Author: Ken Smith, The Herald

MANY a parent has chided a child for disturbing a pet dog when it is quietly lying on the carpet sleeping, bothering no-one.

Sometimes Glasgow City Council seems to have an insatiable desire to poke the citizens of the city awake when they are bothering no-one, particularly over the city’s parks.

You would think the council would cut the grass, pick up the litter, paint the railings occasionally, and let everyone get on with using the parks for a bit of fresh air and exercise. But there is hardly a green space in the city where local citizens have not felt the need to set up committees to defend their parks from the council’s plans, whether it is zip-wires in Pollok Park, nightclubs in the Botanic Gardens, private sports clubs on Glasgow Green or even tree removal at Bellahouston.

Now, when things are a bit quiet in the parks, the council is busy again, drawing up draconian rules which have managed to anger swathes of park users.

These rules can be pretty effective. I remember reading the old rules on a noticeboard at Botanic Gardens which state that no-one can “beat, shake, sweep, brush or clean any carpet, rug or mat in the park without prior consent”. And I have never once seen anyone with a rolled up rug and carpet-beater in the park since the notice went up.

Of course the council has a bit of previous, as the police might say, stretching back more than 100 years. In 1858 Glasgow council planned to sell off most of Glasgow Green to be mined for coal. Only public opposition led to the plans being dropped, although the council tried twice again in years to come, hoping, presumably, that people had short memories.

More recently the Fleshers’ Haugh part of Glasgow Green was to be sold off to a private developer, provoking a public campaign to have it halted. You see, when the council goes hand-in-glove with a private developer, no matter how good the plans are, the public are suspicious. The same happened when entertainments group G1 wanted to build a nightclub in the Botanic Gardens. Inevitably a Save Our Botanics Group was convened to stop what they saw as a blight on the park, fearing drunks trampling the flower beds at all hours of the day and night.

Mind you, there had been a nightclub there before, the old Sgt Peppers – I don’t think the Beatles were ever paid royalties for that – in the old railway station at the park entrance. If my memory is correct, it later went the way of many a building which has outlived its usefulness in Glasgow. It accidentally burned down.

One of the stranger park protests was plans to remove trees in Bellahouston Park in the eighties for the Pope’s visit. Wild claims were made that 200 trees were to be chopped down. In the end only 12 trees were carefully uprooted and stored until after the visit then replanted.

A tabloid newspaper reporter told me they were keen to photograph the actual removal of the trees but did not know when it would happen. The paper eventually found a chap in a flat overlooking the park who had a portrait of King Billy on his wall. He readily agreed to become the paper’s tree watcher and phoned daily to report on what was going on.

One person who did protest at the Pope’s visit was the late Pastor Jack Glass, whose rigid Protestantism opposed all things Roman. The story was told that when Pastor Jack stood outside Bellahouston Park with his banner on the day of the Pope’s visit, Archbishop Tom Winning told him as he arrived: “Nice day for it Jack.”

The story I like about Bellahouston Park was when BBC reporter Alastair Smith covered the British Stunt Kiting Association’s event there. When he did his live broadcast you could hear a pin drop in the newsroom as colleagues gathered to see if he made any unfortunate spoonerisms.

Talking of trees, Glasgow’s Incorporation of Gardeners wanted to plant 2014 fruit trees in Glasgow parks for the Commmonwealth Games. They were told though that there were no fruit trees in Glasgow parks as the punters would eat the fruit. Presumably that sounded too healthy.

So far the council has managed to anger dog walkers, cyclists and nursery schools with its draft regulations, which is quite an achievement. The rules state you must always keep your dog at your heel or on a lead so presumably you wouldn’t be able to throw it a ball or a stick, which is the classic enjoyment of having a dog.

Still, one thing everyone agrees on is that you have to clean up after your dog. A reader in another town had to point out the sign “Dog fouling – maximum fine £100” to a chap who had ignored his dog’s toilet. His brusque reply – “My dog doesn’t play football” – didn’t help the situation.

Cyclists would only be allowed to go at 5mph – a fast walking pace and slower than runners. Trying to keep your balance at that speed is one for the trick cyclists.

Permission would also be needed for any group of nursery children going in the park for a walk. Goodness, even organising a game of football with your mates would seem to be against the new rules unless you have permission.

But sometimes the council does get it right. After trying to turn the disused bandstand in Kelvingrove Park into a nightclub, and being opposed, the council has finally decided simply to renovate it as a bandstand. A stroll through the park yesterday shows that work is well ahead. What will be more delightful than sitting in the outdoors this summer listening to some live music? Mind you, the new rules state you can’t play a musical instrument in the park, so it will be interesting to see how that works out.

Author: Oliver Wright, The Independent

I am sitting in a featureless meeting room in the Cabinet Office with a man called David Halpern. And I’m about to hear one of the more surprising – but simple insights – into human nature that I’ve heard in a long time. 

“Do you have kids?” Hapern asks.

“No,” I reply.

“Well, if you do, then this is worth remembering.”

