Author: Circular Communities Scotland

Circular Communities Scotland is delighted to announce we are looking forward to setting up and overseeing a nation-wide sharing library and repair café network. This is a £310,000 project, supported by Scottish Government and Zero Waste Scotland.

The network, which we intend to build to be self-sustaining, was announced by Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero Michael Matheson at the WWF Pavilion in the Blue Zone of COP26 on Thursday the 11th of November 2021.

The scheme aims to significantly increase sharing and repair facilities across the country, in order to reduce consumption and offer Scottish communities sustainable and affordable alternatives to buying new. This aligns directly with our vision to see a thriving circular economy in Scotland, with communities benefiting from the social, environmental and economic impacts.

“For Scotland to combat climate change, we each need to change our own consumption behaviours. Sharing libraries and repair cafés provide simple and effective solutions to do this whilst reducing our carbon footprint.

“Rather than throwing an old item away we can repair it at a repair café, or even better, be taught the repair skills to fix it ourselves. Similarly, rather than buy a new product we can borrow one from a local sharing library. Everything from tools, clothes, toys, and equipment can be borrowed instead of being bought new, saving people money, whilst saving the planet.

“We are looking forward to overseeing and forming the new network and significantly growing the number of these projects in Scotland.”- Michael Cook, CEO, Circular Communities Scotland.

Circular Communities Scotland would also like to thank Edinburgh Remakery and Edinburgh Tool Library who supported our proposal, and with whom we will be collaborating to set up this scheme. We also look forward to working with them and the rest of our sharing and repair members to help strengthen their impact and replicate their collective success across the country.

The announcement that Circular Communities Scotland will run the sharing library and repair café network comes after CEO Michael Cook addressed Scotland’s Climate Assembly in early 2021, which released its full report this year detailing goals and recommendations for the Scottish Parliament to address climate change.

The overall goal to ‘reduce consumption and waste by embracing society wide resource management and reuse practices’ had 97% of assembly members voting in favour, the joint most popular goal. This project also responds to the specific recommendation supported by 92% of the assembly “… to establish a network of ‘Resource Libraries’ across the country, where people can ‘borrow’ high quality tools and equipment that are maintained and repaired by the library, rather than buying seldom used items themselves.”

Circular Communities Scotland welcomes the Scottish Government and Zero Waste Scotland’s support for the Climate Assembly report and recommendations, shown in part through their funding of this circular scheme, focused on reducing consumption and waste.

Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero Michael Matheson said:

“Scotland’s Climate Assembly called for action and I’m very pleased to announce that we will support the establishment of a network of resource libraries and repair cafes.

“Sharing libraries provide a direct reduction in consumption and emissions because they allow people to switch from purchasing and owning items to borrowing them instead. Repair cafes give people the skills to re-use their own items.

“This network also supports our drive to tackle poverty by giving lower income groups access to tools or equipment not otherwise available and the skills to use them, as well as reducing waste and emissions.”

CEO of Zero Waste Scotland Iain Gulland, said:

“Scotland – and the world – urgently needs to address its consumption problem. The current demand on the planet’s finite, precious materials is unsustainable.

“The circular economy is one of the best tools we have in our arsenal. We can reduce our consumption by keeping existing materials in circulation and only buying new when absolutely necessary.

“Sharing libraries and repair cafes are not only great ways of implementing a more circular way of living, but an opportunity to get to know people and businesses doing amazing work in your community. We hope to see as many of these local initiatives come to fruition as soon as possible.”

Elaine Brown, CEO of Edinburgh Remakery said:

“The Edinburgh Remakery is delighted to be part of this exciting venture to bring repair skills and facilities to communities across Scotland.

“Learning to repair, reuse and value our belongings is essential to reduce waste and pollution, and in tackling climate change and reducing carbon emissions. The environmental benefits of repairing items instead of throwing them away are numerous, as are the social benefits to those learning valuable, practical skills which will aid them throughout their entire lives.

“We look forward to being part of this exciting initiative to help sustainable, circular economy practices flourish in our Scottish communities.”

Chris Hellawell, Founder & Director of Edinburgh Tool Library, said:

“Edinburgh Tool Library is delighted to be involved in supporting the establishment of more sharing libraries across Scotland. We have spoken to numerous organisations and individuals across the country, and the need for a structured network to support them has always been evident.”

“We are really looking forward to working alongside Circular Communities Scotland and the Edinburgh Remakery to share our experiences and support new and established groups to make sharing and repair of everyday items the norm.”

“Using sharing libraries is a straightforward way for us all to reduce our carbon footprint, whilst at the same time, saving money. We want to see a Scotland built on access, not excess.”

For more information about starting a sharing library or a repair café in your local community, please get in touch at shareandrepair@circularcommunities.scot. 

Author: Calum Macleod

Dr Calum MacLeod, of Community Land Scotland, on COP 26, green lairds and on local groups seeking ownership and control of the land on which they live….

Last week I had the privilege of accompanying a group of indigenous leaders representing the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, a coalition of indigenous and local communities from the Amazon Basin, Brazil, Indonesia and Mesoamerica on a visit to Kilfinan Community Forest in Argyll.

The group were in Glasgow during COP26 to advocate for respect of their rights and the inclusion of forest peoples in global negotiations on forests and climate change. 

My very minor role in the proceedings was to provide some Scottish land reform and community ownership context for the indigenous leaders and journalists who made the journey north to Kilfinan.  

At first glance, the land issues facing these indigenous peoples are of an entirely different order to those experienced in Scotland; quite literally a matter of life and death for some campaigners courageous enough to take a stand to defend their peoples’ land rights.

That’s why the Alliance demands an end to violence against, and criminalisation and murder of, their peoples, together with recognition and enforcement of their legitimate territorial rights, direct access to climate finance, full respect of the right to free, prior and informed consent, and incorporation of traditional knowledge in 

But look a little closer and it soon becomes apparent that local communities in both the Global North and South are prey to the same market forces commodifying and financialising the climate emergency in the service of already wealthy elites.

Land, as always, is the gateway prize leading to further riches.

There’s nothing new in that, of course.

In Scotland the brutality of the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries was shaped largely by the financial returns that estates populated by sheep and deer, rather than people, dropped into the Lairds’ laps.

The malign historical influence of global capital has also seeped into Highland estates via other troubling tributaries. Take, by way of example, the impact of the fund (worth £16 billion at current values) established by the British Government in 1834 to compensate former plantation slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’ when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.

Ground-breaking research by Dr Iain MacKinnon of Coventry University and Dr Andrew Mackillop of Glasgow University conservatively estimates that purchases of estates in the West Highlands and Islands by significant beneficiaries of slavery derived wealth cumulatively amounted to 1,144,395 acres between 1736 and 1939, with the number of sales peaking in the years immediately following creation of the compensation fund.

In so doing, that wealth helped to consolidate the concentrated pattern of large-scale land ownership that exists in the region to this day.

Neither is there anything new in the idea that local communities are best placed to make decisions about the land they occupy in ways that promote economically, ecologically, socially and culturally sustainable development.

Decades ago, the late Nobel Prize winning political economist, Elinor Ostrom devised a set of principles for managing ‘common pool’ environmental resources such as forests.

Professor Ostrom’s principles included matching rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions; ensuring that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules; and making sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.  

Strip away the academic veneer from Professor Ostrom’s ‘common pool management’ principles and the contemporary bare wire of what the indigenous leaders visiting Kilfinan are campaigning for is exposed.

Namely, land rights that empower local people to take the lead in tackling the climate emergency in ways that benefit their communities and the planet as a whole. 

In Kilfinan the visiting indigenous leaders witnessed some of these principles being put into practice following the transformation of a previous tract of commercial forestry into a valuable local asset of 1300 acres of community-owned woodland.

They were able to see the timber processing yard creating employment and a local supply chain for sustainable wood products including firewood processing.  They saw the hydroelectric scheme that generates local energy supply; the woodland path network and land leased to the Kilfinan Allotment Group.

They saw affordable housing and forest school sites for local children to learn about and within their natural environment. Above all, they saw the quiet confidence of a community making the most of its land assets for the betterment of the place and its people.    

It hardly needs saying that we should nourish and spread that sense of confidence widely, by enabling more communities to benefit directly from the land where they live.

In that sense, several of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities’ demands highlighted earlier echo Scottish communities’ demands insofar as they emphasise local control and sustainability through enhanced land rights.

