David and Ed Miliband are combining to create a 10,000-strong “army” of community organisers in the first formal rapprochement for the pair since Ed beat David to the Labour party leadership. The Movement for Change, set up by David during his leadership campaign, is to be relaunched in March and expanded, initially under the wing of the Labour party.

The brothers want to increase tenfold the 1,000 activists trained through that campaign to organise people, such as patients, parents and tenants, to resist change imposed by state or the private sector in their neighbourhoods. Lord Sainsbury of Turville is poised to donate £250,000 as the first stage of funding for the training. The move is significant because Sainsbury, a supporter of David Miliband who has bankrolled Labour with £13m in the last 10 years, is one of several big donors who have said they are not keen on continuing to back Labour with Ed in charge. Sainsbury’s donation will be registered to the Labour party, but it will not be interpreted by Ed Miliband as a gift to him.

A spokesman for the Labour leader said: “Ed thinks David has done a brilliant job with Movement for Change. It will play a key part in revitalising the Labour party and reconnecting it with parts of the electorate who feel we lost touch. He is delighted that David will be involved in Movement for Change, which underlines how he will remain an important voice in Labour politics.”

Blair McDougall, organiser of the scheme and a former Labour government adviser, said: “Movement for Change will organise within and across communities to increase the power of citizens to bridge the gap between traditional Punch and Judy politics and passionate concerns in communities about people’s lives.” 

“There are few things more important than that the Labour party rebuilds strong relationships with the people of Britain,” David said.

“Movement for Change is designed to take the best of the rich traditions of community organising from Britain and abroad, and apply them to the present day. [It] will, I hope, help communities across Britain defend themselves and help Labour on the road to government.”

The Milibands hope the cohort will prove a meaningful contrast to David Cameron’s “big society”.

Newly-trained activists will work in partnership with the Labour party to provide training for local parties and members to bring about change in communities.

The idea has ruffled some feathers within Labour ranks. Some are concerned that Labour activists trained in these methods could come into conflict with local Labour councils that might also be trying to impose unpopular policies.

The organisation will resemble a professional body, dispensing training, and not be a mass membership organisation. Ultimately it would be autonomous, controlled by its members, and affiliated to the Labour party as a socialist society.

Author: Andrew Denholm

SCOTTISH parents will be given a direct say over how their school spends part of its budget under an innovative pilot project. East Lothian Council has secured cross-party support for a scheme under which parents from groups of neighbouring schools would discuss with headteachers how to spend up to 5% of their collective budgets.

The idea is to get families more engaged in the running of schools in their area and to foster a wider sense of responsibility for the education of all children across a community. That could mean parents from a secondary school deciding that a proportion of their budget would best be spent on improving the education of nursery age children. The scheme was revealed during an evidence session at the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, which is considering the effectiveness of the current system of local authority management of schools.

Don Ledingham, East Lothian’s executive director of education, told MSPs: “We have cross-party support to take forward the notion of identifying a proportion of every school’s funding and putting it in a pot, and for the decision to be taken collectively about how that money should be best spent.

“It is the notion of using funding as a lever for change and giving interested parties an opportunity to influence that. The proportion of funding we are looking at is between 2% and 5%. It is not huge, and we are also exploring the possibility that schools can withdraw, but they must engage in the discussions and parents must be part of that discussion as well.”

Mr Ledingham said the interest from parents had been strong and added: “This is something we think is very exciting and which has huge potential to help us address key community issues, such as early years.”

The idea was welcomed by Eileen Prior, executive director of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, who was also giving evidence to the committee.

“Parents within the state system in Scotland do have that sense of the common good and they will strive for other kids – there is not the sense that they are only interested in their own,” she said. “That is a fabulous idea, but it doesn’t happen elsewhere and where we have an issue is that the variation around Scotland is just enormous.”

Earlier, the committee heard that the majority of headteachers in Scotland believe education should remain under council control.

Almost 80% of members of the Association of Headteachers and Deputes in Scotland said they wanted local authorities to continue to run schools, although two-thirds wanted fewer council areas.

Author: Philip Pullman

Best-selling author Philip Pullman spoke to a packed meeting on 20 January 2011, called to defend Oxfordshire libraries. He gave this inspirational speech.
 