Halpern begins to tell me about the work of American psychologist Carol Dweck, who has spent her career examining how you can improve the academic performance of children. In particular, one set of tests she devised to examine the effect of feedback on learning.

“So you do a maths test and divide your study group in half,” he explains. “In one group, after they have done the test, you say, good result – you’re very smart. And in the other half you say, good result – that was a really good effort. Then both groups are given a really hard maths test a week later. It is deliberately hard and, of course, some kids give up in the face of that.

“Then a couple of weeks later the groups are given a maths test of the same standard as the original. Now the kids who were told it was really good effort are doing about 20 per cent better than they were originally.

“But the kids who were told, you are really smart are doing 20 per cent worse. It is a one-line difference in the way they are given feedback.”

And the reason? “Imagine you hit a difficulty and certainly kids do with hard school work. How do you interpret that? If you believe that it’s just a matter of some people are smart and some people are not, you think ‘I must be dumb’. But if you believe your performance is really to do with your effort – then you try harder. If you can put a kid down a trajectory of believing – it changes their trajectory in the face of challenge.”

Now not many people outside the world of Whitehall will have heard of Halpern or the unit that he runs from a small, cramped corner of the Treasury. But over the past four years the Government’s Behaviour Insights Team (or Nudge unit) has had a profound effect on the way in which Whitehall interacts with the people it is governing – using simple techniques like the example above. The unit uses insights from behavioural economics and psychology to subtly change the processes, forms and language used by Government – to achieve outcomes that are in the “public good” and save money.

The team found, for example, that by changing the wording used to encourage organ donation, more than 100,000 extra people would sign up annually.

In another case the unit experimented with sending out personalised text messages to people who owed money to the courts.

It found that texts which were not personalised resulted in 23 per cent of people paying the fines, while 33 per cent of those people who received the text paid. If no text was sent, only 5 per cent paid.

The unit has also worked to increase the number of people who pay their tax on time, redesigned the process around which people are required to look for work while on benefits and looked at encouraging people to give to charity – all with impressive results.

So how did it all come about? Halpern, a former member of Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit, says he was always interested in the applications of psychology in the real world since buying a second-hand textbook when he was 14 and thinking, “Oh my god this is so cool”.

But during the Blair years Nudge didn’t catch on – even though it was considered.

“The Blair administration was expanding the state – spending more and regulating more, which was Tony’s orientation, often,” Halpern says. “[In that environment] Nudge feels very different. It’s like, ‘we knew you were a nanny state and now we know you’re really an ultra-nanny state’.”

But that all changed with the financial crash and the incoming Conservative-led Government in 2010.

“Their instincts were generally, ‘we’ve got no money and we’re going to constrain the size of the state and deregulate’. So now you are using these approaches as a softer alternative to regulation.”

But, still, a lot in Government were nervous of Nudge – especially as it was being promoted by David Cameron’s infamous blue-sky thinker Steve Hilton. “We were a skunkworks operation of a few people in a corner,” he admits. “You were sort of given this Mission Impossible and told you’ll probably die and we’ll say we’ve got nothing to do with you.”

But the academic theory did work in practice – and the Nudge team were suddenly in demand. “The pivotal moment was about eight months in, when we did a presentation to permanent secretaries and we showed them our first results.  You could see the mandarins were thinking to begin with: ‘We’ve seen it all before – the bright young things are coming into Number 10 – if we keep our heads down, it will all go away.’ But then, they’re not dumb and they see these results and they realise that the marginal costs of these changes are almost nothing.

“They’re all under pressure on budgets. And then you are putting in front of them an approach which is tangibly getting results.”

Now, four years in, Nudge is about to be spun off into a new company – partly owned by the Government, partly owned by the social enterprise charity Nesta and partly owned by Halpern and other employees. It will allow the unit to expand and take on more work outside the constraints of Whitehall. But given that one of Nudge’s theories is “friction cost” – that the harder you make it for people to do things the less likely they are to do it – surely leaving Whitehall will make it less likely that they’ll be used by Government to solve problems?

Halpern admits this could be a problem. “Look, this is an experiment. I do worry a bit that a lot of what happens in Government happens because you bump into people at the margins and you say ‘hey what about this?’. But in some ways, given how Whitehall works, it may be easier for a Government department to go to an outside body to help them with a piece of work than to get another bit of Government to do work for them.

“Certainly the intention is to maintain the continuity of service. Jeremy Heywood [the Cabinet Secretary] will still be able to send an email to me at the weekend and ask, what do you think about so-and-so?”

But Nudge will expand to look at other areas as well. Halpern wants to examine ways of unlocking “hidden entrepreneurs” who adapt products that could grow the economy but never get beyond garages.

“The famous example is of the mountain bike that was created not by a manufacturer but by someone by using bits of other bikes and putting it together in their garage.

“Studies suggest that 6 per cent of Britons have come up with a significant adaptation in the last year. But most of these never diffuse.

“If more of them did, then the benefits would be enormous. We are going to do a study to identify how many good ideas there are and what is stopping them diffuse.”