The framing and context may differ, but this is essentially a shared global struggle for community land rights in the face of a neo-liberal commodification of the climate emergency in which land is economic, social and political power.   

In the Highlands that process of commodification marches to the drumbeat of the Green Lairds, a relatively new strain of the landed elite within Scotland’s structurally dysfunctional pattern of concentrated rural land ownership.

They range from individual millionaires and billionaires determined to impose their own (rarely, if ever, the community’s) ‘vision’ for what great swathes of the Highlands should look like, to multinational corporations and, increasingly, institutions such as universities.

They are looking for opportunities to offset their carbon emissions and burnish their green credentials, and large-scale private investors are also intent on mopping up the lucrative financial returns spilling forth from the ‘natural capital’ bandwagon.      

As COP26 draws to a close, some will say that incorporating community land rights into efforts to tackle the climate emergency is an unaffordable luxury given the ‘code red’ existential nature of the crisis facing us.

‘Let green capitalists act now to save the planet and claim the spoils’ is the unspoken subtext of that argument.   

As the indigenous leaders within the Global Alliance for Territorial Communities know only too well, that perspective is both discredited and ultimately unsustainable. We know it here in Scotland too.  Another narrative is not only possible but essential.

One which places protection and enhancement of local community land rights at the heart of the pathway to global climate justice.

Anything else really is yet more ‘blah, blah, blah’. 

Dr Calum MacLeod is Policy Director of Community Land Scotland, which represents Scotland’s community land owners. He is a freelance sustainable development consultant and this article has been written in a personal capacity. 

Author: Scottish Government

Summary of recommendations – see full report

The working group recommends that:

1. The Scottish Government should work with stakeholders to establish a new “Scottish Public Interest Journalism Institute” – a high-profile independent body that draws on a wide range of resources to develop public interest journalism for Scotland, co-ordinating new and existing initiatives and strategically administering grant funding to support a diverse, pluralistic and sustainable Scottish public interest media sector.
2. The Scottish Government and OSCR, the Scottish charity regulator, should take steps to enable non-profit public interest news providers to register as charities; and the Scottish Government should also create an alternative legal status, with similar tax benefits to charitable status, for other non-profit public interest news providers.
3. The Scottish Government should embed media literacy in the school curriculum, and launch a voucher scheme for young people aged 15-19 to access public interest journalism free of charge.
4. The Scottish Government should examine the feasibility of introducing provisions like those in the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act, to give community groups the scope to take over a local news publication that is otherwise in danger of closing.
5. Audit Scotland, in partnership with the Scottish Public Interest Journalism Institute (SPIJI), should conduct an annual audit of advertising and marketing investment by the Scottish Government and public bodies, to include a measurement of the impact of this expenditure on the health of the Scottish news publishing landscape; and the Scottish Government should invest no less than 25% of its central advertising and marketing budget with public interest news providers.
6. Audit Scotland, in partnership with SPIJI, should conduct an annual audit of public notices; and the Scottish Government should improve the accessibility of public notices and strengthen the ties with public interest journalism, and issue best practice guidelines for local authorities and other public bodies to ensure that they promote public notices to those who have an interest in the information.
7. The Scottish Government should work with the UK Government to ensure that the new Digital Markets Unit enables public interest news providers of all shapes and sizes to thrive in the digital economy; and the Scottish Government should encourage big tech companies to support the establishment of SPIJI.
8. The Scottish Government should engage with the UK Government to create tax incentives for businesses to advertise with public interest news providers.

We are confident that there is a very strong appetite for quality public interest journalism in Scotland and that the recommendations in this report will go a long way to sustaining the independent, quality media landscape Scotland has always enjoyed and should continue to enjoy in the future.

Wherever possible, our proposals have not included legislation, both because of the need for expediency and because we recognise that the separation of the “fourth estate” from government is essential to any system of democratic scrutiny.

Our recommendations are explained in detail in the following sections. First, we explain what we mean by public interest journalism, and then we put the recommendations into context by setting out the background to this report.

Author: Doug Nicholls, General Secretary, General Federation of Trade Unions.

A new deal for workers in the workplace and the wider community.

Trade Unions and Community Organisations.

Shared Values.

A discussion paper.

1 Collective bargaining, meaning a system whereby wages and conditions are agreed as a result of negotiations between employers and trade unions, has collapsed to around 20% coverage of workers. Union density is in real terms less than 20% of the workforce.  About 80% of workplaces were covered by collective bargaining in 1980. The under unionised areas are mainly in the private sector from which the trade union movement originally arose.

2 Most collective bargaining and high union density exist because of the work of specialist trade unions. Such unions tend to attract the greatest sense of loyalty, membership engagement and democratic practices. Similarly, highly identifiable occupational sections of larger unions attract a high level of loyalty and engagement.  Their work is rarely in the headlines, yet of the 5,400 or so trade unions that have existed over our whole history, most have been in this category. There has been a general tendency to gravitate to amalgamated and merged, large unions. Unfortunately this has led to competition and duplication of effort in certain sectors and disharmony in others.

3 There are 32 million workers in Britain about 6.2 million are in trade unions. There is no real sense of how many of these members are consciously active. There are therefore 26 million non-unionised workers and an even higher number of workers not active in their unions. Improving pay and pensions of members has not always been the number one priority for union members; a range of services from insurance to mental health support, professional advice or legal and personal advice, has attracted members about their unions. Taken together, these factors represent a crisis for trade unionism which is not being effectively addressed. 

4 Trade Union education turned away from politics, philosophy, economics and history and became technical training. No sustained effort outside those of some individual unions was made to generate and methodically develop a new cadre of inspiring leaders for the whole movement.

5 The purpose for which unions were set up, collective bargaining and improving wages and defending workers, has been difficult to execute in the hostile environment and anti-union legislative framework that has existed for forty years. The anti-union legislation sought to strike out the heart of solidarity action. The movement was built and grew by one group of workers taking action to support another. The acceptance of this legislation has eroded many other forms of softer solidarity and support between unions. There is a danger of individual unions working in splendid isolation with no sense that what each union is doing is important for all.

6 Young people generally look everywhere other than to trade unions for their political expression and support.

7 Wage and workplace dignity benefit family and community life. Successful workplace struggle is therefore very political and has a wide impact. A new deal for workers is in reality arguing for a new deal for workers and their families, why not say so?

8 Poverty blights workplace dignity and community solidarity. In the aftermath of the 1926 General Strike the income gap and inequality began to reduce. The return of gross inequality coincided with the anti-union legislation, mass redundancies and the decline of collective bargaining.

9 In the struggle for survival unions have become more parochial. If we were to end up with one brilliantly organised trade union with 100% membership and 100% collective bargaining in its sector, we would not have a trade union movement. The strength of the trade union movement depends on the extent of active membership across sectors.

10 Previous solidarities between workplace organisation through unions and the wider worlds through community organisations have broken down. Both unions and community organisations are fragmented.

11 Britain has a unique history in forming non-sectarian trade unions in the workplace and community organisations in the neighbourhood, or around campaigning issues.

12 More workers volunteer time to be active in community organisations than in trade unions. There are at least thirty times more full time employees, around 835,000, employed by community organisations and charities than there are employed by unions.

13 Community organisations are concerned with what used to be referred to as ‘the social wage’, the quality of life outside work. So are trade unions, but their leverage is in the workplace and campaigning abilities and independence. They are the most powerful organisations.

14 Some community organisations are highly localised to neighbourhoods or villages or towns, some to national campaigning issues to improve an area of life or a particular group. The national organisation of unions across England, Scotland and Wales, though splintering in the absence of truly national collective bargaining arrangements, is distinctive of the unions. Some community organisations have democratic structures similar to unions. Most share the progressive values of the trade unions – social justice, anti-discriminatory practice, empowerment of people, democratic and accountable organisational processes.

15 Their interests cover the full range of human concerns from housing to child care, health to arts, local planning to community services, to transport and environmental concerns. 

16 Some arise as a result of pressing community needs such as the Grenfell residents’ campaign for example.

17 Others have provided a permanent infrastructure of support for building community organisations that empower and enable local residents to campaign and win changes in their local communities. Such organisations fell victim to the first 2010 austerity measures.

18 There is a long tradition of community development in Britain. This is the non-workplace based equivalent of the trade union organising agenda. Like union organising work, community development has a rich history of theory and practice. There has been no cross fertilisation between the sectors to learn from the best practice. There should be.