You don’t need me to give you the facts. Everyone here is aware of the situation. The government, in the Dickensian person of Mr Eric Pickles, has cut the money it gives to local government, and passed on the responsibility for making the savings to local authorities. Some of them have responded enthusiastically, some less so; some have decided to protect their library service, others have hacked into theirs like the fanatical Bishop Theophilus in the year 391 laying waste to the Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of books of learning and scholarship.
 
Here in Oxfordshire we are threatened with the closure of 20 out of our 43 public libraries. Mr Keith Mitchell, the leader of the county council, said in the Oxford Times last week that the cuts are inevitable, and invites us to suggest what we would do instead. What would we cut? Would we sacrifice care for the elderly? Or would youth services feel the axe?
 
I don’t think we should accept his invitation. It’s not our job to cut services. It’s his job to protect them.
 
Nor do I think we should respond to the fatuous idea that libraries can stay open if they’re staffed by volunteers. What patronising nonsense. Does he think the job of a librarian is so simple, so empty of content, that anyone can step up and do it for a thank-you and a cup of tea? Does he think that all a librarian does is to tidy the shelves? And who are these volunteers? Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing? Who are these volunteers? Do you know anyone who could volunteer their time in this way? If there’s anyone who has the time and the energy to work for nothing in a good cause, they are probably already working for one of the voluntary sector day centres or running a local football team or helping out with the league of friends in a hospital. What’s going to make them stop doing that and start working in a library instead?
 
Especially since the council is hoping that the youth service, which by a strange coincidence is also going to lose 20 centres, will be staffed by – guess what – volunteers. Are these the same volunteers, or a different lot of volunteers?
 
This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers.
 
But there’s a prize being dangled in front of these imaginary volunteers. People who want to save their library, we’re told, are going to be “allowed to bid” for some money from a central pot. We must sit up and beg for it, like little dogs, and wag our tails when we get a bit.
 
The sum first mentioned was £200,000. Divide that between the 20 libraries due for closure and it comes to £10,000 each, which doesn’t seem like very much to me. But of course it’s not going to be equally divided. Some bids will be preferred, others rejected. And then comes the trick: they “generously” increase the amount to be bid for. It’s not £200,000. It’s £600,000. It’s a victory for the volunteers. Hoorah for the Big Society! We’ve “won” some more money!
 
Oh, but wait a minute. This isn’t £600,000 for the libraries. It turns out that that sum is to be bid for by everyone who runs anything at all. All those volunteers bidding like mad will soon chip away at the £600,000. A day care centre here, a special transport service there, an adult learning course somewhere else, all full of keen-eyed volunteers bidding away like mad, and before you know it the amount available to libraries has suddenly shrunk. Why should libraries have a whole third of all the Big Society money?
 
But just for the sake of simplicity let’s imagine it’s only libraries. Imagine two communities that have been told their local library is going to be closed. One of them is full of people with generous pension arrangements, plenty of time on their hands, lots of experience of negotiating planning applications and that sort of thing, broadband connections to every household, two cars in every drive, neighbourhood watch schemes in every road, all organised and ready to go. Now I like people like that. They are the backbone of many communities. I approve of them and of their desire to do something for their villages or towns. I’m not knocking them.
 
But they do have certain advantages that the other community, the second one I’m talking about, does not. There people are out of work, there are a lot of single parent households, young mothers struggling to look after their toddlers, and as for broadband and two cars, they might have a slow old computer if they’re lucky and a beaten-up old van and they dread the MOT test – people for whom a trip to the centre of Oxford takes a lot of time to organise, a lot of energy to negotiate, getting the children into something warm, getting the buggy set up and the baby stuff all organised, and the bus isn’t free, either – you can imagine it. Which of those two communities will get a bid organised to fund their local library?
 
But one of the few things that make life bearable for the young mother in the second community at the moment is a weekly story session in the local library, the one just down the road. She can go there with the toddler and the baby and sit in the warmth, in a place that’s clean and safe and friendly, a place that makes her and the children welcome. But has she, have any of the mothers or the older people who use the library got all that hinterland of wealth and social confidence and political connections and administrative experience and spare time and energy to enable them to be volunteers on the same basis as the people in the first community? And how many people can volunteer to do this, when they’re already doing so much else?
 
What I personally hate about this bidding culture is that it sets one community, one group, one school, against another. If one wins, the other loses. I’ve always hated it. It started coming in when I left the teaching profession 25 years ago, and I could see the way things were going then. In a way it’s an abdication of responsibility. We elect people to decide things, and they don’t really want to decide, so they set up this bidding nonsense and then they aren’t really responsible for the outcome. “Well, if the community really wanted it, they would have put in a better bid … Nothing I can do about it … My hands are tied …”
 
And it always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It’s set up to do that. It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.”
 
Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.
 
In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public. And there were several successful publishers who knew that some of their authors would never sell a lot of copies, but they kept publishing them because they liked their work. It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.
 
Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him. Look at this list of last year’s books: over half of them weren’t bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers. Why are you publishing this woman? She’ll only appeal to a small minority. Minorities are no good to us. We want to double the return we get on each book we publish.
 
So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they’re good books but because they’re just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit.
 
The greedy ghost is everywhere. That office block isn’t making enough money: tear it down and put up a block of flats. The flats aren’t making enough money: rip them apart and put up a hotel. The hotel isn’t making enough money: smash it to the ground and put up a multiplex cinema. The cinema isn’t making enough money: demolish it and put up a shopping mall.
 
The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all he understands. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for library cards? Why don’t you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books – you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there – what’s on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs.
 
That’s all the greedy ghost thinks libraries are for.
 
Now of course I’m not blaming Oxfordshire County Council for the entire collapse of social decency throughout the western world. Its powers are large, its authority is awe-inspiring, but not that awe-inspiring. The blame for our current situation goes further back and higher up even than the majestic office currently held by Mr Keith Mitchell. It even goes higher up and further back than the substantial, not to say monumental, figure of Eric Pickles. To find the true origin you’d have to go on a long journey back in time, and you might do worse than to make your first stop in Chicago, the home of the famous Chicago School of Economics, which argued for the unfettered freedom of the market and as little government as possible.
 
And you could go a little further back to the end of the nineteenth century and look at the ideas of “scientific management”, as it was called, the idea of Frederick Taylor that you could get more work out of an employee by splitting up his job into tiny parts and timing how long it took to do each one, and so on – the transformation of human craftsmanship into mechanical mass production.
 
And you could go on, further back in time, way back before recorded history. The ultimate source is probably the tendency in some of us, part of our psychological inheritance from our far-distant ancestors, the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency, which is so alien and unpleasing to the rest of us. The theory says they must do such-and-such, so they do it, never mind the human consequences, never mind the social cost, never mind the terrible damage to the fabric of everything decent and humane.
 
I’m afraid these fundamentalists of one sort or another will always be with us. We just have to keep them as far away as possible from the levers of power.
 
But I’ll finish by coming back to libraries. I want to say something  about my own relationship with libraries. Apparently Mr Mitchell thinks that we authors who defend libraries are only doing it because we have a vested interest – because we’re in it for the money. I thought the general custom of public discourse was to go through the substantial arguments before descending to personal abuse. If he’s doing it so early in the discussion, it’s a sure sign he hasn’t got much faith in the rest of his case.
 
No, Mr Mitchell, it isn’t for the money. I’m doing it for love.
 
I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.
 
And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?
 
Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.
 
A little later, when we were living in north Wales, there was a mobile library that used to travel around the villages and came to us once a fortnight. I suppose I would have been about sixteen. One day I saw a novel whose cover intrigued me, so I took it out, knowing nothing of the author. It was called Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet – we’re back to Alexandria again – was very big at that time; highly praised, made much fuss of. It’s less highly regarded now, but I’m not in the habit of dissing what I once loved, and I fell for this book and the others, Justine, Mountolive, Clea, which I hastened to read after it. I adored these stories of wealthy cosmopolitan bohemian people having affairs and talking about life and art and things in that beautiful city. Another great gift from the public library.
 
Then I came to Oxford as an undergraduate, and all the riches of the Bodleian Library, one of the greatest libraries in the world, were open to me – theoretically. In practice I didn’t dare go in. I was intimidated by all that grandeur. I didn’t learn the ropes of the Bodleian till much later, when I was grown up. The library I used as a student was the old public library, round the back of this very building. If there’s anyone as old as I am here, you might remember it. One day I saw a book by someone I’d never heard of, Frances Yates, called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. I read it enthralled and amazed.It changed my life, or at least the intellectual direction in which I was going. It certainly changed the novel, my first, that I was tinkering with instead of studying for my final exams. Again, a life-changing discover, only possible because there was a big room with a lot of books and I was allowed to range wherever I liked and borrow any of them.
 