Whether life outside Whitehall works for Halpern and Behavioural Insights Team time will tell. But that may not ultimately matter. They have already unlocked a mind-change in Whitehall – that is perceptible across most Government departments.

That maybe the only nudge that is necessary.

Nudge and wink: How it works

“Nudge” articulates the idea that people can be persuaded to make the right decisions by simple changes in how choices are presented to them. The theory was laid out in a ground-breaking 2008 book of the same name by economics professor Richard Thaler and law professor  Cass Sunstein.

The American academics argued that people often make bad decisions in areas of their lives – from personal finances and health to broader issues like how they treat the planet. This simple statement challenged the idea that people act in a purely rational way – always making choices that benefit them financially or in some other way – which is often used as the basis for economic models.

Professors Thaler and Sunstein argued that “choice architecture” – how the options are framed – can help “nudge” people towards the most beneficial outcome without actually restricting their personal freedom.

The authors wrote that “the libertarian aspect of our strategies lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like”.

But they also said it was “legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behaviour in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better”.

Critics have suggested that stronger measures – a push or a shove – are usually required to bring about significant social change.

“Basically you need more than just nudge,” Baroness Julia Neuberger said after a House of Lords inquiry into the theory’s effectiveness found little to suggest it was effective on a large scale.

Full report can be read here 

Extract of report which relates to resources…

166. Whilst the Committee acknowledges that decisions on their spending priorities are matters wholly for local authorities, it is of the view that the variation in the availability of funding for community transport across Scotland presents significant financial challenges to many operators which in turn can impact on the service provision to users. The Committee therefore considers that the potential for the provision of funding to further assist the community transport sector should be explored.

167. In particular, the Committee is of the view that there is a strong case for a source of capital funding to be introduced to assist in the purchase of new and replacement vehicles. Vehicle purchase has been highlighted as the principal funding concern of operators. If vehicles are replaced at the appropriate stage in their life span this will deliver improvements in reliability, safety and comfort and ensure that services are more efficient and sustainable. The availability of a funding stream would also significantly reduce the financial pressures on community transport providers, allowing them to redirect resources to other aspects of their service provision.

168. Whilst only rough estimates of the likely cost of a managed rolling programme of funding the provision of new or replacement of vehicles across Scotland have been provided to the Committee, it appears that this could be delivered at reasonable cost, particularly when balanced against the likely benefits.

169. The Committee welcomes the very positive comments made by the Minister in evidence that he would be prepared to consider how this might be delivered. The Committee therefore calls on the Scottish Government to work with sector representatives to consider how such a scheme might be developed and introduced. This work should include a full assessment of the likely costs and consider from which source these might be funded. It should also bring forward proposals for application criteria and management and delivery options.

Between 17th and 23rd of February, Supporters Direct Scotland will be hosting a weeklong celebration of the community ownership movement across Scotland.

The objective of Community Ownership Week is to promote, celebrate and raise awareness of the Community Ownership of sport clubs and the community ownership movement across Scotland.

At present there are four SPFL clubs under community ownership and we hope the week will educate, empower and inspire more supporters trusts and fan groups to become involved in the ownership of clubs for the benefit of their respective communities.

“Community Ownership Week gives us a chance to celebrate the movement of supporter involvement and ownership of their clubs. We hope the week will both educate and inspire many fans to get involved with their own Supporters Trust and to pursure the idea of further fan involvement in its governance”  – Paul Goodwin

Throughout the week a range of events will be held to promote the movement to various stakeholders within the game, including a presentation to MSPs at Holyrood.

If you’d like to get involved in the week in some way please contact Andrew Jenkin

Andrew Jenkin

Project Manager, Supporters Direct Scotland

t:   01786 845 606

e:  andrew.jenkin@supporters-direct.org

To learn more about community owned football clubs in Scotland click here

Author: Lesley Riddoch, Scotsman

I BOUGHT shares in a company last week – for the first time in my life. As a young leftie my formative years at university were spent opposing the gigantic sale of family silver by Margaret Thatcher.

That experience in the early 1980s left me with a lifelong suspicion of the stock market and an aversion to the vulture-like speculation apparently embedded in the investment process.

Of course as a self-employed person I have a pension but I wasn’t moved by the recent Post Office sale nor have I bought a single lottery ticket or scratch card.

So what broke the habit of a lifetime?

Not the blandishments of an FTSE 100 firm nor the recommendation of a financial adviser.

No – the appeal of Garmony Community Hydro is modesty, practicality and a powerful potential to improve local lives faster than shareholder bank balances. So this Mull-based community-owned energy company is unlikely to enter the portfolios of those with “serious money” – at least not yet. Even though it’s an excellent way to earn cash and support community development, green energy and the eradication of fuel poverty.

Garmony was dreamt up by Sustainable Mull and Iona – a small group of local people who met in a Craignure pub in 2008 and started devising energy-saving insulation projects.

