If the coalition really wants to give power back to the people, it should look to the Alps

While sceptics in Britain worry that David Cameron’s localism agenda might create “postcode lotteries”, the Swiss rejoice in their local diversity. There are 26 cantons and 2,600 communes in the country, each setting its own policy and raising its own different taxes. Even methods of choosing representatives in the federal government are decided locally, provided the method is democratic.

Cantons have their own constitutions, their own laws and their own courts. They decide their own rates for local income tax, inheritance tax and road tax. They raise about 40 per cent of the tax take, the communes another 30 per cent and there are big policy differences between localities.

For example, cantons decide the minimum legal age for buying alcohol, a measure far stronger than Theresa May’s plan to let local authorities decide pub opening hours. Cantons set their own rules on issues such as prostitution and drugs. Some of them recognised civil partnerships well before they were adopted nationally, while others banned smoking in public long before it became national policy. Cantons even decide who is eligible to become a citizen (in one, this involved a popular vote on each candidate until the Supreme Court ruled that tests must be more objective).

Cantons decide how much autonomy communes should have, but they have plenty. For example, they are responsible for their own policing — local control that is, again, much stronger than the Home Secretary’s proposal for elected police commissioners. They also manage their own welfare, local transport and (dream on, Michael Gove) schools.

Switzerland’s federal Government, does only the things that need some measure of co-ordination. It issues the national currency. It is responsible for defence and foreign policy. It manages transport, telecoms and energy networks. But even where policy is decided centrally, the cantons and communes often decide exactly how it will be implemented.

The idea of Eric Pickles, the Local Government Minister, to allow local voters to veto above-inflation rises in council tax is another measure that would scarcely register on the Swiss scale. In all but one canton, spending proposals can be rejected or amended in a referendum. In one, all large and exceptional spending plans are approved by referendum. Some rural cantons even have a system allowing local people to meet and debate local policy — a form of direct democracy that David Cameron must envy. One such assembly of 4,000 people in Appenzell Innerrhoden banned nude hiking after efforts by the canton (Switzerland’s smallest) to tax nude hikers had failed to curb the craze.

Because the cantons enjoy enormously wide powers to decide the level of taxes and services, competition between them is sharp. In particular, they compete on low taxes to induce businesses to locate in their area. One canton, Zug, with its 11 per cent top rate of income tax and 16 per cent company tax, has proved so successful at attracting national and multinational firms — 1,600 of them last year alone — that it is running out of housing and office space. But other cantons are happy to step into the breach, such as Obwalden, which now undercuts Zug with a company tax rate of 12.7 per cent. Geneva, with its 35 per cent top rate of income tax, has been happy to welcome British hedge-fund managers who have balked at the UK’s 50 per cent top rate.

Diversity on this scale makes the UK coalition’s efforts at direct democracy look pretty faltering. When we are all paying the same taxes, postcode lotteries in public service quality are, of course, unacceptable. But it is hardly unfair if towns with ageing populations vote for higher taxes to fund better NHS care, or cities with teen-binge problems raise the drinking age or other places decide that they would rather have fewer services but lower taxes.

Full report – The glass half full

The context for this report is a growing concern over the widening gap in health inequalities across England in 2010. Its publication is timely, just six weeks after Fair Society, Healthy Lives – The Marmot Review. One of the Review’s key messages on challenging health inequalities is that “Effective local delivery requires effective participatory decision-making at local level. This can only happen by empowering individuals and local communities”. The asset approach provides an ideal way for councils and their partners to respond to this challenge.

The emphasis of community-based working has been changing. Among other aims, asset based working promotes well-being by building social capital, promoting face-to-face community networks, encouraging civic participation and citizen power. High levels of social capital are correlated with positive health outcomes, well-being and resilience.

Local government and health services face cuts in funding. Demographic and social changes such as an ageing population and unemployment mean that more people are going to be in need of help and support. New ways of working will be needed if inequalities in health and wellbeing are not to get worse.

