that Scotland would have one: “…to enable rural communities to engage more effectively with government.”

Rural Affairs and the Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead, who will open the gathering, was delighted to welcome the launch of the assembly he has championed. He said: “Rural parliaments work well in other European countries, giving our rural communities and businesses a stronger voice in policy-making and an opportunity to celebrate all that is good about living and working in rural areas.”

The event backed by sponsor Caledonian MacBrayne is expected to attract 400 delegates. Three-quarters of those intending to attend are from a wide range of community-based groups representing many strands of rural life from the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association and Scottish Crofting Federation, to two regional community council networks and Community Energy Scotland.

Mr Lochhead will open the parliament with other senior politicians and public sector figures attending. It will be chaired by John Hutchison from Lochaber, who chairs the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust which has owned the island since the successful community buyout of the island in 1997. He will brief the Convention of the Highlands and islands in Inverness this afternoon.

He says it is very easy to dismiss the idea, but he had come to realise this was a genuine opportunity for rural Scotland.

“Scots are often cynical and can just shrug their shoulders at ideas like this. But it works in Europe, so why shouldn’t it work here?”

He said he had two experiences where he saw problems solved just by having those in authority stuck in a room with those who were most affected by their decisions. A mechanism has been devised to allow anyone to raise any subject in plenary sessions, followed by assessment of delegates’ support.

The discussions will be pulled together in a report by rapporteurs led by former Scottish education minister Peter Peacock, now policy director of Community Land Scotland. The final report should make clear to central and local government which fronts rural Scotland believes are priorities for action.

The Lifeline began in 2005 as a response to the increasing numbers of refugees coming to our charity who were left without almost every basic human need such as food, shelter, a GP or financial support of any kind, denied recourse to public funds, emergency hostels or the right to work. The Project provides short-term, direct humanitarian relief in the form of shelter and food to destitute people from Scotland’s ‘refugee’ communities. The Project also helps service users with practical resources and support to avoid becoming ‘invisible’ citizens. It helps service users, especially young people and women, to avoid being vulnerable to exploitation, both labour or sexual, by offering resources to get back into the legal system with a view to achieving citizenship, if at all possible. In many cases, our intervention has resulted in destitute people getting leave to remain in the UK. Interestingly, there is often no rhyme or reason for these home office decisions.

We provide a Hardship Fund which gives out small cash sums for food and essential needs e.g. medicine, urgent travel. In some cases, we will pay for cheap hostel accommodation. We try to provide some form of assistance to everyone to ensure they do not become street-homeless. The Hardship Fund is paid for by donations from members of the public and charitable trusts. We have a database of accommodation volunteers who agree to offer up space in their home to someone who is destitute for a few days, weeks, or even longer. We have a system to ensure destitute refugees and their hosts form the best match. Ultimately, this is a purely voluntary arrangement between both parties but we do our best to make the arrangement rewarding for all concerned. We desperately need more volunteers who are prepared to welcome people into their homes.

The project provides a service which cannot be provided by the public sector or any other agency, and relies on donations from members of the public and charitable trusts. The need for the Project has grown dramatically. Between April 2008 and March 2009, we supported 276 people, including 21 pregnant women and 13 families with 27 children. 37% of people were sleeping rough when they approached us. This is a 25% increase on 2008.

A volunteer with the Lifeline Project

Alison Swinfen is an education professor at the University of Glasgow, researching languages and intercultural studies. Over the last few years she has provided and spoke to us about her experiences.

“I’ve been volunteering for two or three years now. The first person who came was actually with us for about 5 months which I think is Positive Action’s record, and they sent us a lovely box of chocolates after that. And then we had a couple of folk for just two or three weeks, then someone else longer term and then another for about 6 weeks.

“Being in the house when Joyce was reunited with her sons whom she’d lost touch with was incredibly special. It was just such a happy moment and to be able to share that was a huge privilege. Watching Shah Lin’s English get better and better too was amazing. When she first arrived she could barely speak but by the time she left she was much more confident, and we’re seeing the same thing with Rima at the moment, who’s just turned 17. She’s brought High School Musical and Dawson’s Creek into our lives. We just love having her around and learning how to look after a teenager.

“She’s learning to cook now so the house is full of the smell of lovely Eritrean food. Obviously when people stay they kind of want to give you something back so we’ve eaten some really amazing stuff.