19 Voluntary action, like lay leadership and involvement in unions, is encouraged and widespread in a range of organisations. 38% of the population are involved in some form of civic participation, around 75% often give to charity with £22 a month being an average donation. The most commonly cited reasons for being involved in volunteering in the community are that people want to “improve things” or “help people.” These of course are the same motivations which underpin trade unionism. The commitments to social justice and collective action are shared by both spheres.

20 Many community organisations refer to their work to empower people and collectivise campaigning as social action. This is the equivalent of what trade unions refer to as campaigning, but it often has a more extensive and permanent presence, as opposed to one off campaigning. Social action is about being involved with issues affecting the local area by doing things like: setting up a new service/amenity; stopping the closure of a service/amenity; stopping something happening in the local area; running a local service on a voluntary basis; helping to organise a community event. According to the DCMS Community Life survey in 2017-18, 15% of people had been involved in social action in their local area at least once in the last year.

21 Most progressive, socialist minded community organisations, some of which were previously local government or national government funded, have also struggled after funding cuts. Many of the national support organisations for specialisms within the community sector have disappeared. A new wave of more independent organisations have emerged, yet ultimately many depend for their continuity on local government or government funding. Unlike the trade unions, community organisations do not rely almost exclusively on membership subscriptions. 

22 A predominant legal entity within the community Movement is the charity. This form of organisation prohibits explicit party political campaigning, but does not prevent campaigning to relieve poverty, provide welfare and education, arts and cultural activities.

23 Trade unions are registered by the Certification Officer and cannot explicitly support a political party without holding a successful vote to establish a political fund from which all such political work must be resourced.

24 The community sector sometimes sees the trade union movement as an appendage of the Labour Party. It is not. Out of 130 unions registered with the Certification Officer, only 13 are affiliated to the Labour Party. 

25 Political independence has been as important to trade unions as it has been to the charitable and community sector, yet unions and employees generally face far more restrictive legislation than community organisations. The successful campaigning for rights and legislative changes and reformed institutions and practices undertake by generations of trade unionists has arguably had a greater legislative impact that the community movement. Fundamental employment and democratic rights which affect everyone have been achieved by the unions.

26 Many trade unions fund charities, closely or less closely associated with their core work. Some support associated charities in delivering huge education programmes, some manage retirement and rest homes for retired or sick members. 

27 Some unions have developed what they might refer to as ‘community memberships’ organised in ‘community branches.’ These give a democratic forum and voice within the unions for those not directly organised around the workplace.

28 Some unions fund favoured community projects.

29 Some professionals, footballers for example, have ‘working in the community’, written into their contracts of employment and football clubs all run a community outreach arm.

30 Like trade unions, many community organisations manage properties and training or residential centres. This is common in the faith sector, but also in non-sectarian umbrella organisations, for example local village halls, community associations running community centres. There has been minimal sharing of physical and building resources between the unions and between them and the community sector. 

31 Community organising, and community development, are established techniques to organise and bring groups together to fight for social justice and campaign against problems, or fight for positive outcomes. These are well established areas of work which themselves generated a range of professional training courses and generated a specialist trade union, the Community and Youth Workers Union, now part of Unite.

32 Some trade unionists comment that community and voluntary sector organisations are bad employers and substitute real jobs with volunteers. There is truth in this which is why trade unions have had to organise workers in this sector. It is also true that trade unions themselves do not have unblemished records as employers. Community organisations and trade unions both depend on the voluntary activity of members. In France there is a great phrase for this which roughly translates as the ‘associative life’. It refers to the cultural reality that society is the voluntary, freely chosen support we give to family, friends, community and work colleagues. The idea of community or communal life is essential for progressive social change.

33 We create together ‘civil society,’ we commune collectively with each other. Community organisations, trade unions, elected institutions and professional bodies are the public sphere of our country and share different values from those of the dominant private and corporate spheres and unelected media and political institutions.  The trade union and community movements reinvest in people, they fund activity and social life. Combined they have huge capital investments also which could be put to greater use in ways that reflect the ethics and values of the sectors.

34 Because trade unions and community groups are about voluntary membership and collective mutually supporting engagement, face to face contact and communication between people are essential to their organisational success. The US dominated social media platforms assist the fragmentation, isolation and incoherence of human dialogue. Fortunately some 73% of the adult population still report that they meet friends and family face to face each week. The strength of our sectors is that they operate in the human relationships that strengthen deep level political solidarities. Funding pressures and competition for grants make some community organisations operate individualistically with purely commercial and transactional activities with others. The legacy of deindustrialisation, public sector cuts and criminalisation of some basic democratic union rights, has meant that unions can too easily become insular and beleaguered.

35 As there are in the trade union movement, so there are in the community movement different ideological traditions, most of which are socialist in inclination in the broadest sense and would be recognisable to trade unionists. Many of the techniques to develop and sustain groups and individuals in the community work sector are better than those deployed in trade unions. The trade union movement has not sought to reach out to these. They should do.

36 Community work is a recognised profession with its own skill sets and national collective bargaining, the Joint Negotiating Committee for Youth and Community Workers.

37 There are various initiatives taking place nationally to resurrect a radical model of community engagement. Currently these do not reach out to trade unionism. They should do.

38 A couple of unions are running interesting Friends of the Union, free or cheap membership systems.

39 The National Pensioners Convention would be an example of a national organisation of campaigners, often with trade union experience, running an organisation of universal benefit. Very many of the community associations and centres established in the 1970s were led by combinations of experienced trade unionists and local residents. Some of the more recent, more agile, powerfully organised and influential community organisations are less knowledgeable about the union movement. By and large there is minimal knowledge in the trade unions of the architecture of the community sector. 

40 At the other end of the age spectrum there are hundreds of very good youth organisations. These engage and inspire and organise young people in ways far more effective and sustained than the trade unions. Some, like the Woodcraft Folk or the British Youth Council actively seek to promote awareness of trade unions and support young people becoming members of unions.

41 Trade Unions have a strong identity with the skills of particular occupations, workers join unions because they identify with their trade and like to exercise control over it. This is both extremely positive, and the hallmark of good trade unionism, but negative if pursued in isolation.

42 Community organisations grow often out of a great love of locality, or of particular community of interests or identity such as for example the Indian Workers Association. Some of the strongest community organisations historically, were based on loyalty to place and controlled everything in neighbourhoods from keeping out criminals, refusing destructive business-led planning applications and forcing local councils to build good housing and community facilities.

43 The collapse of local authorities and many other factors have inhibited local engagement and control over planning and other developments of communal space. There is a quiet resurgence of such organisations and some have to consider momentous issues like the disposal of nuclear waste, the development of fracking, the development of new transport systems, the effects of intensive farming on their landscape and water supplies.

44 The globalisation agenda seeks to replace a strong sense of identity with place, culture and country with the market, and the free movement of labour and capital. Instead of an affinity with neighbours it encourages a superficial familiarity with strangers. People are returning to a need for grounded politics. The right to be able to work and live if you want to in the area where you were born with a stable, well rewarded job is an important one.

45 If you consider historic moments or generational campaigns of significance for the creation of a more democratic and equal society in Britain, all of them have been successful when trade unions and wider community organisations have been in close alignment or combination. Consider the origin of the universal franchise, eventually achieved in 1968 with its source in the 1792 manifesto of the London Corresponding Society, later the unions and Chartists, the suffragettes and so on. Consider the struggles first against slavery and then racism, unions and community organisations together. The long history of equal treatment and pay for women in work, impossible to think of without the simultaneous action of those in work, particularly at the TYCO factory in 1976, and those in the wider liberation movement. Consider the removal of child labour and establishment of state education. Consider the development of health and safety at work. Consider the creation of the welfare state, trade unions and mutual societies and charities did not just campaign for its creation, originally provided all those services now provided by the state. Advances in educational methodology, to break the elitism and false hierarchies of University dominated systems, and create a genuine sense of lifelong learning, were pioneered in trade union and community work organisations. Successful peace campaign, from 1916 till today has seen unions and campaigning and faith organisations at the forefront. Similarly with the genuine, deep rooted internationalism in our country; as far as extending the hand of friendship to those in need oversees it has been the unions and major charities that have done the work.

46 A particularly positive form of organisation within the trade union movement has been the Trade Union Councils. These are localised bodies under the aegis of the Trades Union Congress which seek the affiliations of all TUC affiliated unions and create a local forum which often includes and reaches out to with wider community. Local TUCs tend to have more power and authority within the Wales and Scotland TUC structures than in the general TUC where they are still not fully appreciated.