The first part of this publication aims to make the case that as well as having needs and problems, our most marginalised communities also have social, cultural and material assets. Identifying and mobilizing these can help them overcome the health challenges they face. A growing body of evidence shows that when practitioners begin with a focus on what communities have (their assets) as opposed to what they  don’t have (their needs) a community’s efficacy in addressing its own needs increases, as does its capacity to lever in external support. It provides healthy community practitioners with a fresh perspective on building bridges with socially excluded people and marginalised groups.

The second part of this publication offers practitioners and politicians, who want to apply the principles of community driven development as a means to challenge health inequalities, a set of coherent and structured technique for putting asset principles and values into practice. These will help practitioners and activists build the agency of communities and ensure that an unhealthy dependency and widening inequalities are not the unintended legacy of development programmes.

• The asset approach values the capacity, skills, knowledge, connections and potential in a community. In an asset approach, the glass is half-full rather than half-empty.
• The more familiar ‘deficit’ approach focuses on the problems, needs and deficiencies in a community. It designs services to fill the gaps and fix the problems. As a result, a community can feel disempowered and dependent; people can become passive recipients of expensive services rather than active agents in their own and their families’ lives.
• Fundamentally, the shift from using a deficit-based  approach to an asset-based one requires a change in attitudes and values.
• Professional staff and councillors have to be willing to share power; instead of doing things for people, they have to help a community to do things for itself.
• Working in this way is community-led, long-term and open ended. A mobilised and empowered community will not necessarily choose to act on the same issues that health services or councils see as the priorities.
• Place-based partnership working takes on added importance with the asset approach. Silos and agency boundaries get in the way of people-centred outcomes and community building.
• The asset approach does not replace investment in improving services or tackling the structural causes of health inequality. The aim is to achieve a better balance between service delivery and community building.
• One of the key challenges for places and organizations that are using an asset approach is to develop a basis for commissioning that supports community development and community building – not just how activities are commissioned but what activities are commissioned.
• The values and principles of asset working are clearly replicable. Leadership and knowledge transfer are key to embedding these ideas in the mainstream of public services.
• Specific local solutions that come out of this approach may not be transferable without change. They rely on community knowledge, engagement and  commitment which are rooted in very specific local circumstances..

– a summary of an event to discuss the nef/NESTA report

Full report :  Right Here, Right Now: taking co-production into the mainstream.

Tackling the barriers

The discussion focused on the barriers to taking co-production into the mainstream of public services. There was a consensus in the room that commissioning arrangements and capturing the value of co-produced services were among a number of hurdles that need to be overcome. Workforce skills were also identified as an area for further work.

The report offers some recommendations about how to do this, and we’ll also be commissioning a series of practical experiments to test out how to mainstream co-production.

More for more

Philip Colligan outlined that co-production is not about more for less but instead about more for more, as this approach unlocks and values the “assets” that users of public services have. Garath Symonds stated that it was important to learn by doing co-production, whilst Anna Coote talked about the importance of this approach in promoting social justice and tackling inequality.

Summary

There was a sense of optimism in the room and a view that this is the right time to take co-production from the margins into the mainstream.

What is co-production?

Put simply, co-production demonstrates that people’s needs are better met when they are involved in an equal and reciprocal relationship with professionals and others, working together to get things done.

This is the key to transforming public services so that they are effective, affordable and sustainable in the long term. The ‘big society’ needs co-production at its heart – not as a marginal experiment, but as the standard way of planning and delivering services. Our aim is to establish co-production as a new paradigm for designing and delivering services.

For almost a year now we have been working with a group of innovative front line practitioners, and have gained valuable insights into the radical potential of co-production.

WELCOME to a Britain at some indeterminate point in the future – a Britain shaped exclusively by the public will and not by Prime Ministers or MPs. Scotland, for a start, has been cut loose, thanks to a decisive English majority in a UK-wide referendum.

Any immigrant who commits even a minor offence is deported without trial. Criminals can be executed if they face their third custodial sentence. A watered-down version of China’s one-child policy means the state provides Child Benefit only for a family’s first child. Bounty hunters are busy tracking down benefit cheats. Local prison inmates are powering the jail, or contributing to the National Grid, by using exercise bikes and treadmills that drive electricity generators.

