Author: Greater Govanhill

We believe in doing journalism differently. We want to do journalism that serves the community and brings about positive change. A huge part of that is being open, approachable and inclusive. 

That’s why we’re excited to open ‘The Community Newsroom’ right in the heart of Govanhill. The project is a collaboration between Greater Govanhill community magazine and investigative journalism outlet, The Ferret – whose Glasgow staff will share our newsroom while the organisation continues its work across Scotland. This will be the first ever office space for both partners. 

It’s in a prime location, just off Victoria Road in the Southside of Glasgow. It will allow us to have a space that we can collaboratively work, host events, workshops and drop-in sessions for members of the community who want to share their own stories. 

We see it as a hub for community building and a space for sharing of stories, ideas, and perspectives. It will be an innovative space for hyperlocal, community based journalism to collaborate with rigorous investigative journalism; not seen anywhere else in the country. Our first collaborative project, exploring solutions to health inequalities, is already underway.

But we need your help with start up costs to get it up and running. If we could raise £5000 that would mean we can make it more accessible, redecorate, get a sign painted and kit it out with all it needs to be the community media hub we envision.

We know, of course, that money is tight this winter and realise that not everyone has pounds to spare. You can help by 

• Sharing this Crowdfunder
• Donating furniture, house plants or decorations
• Lending skills/helping out with renovations

If we do reach our target, we hope to hold a launch event in November, and you’re all invited! We have always been bowled over by the support of our community and thank any in advance for any contribution they make.

Author: Scottish Parliament

A Holyrood Committee has called for the Scottish Government to demonstrate increased leadership and oversight in the delivery of the Community Empowerment Act (“The Act”), as a new report exposes significant unmet demand for allotments and growing spaces across Scotland. 

Read the report

Seven years after its introduction, the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee has undertaken an inquiry into the Act, examining whether it has improved the availability of allotments and reduced the barriers to accessing them.

The report highlights the benefits that access to land for growing can have on people’s health, the environment, food security, and on communities.

Despite positive developments since the Act came into force, the Committee found that further action is now needed if the ambitions contained in it are to be met. 

Evidence revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had led to a further surge in demand and the emerging cost-of-living crisis is also expected to drive up the need for growing spaces even further.

The inquiry heard that demand for allotment space is even more acute in Scotland’s cities, with the number of people on waiting lists in Edinburgh almost doubling since 2019, rising from 3,000 to 5,600 and Aberdeen’s waiting list increasing over six-fold, from 150 to 1,000 people in 5 years.

With demand for allotments and growing space far outstripping supply, the Committee has warned that broader Scottish Government plans for developing community growing, food growth strategies and improving access to land are all being held back.

The Committee has made several recommendations in its report for the Scottish Government, as well as proposing actions for local government.

Recommendations to the Scottish Government include:

• Increasing the leadership and oversight provided by the Scottish Government to improve access to allotments and growing spaces.
• The creation of a national partnership forum which could foster cross-sectoral collaboration, mutual support and enable local authorities to share expertise and good practice.
• Reflecting the importance of allotments and food growing in wider strategies such as the National Planning Framework, the forthcoming Biodiversity Strategy, and the implementation of the new Good Food Nation Bill.
• Tackling the complexity of existing rights under the Act for ‘community asset transfers’ which were created to enable the transfer of property and land to community groups.
• The importance of land for growing food being incorporated into planning frameworks.
• Improved clarity about how the requirement for local authorities to publish Food Growing Strategies intersects with the new requirement to produce Good Food Nation strategies.

Commenting on the report, Committee Convener Ariane Burgess MSP said:

“The Community Empowerment Act recognised in 2015 how important allotments are to communities and individuals. Whilst there have been many positive developments since then, there is still a significant and increasing demand which is not being met, and access to land remains a challenge.

“Scotland’s appetite for improved access to allotments and growing space is flourishing, in part due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also due to the rising cost-of-living and levels of food insecurity facing people across the country.

“The benefits of allotments were made clear to the Committee by the many passionate individuals we met in our visits to sites and in the evidence we received.

“These benefits extend from improving health and well-being to tackling social isolation, intergenerational engagement, education opportunities, carbon reduction and improved biodiversity. Nurturing communities’ and individuals’ interests in getting involved should be a priority for the government.

“Our hope is that this report prepares the ground for real change and that the Scottish Government now demonstrate increased leadership and a renewed commitment to the Act to deliver on its own food growth and wellbeing ambitions.”

Author: FirstPort

Meet this year’s shortlist

The Social Innovation Challenge funds and supports innovators to kick-start solutions that tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time. The programme will address a new theme every year and in 2022 we looked for innovative solutions to climate change issues faced by rural communities in Scotland. This was in response to the increasingly worrying climate emergency and its effects on the most at-risk communities within Scotland. 

We received 13 applications in response to the Challenge, from the south of Scotland to the very north. We were thoroughly impressed by the caliber of the applications we received, as well as the passion demonstrated by the innovators behind these ideas. Over the last two weeks, our shortlisting panel had the very difficult task of selecting the strongest applications. This has led to four projects being progressed to the final stage of the Social Innovation Challenge. The four shortlisted solutions are: 