One final memory, this time from just a couple of years ago: I was trying to find out where all the rivers and streams ran in Oxford, for a book I’m writing called The Book of Dust. I went to the Central Library and there, with the help of a clever member of staff, I managed to find some old maps that showed me exactly what I wanted to know, and I photocopied them, and now they are pinned to my wall where I can see exactly what I want to know.
 
The public library, again. Yes, I’m writing a book, Mr Mitchell, and yes, I hope it’ll make some money. But I’m not praising the public library service for money. I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.
 
I love it for that, and so do the citizens of Summertown, Headington, Littlemore, Old Marston, Blackbird Leys, Neithrop, Adderbury, Bampton, Benson, Berinsfield, Botley, Charlbury, Chinnor, Deddington, Grove, Kennington, North Leigh, Sonning Common, Stonesfield, Woodcote.
 
And Battersea.
 
And Alexandria.
 
Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy.

A landmark report commissioned by Community Energy Scotland and the Scottish Community Foundation shows just how successful community groups can be when they lead local development. It suggests that there could be a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity for community groups to secure funds through renewable energy developments – funds that could be used to replicate the successes of pioneering community development groups from across the UK. 

Investing for Community Benefit details 10 case studies of community groups which have successfully pioneered and driven local development. It shows that with clear vision, strong partnerships and a real sense of community need, community groups can achieve radical improvements in their community’s prospects. For example:

•         The Goodwin Trust, Kingston upon Hull, with an asset base of £10m and 300 staff, began when a small group of housing estate residents took over a small vacant shop in the estate. It is now a major service provider on health, young people, economic development and community safety issues;
•         Fyne Homes, a registered social landlord operating in Bute, Cowal Mid Argyll and Kintyre in Scotland, began as a small community housing association in the 1970s. It now operates a number of subsidiary organisations which focus on recycling, market gardening and a low carbon initiative, with total group assets exceeding £95m.

In the case studies presented, each group has secured assets or revenue which they have then invested in local development measures. The cases illustrate a range of development strategies, with groups investing in, for example, local service provision, land and property assets, renewable energy development and local business start-ups.

The report was undertaken by the consultancy arm of the Development Trust Association Scotland, with grant funding provided by The Scottish Government. 

The full report can be read here and a summary here.

An audit of Single Outcome Agreements, carried out for LINK by CAG Consultants, is released today and can be accessed at http://www.scotlink.org/files/publication/LINKReports/LINKsoaReportAudit2011.pdf

Over the last two years LINK has assessed how national environment and sustainable development commitments are faring under the Concordat between Government and Community Planning Partnerships.  Today’s report finds that though environmental issues feature in all SOAs, many of those covered are quite narrow, statutory necessities such as waste and street cleanliness, and that local authorities and Community Planning Partnerships generally do not see sustainable development as a priority.  We believe there is a danger that environmental priorities may be increasingly overshadowed by economic ones, particularly in the current financial crisis. 

The CPPs have much to offer in terms of innovation and distinct local approaches and this audit identifies several good practice examples – in Fife, Inverclyde, Clackmannanshire, East Dunbartonshire and East Lothian – where the local authorities recognise the benefits of strong environmental policies in terms of health, jobs, pride and enjoyment in the community.   At present, though, the report indicates that the process generally fails to capitalise on joining up health, environment, and the economy for the benefit of local areas, missing opportunities to address climate change mitigation, adaptation, landscape, the historic environment and the sustainable management of water resources.
 
Local authorities and their partners have a key role in improving Scotland’s environment –  in reducing emissions, adapting to climate change, protecting our beautiful natural and historic landscapes, providing access, education and healthy leisure opportunities, and more. If the intention of the Concordat is to be achieved, more local authorities need to take on this challenge. In doing so they will need clear support and backing from Scottish Government which has a stronger role to play in direction, oversight and evaluation to ensure national targets can in fact be met.