In 2010 the UK government announced Feed-In-Tariffs, which made small-scale community-owned energy schemes more viable. Rumours abounded that Mull was being sized up for a large-scale wind farm, but a community-commissioned feasibility study showed hydro was a far better fit for the land, islanders and local economics.

It took three years of volunteer time, the success of previous island community projects and a new “community-focus” at the Forestry Commission to get the necessary permissions in place. Now – without a single sod cut – Garmony is already a valuable community asset with a lease of land from Forestry Commission Scotland, planning permission from Argyll and Bute Council, a water extraction licence from Sepa and a 400kW export licence from SSE.

Financially, it’s a slam dunk. Garmony should gross about £200,000 per year (much more with current levels of rainfall) before repaying loans, shareholder interest and operating costs. If enough start-up capital is raised through shares the project can return £100,000 a year to the community – with borrowing, returns will reduce to £30,000.

But even that could transform island lives. Net profits will be gift aided to an island charity – the Waterfall Fund. It will consider funding applications from island community groups, clubs and social enterprises. Proposals already include community mini buses for more remote settlements, apprenticeships, social enterprises and the supply of cut-price energy to islanders living in fuel poverty. What’s not to like?

All the project must do now is raise £330,000 by the end of February to convince commercial lenders the project is financially viable. But so far only half of that sum has been raised. Even at a time of recession many Scots have savings and could opt to make better use of it. So why don’t we?

A recent report by ResPublica, The Community Renewables Economy: Starting up, scaling up and spinning out, suggests 5.2GW of community renewable electricity is achievable by 2020 – enough to power three and a half million homes with a potential value of £6 billion to the energy economy. That’s an investment opportunity and a chance to help communities build resilience, connection and common cause. According to green campaigner Jonathan Porritt the combination is resonating with consumers south of the Border so that share offers in community-owned schemes like Garmony are regularly exceeding their target before the closing date. “People like the idea they can take energy matters into their own hands” – especially after endless price-hikes and mis-selling scandals amongst the Big Six energy companies.

So why is Garmony Hydro not inundated with would-be investors, why aren’t similar shareholder schemes blossoming across the hydro heaven of Highland Scotland and will the forthcoming Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill (whose consultation closes this week) do anything to help?

Basically, money has traditionally chased higher rates of return while community schemes have traditionally chased limited grant funding – and ne’er the twain have met. As a result, Scotland’s experience of community-led social enterprises has been weak.

Unlike Ireland we have failed to embrace credit unions. Unlike the Nordics and Spaniards we have failed to establish co-operatives. Unlike almost everyone we have failed to maintain a community-sized delivery tier of local government. And unlike any nation intent on dismantling oversized, disempowering bureaucracies we have failed to protect Scotland’s only real “self-help” success – the community-controlled housing movement in Glasgow. But times are changing.

Internet crowd-funding has introduced ordinary people with cash to ordinary people with marketable ideas. The result has been successful crowd-funded films, books and housing projects. Some people still believe it’s up to the financier, council leader, lottery official or government funder to kick-start change. Others have waited too long for these authorities to deliver and are taking matters into their own hands.

Communities in Scotland now own and run islands, bridges, pubs, wind-farms, libraries and boats. The forthcoming Community Empowerment Bill will go further and let communities take over underused public sector assets. But councils and quangos will still be able to drag their heels, confound volunteers and charge full market rates for sales and leases. Garmony Hydro will pay £6,500 a year to lease a narrow strip of Forestry Commission land. Why?

Indeed, why are such remote communities surrounded by state-owned forests with wind-blown trees and offcuts they cannot touch? The Forestry Commission does offer individual “scavenger licences” but generally only the able-bodied benefit. Why not offer community foraging and coppicing in every state-owned forest and fit wood burning stoves as standard in all rural social housing?

Such common sense operates in supposedly “backward” countries like Poland and Estonia. Here in Scotland, one young family has just quit their rural housing association home because the electric heating bill is unaffordable. My guess is they are not alone.

It may not be fair to expect community projects like Garmony Hydro to sort out such waste and unfairness when the authorities miss the mark. But they will. And so will other shareholder-funded community schemes all over Scotland.

I’ve just bet on it. So could you.

Author: Will Hutton, The Observer

It’s inequality, stupid. It’s inequality that is behind poverty, ill-health and the growth of the welfare bill. It’s inequality propelling the escalating demand for credit. It’s inequality that has created our fragile banking system and its still feral proclivities. It’s inequality that has provoked the collapse in productivity, and the stagnation in innovation and investment – evident before the financial crisis and even more so now. This is the truth that cannot yet be spoken.

Yet reality will out. Ed Miliband’s “cost of living” crisis is a sideways route into opening up an argument over inequality. As he knows full well, the problem is not just the gnawing away of average living standards, but how the effects hit you more savagely the lower your income. It matters how the cake is shared. If George Osborne calls for the minimum wage to rise to £7 an hour, be sure that some acute Conservative political antennae are recognising that the salience of inequality is rising. Finally, it is tiptoeing on to the national stage.