• The Farr North Community Development Trust are looking to ensure that everyone in Farr can get to the places they need to get to, when they need to get there. Their aim is to establish a Community Transport Enterprise, utilising volunteers to drive pool electric vehicles. It will be an on-demand service offering affordable door-to-door transport across a very rural, sparsely populated and challenging geography which features in the worst percentile for geographical access. The solution will address rural inequalities and deprivation, as well as delivering significant carbon savings through the use of the electric fleet of vehicles. 
• Iona Energy Ltd (IEL) is a community-led company on the ‘island off an island’ of Iona, which is a two-ferry three-hour journey from the Scottish mainland. IEL will install a ground source Heat Network, which will provide energy efficiency and affordable, sustainable low-carbon heat for a remote, fragile island community. The Heat Network will deliver a single-step transformation of over 40% of the combined residential, business and visitor heat-load of this globally renowned island. The Network will increase energy security, reduce bills, boost businesses, retain energy revenue, generate permanent community income, and catalyse further expansion of Iona’s Roadmap to a comprehensive cross-island low-carbon energy transition. 
• Propagate (Scotland) CIC are looking to grow the Local Food Hub in the Glenkens by creating a thriving, producer-led but community-involved sustainable and local supply chain. The Food Hub will address the challenge of availability and accessibility of locally produced good food in the local community. It will do this by cooperating as a producer-led collective, combining resources on a shared platform to offer a wide range of products. Produce will be delivered within a defined radius, partnering where possible with the local community transport company using electric vehicles.  
• Ullapool Unpacked C.I.C. is set up to address the challenge of access to sustainable shopping options in a rural, Highland community. They want to help people produce less waste with a focus on reducing single use plastic consumption. They want to expand upon their existing service (currently a small refill trailer) and open a large Bricks-and-Mortar Refill Shop and Community Climate Hub. The Hub side of the enterprise will offer educational workshops and events around sustainability, as well as providing a space for food preservation and mending. 

Author: Anna Chworow, Nourish

Try mentioning the “agricultural subsidy reform”, and see the light drain from other people’s eyes. Apart from a handful of die-hard enthusiasts, the new Agriculture Bill is failing to ignite the nation’s imagination. But it should! The government is designing a new farming subsidy system – the first one ever made in Scotland –and there are many reasons for everyone to care about this issue.

Firstly, the Bill will have major implications for biodiversity and our transition to net zero. Nearly three quarters of Scotland’s land is used for farming. What we do with this land – what we produce on it and how we produce it – has huge impact on our wildlife. The subsidy reform could ensure we pay farmers to leave room for nature, create wildlife corridors, and grow sufficient diversity of crops to support pollinators. We could pay more to farmers who use less pesticides and antibiotics. We could also encourage them to create and maintain vital carbon sinks in the soils, pastures and peatlands. With agriculture accounting for approximately 20% of Scotland’s carbon emissions, we will not get to net zero without just transition in farming.

Secondly, there is a strong link between our collective health and wellbeing and agriculture. There are of course the obvious impacts from the use of antibiotics and pesticides, but the current system has other paradoxes at play. One of the contradictions is that it pays comparatively little to those producing fruit and veg. That’s because the majority of the payments are based on the amount of land farmed, and fruit and veg production uses less land than beef farming or cereal crops. Increasing subsidies to those that grow more of what we need to eat to stay healthy would make these foods more affordable to all. Incidentally, linking the subsidy to the area of land also means that the biggest landowners get most of public money – something that certainly needs to be reassessed! Finally, we also need to consider if subsidising the cereal crops which are used to produce alcohol is a good use of public money.

Thirdly, what we subsidise says a lot about our food culture and what we value. Many people want Scotland to produce more of what we eat, and for us to eat more of what we produce. Subsidy reform can be the locus of this change. This means supporting urban agriculture and small scale farmers, both of which tend to sell direct to consumers, not to commodity markets. We could also offer a percentage of the agriculture budget to local authorities to help them procure food locally. Finally, we could support those who produce nutrient-dense, heritage varieties of foods, which are as important for our health as they are for growing a stronger food culture.

So, what can you and I do? The consultation on the new scheme closes on 21 st November. This is a good place to have your views heard directly by the government, but it’s not the only opportunity. The Bill will not be passed until 2023/24, and between now and then there will be plenty of opportunities to write to MSPs, sign petitions and make sure a wide range of voices are heard. For more updates, you can keep an eye on the Farm for Scotland’s Future campaign. Or you could try dropping “agricultural subsidy reform” into conversation and get others enthused about the possibility of change.

Author: Severin Carrell, Rob Evans and David Pegg, The Guardian

King Charles has been allowed to vet and potentially lobby for changes to emergency legislation to freeze rents in Scotland because the measures could affect tenants on his private Highland estate at Balmoral.

A bill to stop landlords unjustifiably raising rents for the next six months because of the cost of living crisis is being rushed through the Scottish parliament this week.

The King’s involvement, under rules known in Scotland as crown consent, can be revealed after the rules at Holyrood were changed following a Guardian investigation into the monarch’s power to influence and amend the UK’s laws.

The Guardian revealed last year that ministers in Edinburgh had allowed Queen Elizabeth to vet at least 67 pieces of legislation that affected her personal property and public powers under the arcane custom, inherited from Westminster. A Scottish government memo revealed it was “almost certain” draft laws had been secretly changed to secure the Queen’s approval.

There has been growing criticism that the unelected monarch is able to use the secretive mechanism to secure changes to proposed laws without the public being informed; an allegation rejected by the royal family.

In response, Holyrood’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, told the Scottish government it now had to inform parliament as soon as a new bill was tabled whether the monarch had been allowed to see it first.

Previously, ministers would only tell MSPs at the final stages of a bill’s parliamentary scrutiny that the monarch had been allowed to secretly vet it. Ministers have also refused to release letters from the late Queen’s solicitors lobbying for changes on her behalf.

The cost of living (tenant protection) Scotland bill is the first piece of draft legislation affected by Johnstone’s ruling and is the first at Holyrood to be vetted by the King.

In a further development, Scottish ministers said on Monday they would also start explaining why crown consent was required for new bills. Previously, such explanations have not been made public.

In an announcement a few hours before the rent control bill was published, George Adam, the minister for parliamentary business, said ministers would now explain how a bill applied to the royal family’s personal and official interests, and why crown consent was needed.

What the government does not say is whether any changes were made to the draft bill at the King’s request and, if so, what those were.

The government had previously rejected opposition demands for greater transparency about the monarch’s ability to secretly lobby ministers to change legislation, and the monarch’s rights to scrutinise legislation before MSPs.

A policy memorandum published with the draft bill states: “Crown consent will be required because it is considered that the provisions in the bill affecting private residential tenancies could affect residential tenancies on His Majesty’s private estates and those on land forming part of the Scottish crown estate.”

Crown Estate Scotland manages land and property which were previously held by the monarch, but its profits are used by the Scottish government.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats, who helped reveal last year the extent to which crown consent applies in Scotland, said Adam’s measures “barely scratch the surface”.

Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader, said: “This policy would ensure we still remain utterly in the dark. The Scottish government should instead specifically list any changes made to legislation at the request of the King’s lawyers when it arrives at and goes through parliament.

“Everyone deserves to know how their laws are being made because transparency and scrutiny are pillars of our democracy.”

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said if his party won power at Holyrood it would introduce laws requiring ministers to publish correspondence on the King’s lobbying.

“I think people would expect any democratic system, a system designed for the people and in a representative parliamentary democracy, for these issues all to be out in the open for people to know how decisions are made, why decisions are made and where suggested amendments have come from,” Sarwar said.

As an interim measure, Labour said it hoped to expand Scotland’s freedom of information legislation to include correspondence by the King’s lawyers. A private member’s bill being tabled by Katy Clark, a Scottish Labour MSP, aims to update Holyrood’s 20-year-old freedom of information regulations.

Sarwar’s pledge represents the most radical proposal in the UK to open up the arcane consent mechanism. More than 1,000 laws were vetted by the late Queen during her reign before they were passed by the Westminster parliament.

The UK government will simply state consent has been applied, but provide no further information.

A spokesperson for the King at Buckingham palace said: “King’s consent has been requested for this bill and will be processed in the usual way. Consent is provided on the advice of government in line with convention.”

Author: Andy Wightman, Holyrood Magazine

Earlier this summer, the Scottish Government launched a consultation paper seeking views on proposals for a land reform bill to be introduced by end of 2023.

Although other issues are included, the proposals focus on measures to tackle Scotland’s scale and concentration of landownership whereby so much land is held by very few landowners who exercise a form of monopoly power in local areas.

I write this looking out over the land owned by Simec Lochaber Hydropower 2 Ltd., part of the GFG Alliance which owns the Lochaber aluminium smelter.

Quite apart from questions over the future of the smelter and associated employment, the use and management of this vast estate is important and there is no doubt that more effective regulation is required of holdings such as this which extends to over 100,000 acres of land.

The consultation proposes that large-scale landholdings be subject to a statutory code of responsibility, mandatory management plans, and a public interest test when they are sold. The proposals derive from recommendations from the Scottish Land Commission, which was established in 2017 to advise government on land issues.

Any measures designed to deliver greater accountability over decision-making concerning Scotland’s largest landholdings are welcome. The key question is whether they will secure the objectives set out.

The proposals are designed (according to ministers) to tackle “the issues associated with scale and concentration of landownership in Scotland”. Read this carefully. They are not designed to deal with the underlying issue (scale and concentration) but merely to mitigate the impacts associated with this.

The Scottish Land Commission admitted in the advice to ministers that:

“The measures will not, on their own, deliver the longer term systemic change in patterns of land ownership that are required to realise the full benefits of Scotland’s land resource. Achieving this will require more fundamental policy reform, probably including changes to the taxation system.”

There are two proven means of reducing the scale and concentration of private landownership – inheritance law and tax. Succession law reform since the French Revolution (where children enjoy legal rights to inherit land) has delivered a very diverse small scale pattern of landownership.

In Scotland, by contrast, children have no legal rights to inherit land and the pattern of singular, usually male, succession has perpetuated the concentrated pattern of power.

Succession law reform takes a long time to have any effect, however, which is why tax policy needs to be taken far more seriously. In an over-heated land market where corporations and speculative investors are pushing up the price of land, taxation instruments can make a huge difference. 

Even a modest one per cent annual local land tax would raise millions of pounds in revenue for local government and effect a commensurate reduction in land prices. Allied with greater powers of intervention for local government (for example to allow it to buy land for development at a value set by its existing use and not by its potential future use), a virtuous cycle of private and public sector investment could be generated.

But tax is considered as an afterthought in the government’s consultation paper. Indeed, at one public meeting an official stated that any ideas on tax would not be considered for inclusion in the forthcoming bill. 

Concerning too is the lack of any consideration of what role local government can and should play. The Scottish Land Commission themselves in their advice to ministers noted that:

“Running through all three proposed mechanisms is the underlying intention to better connect landownership and decision-making with local democratic accountability. In most northern European countries that have regulatory mechanisms for land ownership, decision-making is generally embedded at a municipality level.”

Since the very early days of devolution, ministers have ignored local government in their various land reform measures. It has always struck me as absurd that if a community in Caithness wishes to acquire a disused water treatment plant, it needs to have the consent of Scottish ministers rather than Highland Council. Similarly, the proposals being consulted upon right now suggest that ministers or the Scottish Land Commission should administer the new regulatory powers.

Ironically, whilst ministers are proposing measures to curtail the power of the owners of larger landholdings, it is at the same time concentrating even more power in the hands of civil servants and themselves in Edinburgh.

Land reform is fundamentally about democratising land.

In a book I wrote at the beginning of devolution, I observed: “Land reform is not simply about tactical interventions in the status quo. 

“It involves reform in the way power is derived, distributed, transferred and exercised. It involves meaningful reform of the tenure system, the ownership of land, the market in land, the division of land, the use of land, the fiscal status of land and the occupation of land.

And it involves eliminating those characteristics of the current system which serve to perpetuate the status quo, which frustrate the public interest and which are antithetical to a just, fair and open society in a new Scotland. It is thus a highly political venture because in order to promote social, economic and environmental advancement, it needs to challenge and reorganise existing power structures.”

Those power structures include government.

Author: Janey Starling

Too fixated on doing ‘good’ and being polite, charities have stopped fighting for social justice

The runaway cost of living in the UK is terrifying. Parents are going days without food in order to feed their children, elderly people are unable to heat their homes and winter isn’t even here yet. The government has largely turned its back while people plummet into poverty and, as usual, charities are expected to pick up the pieces.

Charities help the growing number of people who have been discarded by the business market and neglected by the shrinking state. Yet, as the Tory policy machine creeps further into authoritarianism and one in six working households face poverty, charities have become more than a safety net. They are a permanent feature of the government’s refusal to meet people’s basic needs.