Cannabis and prostitution have been legalised. The Afghan war was ended at a stroke by the UK Government purchasing the country’s entire opium crop, thus denying the Taliban vital revenue – and putting Afghan farmers on our side. Trident has been scrapped. Multi- millionaire footballers, long the figures of public envy, now see their bloated salaries taxed at 95% over pound(s)240,000. Junk food carries VAT at 50%. Army recruitment has been suspended. And the pound(s)12 million that would have been spent on the Pope’s visit in September 2010 was instead directed at medical research and healthcare, both of which have for hundreds of years been “more effective than prayer”.

Is this the rosy dawn of a blissful utopia that can’t come quickly enough? Or a stagnant post-apocalyptic vision that does not bear thinking about?

What it is, in reality, is a summary of some of the 45,000 suggestions volunteered by members of the public in response to an exercise by HM Treasury.

Most of the suggestions which might attract widespread support include reducing council spending on contracts, replacing school dinners with reduced-rate school dinner packs from supermarkets, culling further quangos, axeing further high-speed rail routes, and slashing the number of deputy head teachers and senior teachers to pre-1997 levels. Others, however, clearly reflect the contributor’s personal hobbyhorse, whether it’s the BBC, Scots devolution or immigrants.

The innovative “crowdsourcing” challenge, launched by Chancellor George Osborne on July 9, was originally open to public service workers, who responded by sending in 63,000 responses between June 23 and July 8. The department then decided to extend it to the wider public, Osborne saying: “Tell us – where’s the waste, what should we cut out, what can we improve, what’s working really well that we should be doing more of?” He said many of the ideas put forward by public sector workers are already being put into practice.

The website is now closed to ideas, but the public has until Tuesday to comb through the 45,000 submissions and rate the ones they think have the most potential to save money while impacting least on public services.

“Remember: we’re looking for ideas that can be implemented quickly to help to make savings, deliver services more efficiently and get more from less,” says the Spending Challenge website. Treasury staff are reviewing the ideas with the most potential and will investigate them in further detail to see if and how they could be taken forward for the Spending Review on October 20 and beyond.

The dozens of tags on the website range across the alphabet, from academics to zebra crossings, via other subjects, some decidedly more hot-button than others: binge drinking, banking, climate change, benefits, police and foreign aid are all represented, as are consolidation, daylight saving, magistrates and stamp duty.

The fact more than 100,000 ideas were received in a few months has plainly delighted the Treasury.

A spokesman said: “The Government is committed to engaging with all parts of society as we tackle the country’s record deficit. That’s why we asked everyone across the country – the people who use our schools, hospitals, transport systems and other public services – to send in their ideas for how to save public money and get more out of our services. We had an overwhelming response, with over 45,000 ideas submitted by the public. Now we’re asking the public to help us identify the best ideas to be taken forward and investigated in further detail.”

The exercise, however, has its critics. Laurie Penny, a London writer, journalist and feminist activist, whose Penny Red blog was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, believes the Government cynically turns its ear to public opinion when it coincides with its own agenda.

“I think it’s a way of using the principles of direct digital engagement to legitimise the Government’s programme of cuts,” she said.

“It doesn’t offer you an option, for example, to vote for no cuts, or vote for taxing the rich, or to vote for progressive changes. It only offers you a choice that is not really, at the end of the day, a choice.”

Penny points out that the Government never sought public approval for cuts of up to 40% in some departments, but with big decisions already taken, the Spending Challenge exercise has been deemed to be good for its public image – particularly when, at times such as these, people often turn on their more vulnerable neighbours.

On whether many of the public’s suggestions will eventually be taken up by the Treasury, she said: “Because there are so many options on there, the likelihood is that some of them will match what they plan to put in the Spending Review anyway, so the Government can say it is doing what the public wanted, which is the beauty of the scheme from its point of view.”