The sheer unfairness of who gets how much is the first reaction to inequality, a challenge to us as moral beings. It is not just that so many incomes at the top, many times higher than a generation ago, are plainly undeserved and unrelated to merit; it is also about the multiple ways that inequality expresses itself. Your starting point in life and your parents’ networks are ever more important in determining your life chances, whether you want to get on as an investment banker or actor. Your chance of getting on the housing ladder early or late is closely determined by the wealth of your parents.

Inequality is all around. You can rage at the phenomenon of young people, unable to afford sky-high London rents, cramped into one shared room, while the super-rich dig down under their homes or buy the house next door to expand their living space.

Are the rich so newly virtuous or the young so newly feckless that either deserves the extraordinary change in their circumstances? Nobody, except the rich themselves or their valiant apologist Boris Johnson – drawing our attention recently to their alleged higher IQ (is it higher, relatively, than 30 years ago?) and alleged indispensable role in “wealth generation” (more indispensable than 30 years ago?) – can justify what is happening. Inequality’s sole possible rationale is that, however repugnant, it is the price we pay for the capitalist economy to work effectively.

But the capitalist economy is not working effectively, even while inequality has surpassed the levels of Edwardian England. For three decades, policymakers in Britain have tacitly accepted the Johnson thesis or, at the very least, not accepted responsibility for the inequality that has directly resulted from the “reforms” they have initiated. Target number one has been the reduction of trade union power in the name of promoting labour market flexibility. Target number two has been the reduction of taxation on capital, companies and higher earners in the name of promoting incentives and “wealth-generation”. And target number three has been not to object to ever denser concentrations of market power, particularly in the City, because Britain “must be open for business”.

The result has been a stunning increase in inequality, the fastest in the OECD, so that Britain now ranks 28th out of 34 countries in the equality “league table”. But there has also been a weakening in the long-run growth rate, an incredible mountain of mortgage debt, falling productivity and the financial crisis. Usually, these are understood as separate phenomena. Bankers, we understand, created the financial crisis. Productivity is falling because workers have inadequate skills or simply shirk. Mortgage debt is down to crazy house prices, driven by land shortages and inability to build new homes. The low growth rate is because companies lack the confidence to invest.

All those explanations are partially true. But the bigger story is that all have common roots in inequality. The indifference to the growing gap between rich and poor, in all its multiple dimensions, is the first order category mistake of our times. No lasting solution to the socioeconomic crisis through which we are living is possible without addressing it.

The story begins with the evisceration of the institutions in civil society – primarily, but not only, trade unions – that ensured that the share of wages in national income stayed broadly constant. Labour market “flexibility” is constantly portrayed as an unalloyed benefit, increasing employers’ room for manoeuvre in controlling wage costs and making hiring more likely. What is never said is that there are trade-offs. Cumulatively, over the last generation, the weakening of trade unions’ countervailing market power has seen between 5% and 7% of GDP being moved permanently from the workforce to shareholders. Average real wages at first stagnated and are now falling.

Entrepreneurs are the engine room of a capitalist society, at best making fortunes on the back of genuine risk-taking, usually when they bet their assets and reputation on some innovation. They can also lose everything. But as companies found their profits rising sharply, executives at the top sold the unwarranted proposition that it was because they too were entrepreneurial, rather than the beneficiaries of weakened trade unions. They should, they claimed, receive entrepreneurial returns , even if they risked nothing. Showered in share options and extravagant bonuses, executive pay since the late 1980s has grown faster and to higher levels than at any time in our history.

Some try to explain this radical redistribution of income to the rich as the consequence of globalisation, immigration or the growing importance of skills and education. But while these effects clearly exist, all are modest or small in scale: they cannot explain such a substantial change in the wage and profit share. That has been fashioned as a matter of political and economic choice.

The cascade of consequences is formidable. Workers, struggling to maintain their living standards, have borrowed extraordinary multiples of their income to make money the only other certain way – through the housing market. Withdrawing equity from one’s home, now estimated by estate agents Savills at £1.8tn in total, is the sole reliable route to sustain living standards. House prices have been bid up well beyond a sustainable relationship between wages. Poorer wage earners left out of the boom have to rent, creating a class of private sector landlords whose collective equity is now estimated to top £800bn. After being temporarily halted during the financial crisis, the process is now under way again.

None of this would be possible without credit. British banks have lent £1.2tn in mortgages. But if inequality has fuelled demand for credit – whether through mortgages or payday loans – it has also helped drive the supply, and thus the creation of an extraordinary financial system biased to lend to property and not to enterprise. The general rise in executive pay in terms of the share of national income has become most distended and easiest to achieve in finance. The faster and larger a bank could grow its lending, the higher its profits, and in the new world in which banking bureaucrats were paid as entrepreneurs, those profits fed straight through to bankers’ bonuses. Bankers knew their balance sheets would in effect be guaranteed by the state. Regulation was weakened by the fashion for believing in free markets. Too much pay at the top and too little pay in the middle and bottom became the structural causes of a financial system that by 2008 had become a predator on economy and society alike.