On the surface, this work is honourable. But beneath lies a more insidious manoeuvring of power, and I don’t think it’s good.

The day my fading faith in charities finally evaporated was 16 June 2017.

I was working in the campaigns team at one of the UK’s biggest housing charities when the Grenfell Tower fire happened. A BBC TV live stream showed thick smoke billowing from the charred tower block. The grief and shock inside the office was palpable.

It had been two days since the news broke and, despite having a full-time press team, the organisation had not made any public statement. The silence was enraging. I remember walking over to the policy team to ask why, and a flustered policy officer barked at me: “Because this isn’t a housing issue, it’s a fire safety issue.”

Grenfell was a Rorschach test for class-consciousness. Looking at the burning tower block, did you see a tragic accident? Or the outcome of long-term state neglect for people living in desperate housing need? Housing is, after all, a sanitised way to talk about poverty. And poverty is political. A housing charity’s failure to speak truth to power in what should have been a watershed moment for race and class in the UK was bleak.

But this was unsurprising given the context of charities in the UK.

Charity services have become increasingly necessary due to austerity and now the cost of living. But, cowed by funders, co-opted by the Conservative government and edging further into commercialisation, their campaigning voice has been gagged.

This state of affairs is not new – the concept of charity itself originates in religion, philanthropy and capitalist inequality – but recent reforms have made things worse.

Publicly criticising charity is an uncomfortable thing to do. As with the NHS, the fear of playing into the hands of a right-wing lobby seeking to crush the sector can prevent us from identifying its flaws and the harm caused to both staff and people using charity services.

But dysfunction is not a licence to destroy – it is a signal that urgent change is needed. And in our current political environment, unquestioning deference to the concept of charity is unhelpful. Assumed to be a ‘good thing’, staffed by ‘good people’, I believe it’s the unquestioned ‘goodness’ of charities that is actively obstructing the broader pursuit of social justice in the UK.

‘A moral safety valve’

It seems monstrous to suggest that supporting people who are struggling could be anything other than good. But penetrating this notion of goodness is crucial if we are to recognise that charities are increasingly complicit in upholding inequality.

As writer and activist Arundhati Roy said in her essay ‘The NGO-ization of Resistance’: “NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state… their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.”

Food banks are one example. A photo of former prime minister David Cameron volunteering at a food bank circulated earlier this year. Given that food bank use increased by 2,612% while he was prime minister, the hypocrisy was staggering – but not to him. In his view, the responsibility to make sure everyone can eat should fall to Cameron the citizen rather than Cameron the government minister.

This exemplifies what Janet Poppendieck, author of the book ‘Sweet Charity?’, has identified: that charity acts as a “moral safety valve” that “normalises destitution and legitimates personal generosity as a response to major social and economic dislocation”.

Cameron, the architect of austerity, fantasised about a “big society” where charity would replace state services and liveable wages, and middle-class do-gooders could offset their guilt through goodwill. The structures that determine who volunteers at and who uses food banks remain in place – but people benefiting from class inequality don’t need to feel bad about it.

Threats, restrictions and ‘respectability politics’

The government loves this Victorian vision of charity; not so much charities’ work campaigning for systemic overhaul. Many charities in the UK combine both roles, with the service provider role granting the organisation legitimacy to campaign in the interests of their supposed beneficiaries – a dual-operating model described as “services for the poor and advocacy with the rich”.

However, these dual-model charities have been defanged by growing restrictions on what campaigning activities they can undertake. The 2014 Lobbying Act, which introduced bureaucratic and financial threats to restrict any charity activity that could – vaguely – “be seen as seeking to influence election outcomes”, has created a culture of risk-aversion through the need to be ‘impartial’. The 2017 Tampon Tax Fund made cash available to underfunded women’s charities – on the strict condition they didn’t use it to campaign.

Legislation and funding restrictions, on top of Charity Commission (the regulatory body for charities in England and Wales) red tape, make it difficult for any organisation to point at the government and state the obvious: you are killing people.

Last year, the Runnymede Trust issued an online statement criticising the UK government over its race report, which had concluded that systemic racism did not exist in Britain. In response, MPs reported the race equality think tank to the Charity Commission for stepping out of line. Runnymede was investigated for six months, at risk of losing its charity status. Although it was cleared, the case served as a warning to others.

These dynamics of control and dependency between the state and the web of services and charities that rely on state funding and/or recognition to perform their work – who ultimately become dependent on the state rather than able to challenge it – are known as the “non-profit industrial complex” (NPIC).

California-based academic Dylan Rodríguez, who coined the term, has critiqued the mechanisms of control charities face in this system: “As organisations linked to the NPIC assert their relative autonomy from, and independence of, state influence, they remain fundamentally tethered to the state through extended structures of financial and political accountability.”

In the UK, this financial tethering is easy to identify and ugly to acknowledge. The Home Office made millions available to charities through Prevent, its Islamophobic surveillance programme, on the condition that communities in receipt of much-needed funding would, in return, give data on Muslims to the government.

But it isn’t just the threat of financial ruin or administrative entrapment that has tamed charities. There is something more insidious at play: respectability politics.

Committees not campaigns

Charities in the UK are increasingly impotent to criticise the state. Afraid to upset funding commissioners, and snuggling up to government in their consultative role, charities cling on to their service contracts and sit politely on committees, offering tepid policy briefs, while the government does whatever it wants. This dynamic is reinforced by the revolving door between the civil service and NGOs.

Endlessly churning out responses to white papers and consultations in order to make the most of supposed opportunities for change, policy teams are perpetually on the back foot. This leaves little capacity for creative thinking, or for ambitious or collaborative campaigning work.

Rather than proactively envisioning or creating opportunities – as direct action does – charities wait their turn to be called to consultations, round-tables or other paper-shuffling ‘opportunities’ where their ‘expert’ voices and ‘recommendations’ may be referenced in a new policy framework (which is then ignored).

Austerity has wrecked solidarity by pitting charities against one another for money; and if being truthful is troublesome and could cost you funding or status, it’s better to aim for what’s ‘realistic’ and distance yourself from anyone who could jeopardise that. In other words, keep your head down and stick to the status quo. Civility keeps charities submissive.