Shah Lin was incredible, when she got her money from Positive Action in Housing she used to go to the Chinese supermarket and cook amazing stuff for us in the evenings. We’d come in from work at the end of the week and there’d be this fabulous food waiting. We used to say ‘no, we’ll cook this week’ but it was really important to her. I think it gave her a sense of worth that she was able to do that.

“We’re just sharing a home, which means different music, different books, different conversations. Initially people have taken a little bit of time to settle and gradually developed a structure and routine around ours. And then gradually we’d involve them a bit more, and then start eating together and cooking together. And we do have a lot of laughter in the house. It was lovely at Christmas, we had a couple of people back who’d stayed with us in the past. It was a really special day. We just sat round sharing, telling stories and remembering things that happened when they were here, just things that were funny.

“I would absolutely recommend volunteering, it’s transforming in so many ways. My advice would be that it’s really important to remember that the people you welcome are just normal people who need to sleep and eat. Keeping a good routine and normal structure I think is important, not stepping out of your own routine and not going overboard. Some of the folk you’ll stay in touch with and they’ll be friends for life potentially, others won’t be which is just normal, because you’re dealing with normal people.”

Scottish Communities CAN is inviting applications from community groups to take part in a project that should benefit them through expert advice and support on climate action community engagement. There is also paid work available for peer coaches / mentors.

This is a demonstration project funded by Scottish Government, the learning from which will be evaluated and shared with other communities.

Support from the project will be provided during February-August 2015. Community group participants will be chosen according to their potential to benefit from taking part; geographic coverage; and the focus of planned community engagement (e.g. energy efficiency, waste reduction, food and growing).

Coaches / mentors will be drawn from a pool which might include other community projects with practical experience (peer to peer), consultants and academics. They will be matched to participant projects based on their expertise, and the participant’s needs.

For more info, and application form, visit www.scottishcommunitiescan.org.uk . Closing date for community groups seeking support – 30 November 2014.

Interested in being a coach / mentor? Paid work available! If you would like to put yourself forward as a Coach, funded by Scottish Government to provide peer-to-peer support on community engagement to participant community groups, the closing date for applications is 10 November 2014. See http://www.scottishcommunitiescan.org.uk for details.

We also need an independent Evaluator, funded by Scottish Government. The closing date for applications is 10 November 2014. See http://www.scottishcommunitiescan.org.ukfor details.

Author: LIAM BARRINGTON-BUSH, 27 October 2014

When the Argentinian economy collapsed, lots of workers didn’t believe that the things they made were no longer needed. And so they broke into their factories, and started making them again – only to prove they could run them better than their former bosses.

What do you think happened when foreign investment fled from Argentina after the country’s IMF-poster-child economy collapsed in 2001, shutting down many of the country’s factories overnight?

For one, the Argentines ousted five presidents in the first months of 2002 to voice their displeasure. But rather than simply protest, a movement of suddenly unemployed workers emerged to reclaim abandoned workplaces and run them as democratic workers’ collectives.

Recovered businesses, as they were innocuously termed, spread across Argentina as workers returned to their old factories, clipping the chains on the gates that stood between them and their jobs. Their slogan, ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce,’ highlighted the radical nature of the movement, which threw private property rights into question, as more and more workers began to assert that their right to work trumped the employer’s right to own an empty factory.

Occupied factories took on different forms. Some remained relatively traditional, with clear job titles and hierarchical salary structures, while many others began to change the nature of their workplaces in a range of deeper ways. Assembly decision-making processes, equal salaries across the workforce, and collective administration of the business, in sales, pay role, budgeting, and production forecasts, were but a few of the shifts that began to take hold in many of the factories.

Recovered businesses would support other recovered businesses, giving each other the first contracts they needed to get machines operational again, supplying the different parts that other factories needed to make whatever it was they made. Even in the face of a severe economic downturn, several of the two hundred-plus occupied workplaces began to turn profits surpassing those achieved by the previous owners, often doubling everyone’s pre-occupation wages in the process. As one worker highlighted in Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’ 2004 documentary, The Take, ‘What we’ve learned is that in a business, participatory democracy is more efficient.’i

For example, when the recently jobless Unión y Fuerza piping factory workers voted to occupy their old workplace, their union’s lawyer told electrician Roberto Salcedo there was no way they could get the bankrupt factory up-and-running again. ‘If the owner, with his entire team of professionals and all his experience, ended up bankrupt, how could fifty workers with no experience manage to make it work?’ii But the men – not a university degree among them – formed an assembly where all decisions were made, registered as a workers’ cooperative, turned down loans from eager banks and investment from former clients, and did just what they were told they couldn’t.