47 In the trade union movement there is one main ‘centre’, the TUC, established in 1864. Many other countries are plagued by having more than one trade union centre where these are created around political or religious ideologies. In Britain any union with any overall political inclination other than racist or fascist can join the TUC. This gives a potential for unity at the heart of the trade union movement. 120 years ago the TUC established the General Federation of Trade Unions as a complementary federation to provide education, research, international, practical and other forms of service support to affiliates which the TUC does not provide. The two are complementary and many unions join both.

48 In the community movement there is a parallel architecture with umbrella and infrastructure, membership based organisations, speaking on behalf of and supporting their affiliates. Like the trade union movement, these bodies have local and regional structures and work along similar democratic lines.

49 The trade union movement’s great commitment to education means that there are organisations and institutions which have provided trade union and community education. The Special Designated Institutions, that is adult residential colleges and providers like Northern and Ruskin College, or the Co op College or the Workers’ Education Association in particular seek to train new generations of leaders in youth and community and trade union organisations. It is in such organisations that the potential power of greater alliances been trade union and community organising can be felt. Their work should be developed and supported more by trade unions and community organisations.

50 Many of the services provided by umbrella bodies in both sectors are similar. Many of the practices of democratic accountability and collective responsibility are identical.

51 How people live, how our voice is heard and used to make improvements, how we are treated at work, how our children are treated and educated, how our health is enhanced and treated, how our environment is protected, how our ability to commute and communicate,  benefit from value for money utilities and free public services  and care for our elderly with good pensions negotiations and good social care support, are all shared concerns within the community and trade union movements. There are more. A forum should be created to establish such a dialogue.

52 All services required within a community – hospital, school, community hall, library, fire service, utility service, police service, sports and leisure centre, post office, shops, justice system, housing department, government department, are staffed by trade unionists. When there is flood, fire, or accident in a community it will be trade unionists in the emergency services who will be giving assistance. Why is the interaction limited to purely the work functions? Why do the workers’ unions and community’s organisations not speak together?

52 In considering this requirements the highest values of co-operation, solidarity, commonality, mutuality, sharing, caring and supporting have developed and become enshrined in democratic organisational form. Trade unions at the workplace, community organisation outside are the main forms that have been developed. It is time for more discussion together to rebuild our country and create a deeper sense of agency and control by the people.

53 The trade unions refer to themselves as being part of a Movement, so do the best community organisations. What if through closer alignments and co-operation, creative partnerships and regular communications they became a new Movement?

54 How could the new deal for workers campaign be used to re-engage with the organised community sector? How could the exemplary work of community and youth organisations and their techniques of engagement and their reach benefit the trade unions? Is this worthwhile ground for future consideration? The GFTU has previously debated the idea of closer partnership or perhaps encouraging affiliation of non-trade union organisations. Is it time to consider this idea again?

Doug Nicholls

General Secretary, General Federation of Trade Unions.

February 2020.

Author: Third Sector Journal

The House of Lords has backed the creation of community wealth funds that would make grants to support local social infrastructure in deprived areas. 

Peers yesterday voted in favour of an amendment to the Dormant Assets Bill, which is making its way through parliament. 

Charity sector bodies have long called for funding from dormant assets to be invested in community wealth funds in order to help deprived communities.

The amendment would allow for community wealth funds to be set up to “make grants and other payments to support the provision of social infrastructure to further the wellbeing of communities suffering from high levels of deprivation and low levels of social infrastructure”. 

It was introduced by the Labour peer Lord Bassam of Brighton, who also works as director of place at the Prince of Wales’ responsible business charity Business in the Community. 

He told peers yesterday that the amendment would give the government the power to establish a long-term pilot scheme, “enabling small-scale investments to be made in local communities that have been left behind in recent years and for data relating to the social impact of those investments to be gathered and analysed”. 

He said: “My argument is simply that the proposal could act as a powerful tool in boosting deprived areas, putting small sums of money in communities’ hands so that they can invest in the facilities or services that would have the most local benefit – perhaps subsidising a community hall, running adult learning classes, supporting skills and training hubs and sports facilities, and improving digital connectivity. 

“I am sure we could all come up with a long list of things that could directly benefit communities that have been left behind and require levelling up.”

The amendment says that the relevant secretary of state could make an order for the creation of such a fund “for a temporary period of at least 10 years” and “at the end of that period review the efficacy of the community wealth funds with a view to creating community wealth funds on a permanent basis”.

The amendment defines social infrastructure as charities or “buildings or other assets owned or managed by organisations located in communities for the purposes of local residents meeting, socialising, accessing educational resources, or conducting other activities to improve their wellbeing”. 

The amendment will need to survive passage through the House of Commons to become law, but its prospects are uncertain given that almost all Conservative peers voted against it. 

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts was one of just two Tories to support the amendment. 

He told peers during the debate yesterday: “I will repeat, in four sentences, four reasons why I am attracted to community wealth funds. 

“They are very local and can reflect the often highly idiosyncratic needs of a particular local community. They can provide a physical space – a building – as a focus for presenting and answering those particular needs. 

“Thirdly, they can provide an element of professional help, without which a purely voluntary organisation can struggle. 

“Fourthly – this is most important – they can provide the long-term capital needed to answer and build answers to the very deep-seated challenges that many of these communities face.”

Author: Charlie Ellis, The Scottish Review

The lockdown revealed many disparities in our society. One was the very different lockdown experience had by those with and those without access to a garden. Gardening became a lockdown activity for some, with many discovering its many benefits for physical and mental health. Advantages long known and illustrated by the gardens for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at places such as the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. The Cyrenians currently run two gardens on the site with a mission to ‘grow food, build communities and improve health and well-being’.

The lack of a garden is a particularly acute issue in heavily populated areas, such as Leith. According to the 2011 census, the Leith Walk area is the most densely populated area in Scotland. Clearly green spaces are at a premium. There is actually a long connection between Leith and gardening. An early incarnation of the Royal Botanic Gardens was situated on Leith Walk, before moving in the 1820s. In 2010, the Botanic Cottage (built in 1764-5) was moved from Leith Walk – stone by stone – to the current Botanic Gardens in Inverleith where (since 2016) it has been used as a base for education and community sessions, as well as public events. The surviving remnant of the botanic garden in Leith can be seen at Hopetoun Crescent Garden.

Abundant plots

The gardening spirit lives on, including in the Leith Community Growers and Edible Estates projects. Sloan Street Community Garden is part of this network. Though in a busy area close to Easter Road, it’s easy to miss it, as it’s surrounded by tenements. As the new president of the Sloan Street gardens, Flip Kulakiewicz admits: ‘though I live just around the corner from it, it took me several years till I found out about it’. Access is via a locked gate on South Sloan Street. As you enter, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden (1911) immediately comes to mind: ‘the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles’.

On passing through the gate, you soon find yourself in a thickly wooded area, with narrow shaded paths leading you to open ground. Abundant plots engulf the clearings. Following the heavy rains of May and the sunshine of early June, the place was waist-high in plants and verdant clumps of herbs.

Flip’s own plot produced a superabundant oregano plant with enough of the bold and earthy herb to keep a busy Italian restaurant going for months. Flip says that the garden was a godsend during lockdown; a place she could decompress in after a long stint on her laptop: ‘Like many, I was working from home during lockdown and I really needed a place of serenity to wind down during a break’.

Flip also feels that ‘in the midst of a pandemic and all the upheaval, it was very reassuring to have a place which didn’t seem affected by anything – plants and animals were all continuing as usual’. She relates that during the deepest periods of lockdown she ‘got into a nice routine where I’d come each day to weed and water and then just sit for a few minutes and look at everything; it was almost a form of meditation’. One legacy of the pandemic may be a greater appreciation of the many benefits of gardening and of quiet green spaces.

Communal associations

For many, a community garden or allotment is merely a handy place to spend some time in the fresh air or to grow vegetables, fruit and herbs. However, some see the allotment as something inherently political. It is seen as an example of common ownership and organisation in action. That’s common ownership as opposed to state or public ownership. Though Sloan Street Community Gardens are owned by the council, they are organised communally. This, some believe, is an example of how society could be based on communal associations. Such a view is best expressed through the writings of the British anarchist thinker Colin Ward (1924 – 2010) and the ideas of ‘associative democracy’ expressed by Paul Hirst (1946–2003) .