This is the environment that sees charities scrabbling on a hamster wheel of parliamentary bills, competing with one another to amend them. This is the environment that sees women’s charities lobbying for pitiful modifications to draconian legislation, considering it a ‘win’. This is the environment that stopped the UK’s biggest housing charity from saying that Grenfell was an act of class war.

The desire to ‘do good’

Charity authority is upheld by emotional scaffolding, primarily feelings of guilt, goodwill and goodness.

That extends beyond donors and volunteers. Many charity staff are pulled into the work by a desire to ‘do good’ (I was one of them) in an unfair society.

But the ‘nice’, ‘polite’ culture that is typical of charity campaigning is both a cause and consequence of what are often exploitative working conditions within the sector. The ingrained notion that charities are there to ‘do good’ at all costs, often without valuing people’s labour by paying them proper wages, makes martyrs of staff and maintains the exclusion of anyone who can’t afford to build a CV from unpaid volunteering.

The resulting impact on an organisation’s critical analysis shows. In a sector where there are more middle-class white women named Lucy than people of colour, there is poor staff unionisation and power-building internally. This translates into a total neglect of power-building and solidarity as a route to change externally.

At the housing charity I worked for, the management’s attempts to cut pay and pensions were accompanied by manipulative urges for staff to accept worse working conditions in order to ensure they “could provide services for the most vulnerable”. This ignored the reality that some of the lowest-paid staff in those services were on housing benefit themselves, because their wages were not enough to cover their own housing costs.

Women’s charities: infrastructure over ideals

This assumed distinction between the “professional” and the “service user” is most apparent in charities supporting women fleeing abuse, which operate as though workers are not also survivors, expecting us to stay emotionally disengaged from traumatising work. Within dual-model women’s charities, the situation is further complicated by a separation (and often class difference) between people working in frontline services, delivering emotionally exhausting and often high-risk casework, and those in head office, doing the bigger-picture campaigning and policy work.

This stratified way of operating dampens the incendiary solidarity that kickstarted the anti-violence movement and its first refuges.

The urge to professionalise is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, having paid staff ensures resources are allocated to build the infrastructure that helps women escape abuse, and organisations can advocate at a national level. But prioritising the maintenance of that infrastructure can overshadow a charity’s values, with organisations applying for fixed-term project funding that is more aligned to funder ideals and so-called ‘innovation’ than what women, and workers, actually need.

Last year, workers from UK domestic abuse charity Solace Women’s Aid publicly called out “a wider turn from a grassroots feminist organisation, to a corporate entity, of corporate sector values with charity sector salaries.” (Solace Women’s Aid also responded publicly.) It is the quest for respectability that establishes a grim power dynamic between career CEOs vying to be head girls for the civil service, and the workers and women they represent.

The positioning of women’s charities as polite, submissive and ‘reasonable’ is a dark betrayal of the broader feminist movement. Afraid to bite the hand that feeds them lest they lose their service contracts, they are rewarded for their complicity in keeping things as they are – not confrontational, but ready to concede.

Feminist academic Alison Phipps brands this self-interested strain of feminism as “political whiteness”, which seeks to gain power in the short term within the existing system, “rather than overthrow the system itself”.

This fixation on legitimacy throws marginalised women – especially trans, disabled and migrant women – under the bus. It dismisses grassroots groups as unreasonable and unrealistic because they, unhindered by restrictions affecting ‘legitimate’ organisations, are willing to be outspoken.

Yet the unreasonable and unrealistic are the fertile ground of liberation movements. In her essay ‘We were never meant to survive’, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo prompts feminist anti-violence organisations to reflect on whether they are working from a place of integrity, asking: “Is the way we work, the way we prioritise and engage in social change, reflective of the change we’re seeking?”

I don’t think many charities in the UK could answer ‘yes’ – poor working conditions make their ‘good’ work redundant. Boxing ourselves into respectability, and submission to state control, won’t make a dent in social inequality.

I don’t blame the charities

Despite my disillusionment, I don’t lay the blame with charities or their well-intentioned workers. This takes the heat off the state and the philanthropic foundations that invest significant wealth in charities in pursuit of their own social agendas, escaping critique by dressing it up as altruism.

Many charities provide vital services and transform the lives of individuals they help. But they are workplaces where kind people become co-opted into a culture of crushing mediocrity, false urgency, poor management and a dearth of imagination.

Throughout history, our liberation has been won through confrontation, not negotiation. Often, it has been won through political strategies designed and led by the people who are most oppressed; who refuse to let the parameters of freedom be defined by those who produce their suffering. Limiting our goals to what is ‘realistic’ often means accepting defeat before we’ve even tried to fight.

Thankfully, there are people moving against the grain, through unions and collectives like Charity So White, to bring organisations into alignment with their values.

This often means being ready to build solidarity and turn down money. Through the Together Against Prevent coalition, for instance, over 50 organisations have pledged not to accept Prevent funding.

Ultimately, though, the best resistance to respectability politics may involve shunning the charity structure, with its regulatory restrictions and single-issue ‘sectors’, in its entirety.

If goodness equates to being toothless, it’s time charities stopped ‘doing good’ and started doing what’s right. The stakes are now too high not to.

Author: Karen McVeigh, The Guardian

An unofficial network of fishers, divers and scientists are banding together to stop illegal fishing and curb coastal destruction     Full article 

Scotland’s coastal waters are in trouble. They contain some of the world’s richest and most diverse marine life: bottlenose dolphins, porpoises, minke whales and orcas are among 20 cetacean species found along its coast, while seagrass and kelp forests host otters, octopus, lobsters, sea urchins and squid.

But these waters are vulnerable. A sobering assessment by the Scottish government in 2020, found that it had failed to meet targets to prevent damage to priority marine environments, causing five large seabed habitats to shrink. Years of dredging, trawling, anchoring and overfishing are to blame, according to the report, which found that the climate crisis, ocean acidification, storms, disease and pollution from fish farms have also played a part.

As politicians fall short in tackling the accelerating human pressures on the seas, many coastal communities are taking matters into their own hands.