Key findings

• The Local Government in Scotland Act (2003) established sustainable development as a statutory duty as part of the Best Value regime. However, the findings of this audit suggest that sustainable development is not widely seen as a strategic priority for Community Planning Partnerships in Scotland .
• Neither does sustainable development appear to be widely understood, either in SOAs or in the guidance for SOAs, as an over-arching framework for policy development which it is intended to be in the UK’s shared framework for sustainable development ( One Future – Different Paths , 2005).
• Perhaps as result of the absence of sustainable development as an overarching framework, the interconnectedness between outcomes is not fully capitalised upon and few SOA’s explicitly recognise and address the ‘crunch issues’ which it would be necessary to address in a truly sustainable approach. Allowing such conflicts to remain wastes resources and will undermine the achievement of the intended outcomes .
• Many SOAs do recognise the interconnectedness of environment, health and transport outcomes and this provides a useful model for integrated thinking in other areas, demonstrating the multiple benefits and efficiencies which can be achieved by adopting such an approach . 
• At a general level, the environment receives considerable attention within SOAs and most in some way recognise the environment as a priority. However, in some cases, the  coverage of environmental issues is quite narrow in its focus (e.g. on waste, recycling and street cleanliness) and some significant gaps in coverage have been identified including :
•  Climate change mitigation – only two SOAs include indicators for per capita production-based emissions across the local authority area, although 10 include
a carbon footprint indicator (for consumption-based emissions).
•  Climate change adaptation .
•  Historic environment .
•  Landscape – no SOAs include outcomes or indicators for landscape.
•  Sustainable management of water resources , including links to climate change mitigation.
• Because of the patchy coverage and inconsistent treatment of environmental issues in SOAs, it is unclear how activity at the local level in Scotland will contribute to the meeting of key national outcomes and targets , such as the demanding national target for reducing CO 2 emissions.
• The scale and urgency of the environmental challenges we face is not well reflected in SOAs and there is a danger that environmental priorities may be increasingly overshadowed by economic ones in the current economic climate. The interconnectedness between the two is not well recognised, which could have serious adverse impacts on Scotland’s economic prosperity in the long term.

South Lanarkshire Council has earmarked the new town’s Hunter House Museum for closure as part of its efforts to save £80million over the next three years. The museum is housed in the cottage where the town’s two most famous sons – brothers John and William Hunter – were born in the 1700s. The duo were responsible for some of the most important advancements in medical history. Some of their techniques are still in practice today and there are also museums in Glasgow and London devoted to their work.

East Kilbride residents are desperate to save the museum and have enlisted the support of Lanarkshire-based MSP Linda Fabiani. Ms Fabiani tabled a motion for debate in the Scottish Parliament about the future of the museum and the potential for local community groups to take over the running of the building. She will join residents at a rally outside the Maxwellton Road museum at 11am on Saturday.

Ms Fabiani said: “Hunter House Museum is a very important asset for East Kilbride, one of the few places in the new town where people can find out about East Kilbride’s rich history. Its loss would be a blow, not just to people in East Kilbride, but to Scotland as a whole.”

Closing the museum, housed in a Grade A-listed building, would save the council £30,000. One group is willing to take over control of the building and expand it to include a more detailed exhibition. Kirsten Robb, 36, is a founder member of the East Kilbride Development Trust and a local community councillor. She said; “The museum can be something much better than it is and we would ask the council gives it a one-year reprieve and gives us time to develop a plan to take it over.”

The council’s Executive Committee will decide the museum’s future at a meeting later this month.

A wide range of experts have told MSPs that the unelected Crown Estate Commissioners should no longer have any role in Scotland.

Figures from politics and broadcasting, academia, community organisations, a think-tank and members of the public have united to tell MSPs they need to act now to bring about a historic change. They believe that after decades of political rhetoric about tackling what was once described as the worst kind of unelected, upper-class club, there is now the chance to bring the responsibility for the management and revenues of all Scotland’s Crown property rights, particularly the seabed, under the full jurisdiction of the Scottish Parliament. They believe it is a first step to giving local communities greater economic control and therefore benefit.

MSPs on the Scotland Bill Committee are currently scrutinising legislation the Scottish Government is proposing in response to the Calman Commission’s recommendations on how to beef up Scottish devolution.

The bill includes a proposal that the Chancellor appoints a Crown Estate Commissioner (CEC) to represent the interests of Scotland. This is described by Reverend Peter D Thomson as “an utterly inadequate sop to Scottish opinion, and should be rejected out of hand” in his submission to the committee. He is one of those demanding the abolition of the Commissioners, described by some as “an undemocratic anachronism”.

This would leave the Scottish Government to take control, particularly of the seabed, at a time of multibillion-pound investment in offshore wind, wave and tidal power projects. In his submission to the committee, the leading authority on Scottish common land, Andy Wightman, says this could be achieved easily by amending The Crown Estate Act 1961 to state that it no longer applies to Scotland.