Ward and Hirst’s thought exemplifies the antithesis in British socialism between a belief in the role and power of the state on one hand and unease about its growth on the other. Ward clearly belonged to the anti-statist socialist tradition and viewed the post-war era as one in which British socialism took the wrong ‘road’ and attempted to ‘bypass’ the ‘multitude of local initiatives’, in favour of ‘the conquest of the power of the state’. Ward was critical of both the collectivist state and the market, both of which, from this perspective, threaten civil association.

For Hirst, the aim of the left should be to ‘devolve activities from the state to civil society as far as is possible’. He defined the associative society as one which treated ‘self-governing voluntary bodies not as secondary associates but as the primary means of both democratic governance and arranging social life’. This echoes Ward’s distinction outlined in Anarchy in Action (1973), between ‘the tradition of fraternal and autonomous associations springing up from below’ as opposed to ‘authoritarian institutions directed from above’.

Ward was an advocate of communal ownership and ‘self-managed’ organisation of as many features of our lives as possible. As he reflected in an essay on Patrick Geddes and planning, Ward was ‘absorbed by the ways in which people use, manipulate and shape their environment’. For Ward, allotments were seeds of an alternative form of social organisation, evidence that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. As he put it, ‘a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state’.

In his book (co-written with David Crouch) The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988), they argued that the non-hierarchical and decentralised workings of allotments are an example of the anarchist ideal in action. Ward bemoaned the fact that allotments were ‘taken for granted’ and instead lauded these examples of local self-sufficiency. They considered the allotment movement to be a vibrant subculture. They argued that many other abandoned public spaces should be transformed into allotments.

A spontaneous order

Ward would have welcomed the plots which sprang up on the disused bowling and putting greens at Powderhall a few years ago. He would, however, have been saddened that allotments don’t seem to be a central part of the long-term vision for this area as its full-scale redevelopment takes effect.

It’s not always been easy for advocates of allotments to carve out permanent spaces. The drawn-out efforts to set up a community allotment near the old Morningside Station in 2009 are a cautionary tale. For many months, ‘guerilla gardeners’ fought to make use of this piece of waste ground off Balcarres Street before Network Rail relented.

After a couple of years, which saw volunteers of a wide variety of ages and backgrounds successfully cultivate the land, permission was withdrawn and the area reverted to wasteland. What a waste indeed. Ward would have seen such aborted projects as evidence of the deadening hand of private and public bureaucracy. Ward and Crouch felt that the allotment was an idea that was constantly under threat, with long-held sites regularly taken over for other purposes.

That things such as community allotments and gardens emerge without the directing hand of an authority connects to the idea of a spontaneous order, which underpins Ward’s thinking. Societies do not collapse without authorities, quite the reverse in many cases. For Ward, it’s only in such marginal places that this spontaneity is free to emerge. Usually, it is throttled before it makes any progress.

This connects, rhetorically at least, to strands of conservative thought which seek to reduce the role of the state in our lives. Indeed, Ward’s work was much praised by David Green and Ferdinand Mount, two prominent conservative thinkers and writers on the theme of ‘reinventing’ civil society and ‘mutualism’. However, for Ward, the market is equally a threat. Free market capitalism might have some of the characteristics of spontaneity (its ability to adapt nimbly to change) but it entrenches existing power relations and inequalities. Ward aimed to reclaim for the anti-market left some of the libertarian terminology adopted by the free-market right.

Fundamentally, Ward rejected overarching narratives and grandiose centralised projects. He did not seek perfect models and instead concentrated on experiments and moments of possibility that might unlock the potential for a better society.

The community garden on Sloan Street is a prime example of this. Unlike so many green spaces in the New Town, it is not private and exclusionary. Instead, those involved in the garden come from a range of backgrounds. Any visitor to the gardens is unlikely to feel that they are witnessing the vanguard of a social revolution. In such a tranquil place, the first thoughts are of the wildlife and ripening crops, not social change. Indeed, whatever your political perspective, places such as the Sloan Street Community Gardens ought to be valued and nurtured. We surely need more of them. As so many areas of Leith and Edinburgh more generally fill up with new (and converted housing), the need for such places is ever more urgent. Many marginal spaces are disappearing.

In general, the pattern is for community gardens and allotments to spring up as areas are cleared for redevelopment and for them to disappear when development ends. In Fountainbridge, a community garden was set up on waste ground near the new Boroughmuir High. As the massive Fountainbridge development continues, this area is bound to be swallowed up. Instead, such places should be maintained after the development process has ended. Those in the new housing will need green spaces. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of positive stories across the city.

Taking back control

It’s certainly heartening to see similar community gardens spring up in other marginal places all over Edinburgh. Leith Community Croft, which makes use of some disused tennis courts at the west end of Leith Links is another example of Ward’s thinking in action. Their belief that ‘urban crofts can help generate community solidarity and well-being, strengthen the local economy, and contribute to community wealth building and skill-training’, brings out the political perspective underlying the project.

The Community Croft project also emphasises the urgent issue of food poverty. The Granton Hub, based at Madelvic House, lies in an area of crumbling factories. The community garden there has made creative use of an unpromising bit of wasteland. Its flourishing embodies the new energy of the area.

During lockdown several volunteers worked on a log boat, based on a design from the Iron Age. There were dreams of rowing the boat out into the Forth and perhaps even over to Fife. When I saw the boat last summer, I’ll admit I was impressed by the efforts made but sceptical about the vessel’s sea-worthiness. I’m told by Tom Nelson of the Granton Hub that the log boat successfully launched in mid-June, with tests in and around Granton Harbour, where it is now moored. Short trips down the coast to Newhaven and Crammond are in the offing, with the ‘big crossing’ to follow if all goes well. Regular sailings are then planned for the future. Clearly community gardens – and those who use them – are imbued with almost limitless optimism, with some of it justified.

John Harris and John Domokos’s Orwell Prize-winning Anywhere but Westminster series for The Guardian has been brilliant at picking up the underlying trends in British politics over the last decade. Though often downbeat and pessimistic, the main seeds of optimism they contained were the community projects they encountered across the UK. Projects which were ‘changing the world a little bit at a time’.

Their December 2019 episode on Edinburgh and East Lothian featured the inspiring The Ridge community garden in Dunbar. One of the volunteers there summed up the outlook: ‘Sometimes when the world is shit enough… communities and individuals go… they are not going to do it for us, we are going to have to do it for ourselves’. Taking back control in a genuine sense. For Harris, this was a ‘spectacular illustration’ of people trying to change things at a grassroots level and represented ‘where the future of the left has to start’. Their ‘political with a small p’ efforts very much fit with Ward’s philosophy of mutual self-help and communal organisation – and Hirst’s desire to devolve activities from the state to civil society.

Sloan Street Community Garden is one of those projects which flourishes, almost unnoticed, beyond the tentacles of the council. Community gardens and allotments should be seen as something far more than an oasis of calm. The way that community gardens and allotments continue to thrive is a cause for optimism. Indeed, they may well be contributing to an unhurried and unseen social revolution. Alternative ways of social organisation are, Ward believed, ‘already there… the parts are all at hand’. They are, in Ward’s words, seeds beneath the snow.

Across Leith and Edinburgh, local groups are embodying this ‘do it yourself’ philosophy in radical and inclusive ways. Their example provides optimism in a bleak political climate of confected culture wars and constitutional crisis. Like the Granton Hub log boat, such efforts need long-term commitment, collective effort and more than a little optimism. More anarchy for Leith doesn’t mean chaos but instead the strengthening of social bonds and the enriching of its civic culture.

Charlie Ellis is a researcher and EFL teacher based in Edinburgh. He is currently working on a book for Edinburgh University Press on British conservatism

Author: Angela Catlin, Georgina Hayes. The Ferret

On a crisp November afternoon in Maryhill, Glasgow, a small group of mask-clad local residents begin to gather just outside Wyndford Nursery School.

Situated in the north-west of the city, Wyndford estate comprises 1960s and 70s-style council flats – mostly run by a housing association, some as high as 26 storeys. Other residents pass by, many hand-in-hand with their young children.

Before long two teenage girls arrive, armed with crates full of hot food. Chantelle and Dion, both 17, have lived in the area their entire lives and have spent the last year and a half preparing and delivering meals for their neighbours.

Now apprentices for the G20 Youth Festival – a postcode-based project with an ethos of empowering young people and helping others – the girls were inspired to start a community feeding project when lockdown struck.