Howard Sargent and Rose Reid: saving marine life from rogue dredgers

In the clear waters of Lamlash Bay – a ribbon of sea between Holy Isle and the larger Isle of Arran – otters hunt for sea urchins among its kelp beds and maerl, a pink coralline seaweed, carpets the seabeds. But despite their protected status, these waters are threatened, says Howard Sargent, 56, a former architectural designer who lives on Holy Isle.

The sea here was not always so full of life. By the early 2000s, decades of trawling and dredging for fish had left it close to collapse. Sargent traces the problems back to the government’s decision in the 1980s to allow trawlers to fish closer to the coastline. “It’s the ‘tragedy of the commons’ – if it’s a free-for-all, everyone takes everything before anyone else can,” he says.

Residents intervened and in 2008, after a campaign, Lamlash Bay was designated a “no-take zone” – banning damaging fishing practices.

Since then, the waters have seen a dramatic revival. Lobsters are now four times as abundant and scallop density is four times higher. But rogue fishing vessels still seek to dredge the seabed for prawns and scallops.

Sargent and his partner, Rose Reid, 39, are part of an unofficial network of coastal defenders. “We keep an eye out for dubious fishing activities,” says Sargent.

He reports any potentially illegal fishing to Marine Scotland, the branch of government regulating Scotland’s seas and fisheries, but it is hard to secure convictions without solid proof, as vessels are allowed to transit through no-take zones.

In March 2019, Sargent spotted a trawler dragging nets through the bay early in the morning. He grabbed his camera and managed to get photographic evidence. “It had big nets out the back and there were seagulls overhead,” says Reid, a psychologist.

They were due to give evidence against the vessel in court but at the last minute, the skipper pleaded guilty to having fishing gear deployed and was fined £2,200.

Campaigners called the fine “paltry” – the maximum penalty is £50,000 – and the couple were disappointed the prosecution was stopped. But Sargent believes the case is a deterrent: “Local fishing boats are now aware that Lamlash Bay is well monitored.”

A spokesperson for Marine Scotland says it assesses all reports of suspected breaches of marine protected area (MPA) regulations and, where possible, deploys a compliance vessel to gather evidence and detain suspect boats. It is also “rolling out tracking and remote electronic monitoring across the inshore fleet”.

Chris Rickard and Lauren Smith: fighting to save the ‘manta ray of the north’

Three years ago, Chris Rickard became one of the few people in Britain to have seen a flapper skate in the wild. He spotted the elusive, critically endangered animal on a dive in the Summer Isles in the Scottish Highlands.

“I was struck by how something so massive and majestic could be so unknown in our waters,” says Rickard, a marine conservation consultant and keen diver, who lives near Macduff in Aberdeenshire.

The world’s largest skate, sometimes known as the “manta ray of the north”, flapper skates can reach up to three metres in length, with a wingspan of 2.5 metres. The giant predator, once common in British waters, is so rare that it has been described as extinct in large parts of its former range due to overfishing; the north-west coast of Scotland is one of its last strongholds.

A few weeks after his sighting, Rickard, 45, saw on social media that a mermaid’s purse – the egg case of skates – had been found by a scallop dive boat on Scotland’s west coast. He persuaded the boat’s skipper to take him to where it was found – the cold, dark waters of the Inner Sound of Skye, near the uninhabited island of Longay.

They dived more than 30 metres below the surface, where Rickard shone his torch through the gloom: “Suddenly I spotted a couple of purses.” By the end of the dive he had counted 40. “I knew they were alive, as I could see embryos wriggling inside some of them.”

On surfacing, he texted Lauren Smith, a friend and marine biologist who runs Saltwater Life, a shark research and conservation NGO. “This was really something,” says Smith, 39.

But live eggs, lying unprotected near scallop grounds, could be wiped out in seconds by dredgers. Rickard contacted Marine Scotland but no protection was put in place.

Returning to the site in 2020 with Smith and others, they found more than 100 egg cases – the largest known flapper skate egg-laying site in the world. With the help of Our Seas, an alliance of groups supporting sustainable seas, and Blue Marine Foundation, they publicised the find and called on the Scottish government to take action.

In March 2021, the government designated the site “the Red Rocks and Longay urgent marine protected area” and banned all fishing. It is now deciding on permanent protection measures.

Smith and Rickard would like to see more of Scotland’s waters protected from trawling. “At the moment, Scotland is doing a really good job of trashing our inshore waters,” Rickard says.

A Scottish government spokesperson said 37% of Scottish waters were MPAs and it was committed to increasing protections, including through new highly protected marine areas. These will cover at least 10% of Scottish waters by 2026, “prohibiting all extractive, destructive and depositional activities”.

John Aitchison: halting a fish farm in a protected area

John Aitchison, a wildlife cameraman, director and producer, has travelled to some of the world’s most remote places for films including the BBC’s Frozen Planet, to witness the wildlife crisis at first-hand.

But it was back home, in Mid-Argyll, that he decided to take action. A few weeks before Christmas 2016, he discovered plans for an industrial-sized fish farm off the Sound of Jura, a designated MPA.

The company behind the farm planned to site a dozen 100-metre circular cages capable of housing 1 million rainbow trout, just off the coast at Dounie. Nearly everyone thought the site was inappropriate, Aitchison, 56, says. “It felt like a juggernaut coming towards us.”

Kames Fish Farming argued its farm would be built and operated responsibly and would create local jobs. The community argued that pesticide discharge, sea lice and fish escaping from the farm would threaten the environment and wild salmon.

Aitchison, chair of the Friends of the Sound of Jura, had to take a crash course in licensing and planning law: they only had 28 days to oppose the granting of a licence by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. More than 3,000 people signed a petition against the plans, more than a third from Argyll’s villages and hamlets.

It was a frustrating process, says Aitchison. But they got a lucky break. A seabed survey found northern sea fans, some of Scotland’s rarest sea life, close to the proposed site. In December 2017, Kames Fish Farm withdrew its application.

“Although we succeeded, it left us realising how difficult it is to influence that type of decision. In Scotland, planning rules favour developers and they favour salmon farming,” Aitchison says.