But easy profit and easy top pay have not catalysed an investment and innovation boom. A company’s share price does not rise if it invests and innovates; those are risks that could go wrong. Management teams instead look for low-risk activity – lush government contracts, lobbying to drop regulations, paying workers minimally or using their profits to buy the company’s own shares – to keep up their sales and profits.

Thus Britain today. At the bottom, a world of food banks, payday lending and quiet desperation. And at the top, an extravagantly paid elite. Social ills ranging from obesity to depression become ever more entrenched. Yet this same inequality creates a fragile, enterprise-averse banking system, an escalating credit boom, overpriced homes and a low-investment, low-innovation economy. It is also inequality behind so much extra public spending – on housing benefit, policing, care and remedial interventions.

Societies as unequal as Britain’s are profoundly dysfunctional. The inequality that drove the last crash is even greater now and, ominously, the same forces are abroad again. The recovery cannot hold unless we address inequality; our politicians must rebuild the institutions they have so carelessly trashed. Inequality must be tackled head on.

Author: Amy Dockser Marcus, Wall Street Journal

Ordinary people are taking control of their health data, making their DNA public and running their own experiments. Their big question: Why should science be limited to professionals?

More than a decade ago, in hopes of advancing research on the rare genetic disease that afflicts her children, Sharon Terry let two different researchers draw their blood for study. But when she asked for the results of the investigations, the scientists gave her a startling response. Information generated from her own children’s DNA, they said, didn’t belong to her.

“It’s my data,” says Ms. Terry, who is now president and chief executive of Genetic Alliance, a network of organizations that do research, advocacy and education around genetics, in Washington, D.C. “But it gets locked away in some database that I can’t get to.”

Today, Ms. Terry is part of a growing movement to unlock medical secrets by empowering patients to gather, control and even analyze their own health data. For some people, that means posting detailed personal information, family histories and genetic test results online for all to see. Others may decide to make public only limited information or to grant access exclusively to researchers who agree to share the results of their studies.

Members of this loose collective of amateurs, who call themselves “health hackers” and “citizen scientists,” also perform their own analyses and use the Internet to create and run experiments and clinical trials. They all believe that too much science happens behind closed doors.

The efforts are varied. Some include small groups of people who either know each other socially or met online. Their experiments explore issues like preventing migraines, improving sleep and testing the effectiveness of vitamins. There are now a number of companies dedicated to helping citizen scientists devise experiments, and medical journals are publishing the results of their trials.

Ms. Terry’s run-in with research scientists led her to start a patient-run database to collect the medical data of people with her children’s disease—PXE, which can cause vision loss and other serious problems. After posting information about the data bank on the Web, she put together kits with blood vials and FedEx envelopes and distributed them to participants. They, in turn, took the packages to their doctors, had blood drawn, and then sent the samples to a central lab, where they are available to researchers willing to disclose their findings.

She is now helping to run another effort, launched earlier this year, that is even more far-reaching. Called “That’s My Data!” it aims to facilitate the flow of patients’ detailed genetic data to researchers in exchange for open access to the results for those who contributed samples.

The controversial notion that people with no formal scientific training can make meaningful research contributions arose a few years ago, prompted in part by new, inexpensive DNA tests intended for consumers.

Another catalyst was a simple clash of perspectives. The questions that most people have about their DNA—such as what health risks they face and how to prevent them—aren’t always in sync with the approach taken by pharmaceutical and academic researchers, who don’t usually share any potentially life-saving findings with the patients.

Increasingly, the outside-the-system approach seems to have reached a turning point. In talks at national conferences, in webinars, blogs and articles, more people are starting to ask: Is science really something anyone can do?

Critics of this new wave of citizen scientists point to several potential problems. Amateurs may not collect data rigorously, they say, and may draw conclusions from sample sizes that are too small to yield statistically reliable results. When an individual patient determines that something is making him feel better, “that’s great,” says Harlan Krumholz, a professor at Yale School of Medicine, “but to find something that I can put in a textbook and encourage everyone to offer to patients requires a stronger evidence base.”

Having individuals collect their own data poses other issues. Patients may enter data only when they are motivated, or feeling well, rendering the data useless. In traditional studies, both doctors and patients are typically kept blind as to who is getting a drug and who is taking a placebo, so as not to skew how either group perceives the patients’ progress.

Others fear that patients may decide to take over-the-counter medicines or supplements based on unsupported data, then fail to tell their physicians. “I think the medical specialist always has to be there,” says Ardis Hoven, past chairwoman of the American Medical Association’s board of trustees.

In traditional studies, scientists guard their data from outsiders for several reasons. They fear that someone else might take that data and publish a finding ahead of them, taking credit for their discoveries. Even after a study is done, they often prefer to keep the data private, for any potential future discoveries. It’s all part of the effort to advance in the field, establish a reputation and get grants.