Among those who endorse Mr Wightman’s proposal in submission is the acclaimed Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter. In his submission Labour’s former UK Energy Minister Brian Wilson tells the committee: “It seems to me that this represents a genuine opportunity to tackle an issue on which a great deal of political rhetoric has been expounded, without anything changing.”

Writer, broadcaster and journalist Lesley Riddoch also backs Mr Wightman. She says if Scotland is to lose its unenviable reputation as “the best wee feudal country in the world”, control of its natural resources must be freed. “It seems to me the quickest way of starting a change process is for the Scottish Government to take over the administration of CEC rights immediately and the simplest means of achieving this is to remove the CEC from any responsibilities in Scotland,” she said.

The Scottish Islands Federation also endorses that approach and not just because of offshore renewables. “This would also provide the trust ports and harbours in Scotland with full control of the seabed, which they currently lack, thus giving them the ability to plan their own future,” they said.

The think-tank Reform Scotland believes it would allow the Scottish Parliament to use offshore renewables as “a driver of future economic prosperity”.

Community Land Scotland, which represents Scotland’s community landowners such as Assynt, Eigg and Gigha, also believes coastal areas should be solely the responsibility of Holyrood and that revenues should remain within Scotland.

The Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster has launched an Inquiry into the Scotland Bill

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/scottish-affairs-committee/news/scotland-bill/

Call for evidence by 31 January

Scotland Bill page at UK Parliament is at

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-11/scotland.html

Extract from Jericho Road by Jess Steele, DTA

“On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will only be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s history “ – Martin Luther King

The Coalition Government is busy drafting legislation to ‘give’ a series of rights to local communities. After many years of the rhetoric of ‘community empowerment’, the cliché that ‘local people know best’ and the fundamental failure to do anything practical about it, this new language of community rights has to be welcomed. Whether it has any more impact than its predecessor is yet to be seen. But we will not wait to see if they mean it this time: we must make it true.

In the real unequal world, where we need to exalt the valleys and lower the mountains1, rights are not legislated by government. The Equal Pay Act did not close the pay gap, anti discrimination laws do not end prejudice. In his Civil Rights Message on the day the Alabama National Guardsman were called to enforce the rights of two black students to attend the university, JFK said that Congress had to act but that civil rights would only be achieved by the human decency of every American citizen. He also famously acknowledged that “those

who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Given the parallel shock-and-awe of spending cuts, welfare raiding and mass asset disposal his words are more relevant to us than they have been for twenty five years.

Community anchors – independent, neighbourhood-based organisations led by local people – have a long history and an impressive geographical spread across the United Kingdom. They are committed to social justice through collective social action, creating local wealth and keeping it local, building resilience for themselves and throughout their communities. This is a well-networked movement of bi-focal organisations that care about and support each other across the country as well as dedicating passionate energy to their own fine-grain patch and its people.

This movement is the foundation of the Big Society, the good society, the Great Society. It is collective local action that will transform the Jericho Road, and it is the bonds between localities that will make sure this is not an isolated right won by the few, but a control-shift that genuinely enables people in any neighbourhood, however high their mountains or low their valleys, to get on with what needs doing. This is not a bid for power-over, for ‘communities at the helm’ of big budget regeneration – we know that time is over, for what it was worth. This is a demand for power-to, for groups of local people to be allowed to make our own change, using whatever resources we can collectively marshal. The challenges ahead are undeniably frightening and the opportunities are hard to grasp before they slip away. We need co-ordinated practical actions across a range of fields, and we also need a clear way of agreeing and explaining what we are trying to achieve.

To find full article and others in the publication click here

Maurice Glasman still seems surprised as he sits in his cosy, ramshackle apartment perched above a clothes store in bohemian north London. The Jewish academic-cum-community organiser was astounded when he was offered a peerage, out of the blue, by Ed Miliband in the new year honours list.

“I was completely shocked,” he reflects. “I was out having coffee with a friend when I had the call, so I immediately rang my wife, who took some convincing that I wasn’t just making it up for a laugh.” He adds: “Ed told me: ‘I just really like what you’re doing and want you to keep doing it.'” The unlikely ennoblement of this university lecturer, 49, passed largely unnoticed in the press. A peerage for Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, and a damehood for Lady Antonia Fraser made more headlines. But a few weeks on, Glasman’s admission to the upper house is beginning to excite interest among leading figures at Westminster, who believe it may prove to be a significant development in British political life in 2011.