Penny has already observed that some ideas lodged on the website reflect what she termed “ludicrously punitive” attitudes towards welfare claimants and asylum seekers: one particular suggestion was that single mothers ought to be sterilised.

A submitted idea still visible on the website says some people “should be able to renounce work and be given a free (modest) house and a modest but liveable income” if they “stay single (not even allowed to date), have no kids, are castrated/sterilised, do not drink, smoke, or have sex (so they don’t get STIs), do not take drugs or have any addictions …”

The Treasury confirmed that a team moderated the suggestions to weed out those deemed to be unsuitable.

Professor John Curtice, of the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, thinks the exercise has some political value. He said: “Those people who have views they wish to express are given a chance to do so. Insofar as the Government is trying to take people with it down a pretty difficult path, anything that might help people feel they have at least had their say in what happens, might help make some a little happier.

“I trust no minister will stand up at the end of the day and say, ‘These are the 10 most popular ideas, and these are the 10 we are going to implement’. But there might at least be, amongst all those 45,000 ideas, the odd bright one that nobody in Government would ever have thought of and might warrant further investigation.”

…the bad news

The Scottish Government has announced that the Community and Renewable Energy Fund (CARES) will close to new applications due to unprecedented demand. The scheme has already helped over 300 community groups to invest in renewable technology such as biomass, solar panels and wind turbines. A further 300 groups are expected to benefit by April next year.

The CARES scheme, which opened in May 2009, is delivered by Community Energy Scotland. The two elements of CARES are a network of development officers offering free advice, and grant support of up to £150,000 for technical studies and installation of renewable equipment.

Energy Minister Jim Mather said, “The Community and Renewable Energy grant scheme has been extremely successful in helping communities generate their own green energy, cut carbon and stimulate the market for renewable technologies.

“Since CARES was launched last year the demand from community groups wishing to invest in renewables funding has been unprecedented with over 600 groups set to benefit from £13.5 million of funding. The scheme, part of this Government’s move to treble the budget for community renewables and microgeneration has boosted our growing low carbon industries. As a result, the scheme is now facing financial pressures.

“We remain committed to driving local ownership of energy and in doing so, securing wider community benefits. Building on this success of CARES, we have commissioned a feasibility study to look into early stage financing for renewables projects which will be carried out by the Scottish Agricultural College in conjunction with Community Energy Scotland. That will report back in September and we will look at future options for funding as part of the budget process this autumn.”

This announcement only impacts on new applications. Subject to normal checks on eligibility, all projects currently going through the system and supported by development officers will be funded.

You can get more information on the Scottish Government website.

…and the good news

There has been a positive step forward this week as Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) updated their guidance in line with EU State Aid Law, making it clear that it is possible for grant aided projects generating renewable electricity to receive Feed In Tariff payments. Previously there had been a blanket prohibition on this, based on what Community Energy Scotland felt was a misunderstanding of EU State Aid law.  

Since  CES’s  response to the consultation on the FiT in September 2009, there has been concern it would adversely affect organisations in receipt of grant funding for renewable installations, especially small community groups taking forward wind and hydro projects. This was because such groups would find it difficult to take out loan to cover capital costs. In April this year when the FiT Order was launched Community Energy Scotland argued strongly that community groups should be able to receive grant funding and be eligible for FiT payments. This culminated in a   letter to Gregory Barker MP, Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change in July.

DECC has now confirmed that this is indeed possible. The news is particularly relevant for projects up to 50kW in size.

The new addition to the FiT Order 2010 will mean that many organisations who receive/have received grant will be eligible for FiT payments for their installation as long as the total amount over 3 years is within the European Commission State Aid De Minimis Level. This is currently at 200,000 Euros which is equivalent to around £160,000.

For example if a grant towards the  capital cost was £40,000 and the amount of FiT received for the first 3 years was £15,000 then the total amount would be £55,000 which would be well within the De Minimis level.

This is a positive step for community groups who are installing renewable technology for their community facilities. We are currently assessing the detail of this update and how it will work in practice for the many groups that we are currently supporting to install community renewable projects across Scotland.