Ms. Terry has attained a measure of legitimacy among scientists by working at times with trained professionals. When a paper about mammograms for PXE patients was published in 2003, Ms. Terry was listed as one of the co-authors—and hers was the only name without an M.D. She now has 83 peer-reviewed published papers for which she is either the author or co-author.

Citizen-science projects don’t fall under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, since they generally don’t involve testing or developing anything new—such as a new drug, medical device or diagnostic test. The experiments usually test things like vitamins that are already FDA-approved or sold over-the-counter.

Earlier this year, prompted by the growing availability of consumer DNA tests, the American Medical Association sent a letter to the FDA saying that genetic testing should only be done with the guidance of a doctor or trained genetic counselor. Doctors worried that people might not understand the genetic information being explained to them.

Scientific research wasn’t always considered the domain of professionals. In the 1700s and 1800s, most people practicing science made a living in other fields. The classic example is Benjamin Franklin, who was a printer, publisher and public official but still made key discoveries in electricity. Others conducted experiments at home or in labs that were funded either by themselves or by wealthy supporters.

In the 19th century, science became increasingly professionalized. Many practitioners saw that to improve the quality of their work and to take on bigger projects, they needed to go beyond basement tinkering. Support emerged for training scientists at universities, creating professional societies and seeking sustained financial support from the government to tackle important public issues.

Melanie Swan, an investment adviser in Silicon Valley, is one of the citizen scientists questioning the traditional approach. She has written a smart-phone app that lets users study their genetic data to find any correlations between known efficacy rates for drugs associated with certain genes. Ultimately, she says, the goal is to help patients tailor their own treatment plans.

Last year, Ms. Swan helped to run a small trial to test what type of vitamin B people with a certain gene should take to lower their levels of homocysteine, an amino acid connected to heart-disease risk. (The gene affects the body’s ability to metabolize B vitamins.)

Seven people—one in Japan and six, including herself, in her local area—paid around $300 each to buy two forms of vitamin B and Centrum, which they took in two-week periods followed by two-week “wash-out” periods with no vitamins at all.

Ms. Swan found a deal at a lab offering cut-rate prices on blood tests, and subjects went each week to have their blood tested for homocysteine levels. They uploaded all of their results to an online wiki.

In March, Ms. Swan gave a talk at a genomics conference at Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, explaining the trial to a group of scientists. “It was rigorous experimentation,” she says of the protocol that they put together and had reviewed by two professional scientists.

The scientists clapped politely at the end of Ms. Swan’s presentation, but during the question-and-answer session, one stood up and said that the data was not statistically significant—and it could be harmful if patients built their own regimens based on the results.

“Melanie did a good job presenting information,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, who invited Ms. Swan to speak. He believes citizen science has “extraordinary” potential. Still, he says, many of the attendees considered Ms. Swan’s experiment to be “soft” science.

“The bar has been raised considerably for what scientists deem acceptable evidence for making changes to one’s health,” says Dr. Topol.

Ms. Swan acknowledges that citizen scientists need to start running trials with much larger numbers of people to insure better accuracy. “It’s not enough to study our own data, run our own trials, if the results don’t change science,” she says.

Yet striking a balance between the two worlds can be tricky. Undaunted by her reception at the conference, Ms. Swan went back to the other participants in the trial and suggested that they pursue a more professional tack—including getting approval for the next phase of the trial from an institutional review board, just as traditional studies do. The effort fell through when some of the participants felt Ms. Swan was introducing too much bureaucracy.

Citizen scientists “are trying to turn that on its head,” says Raymond McCauley, who had come up with the idea for the vitamin study with Ms. Swan and works for a start-up that helps groups run their own studies and trials. “We are making a decision as a group to try to see what works and what doesn’t work and sharing the information. We didn’t want another hoop to jump through just to figure out if something works.”

Joseph Kvedar, a physician who founded and directs the Center for Connected Health at Partners Healthcare in Boston and who supports citizen-science efforts, says he worries that the more citizen scientists adopt the traditions of mainstream science, “the more you will choke off creativity and innovation.”

Stephen Friend, who runs “That’s My Data!” with Ms. Terry, came up with the project’s name earlier this year because, he says, “it reflects the absurdity of the current situation.”

A pediatric oncologist by training, Dr. Friend co-founded Sage Bionetworks in Seattle after many years in the pharmaceutical industry. His mission was to build a neutral place where data could be collected and anyone could leverage it to make discoveries—including patients.

Earlier this year, Dr. Friend convened a meeting in Toronto with 60 academics, scientists and patients to discuss ways to work together. One participant was John Wilbanks, who earned a degree in philosophy from Tulane and went on to run Science Commons, which focuses on getting scientists to collaborate by signing agreements to exchange research data.

Mr. Wilbanks hopes that more collaboration between citizen and professional scientists will lead to discoveries to benefit his sisters, one of whom is profoundly autistic, while the other has a very aggressive form of arthritis.

“To help people like my sisters, there needs to be a large enough sample of people who contribute genomic information so we can draw statistically significant inferences,” says Mr. Wilbanks. “Privacy law stands in the way of getting a million full genome sequences and a million full sets of phenotypes of those individuals.”