A spokesperson for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency said itlistens to those who share an interest in Scotland’s water environment before it authorises a development.

Guardian

David Nairn and David Ainsley: protecting porpoises from noise pollution

Five years ago, David Nairn, a skipper and conservationist, was watching porpoises on his cruiser in the Firth of Clyde, the deepest coastal waters in the UK, when he noticed something amiss.

“We’d been surveying them, zigzagging up the Clyde,” says Nairn, 50, who records underwater noise, identifying the mammals – a protected species in Scottish waters – by their high pitched clicks. “But when I passed fish farms, there were none.”

Later analysis revealed a “horrendous noise”, says Nairn, founder of Clyde Porpoise. It was an acoustic deterrent device (ADD) used to scare off seals that attack fish-farm cages.

Porpoises, which are not a threat to fish farms, “are really affected by high-frequency noise”, says Nairn, who estimates as many as 2,500 live in the Clyde during the calving season.

Farther up the west coast, a marine biologist working in wildlife tourism was also convinced that acoustic deterrents were driving cetaceans away. “My life is out at sea, watching for porpoises, dolphins and whales,” says David Ainsley, a former creel skipper who runs Sealife Adventure, a wildlife tourism company in Seil Island, with his wife, Jean.

They say the difference between areas with salmon farms and those with none is like “chalk and cheese”. “If you damage the hearing of an echo-locating animal, it can die because it can’t find food,” he says.

Nairn and Ainsley, who met through the Coastal Communities Network, an alliance of grassroot groups in Scotland, began working together to tackle the problem.

They knew that, under Scottish law, fish farms using acoustic deterrents need a licence, unless they can demonstrate that the devices do not disturb cetaceans. They also knew that by 2018, about 90% of Scottish fish farms were using them.

Despite the licence requirement, Nairn and Ainsley discovered that Marine Scotland did not hold any information about how many acoustic deterrent devices were used in fish farms.

They argued – via petitions, parliamentary questions and using acoustic evidence – that the Scottish government should enforce existing law. During this time, deterrent use dropped off dramatically.

In November last year, the pair enlisted Guy Linley-Adams, an environmental solicitor, who made a formal complaint to the independent regulator, Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS), accusing Marine Scotland of failing to ensure fish farms were complying with the regulations.

In August, ESS published a report recommending improvements in the Scottish government’s “compliance process”, which it says have since been implemented. Linley-Adams described this as a “de facto ban” on acoustic devices in salmon farming, because it would be “impossible” to prove the use of the device would not disturb cetaceans, or for the industry to successfully apply for a licence, especially as effective alternatives such as seal nets are available.

The Scottish government told the Guardian it welcomed the ESS report and said fish farmers must obtain any relevant consent or demonstrate that acoustic devices “will not harm marine mammals’”. Salmon Scotland, which represents the salmon farming industry, said no devices were currently in use in Scottish farms.“There is no ‘victory’ or ‘de facto ban’,” a spokesman said.

Theo Bennison: mapping life on the seafloor

Marine ecologist Theo Bennison has spent the past five months on the Sea Beaver, a boat travelling around the Scottish coast to measure the health of the seas.

Operation Ocean Witness, run by Greenpeace and the Scottish charity Open Seas, relies on networks of local communities to report on threats including illegal fishing in MPAs.

In June, sources led them to Orkney, where they found dredging damage to maerl beds, which take decades to grow and act as a nursery for invertebrates and fish.

“It is shocking that damage like trawling and dredging is allowed to happen in protected areas,” says Bennison, 28, a researcher with Open Seas. “The government said it was going to protect biogenic reefs, which maerl beds are, and the fact that this has happened is pretty worrying.”

Open Seas will report its findings to Marine Scotland.

By using drone footage, Bennison and the team also helped produce the first map of an important seagrass meadow off Papa Westray, measuring 30 hectares (74 acres) in total.

There are already five fish farms in the area, says Bennison. “Hopefully, it will help the community in their battle against a new proposal for another fish farm.”

Author: Ninian Wilson, The National

COMMUNITY ownership of land in Scotland has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, according to a Scottish Government study.

The Community Ownership in Scotland 2021 report has shone a light on how local groups across Scotland are purchasing land from private individual landowners.

The most recent figures, taken from December 2021, show an eightfold increase in the number of community groups owning assets since 2000 – rising from 84 to 711.

And in the year leading up to December 2021, there was an increase of 48 (7%) from 663 in 2020.

Reflective of this trend, the number of Scottish community groups has soared from 74 in 2000 to 484 in 2021.

How much land do community groups own?

The area of land now owned by community groups has significantly risen in the last couple of decades.

There is now almost four times as much community-owned land in Scotland since 2000, an increase of more than 155,439 hectares – more than five times the size of Glasgow.

In the year leading up to December 2021 alone, there was an increase of 252 hectares of land.

There has also been marked variation in the year-on-year increases in community-owned land – largely due to the purchase of a small number of very large estates, which were all in the Highlands and Na h-Eileanan Siar.

What is the spread of community-owned land in Scotland?

The areas with the most community-owned assets are the Highlands (165) and Argyll and Bute (94).

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the area of community-owned land is found in the Highlands and Na h-Eileanan Siar. 203,719 hectares of land are owned in these two community groups combined.

The area of community-owned land outwith these areas has also risen – a 70% rise has been reported in the rest of Scotland.

A total of 118 of the 484 community groups in Scotland own more than one asset. The most owned by one group is 13.

What are people saying about the figures?

Lesley Riddoch, an expert on community land ownership, has said the trend is a largely positive one – but not without a few downsides.

She pointed to the Isle of Eigg, which recently celebrated 25 years of community ownership, as an example of “the incredible resourcefulness that can be unleashed when local people are in charge”.

However, she added that there are negatives – including burnout for local volunteers who “struggle to become experts in funding, governance, health and safety, housing, business and other complex systems”.

Another point raised is the escalating price of land, which Riddoch says is making community buyouts “almost impossible” for some groups.

Riddoch used the example of Tayvallich in Argyll, which has a market value of around £10 million, something the locals there will struggle to afford when the maximum Scottish Land Fund grant is around £1m.