Please see this link for the DECC update which was released yesterday.  http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/energy_mix/renewable/feedin_tariff/fits_grant/fits_grant.aspx

The idea of Scottish Orchards is that it’s very down to earth, and open to ordinary (and often extraordinary) people. It’s meant for individuals to join rather than be a forum of groups, or representatives of government quangos and agencies.

It’s about helping people get their hands dirty and do practical fun things, to create a Fruitful Scotland. Involving children and families is a great way to ensure this remains grounded.

What’s next… ?

We think it will thrive if it’s useful to people – as a source of information – and as a “fellowship” where people can share ideas with people who have a common interest. We’d like to run a series of local Scottish Orchard networking events across Scotland in the autumn/winter – to allow people to find out how to get involved. We’d like these to have a wide geographic spread and be fun and quite informal. If you’d like to help host one near you, then let us know.Scottish Orchards will succeed if it helps people to grow their own fruit, builds on skills, and creates a market for Scottish fruit. We are aware of lots of great local growing initiatives and hope that we will be able to provide useful support and help them develop.

Aims of Scottish Orchards
• To promote all aspects of planting and maintaining new and established orchards in Scotland
• To maintain and develop the knowledge and skills used in planting, propagation etc. by sharing knowledge and research
• To help preserve the heritage of Scotland’s orchards by establishing a national mapping database of orchards and fruit varieties
• To encourage sustainability and biodiversity and improve the local and wider environment
• To create local networks and markets for fruit
• To promote healthy eating and access to locally grown food at affordable prices
• To promote the planting of fruit trees as part of community development and educational projects
• To provide local opportunities for volunteering and community involvement
• To encourage the integration of orchards into the design and planning of the urban and rural environments

We wish to make orchards and fruit growing fully available and inclusive to all regardless of age, ethnic origin, gender, social circumstance, or due to health or mobility factors.

Website: http://www.scottishorchards.com/

Extract of Jimmy Reid’s inaugural speech as Rector of Glasgow University  (A copy of the full speech )

…The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.

Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It’s once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked “Where do you come from?” I can reply: “The Western Region.” It even sounds like a hospital board.

It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals – where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.

Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under “M” for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.

If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let’s make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let’s gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.

Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people’s participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.

To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It’s a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development……

Their influence diminished after they took on responsibility for provision, according to study by Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Baring Foundation

Voluntary sector organisations that run public services should be aware of the pitfalls encountered by housing associations, according to a report from Charity Commission board member Andrew Purkis.

The study was jointly published by social research charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and grant-maker the Baring Foundation and written by Purkis, whose tenure the commission’s board was extended for three months in July.

It says housing associations have lost their independence and their role as campaigning organisations has diminished as a result of assuming responsibility for housing provision and the need to respond to government targets and demands.

“It is a very long time since individual housing associations saw themselves as campaigning bodies,” says the report. “Here are voluntary organisations that are in day-to-day contact with 2.5 million families, including many towards the bottom of the social heap. They see their vulnerabilities and are shocked by neglected needs, but you will rarely hear a squeak about these from the vast majority of housing associations.”

The report says that, in most cases, not even a “tiny percentage” of associations’ operating surpluses is used to fund campaigns on behalf of tenants other than part of the membership fee associations pay to housing association umbrella body the National Housing Federation.

Purkis said voluntary organisations that “go the same way as housing associations” with regard to running public services could lose some of their independence.

“There is a lot of pressure on the voluntary sector in terms of delivering public services,” he said. “But each voluntary sector organisation should look at the experience of housing associations and consider the implications of becoming too dependent on government.”

http://www.baringfoundation.org.uk/HousingAssociations.pdf

Author: Lorraine Connolly, Community Newswire

People across the country believe the decline of local newspapers has disempowered them, according to research published today.

Meeting the News Needs of Local Communities, commissioned by Media Trust, said the decline of local newspapers had left many people feeling disempowered, unheard and irrelevant and may significantly hinder the emergence of the much debated “Big Society”.