“We were delivering to doors, delivering to people who couldn’t get out – like the elderly and people with health conditions,” says Delma Egan, one of two adults joining Dion and Chantelle, as she offers boxes of freshly cooked spaghetti bolognese to waiting residents.

Despite COP26 taking place mere miles away, pledges by world leaders and corporations at the SEC feel worlds apart from the activism taking place in Maryhill. There has been criticism of the failure to address issues about food insecurity and its links to poverty and climate change.

Securing better food systems across both the global south and north, many argue, is at the heart of climate justice.

“I think they don’t know the way poor people live. They’re so out of touch,” Egan says.

They see first hand that food insecurity is an issue right here in Scotland. Every Monday night, G20 collects food from Co-op stores and young people help cook it at their youth club the following morning, before heading to Wyndford that afternoon for the street food project.

“We were really busy during lockdown, we were making up to 120 meals a week and delivering them in the community for free,” Egan explains as people fill their bags with cardboard-packaged hot meals and groceries. “People were getting through on social media to say they were really struggling.”

Glasgow has suffered a particularly difficult pandemic, having endured the harshest Covid-19 restrictions in Scotland for the longest period of time, measures which often affected vulnerable communities the most.

In a bid to get word out of the help on offer, Chantelle and Dion would hand out leaflets and leave them in the closes of flats. “These young people have grown up in Maryhill so they know everybody. That community connection is so important,” says Egan.

Born and bred in the Gorbals, Delma joined G20 two years ago after a spell as an addiction worker with adults. Alongside doing one-to-ones with young people, she also helps run a family support group on Thursday nights where “the mothers and grannies of the young people come to shout and share about their week”.

Now that the pandemic has tapered and people can get to shops, around 20 people still show up every week for the food. An area historically associated with disproportionately high rates of poverty and health inequalities, there’s a “real need” for the extra support.

“There’s folk who come here who are obviously in active addiction, like any scheme in Glasgow,” she says, waving at a man passing by.

“We also get asylum seekers, and people with severe mental health issues too. We’ve got a transgender person who comes who’s lovely – a whole variety of people and everybody’s welcome.”

Research has frequently revealed that the majority of foodbank users often feel fear and embarrassment, while need for the services has increased by 128 per cent in the last five years across the UK as a whole, largely as a result of welfare issues and challenging life experiences such as ill health.

However, a Durham University study also found that some of these feelings of stigma were overcome when people realised that others they consider to be like themselves may also rely on food parcels.

Egan explains: “With us, we usually get a good laugh out of the people when they come – there’s interaction. They’re especially proud people, Glaswegians, and many feel shame going into a food bank.

“But I think because this is out in the fresh air and they’re popping by rather than going into a building that says ‘food bank’ on it, there’s no stigma. We invite people over and we’re out in the open,” she says, adding: “I’m working class, my parents are working class, we speak their language.”

But while COP26 is far from people’s minds here that isn’t to say that being environmentally conscious isn’t at the heart of this operation. The hot food containers are cardboard and waste goes to a nearby allotment, used to source fresh produce for the hot meals – from potatoes and carrots to green beans and kale.

“We took over the allotment a year ago. One of the young people found it and now we’ve got three plots,” says Emily Cutts, director of the Children’s Wood, a gap site transformed by the local community in the west-end of Glasgow despite threats of eviction from high-end property development bids.

“Young people have been quite negatively viewed in the community with police on them all the time, but after the pandemic people were saying well done,” she says.

“There’s so many strengths but so many barriers. School hasn’t worked well for a lot of them, but they respond really well to the outdoors. We’re now trying to train them up to get green jobs.”

Six miles east in Provanmill, an area of major deprivation in the city, St Paul’s Youth Forum is similarly committed to sustainable, dignified community solutions to food insecurity.

Located in – although not affiliated with – St Paul’s parish church, the project hosts a free, three-course community meal every Tuesday evening as well as a food pantry on Wednesdays. The menu tonight includes chicken curry and a spiced pumpkin loaf with custard.

Much of the produce served comes from a community garden that surrounds the church. Here there are several polytunnels as well as a chicken coup and pizza oven.

“Because it’s a very community-orientated place we don’t lock the gates, which means a lot of families can come up at all times of the day to see the chickens even if I’m not here,” says Joe Lowit, the forum’s community gardener. “We’ve never had any vandalism.”

Straddled by two motorways, Provanmill suffers pollution levels which are almost never at a safe level, and less than 50 per cent of residents own a car.

“There’s no Subway, there’s no train service, there’s a very expensive and temperamental bus service… which obviously makes it very difficult for people to access local, affordable healthy produce and that affects their general health,” Lowit says.

Like G20, St Paul’s found that demand skyrocketed during lockdown, and at its peak they were supporting around 260 people a week in just over a square mile.

“For a lot of people it was austerity, job losses, or a lot of old people where the only way to get any food in was to get on a bus to Asda,” adds Lowit. “Our food system, our transport system and our benefits system have all failed,” he adds.

A variety of local residents help with the garden, he says, ranging from nuns living nearby to first generation immigrants and asylum seekers.

“It’s really interesting because in Scotland we’ve been de-skilled a bit, so a lot of people are very happy to take veg from the garden if it’s things like leeks and tatties but there’s other things they wouldn’t know how to cook.

“Whereas quite a few of the local families whose roots are in Africa for example, they’ve come and shown me recipes from the garden that I never thought of. I thought pumpkin leaves were just for the compost, but they say it’s a delicacy.”

They also receive food from FareShare – a charity network that aims to reduce food poverty and waste by redistributing surplus food from shops and producers – although they haven’t been able to provide as much fresh produce as usual due to the supply chain crisis, he explains.

“It’s more dignified than a foodbank; you’re not just being handed a bag,” says Darren Rennie, another St Paul’s organiser.

“It all started with the community meal, and that way nobody would know who was struggling and who wasn’t. Some people would come just for the social interaction.”

Although when the project first started over six years ago “everybody was scared young people would trash it”, they managed to build the garden up “with a sense of ownership”.

“Every tree here was planted by a local young person, and we knew if we made them a part of it then they’d protect it and that’s what they’ve done,” he says. Almost every young person in the area has been given a strawberry plant.

“All the work I do in schools is about teaching children where their food comes from,” he adds.

However, they’re keen not to be “too preachy” about environmentalism: “We’re trying to reduce food miles, but most of the people who live here aren’t a huge part of the problem; they aren’t flying regularly, they don’t have lavish lifestyles.”

And while these community projects may seem disconnected from each other, a concentrated campaign is underway in Scotland’s largest city to increase open agriculture, improve education and address food insecurity in a holistic way.

The Glasgow City Food Plan, developed by a team involving the city council and NHS among many others, aims to shape Glasgow’s food system into something more sustainable and equitable.

“Around 80 different organisations helped introduce the plan after a two-year consultation,” says Abi Mordin, a food activist and strategic lead with the Glasgow Community Food Network and Propagate.

“We feel it’s been influenced by organisations where everything is in unison – anti-poverty associations, restaurants, the council, all got their heads together to see how we can address food system change in a way that’s healthy and fair.”

Goals of the plan include increased understanding of the food system, more opportunities for communities to cook and grow together, increased redistribution of surplus food, better availability of locally produced food, and improved health as a result of these measures.

“Another policy driver is around universal basic income,” she adds.

“Energy prices are going up because a small minority of companies own it all, the cost of living is rising, more people are experiencing poverty – and food is part of that picture. That’s why we need to start making the connection between social and environmental justice.”

For Chikondi Chabvuta, Care International’s Southern Africa advocacy lead, the link between the two could not be more pressing for poorer nations.

“We’re already working with countries that are on the frontlines of trying to defeat poverty, and then when you have climate emergencies happening it affects the most vulnerable and marginalised the most due to existing inequalities,” she explains from COP26 as she visits Glasgow for the summit.

“For most of the countries in Africa, when they are trying to promote agriculture to sustain themselves, flooding comes that will take away cropping and then droughts mean there is little to zero rainfall. It devastates food production and how countries resuscitate themselves.”

However, just like in Glasgow, grassroots organisers are finding innovative ways to empower local people to take food production into their own hands.

“At the community level, we work with women’s groups to really harness how they are adapting and how they could put that to scale, whether it’s promoting seed banks or locally available resources, and also supporting them in setting up markets,” she explains.

Currently the organisation is offering support to around 50,000 women farmers in the region to self-sustain. For their sake Chikondi is “trying to keep hopes high” that promises from western leaders at the critical conference aren’t as hollow as many fear.