The bigger issue for Riddoch is whether the Scottish Government intends to end Scotland’s feudal land ownership structure through “expensive, taxpayer-funded community buyout”.

She adds: “There must be several other strings to the land reform bow and that means biting the bullet to finally tax large estates in the same way every other European country does.

“Community ownership is icing on the land reform cake. Where’s the cake?”

Maggie Fyffe of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust said: “If a community has the commitment & energy to progress a community buyout, they should be given every assistance. As we’ve found on Eigg, having the opportunity to decide, progress & manage what is important to the community can make a world of difference.”

Commenting on the report, Land Reform Minister Mairi McAllan said: “Communities know best what’s right for them, including when it comes to how they own and use local land and buildings. So it’s great to see that the number of assets known to be in community ownership has increased eightfold over the past 20 years.

“These sustained upwards trends in community ownership show real progress and delivery of the Scottish Government’s ambitions for land reform.

“Our 2016 Land Reform Act made various changes to land ownership and management and established the Scottish Land Commission. And the Scottish Land Fund has over a number of years helped many community groups bring their visions for thriving local assets to life.

“While this is positive, we know there is much more work to be done.”

McAllan went on to reference the upcoming Land Reform Bill, expected in 2023, as a “a significant step forward in ensuring our land is owned and used in the public interest and to the benefit of the people”.

She added: “It supports and extends existing work to pass more power to people and local communities, and to encourage responsible and diverse landownership and communities having a say in how land in their area is used.”

Author: Steven Morris, The Guardian

Mared Llywelyn Williams, a 29-year-old education officer at a heritage site on Pen Llŷn in north Wales would love to be able to afford her own home. “But there’s no chance,” she says. “A terraced house perfect for a first-time buyer goes for £300k, a one bedroom fisherman’s cottage, £250,000. That’s outside the price range for me and most young people here.”

Llywelyn Williams left the Gwynedd village of Morfa Nefyn where she grew up for university, but after graduating wanted to return – and found she had no choice but to move back in with her family. Many of her contemporaries, even those with well-paid jobs – teachers, health professionals, lawyers – have left, squeezed out by second-home owners and property investors who have sent prices soaring.

“Where’s the justice in that? You should have the right to live in the place where you’re from,” Llywelyn Williams says. “If that doesn’t happen, communities like this will die out. We lose control.”

The Labour-led Welsh government seems to have heeded warnings like this and, working with Plaid Cymru, is bringing in an extraordinary raft of measures designed to stop communities such as Morfa Nefyn, a Welsh-speaking heartland, being hollowed out.

From next year, councils will be able to raise discretionary council tax premiums for second homes to 300% – so a £1,000 bill for a permanent resident would be £4,000 for a second-home owner. The government is also tightening the rules to ensure these owners cannot avoid the hefty tax by renting houses out as holiday lets for relatively short amounts of time, and plans to introduce a licensing scheme for holiday homes. Councils in second-home hotspots are to be allowed to apply to the Welsh government to increase land transaction tax – the Welsh equivalent of England’s stamp duty – to dampen prices.

This week it set the wheels in motion for a scheme to give local authorities the option to classify homes as primary residences, second homes or holiday lets. An owner would need planning permission to change a property’s classification from a primary residence to a second home, which the government hopes will help keep more properties available for local people.

The first minister, Mark Drakeford, said this was the “most radical” of the measures. “It would be a very significant intervention in the marketplace and probably represent the biggest intrusion in the way people conduct their affairs,” he told the Guardian. “If a property can only be sold as a primary residence, it is much more likely to go to a local person. Local buyers will have extra protection.”

Drakeford describes the approach as “many-stranded”: “No single policy intervention will make a difference in those communities where the concentration of second homes risks changing the character.”

At the recent Labour party conference, Wales’s plans attracted the attention of leaders from other parts of the UK with second-home issues, such as the Lake District and Yorkshire.

Arguably, the Welsh situation is even more dire because the loss of homes for local people puts at risk a country’s culture and language. Hotspots that are most under threat tend to be Welsh-language strongholds, such as in Pembrokeshire and Gwynedd where 40% of properties in some places are second homes or holiday lets.

Drakeford rejects the notion that the policies are anti-English. “It’s a myth that this is about stopping people from other places. Anyone who is Welsh will be just as affected by these rules. It’s palpably not about outsiders, about keeping people out. It is about making sure we have balanced communities, where young people have a fighting chance. It protects the interests of local people and protects the character of the area. Otherwise the nature of the communities is fundamentally altered.”

Some believe it is too late for villages such as Abersoch on the other coast of Pen Llŷn, from where young families have vanished, leading to the primary school closing in December because only seven pupils remained. Drakeford, however, refuses to believe any places are lost. “All communities are dynamic. I wouldn’t talk myself into a neo-determinism that it’s all too late. The character of those places may change again.”

A fear is that Morfa Nefyn could be the “next Abersoch”. At this time of year, driving towards Nefyn golf club into the prettier end of the village at night, perhaps only half the houses have lights on and cars on the drive; the rest are unoccupied second or holiday homes.

The village has long been a nationalist stronghold and the second-home crisis may help the cause. “Yes Cymru” stickers are dotted around and a sign demanding “no more second homes” greets visitors. Some residents are planning to head to Cardiff this weekend for an independence march.

Plaid Cymru’s leader at Westminster, Liz Saville Roberts, who has lived in the village for 30 years, backs the Welsh government measures and is also pleased Gwynedd council has bought land in Morfa Nefyn to build homes for villagers. It intends to rent them out or offer them for sale on a shared equity scheme.

Saville Roberts’s twin 30-year-old daughters cannot afford to buy here. One lives in a caravan next to the family home, the other has moved 20 miles up the coast to Caernarfon, where property is more affordable. “That experience is so typical,” she says.

The idea that the new policies are aimed at keeping people out is a “very English perception”: “It’s about how we are trying to keep these communities alive.” Saville Roberts says tourists are wanted and needed, “but we need to do it in a way that is mutually beneficial”.