Glasman was moderately well known in Labour circles in the capital thanks to his ground-breaking work with London Citizens – an alliance of faith institutions, universities, schools and trade unions that he brought together to run community projects. Suddenly, his political philosophy of local activism is being touted by some as Labour’s answer – its possible trump card – to David Cameron’s “big society”. Others in Labour go further, saying it could even offer the kernel of the “big idea” that Miliband is desperately seeking to define his leadership.

The Glasman creed is that Labour – real, traditional, pre-1945 Labour, as he would put it – is the only party with the values and beliefs that can make the “big society” work. Unlike the Tories, whose vision relies on a volunteer spirit rising up when institutions get off people’s backs, he has a different idea – one he says is in some respects “more conservative than the Conservatives”. He wants to foster a “Labour big society” based on ideas of “family, faith and the flag” and nurtured through cherished local institutions – everything from churches to post offices, banks, hospitals, schools and football clubs.

“At the moment the Conservatives have got an idea of a society built on volunteers,” he says. “It has got to be much more than that.” He cites football clubs as a key example of where local loyalties and spirit can be reinforced – and local banks as institutions that can inspire economic activity – if their governance is reformed. “Football clubs are a form of magic and a form of belonging, of hope, of glory, but fans are just being exploited by venture capitalists from a thousand miles away. It offends against the sacred sense of belonging. Ideally I would like to see the Labour party taking very strong support for mutual ownership of football clubs. I would like to see the endowment of local banks so there is regional capital and regional economies.”

He reels off long lists of academics and political thinkers, from Aristotle to the lesser-known Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, as influences. The latter, he says, taught him that capitalism, though a force for good if controlled, could also be a menace if not. Labour now had to “rediscover” the need to tame the markets as part of its mission to make individuals feel valuable again.

“The logic of capitalism is to turn human beings and their natural environment into commodities,” he says. “The logic of democracy, and particularly the Labour movement, is to protect the human status of the person.”

But the biggest influence was his mother, Rivi, who died two years ago, leaving him struck with grief and in despair about his life. “She was very conservative Labour with a very strong commitment to work, faith, country, very patriotic. England for her was the country that saved the Jews from the Nazis; alone in Europe we survived. She was a monarchist. She was very religious, very radical. She thought the country was very unfair. She was very tied to Labour. Labour was the great hope of working people. I didn’t know what to do with my grief when she died.” A close friend told him to honour her with what he did. “So I began to re-engage with Labour.”

There cannot be many community activists with such an impressive intellectual hinterland. Glasman directs the faith and citizenship programme at London Metropolitan University and his shelves are stacked with analyses of the Enclosure Acts to discussions of the Torah. An alumnus of the European University Institute in Florence, he spent the year the Berlin Wall fell studying the crisis of state socialism and its aftermath. The book that came out of that thesis is entitled Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia.

Glasman believes that before Labour can move on it has to learn the lessons about the failures of state socialism. He is for localism and “bottom-up politics”, as opposed to top-down Whitehall diktat – and if that sounds a bit like David Cameron it is meant to. Affronted by the coalition’s evocation of a smaller, cheaper public sector, Glasman wants to outdo compassionate conservatism with a Labour vision of “the common good”. He likes to talk of “Blue Labour” – a small-c conservative version of socialism bound together by strong ethical glue.

He objects to the idea that it was New Labour that was the problem – arguing that the party started leaving people like his mother behind after 1945, when the National Health Service and the welfare state were created. It gradually became elitist, managerial, bureaucratic in its style and thinking. Socialism became statism. Labour became “nasty”.

“It became cynical because it was about a certain view of what was realistic; it was moralistic in the sense that if you did not agree with their discourse you were opposing progress. It was disempowering because of its administrative form. It was hostile to human association because it was about every individual entitlement, not people doing things together.”

The nadir came in the ghastly encounter between Gordon Brown and Labour supporter Gillian Duffy on the campaign trail in Rochdale last May, when the prime minister angrily dismissed Duffy’s views on immigration as “bigoted”. Glasman believes Brown’s dismissal of Duffy summed up Labour’s internal crisis. “Labour had reached a situation under Brown where most of the people in the party hated one another and they hated people outside the party too.”

To re-emerge as a viable political force, Glasman believes Labour has to get the Gillian Duffys back onside and re-engender the idea that people enjoy working together for the public good. It will do so, he says, not by promising to deliver a more just, equal society from the commanding heights of Westminster, but by standing with people in their local struggles.