Mr. Wilbanks, who recently left Science Commons, created a standard consent document that will allow people to agree to let their genetic data be studied by anyone who is interested—as long as the investigator shares the results.

The first project that will use the documents involves a group of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Friend found a company willing to sequence the patients’ entire genetic codes for free. The patients will sign Mr. Wilbanks’s consent form, enabling them to share their medical information with the professional scientists attending the next Sage conference next year. The data will be studied to uncover genetic differences that might explain why some people respond to standard medications and some do not. Any correlations found will be shared with the patients.

The endpoint of the project was devised by both citizen and professional scientists working with Sage. Dr. Friend says he hopes that the patients will use the results to fuel their own follow-up experiments.

“We want to show patients what can be done,” says Dr. Friend. “This will point the direction to the next experiment.”

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An Drochaid/The Bridge Rising is our lively documentary about the ten-year battle against the Skye Bridge tolls. Originally broadcast in shorter form on BBC Alba, this new cinematic version, featuring more of the story and an especially commissioned sound track, has been supported by Creative Scotland.  An Drochaid/The Bridge Rising follows the many twists and turns of events through the words of the protagonists themselves, from protesters to prosecutors, engineers to financiers, politicians to police officers, uncovering several surprises in the telling.

To view a clip of the film, click here

Author: Uist Wool

Uist Wool is a community benefit society that will operate a new spinning mill and wool centre on the island of Grimsay in the Outer Hebrides.

With the encouragement of our communities, and from leaders in woolwork from the Harris Tweed Authority to Scottish craftspeople and the Green Mountain Spinnery (Vermont), Uist Wool is on its way to opening a new spinning mill in the Outer Hebrides in 2013.

The Uist Wool Mill will spin local and other fleece into desirable, unusual yarns to supply weavers, craftspeople, and visitors alike. It will help to revitalise this traditional island industry through creating employment, training and workspace using a local asset – wool. Uist Wool will also become a Centre where skills, ideas, design and inspiration are shared by young and old, novices and experts, islanders and visitors alike, through training programmes, workshops and education.

Uist Wool will operate a new spinning mill at Scotvein on the island of Grimsay in the Outer Hebrides that uses a valuable and sustainable resource, wool, to create a high quality spun yarn with a unique Uist style.

After years of community concern about the decline of the traditional woollen industries in the Uists and the upheaval in the Harris Tweed industry, the local Wool Development Group was formed in 2008.  Through a series of community meetings and workshops with the public, crofters and craftspeople from Berneray to Barra and a comprehensive feasibility study completed in 2010, the idea to establish a community based wool-spinning mill was agreed.

Uist Wool has naturally progressed from the comprehensive research and development work undertaken by the Wool Development Group and is now constructing the production area of the Mill, undertaking product trials, creating a visual and digital identity to the enterprise with the goal of launching the first Uist Wool products by Winter 2013.

OVER two million people in Scotland, more than half the adult population, regularly take part in voluntary activities under the arts umbrella, making it one of the biggest areas where the voluntary sector meets mainstream society.

With over 10,000 groups, mainly operated by volunteers for the love of their past-time, voluntary arts plays a key part in Scottish culture, providing opportunities to sing, dance, knit, act, draw and play an instrument, to name just a few.

Such is the interest in voluntary arts that Voluntary Arts Scotland (VAS), the development agency for amateur arts and crafts, has tasked itself with mapping the sector in 2014 in a bid to make it even easier for people to get involved.

“Quietly people attend rehearsals, tutor others, share skills and organise community events,” said Jemma Neville, VAS director.

“Together with partners, we plan to undertake a mapping of local cultural infrastructure across Scotland, and look into the ways in which voluntary arts groups, professional artists, venues and public services can strengthen and support one another.”

With so much going on in this area, this task isn’t an easy one but VAS is determined to create a stronger environment for amateur arts to flourish.

Already a worthy champion of the sector, VAS offers information and advice to anyone involved in voluntary arts and crafts, helping make connections between local groups, local authorities and voluntary sector agencies and ensuring the voice of the voluntary cultural sector is heard by local and national government.

More than just a fun local activity, VAS believes that local arts activities are vital to the health, social and economic development of Scottish communities.

“We want to turn up the volume on the achievements of local activities so that other people and places can learn about them and experience the feel good factor that comes from arts participation,” Neville continued.

“There is a resilient spirit running through the voluntary arts sector, despite tough economic times, but even more people could enjoy the benefits of cultural creativity if obstacles in their path were removed.”

The Epic Awards were set up in 2010  to promote, support and champion the voluntary cultural sector. – Click here to see more.

You can participate in this year’s EPIC awards by voting in our People’s Choice Award, a fun award for the honour of being the public’s favourite. To cast your vote, please view the entries below and vote by clicking the green ‘thumbs-up’ button under your preferred entry (only one vote per person for each group – you will be asked to register solely for the purpose of voting). – 

Vote for the People’s Choice by clicking here