In a diving Argentine economy, these workers carried out a market evaluation, determined potential income and expenditure (minus the costs of all the long-gone managers), and decided together to opt for an equal waging system for all. Unión y Fuerza soon became the biggest domestic pipe supplier in Argentina.

‘You have to break through many fears, like the idea you can’t take over a company like this one,’ says Salcedo. ‘Actually, you learn how. And then you have the satisfaction that you are doing it for yourself.’iii

If our social change organisations are committed to practicing the democratic values we speak about, it is hard to imagine why senior management teams still exist at all. The notion that staff in any organisation are unable to come together to make responsible decisions is an elitist remnant of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time that needs to be thrown away if we hope to align our means and ends for social change.

But if the notion of scrapping Senior Management still seems excessive, why don’t we think for a minute about some other important events in our shared histories that have transpired without a single manager orchestrating peoples’ actions. While countless Argentine companies went bankrupt in Argentina, but became financially sound without managers, if we had tried to achieve the changes brought by social movements through our organisational management structures, we can almost guarantee we would – at best – have gotten in the way. All of which should lead us to ask whether, even with the best of intentions, management itself might be the problem?

Author: MARY FITZGERALD, Blog 28 October 2014

Mary Fitzgerald is Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy.

Well, thanks to some encouraging ruckus in the last few months, you may actually have heard of TTIP: the anodynely-acronymed “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership”. In plain English, it’s a massive trade deal between the EU and North America which could affect everything from healthcare choices to government banking regulations to the air we breathe. (And it gets better, TPP is the US-Asia Pacific counterpart.)

Activists and even some politicians have been up in arms about one particularly nasty element of these behemoths, which together will cover almost 50 percent of global GDP. That element is the proposed secret courts where, in theory, oil companies could sue governments who try to bring in green-friendly policies, tobacco companies could challenge advertising restrictions, and private healthcare providers could pick apart what’s left of national health services. To name a few.

Don’t mention the deal behind the curtain

But in truth, we just don’t know what TTIP will mean because the negotiations are happening in secret. And the European Commission has just made a mockery of its own European Citizens’ Initiative, whereby citizens are supposed to be able to register dissent, by refusing to “allow” that dissent to be registered. (This in fact could prove a spectacular own goal because, in making it so plain that this supposedly-democratic mechanism is toothless, it paves the way for a challenge in the courts.)

What we do know, however, are the lessons from recent history. As Saskia Sassen, who has looked at this question for decades, points out: time and again, when global corporations gain rights through free trade deals, citizens lose out–in large part through a negative boomerang effect of job losses and wage stagnation that cheaper goods just don’t compensate for.

We also know that it’s farcical of the European Commission to try and claim that Europe’s citizens cannot have a say in this process because the treaty will have “no legal effect” on citizens. Grist to the mill of UKIP and others, as if they needed it.

Exposing and challenging this unaccountable “Nafta on steroids” is just what openDemocracy was made for.

Author: 29 October 2014 by Susannah Birkwood,

The Community Development Foundation calls on the political parties to pledge to maintain funding for small community groups

The existence of a million under-the-radar community groups that provide vital services and support could be in peril, according to the latest research from theCommunity Development Foundation. Its report, Tailor-made: How Community Groups Improve People’s Lives, published today, says that between 600,000 and 900,000 “under-the-radar” groups exist in the UK.

Without small amounts of funding, the report says, much of the work these groups do would never happen, and the value of the services they provide, the volunteers that they attract and their impact on the community would be lost. CDF is calling on the political parties to include pledges to maintain funding to small community groups in their manifestos for the next general election. The research was carried out between September 2013 and July 2014, during which period CDF interviewed a group of partners – namely, the Asda Foundation, the Trust for London, Action with Communities in Rural England, the Community Development Finance Association, Community Matters and the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action – and conducted a literature review.

“We’re calling for the government and other funders to preserve these vital funding streams that are a lifeline to small community groups,” says the report. “Many activities still require funding, so generating this income remains a widespread concern and an enduring need for groups.”

The report notes that community groups raise the majority of their funds through individual donations but that grant funding is still critical for many groups. It says that small grants – of less than £10,000 – are particularly useful for “under-the-radar” groups, which are often too small to qualify for larger grant programmes. The report also says that state funding represents a larger proportion of the funding mix for groups in deprived areas, making them more vulnerable to reductions in state spending than their counterparts in more affluent areas.