What kinds of struggles does he have in mind? He cites the fight to keep the port of Dover and its historic surroundings from being privatised, and the fate of Billingsgate market. “The Billingsgate porters are one of the most ancient workforces in the country and the Corporation of London wants to make them redundant. So the City of London – all the privileges, all the political status, belongs to the rich and to capital – and the workforce have no protection.” National treasures such as the Forest of Dean, Sherwood Forest and the White Cliffs of Dover must be preserved. “I would like to see Ed on the white cliffs saying: ‘This is forever England.'”

He says Cameron’s “big society” is in thrall to a free-market philosophy that leaves communities and individuals at the mercy of forces that respect profit far more than tradition, custom and a sense of place. The “blue” in “Blue Labour” comes from a conservative conviction that market forces, unconstrained, play havoc with the fabric of people’s lives. It is the Labour party’s task and vocation to provide a “countervailing force” protecting communities against wealthy, powerful interests.

It is innovative stuff, a long way from Blairite themes of competition and market reform of the public sector, and Brown’s Treasury-based redistribution of the proceeds of growth by tax credit. New Labour defined itself by an accommodation to the market (and in Peter Mandelson’s case, the filthy rich), and engaged in modest redistribution of the proceeds of growth. Blue Labour, in the name of “the common good”, attacks such laissez-faire economics from both left and right.

The Glasman “project” will undoubtedly ruffle feathers inside and outside Labour. As well as high-flown theory, he has mischief and humour. Once he had decided to accept a peerage, Glasman’s next step was to contact the relevant authorities to request that his title be Lord Glasman of the City of London. He wanted to make a political point that an under-regulated City of London should be more accountable to parliament – only to be told that his request was “unprecedented” and “unacceptable”.

Instead he is likely to plump for the humbler, simpler title of Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill. It was, perhaps, the first hard lesson on his unexpected journey from academia to life at Westminster.

GLASMAN IN HIS OWN WORDS…

On Brown and Blair

“Brown ended up defending the state, Blair ended up defending the market, and there was no concept of society”

On Tory “big society” rhetoric

“Power to the people. They are claiming all that stuff that Labour has abandoned as absolutely pivotal. We have to reclaim the land.”

On standing with the people

“Labour should stand with fans and not the bosses of [football clubs such as] Manchester United and Liverpool.”

On David Cameron

“I think that David Cameron is genuinely a One Nation Tory… It is Clegg and Osborne who are in the deep alliance on the neo-liberal Thatcherite economics.”

On Miliband and the PM

“What Ed should do is invite Cameron to join Labour, which is really about the big society and won’t be closing post offices and libraries.”

The Plunkett Foundation has published a new report containing an overview of the development of the community shop sector in the UK, and of the health and wealth of the sector today. The report is based on an indepth review of community shops undertaken in 2010 by the Plunkett Foundation and Community Retail Advisers with 121 community shops. The report includes new statistics focusing on the success factors of community shops and in particular the reasons why community shops represent better forms of business.

In summary, community shops represent;

1. Better resilience:
• Community shops operate with a 97% success rate, compared with a national UK business survival rate of 46.8%
• Community shops are set to continue their growth  at around 19 new shops per year
• With an estimated  400 commercial village shop closures each year, community shops replace 5% of all village shop closures

2. Better Governance:
• All shops adopt robust structures promoting genuine community ownership and democratic control
• Community shops have an average of 7 directors and 133 members
• 65% of community shops adopt the IPS Bencom structure which significantly boosts member engagement: 155 over 48 for other structures

3. Better Finances
• Turnover for community shops range between £7,000 – £900,000pa
• The collective turnover for community shops in 2010 is estimated to be at £33million or £132,635 per shop
• Average Net profits were recorded to be £3,654 per shop or £1million collectively
• Community Shops were operating at average gross margins of 21%
• Volunteering saves shops an average of £27,752 per year in staff time

4. Better Services
• 98% of community shops sell local produce
• 40% of community shops have cafes
• 58% of community shops host Post Offices
• 59% of community shops take debit/credit cards

5. Better Communities and Lives
• 22% of Net Profits are reallocated to community projects representing £200,000 nationally
• Shops typically employ 1.9 members of staff and create 30 volunteer placements
• 90% of shops use volunteers regularly, in 2010 using 1million hours

The full report is available here.