“We need that collective action, and it requires both rich countries and governments stepping up and ensuring that the resources that have been committed really are ending up in the hands of women that are most affected,” she adds.

“We need to actually walk the talk on bottom up, bottom led work.” And that’s a sentiment clearly shared by many here in Glasgow.

Author: Energy4All

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As part of Scotland’s targets to move towards producing more green energy for a net zero future a competitive tender for the next generation of offshore wind energy is currently underway. This will result in some of the largest wind farms in the world off the Scottish coast and is an ideal opportunity for Scotland’s communities to get involved. Falck Renewables, Ørsted and BlueFloat Energy who together are bidding for the rights to build offshore wind farms have asked Energy4All to gauge the opinion of the people of Scotland on community ownership of offshore wind farms.

Community ownership is a way for people to come together to finance owning renewable energy schemes, boosting the local economy and using the profits for the benefit of the community.

We want to find out if you think community ownership of offshore wind is a good idea, if you’d want to be involved and how you think this should happen.

Author: Bella Caledonia

In a stunning political defeat for rentier capitalism, Berlin voted in a referendum last month for “the socialisation” of 250,000 apartments. Ben Wray spoke to Bronwyn Frey, activist in the ‘expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co campaign’, to find out how it happened and what happens next.

Something special happened in Berlin last month. A campaign calling for the expropriation of landlords, who own around 3,000 properties which equates to about 250,000 apartments in the city, took their message to Berliners and convinced them that this radical housing demand was a good idea.

In a referendum held on the same day as the country’s federal elections, 26 September, 1,034,709 Berliners voted Yes to expropriation, 56.4% of all of those who voted. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had described the idea as “not the appropriate remedy for the housing crisis”, while the prospective mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey of the centre-left SPD, had said “I don’t want to live in a city that sends the signal that expropriation is going on here.” But the voters of Berlin ignored Germany’s political establishment, and voted for expropriation anyway.

The result is almost certainly the most sensational political defeat for rentier capitalism in Europe for decades. Not only does it show that radical housing demands can win majorities, but it also reveals that the sacred cow of property – that you can demand just about anything except encroaching on liberalism’s most sanctified belief that property rights come before everything else – can be slain.

The campaign began in 2019 with a demonstration of 40,000 through the streets of Berlin, the largest renters march in the city’s history, and involved a huge grassroots organising effort to defeat the big money behind real estate capital’s ‘No’ campaign.

But it’s not over. The vote is not legally binding on the incumbent Berlin coalition government, which is likely to be led by the SPD and include Die Linke (‘The Left’) and the Greens. Campaign efforts are now turning to ensuring the politicians respect the mandate they have been given by over a million Berliners.

To talk about all this, Bella Caledonia spoke to Bronwyn Frey, who is in the Right to the City working group in the expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co campaign. We discuss:

02:23: The housing crisis in Berlin

06:01: The evolution of the housing movement in Berlin

09:24: The ‘expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co campaign’ on the ground

15:43: Getting the Berlin Government to deliver on the ‘Yes’ vote

20:23: The cost of expropriation

23:27: The international repercussions of the referendum vote

26:53: Effective grassroots politics

Bella Caledonia · Berlin’s vote to expropriate the landlords: interview with campaign activist Bronwyn Fery

Bella Caledonia: Let’s start with the context for the referendum: After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin was seen as a cheap place to live, but much of the public housing was privatised and especially since the financial crash the situation has changed dramatically; Berlin has become very expensive for renters. Can you paint us a picture of how th becoe housing crisis has evolved in Berlin?

Bronwyn Frey: Since the fall of the Wall, neoliberal housing politics is on the rise, not just in Berlin but all over the world. Many big cities are becoming unaffordable. But what’s specific to the Berlin case is that in the 2000’s Berlin sold off almost 200,000 public housing units to real estate investors, consulting groups – a large part of it was sold to McKinsey [the world’s largest consultancy firm] for example. These units were put into the market, and is one of the main drivers of rapidly increasing rents in Berlin.

I think 10 years ago Berlin would have still counted as a renters paradise, but the cost has in some places have quadrupled in 10 years. So for example apartments in Schillerkiez, which is this very cute area by this big park, 10 years ago were like €200 euros a month and now are €900.

BC: How have those changes altered the experience of people living in the city. Gentrification for example often leads to segregation, where communities live almost entirely separately from one another. Have you got a sense of how the culture of the city has been affected by this housing crisis?

BF: I don’t have the best overview of this because I’ve only been living here myself for the past two years, but yeah of course it changes the demographics. During the flyering activities for this campaign I was talking to a teacher who lives in Neukölln [an area of Berlin] for decades, and she was just noticing that she has less foreign students and students from ethnic backgrounds because they are getting pushed out of this area. We are on the trajectory of cities like San Francisco, or in my own city of Toronto, where it just becomes rapidly unaffordable for newcomers all over the world, for artists, for students, and basically the city loses the diversity that makes it such an awarding place to live in in the first place.

BC: Let’s talk about the housing movement and how it has developed in Berlin. I know in 2019 a rent cap was introduced, but that was then struck down by the Constitutional Court in April of this year. Can you explain a bit of the background to this campaign and why the referendum became a key part of the housing movement’s strategy?

BF: I think this campaign is the result of over a decade of tenant organising. There have been other groups that have definitely fed into the expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co campaign. So for example there is Kotti & Co, which was centred in this Kreuzberg neighbourhood in Berlin, and lots of really experienced renters groups who have been fighting for a long time.

I think when the campaign really started to pick up steam was when we discovered articles 14 and 15 in the German constitution. Article 14 allows for expropriation – the taking of private property into public ownership – and Article 15 allows for socialisation for the common good – privately owned properties should be governed by the public. Expropriation happens all the time, the government will buy up your house to build a coal mine or a highway or whatever, and publicly run large organisations are not an exception either. The public transport in Berlin for example is organised according to principles that serve the common good.

The rent cap that was implemented by the social-democratic party in 2019, was actually a response to this expropriation demand. The proto-expropriation campaign brought their proposals forward and it was becoming really popular and the Social Democrats, who are definitely more friendly to real estate investment, said ‘no, no, no, we will do our own thing, how about we do this rent cap?’. And the rent cap failed because they didn’t check it was constitutional. So the failure of the rent cap only added fuel to the fire of our own campaign. We have done our research. We’ve asked the research groups of for example the German Parliament, Berlin’s senate administration for city planning, all these research groups have determined that our proposals for expropriation are completely constitutional, so we are ready for this.

BC: The Yes campaign seemed to have been a very well organised grassroots campaign. I noticed that Jane MacAlevey, who is a well known international trade union and community organiser and writer, has been helping to train the campaign on grassroots organising. Can you tell us a bit about how the campaign has organised?

BF: First of all, it’s a huge campaign. It’s organised around a main plenary every two weeks, and then there are different working groups; there’s a working group for figuring out the socialisation laws, a working group for public relations, a working group for managing the neighbourhood teams, and they have their own Telegram chats for organising putting up posters, collecting signatures and doing door-to-door talks. So there’s the working groups and then there’s the neighbourhood structure.

BC: What was key to getting your message across?

BF: One of the basic things is that everyone in Berlin is feeling this existential pressure. Even people who have good rental contracts now feel like they can never move again because if they do they will be moving out of the city. And people coming to the city are searching for months and sometimes up to a year to find a place. So everyone in the campaign has done a really good job of capitalising on that. So there is a really excellent social media team. It’s also a matter of engaging people face to face, collecting signatures there’s people on the streets in purple vests, and that’s a very visible type of branding

BC: In terms of the message of the campaign, to expropriate landlords, it’s obviously a strong message. When you were first trying to talk to people about this, what was the immediate reaction from Berliners to the idea?

BF: When I was collecting signatures for example I would just ask people if they wanted a city with affordable rent for everyone. Of course people want that. Or they had just heard about the campaign already because there was such good media about it. There were people who were against it, for example a lot of people who were in Berlin during the GDR who are suspicious of communism and think socialisation would mean there was less freedom about how to live their lives, which is not at all what this is about; we are not going to say people have to live in this apartment or that apartment or anything like that. So there was some mistrust there.

BC: What about the arguments which the other side of the campaign put forward? I read somewhere that it was quite an arrogant response from real estate capital, where they didn’t feel like they really needed to make their case.