The report, written by Professor Natalie Fenton from Goldsmiths Media Research Centre, highlights the link between strong local media and proper accountability and democracy.

Caroline Diehl, Media Trust founder and chief executive, said: “This report undeniably makes the case for a vibrant local media as a cornerstone of democracy, accountability and social enterprise.

“If communities are to respond to the Government’s call to hold the authorities to account, there needs to be an effective independent mechanism for doing so.

“Transparency is meaningless without free and easy access to information and the means to test, challenge and debate it.”

The research showed members of the public wanted to get their local news from old-fashioned newspapers.

Ms Diehl added: “There is a latent demand for the rapidly disappearing, truly ‘local’ newspaper, for quality investigative journalism that can represent and reflect local concerns, underpin accountability and arguably, be the key tool in bringing back a sense of community.

“The respondents and focus groups involved in this research wanted to see and know local journalists, wanted them to ‘walk the beat’ and engage face-to-face.

“They want journalists, local news and local newspapers back at the heart of their communities.”

Those interviewed for the report said that while online news could provide a solution to local accountability and information, it was still a long way from filling the gap left by local papers.

Even communities that had local and hyperlocal websites still wanted a local paper with news about their neighbourhoods and communities.

In the report’s executive summary, Prof Fenton called for local news hubs, supported with funds from local authorities and foundations.

Media Trust said it believed such hubs could act as a local catalyst, bringing together communities and professional journalists alongside training, volunteer mentors and technical support for communities to engage in identifying, investigating and reporting local news.

Such hubs could act as a new and accessible source of news stories for existing local and regional media, and they could possibly start a new layer of local papers – run as commercial, or not-for-profit, social enterprises.

Ms Diehl said she believed this solution would be positive for the wider media industry: “We have long believed the BBC should take positive action to increase the range of services, viewpoints and engagement accessible to communities and citizens.

“The BBC could play a vital role in setting up and resourcing such hubs – especially in mentoring and training staff, and promoting attachments and secondments.

She also said news must, by its nature, be independent: “There is no place for local authority newspapers and ‘news’ websites. This direct control of the local news agenda is not only undemocratic but an unsustainable and ineffective use of taxpayers’ funds.”

Ms Diehl said she felt a fraction of the £450 million local authorities spend on communications could be matched by funds from Big Lottery and local community foundations to provide seed funding for news hubs, which would provide a new source of dynamic local news content, freely available to all media.

She concluded: “They would hold local powers to account – the new GP fund-holders, local authorities, parent-run schools and post offices – and encourage local participation in decision-making and democracy.”

Author: Gerry Hassan, The Scotsman, August 13th 2010

The prevalent reaction of many people I know in Scotland to David Cameron’s idea of ‘the Big Society’ is to pour scorn on to it, and dismiss it as window dressing for the forthcoming cuts.

This has a similarity to the haughty dismissal of ‘the Con Dem Nation’ prevalent in centre-left chattering circles. Whatever you think of the coalition, there is a smugness, self-satisfaction and unattractive sense of certainty in this mindset.

Politics often involves the knee-jerk, tribalism and the instant dismissal of opponents, but there is a huge danger in being too closed minded about everything which comes from the coalition government, and in particular damning the potential of ‘the Big Society’ out of hand.

‘The Big Society’ might not be completely worked out, and might well be part fig leaf for the tough times ahead, but it does have something interesting in it. There is even a degree of intellectual muscle derived from Phillip Blond’s eclectic ‘Red Toryism’ which has created a centre-right niche critiquing the failures of economic and social liberalism. There are weaknesses in ‘Red Toryism’, but it has managed to create something more interesting than left-wingers have for decades.

What the ‘Big Society’ is trying to address is the sense that the state has over-reached and across numerous areas of our lives crowded out other individual and collective ways of organising and expressing oneself. This has aided a feeling of passivity in people, looking for top-down solutions, and atrophying localism. Where it falls down is the practical issue of who funds and supports initiatives, its fixation just on the state as the problem, and blindness to corporate over-bearing power which equally makes people feel powerless.