BF: Well I think they do have a lot to prove. Because rents are increasing, and from all of these big real estate companies that we want to socialise, on average €200 a month is just going straight into the pockets of investors, it’s not even going into upkeep. And €200 is a lot of money.

So I think they are definitely on the defensive. I think before we had the referendum, one of the corporate landlords said ‘oh we are just going to have a five year rent freeze on all of our apartments’, and we said ‘no, we are not just going to have a temporary rent freeze and who knows what the rents will be afterwards, we are still going to fight for something that will be a long term affordable solution for the most number of people possible.

BC: The Yes vote in the referendum is not legally binding, and therefore the campaign is putting the onus on the new city-state government to deliver on the mandate of the referendum result. The prospective mayor, Franziska Giffey of the centre-left SPD, has said opposition to expropriation of landlords is a “red line” issue for her when it comes to negotiating a coalition government in Berlin with Die Linke and the Greens. How difficult is it going to be to get the result of the referendum respected and delivered?

BF: I think the more public pressure we put on the incumbent coalition the more successful we are going to be. Giffey did start out saying before the referendum that she had no intention of respecting a successful referendum. The referendum was successful, so her response was ‘we need to check that the constitutional legality of this’. Which is a softening of her positioning – and as she well knows we have checked the constitutional validity of this. And now she wants to set-up this expert commission that will review the legality of expropriation over the next year so that maybe by the beginning of 2023 if the commission has decided its legal then they will think about how to implement it, but this is not what we want. Almost 60% of Berlliners have voted for expropriation now, and we know it’s constitutional, so there’s no way we can accept some kind of unnecessary delay.

So there are demonstrations outside of the coalition negotiation meetings, between the Social Democrats, the Left and the Greens. That will be decided by the end of the year, and the implementation of the socialisation [of the apartments] is also part of these coalition talks. So we are always outside of every coalition talk, we are in the news, we have a very good PR campaign, because we’re seeing that the more pressure we put onto the parties they actually respond to it so we’re definitely prepared to do that and are going to continue to do so. The campaign is also developing a smaller working group that will be part of the coalition talks and report back to the main campaign. So that’s our strategy right now.

BC: The Left supported the campaign from the start, and the Greens didn’t at the start but they have come on board before the referendum vote. Do you expect those parties to make this an important part of agreeing to be part of this coalition?

BF: I think the Left is the surest bet for sure, because they have supported this campaign, also financially, from the beginning and their resources have been invaluable. At the same time they were also part of the coalition back in the 2000s which sold of 200,000 apartments, so we’re not taking anything for granted. So the Greens were also saying before the referendum that they weren’t so in favour of socialisation, but now in more recent public announcements they have talked about the need to respect it and implement it because this is what the majority of Berliners want. So it remains to be seen if they are willing to back up what they are saying with actual plans to deliver it. So that’s the landscape.

BC: One of the arguments of Giffey against expropriation is about the cost. She has said the properties in question have a total value of €30 billion, and that money was needed for other priorities. I know that the expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co campaign argues that the cost would actually pay for themselves, based on paying compensation below market-value – because the constitution stipulates you can do that – and using a bond which would be paid back through the rents from the properties over many years. Is that a fair summary of the idea? 

BF: Yeah that’s great, that’s a very good summary of our plan.

BC: Is this convincing people, that it’s possible to do this, that socialising properties can pay for itself? Is that idea widely understood?

BF: I’m not exactly sure what the public sentiment is about that, but you are absolutely right that there is nothing in the constitution which says that we have to pay market-value for these inflated apartment prices.

Also, the City of Berlin, even before the referendum was successful earlier in September, they decided to buy-back almost 1500 apartments at market-value, so if they are worried about the cost effectiveness, we have a plan where this is not actually going to cost the taxpayers of Berlin anything, and I think our plan makes a lot more financial sense than the fact that they sold off these buildings in the 2000s for a pittance and now they are buying them back for however many millions or billions of Euros they are planning to spend. So I think if people are worried about the financial sensibility of our plan for socialisation, I think they should be first looking to the way that mainstream political parties have been handling this so far.

BC: Obviously there has been a lot of international interest in this, because you have shown that it is possible to build a mass movement around radical housing demands that can win the support of the majority in a democratic vote. You’re from Toronto, Canada, and obviously there’s a big housing crisis there too. To what extent is this victory transferable to other countries?

BF: Obviously the political and legal landscape is different everywhere so I don’t actually know if there are provisions in the Canadian constitution for the sort of expropriation that we have planned, or where that might exist in other places in the world. But I think that what other people fighting for affordable housing around the world can take away from this is that you can’t stop fighting. This campaign is the result of ten years of so much experience organising tenants, and now it is finally coming to fruition, that work is totally worth it. Even if for some reason the Social Democrats and their coalition decide not to respect the democratic vote and to not implement this, we’ve already made changes. Berlin has already tried to take away some of the impetus of our campaign by saying they are going to buy back 1500 apartments, so that’s already made material conditions for many people in Berlin a lot easier. I know for example in Toronto, there’s this very cute neighbourhood called the Kensington market and activists have been fighting there for a decade if not longer to make it an affordable place for everybody. And they have had success, preventing a Walmart being built right next to it for example. So I think the main point is for people not to give up. You are not going to win every time, but I think definitely people can learn from how well organised we are and from our social media campaigns, all of that has been very effective. And as we have seen public pressure can really make a difference when it comes to housing politics. So I would just encourage everyone to not just let themselves be defeated by the idea that ‘capitalism just works this way and we are just going to keep our heads above water for as long as we can, it’s not so bad yet’.

BC: I think it’s interesting that you have said that ten years of organising tenants is what has led to this, because sometimes political campaigns are contrasted to grassroots organising as if they are a dichotomy; either you focus on the state and trying to change things at a political level, or you focus on tenant unions and grassroots organising like it’s one or the other. Would it be right to say that the way the housing movement has evolved in Berlin, it’s been the combination of those two things that have given the movement power?

BF: I think that’s a great point. I don’t think that a grassroots organisation should exclude the possibility of working with sympathetic politicians or political parties. Because our co-operation with The Left party has been pretty important to how this campaign has gone.

BC: Finally Bronwyn, what would you say to people who are inspired by what they’ve seen in Berlin and are thinking about how they can build a campaign, what the key aspects of building a campaign are, what would be your main advice from this campaign?

BF: It’s going to be very personal advice because I’m not a main campaign organiser or anything, there’s definitely other people in this campaign you can ask about starting things from the ground up. But for me it’s just been a matter of joining initiatives who’s politics I agree with but then also who seem to have a clear plan for action. So I would just say that I would encourage people in my position, who maybe don’t have so much experience as organisers, to find out which groups are making the most changes in your city or country, figuring out if it’s a good political match for you and then just building solidarity from there.

Author: Accounts Commission and the Auditor General for Scotland

Lessons need to be learned from the community response to Covid-19, two Scottish bodies have recommended

The community response to Covid-19 must be built on, two public bodies have recommended.

A joint update from the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General for Scotland outlines how Scotland’s public bodies worked with and empowered communities in the response to the pandemic, creating new ways of delivering support. The speed at which some communities were both enabled and empowered to work with councils, partners and charities showed how bureaucratic barriers can be quickly removed.

This momentum needs to be maintained, alongside a determination not to return to pre-pandemic ways of working, they have said. Doing so would help alleviate the unequal impacts of the pandemic on Scotland’s most disadvantaged people, but requires leadership and partnership working at national, local and community levels.

The update also provides several case studies from across Scotland of community responses to the pandemic. The learning from these case studies, and the wider response, are aimed at supporting public bodies, alongside their communities, to develop longer-term approaches to supporting and empowering citizens.

Geraldine Wooley, member of the Accounts Commission, said: “Covid-19 made some public bodies quickly deliver services differently. In many places, voluntary sector organisations were able to work at pace and with a greater freedom to support their communities.

“Community organisations across Scotland have a depth of understanding about local needs that we should continue to tap into. They were able to identify those who were most vulnerable, bringing insight into very local issues. Their ability to quickly maximise local knowledge and connections was crucial in the local response.

“We urge councils to build on this and not return to business as usual. Truly empowered communities are vital in helping reduce the disadvantage and inequalities that have become more severe because of Covid-19.”

Stephen Boyle, Auditor General for Scotland, said: “Empowering communities is a national priority for the Scottish Government. It reaches every corner and aspect of how our public services are delivered. Public bodies need to be able to take risks, however, to be able to be innovative and try different ways of working, within a culture of trust that embraces change.”