Is there a progressive version, and in particular a Scottish variant of ‘the Big Society’? Labour seem to have retreated into oppositionalism – on the Alternative Vote, law and order, public spending, and ‘the Big Society’. This reduces what is centre-left to the idea of statism, an altogether impoverished, depowering vision.

Labour has an alternative, pluralist tradition: one of co-operatives, friendly and mutual societies, and the origins of trade unions. Maurice Glasman, self-styled ‘Blue Labour’ has stressed that Labour needs to be neither statist or big corporatist: the two overbearing approaches which New Labour combined in government.

What of Scotland? This is a country which prides itself on its inclusive, compassionate character, and yet the reality is very different. This is a land of institutional capture, gatekeepers and a nomenklatura across public life. Whether in the public, private or voluntary sectors, there are institutions and cultures which block change and are part of the forces of conservatism which shape so much of Scotland.

Civil society isn’t just a warm, cuddly collection of well-meaning people. There is still in Scotland an over-romanticised view of civil society – often from middle class people – which disguises a different reality, of a civil society reliant on the state, and controlled or limited by Labour place people, particularly in the West of Scotland.

Scotland has been a land which for all the progressive rhetoric has been immune to radical ideas for decades. The poll tax disaster is the major exception. Thatcher’s council house sales did dramatically change life for hundreds of thousands of Scots, but that wasn’t specifically Scottish, and was bitterly resisted by Labour councils.

Devolution itself has proven to be the vessel of institutional Scotland, rather than one of shifting power. It has been characterised by the politics of continuity and the self-preservation society.

This is where a Scottish version of ‘the Big Society’ could be powerful and potent. One which is fashioned by our own priorities and ideas, and the need for imaginative thinking and practice, challenging and dispersing the concentrations of power which exist in our public life, and giving people both choice and voice.

It does not matter if you call this left or right. What Scotland needs is a cultural shift – and rather than just the rhetoric of change we have had in recent years – this requires political change and a different way to thinking about power and public life.

Scotland’s ‘Big Society’ could entail bringing together a new sense of responsibility and community, with a vision of freedom, hope, imagination and emancipation. We would need to give it a name which captured its vision and boldness.

This isn’t anti-state or pro-market. It is neither. It would say lets stop thinking in such simplistic binary terms. We need a strong, responsive state. And we need a different kind of state. We need strong, open, dynamic markets. But we don’t need oligopoly or Tescopoly.

We need to be against concentrations of power wherever they come from. This is apposite, given that the forthcoming age of austerity and cuts will bring about new configurations of power and centralisation, mergers and take-overs in both the public and private sectors.

Who will give voice to this new Scotland? Labour could tap into its radical roots of mutualism and the co-operative movement, but there is no sign of any febrile activity anywhere in Scottish Labour.

The leaves a huge opportunity for the other parties – who have less to gain from clinging to the defence of the remnants of Labour’s extended state across Scotland.

The biggest opportunity here is for the Nationalists. Can the SNP gather together the beginning of an idea of a different vision of society in Scotland? The state isn’t their state; the forces of big business aren’t their natural constituency. So far this state of affairs has produced caution and lack of radicalism from the SNP as they have attempted to not make enemies of institutional Scotland.

And yet, the prospect of a politics of genuine self-determination could inform and make real a politics of self-government, linking change in society to constitutional change.

With the coming together of public spending cuts and fiscal autonomy in political debate, there is room for bold national leadership of the kind rarely seen in modern Scotland. Who will first speak and dare to capture a different Scotland, not anti-state or anti-market, but posing a different state and different kind of market, could shape Scotland for years to come.

The Scotland of the last decade has been one of the forces of conservatism presenting themselves as the tribunes of the people, while real, radical voices have been marginalised. The coming storms will open up all sorts of opportunities for radical ideas – which ‘the Big Society’ for all its weakness – touches on. Scottish radicals need to start being daring and dreaming of a different nation.