Author: Maxwell MacLeod

It is five in the morning and my sleep has been stolen by an on-line advertisement on the Isle of Eigg web site for a tiny bothy that is for sale on that exquisite Hebridean island. I know the cottage well, it is a broken little stone howff that has probably lain shivering and cold for several lifetimes.

I imagine it’s one of those places that is so damp that if you try and dry out your drookit trousers by the fire it would take half a forever.

It is far from nowhere and yet close to everywhere that matters and is available to someone who wants to live permanently in the land of the ever young, eating little other than the view and dancing with the tweetie birds on the raggity beach for their disco. The cottage is for sale for offers over sixty five thousand pounds Roll up, roll up.

No doubt the poor Isle of Eigg trustees who manage the island on behalf of the islanders will be inundated with applications to buy it from other restless nutters wrested this dawn from their slugabed warmth. Last night in dreams I went once more to the bay on the back of the ocean and there in infinite sadness I watched my life go down.

Back in the day I lived for a few months on that lovely island, writing the odd irrationally silly piece for The Independent as half the world seemed to be watching as the local population tried to raise a million pounds to buy their island from a half mad German painter who had bought the place with money he had borrowed from granite eyed money men in Hong Kong who took no prisoners and wanted their cash back.

I am told, though have never been able to confirm the story, that when the news finally came through that an anonymous little old lady from England had decided to send several hundred thousand pounds of her savings to the island to put them over their target that it was such a news story that even in far away Australia one television company had interrupted their regular programmes with a newsflash that made millions smile.

I myself was on the mainland when the news came through that the islanders had bought their land but dashed at once to it’s waking glory by tiny buzz boat. I remember we had trouble steering that inflated rubber soap dish as our eyes were misted with tears as we blattered across the dawn fresh waves that oozed restless and slow turning under a tablecloth of mist. When the mists finally cleared and we saw a shore crowd waiting for us gathered round a farm house our steersman, whose home that farmstead was, turned to us and said “ See that island? Well it’s ours now. That’s my home, that s my family. “ and we howled with unrestrained tears and let the boat graze awhile untended in the blue hills unable to run across them any further. All lost, yet all found.

Recently I attended a dinner party and sat next door to a wealthy land owner. Half way through the cheese and port she turned to me and said: “I hear you supported those ghastly hippies on Eigg, subsidy junkies all of them . It will never work you know. Never work. They are just parasites.”

Part of me knew she was right, yet part of me also knew she was wrong.

Back in the seventies when the alternative land economist John Seymour of “Fat of the Land” fame, once wrote in effect that the trouble with conventional economics was that it evaluated the cost of milking a cow with your head against her soft belly at dawn as a burden. when he saw it as a benefit, it made me wonder.

After all, no system can be taken as sensible if it’s end product is the fall of man.

And the exemplar of Eigg has it’s part to play as we re-set the world.

I hope someone nice buys that damp cottage on Eigg. I hope they cover it’s carpets with noisy children and squeeze every subsidy going from the real parasites in soft grey offices far away. It will never work? It has worked darling. Have you?

Let Scotland flourish.

Author: Calum Ross, P&J

Hamish Trench, chief executive of the Scottish Land Commission (SLC), said that the “option” of establishing community funds was being considered as part of work to draw up policy recommendations in response to the soaring demand for estates.

In an exclusive interview, the boss of the Inverness-based organisation also outlined other ideas, including developing “mixed governance models” for land, which bring together private sector, public sector and communities in a “joint ownership” structure.

The plans are being discussed amid growing concern that communities will be priced out of owning and benefitting from local sites as result of the burgeoning interest from so-called “green lairds”.

‘Green lairds’

The term has been used to describe businesses and others seeking to off-set their carbon emissions and take advantage of government grants by buying land for initiatives such as tree planting, as well as others who are focused on investing and generating returns through trading in carbon credits.

Looking to the longer term, one option is that this could be the basis for community wealth funds, and reinvesting some of this value in local economies and communities.”

Last week, we reported that fresh fears had been raised about the trend after Standard Life Investments Property Income Trust (SLIPIT) announced it had spent £7.5 million buying 1,447 hectares of upland rough grazing and open moorland in the Cairngorm National Park, to be “used as part of the company’s carbon strategy”.

It follows plans from craft beer giant Brewdog to create a “lost forest” at the 9,300-acre Kinrara Estate in the Cairngorms to offset carbon produced at its brewery.

Mr Trench said the SLC was focussed on this “rapidly developing influence on the land market”, and was aware that it brings “risks and opportunities”.

He said: “My view is that generally this is a potential win-win for Scotland, in that there is an opportunity here, we know our land use can deliver the big change we need for our climate objectives, we know the finance is out there to bring the investment in to do that.

Climate objectives

“So the big question is to make sure we do that well and to make sure that the benefits of that are felt widely.”

Mr Trench said the first job, which was under way already, was to identify the scale of the influence on the land market, because many transactions are carried out privately.

He said the SLC would also be working with landowners, agents, and investors, to “look at responsible practice”.

“There’s no reason already why we shouldn’t be looking at ways that deliver community benefit, through this investment,” Mr Trench said.

“That doesn’t need to wait for a legislation change or policy – there’s a good opportunity now to actually develop models like this that deliver community benefit and bring communities into the decision-making as well.

As well as work already under way, Mr Trench said longer term policy recommendations were expected to be developed over the next six months.

Asked if a Norway-style wealth fund could be considered, he said: “Yes, I think that is an option.

“Fundamentally this is a shared national resource that we’re looking at here, in terms carbon and natural capital values.

“Looking to the longer term, one option is that this could be the basis for community wealth funds, and reinvesting some of this value in local economies and communities.

“There’s learning from what we did and didn’t do back in the oil and gas sector.

“Obviously in more recent history, in terms of renewables, there has been more formal mechanisms for community benefit. So again, there is learning from that.”

Mr Trench confirmed there was an “option” of using taxation to create such funds.

He also spoke of the potential to “reinvest value to help communities acquire ownership directly”, as well as joint ownership models, which were being investigated closely.

“That’s somewhere where we can see quite a bit of potential,” he said.

“If you look internationally, Scotland is actually quite unusual sometimes in thinking about our land ownership as being very strictly either private, public or community.

“What you often find in a lot of other northern European countries is that those sectors are much more mixed.

“So we see quite a lot of scope for joint ventures and mixed governance models, that bring the communities with the private sector and the public sector together in different ownership structures.”

Further reading about trees and offsetting your carbon footprint

Author: Scottish Housing News

The Glasgow community of Maryhill is set to get its own flag this October, for the first time in the area’s 200-year history.

It follows a unique, year-long competition involving hundreds of individuals, local schools and community groups who were all given the chance to submit a proposed design thanks to a £2,000 community regeneration fund.

The ‘A Flag for Maryhill’ project, an idea conceived by staff and volunteers at Maryhill Burgh Halls during the COVID-19 pandemic, is designed to allow a community of around 75,000 people the chance to reflect on a shared history and look with pride to the future.

A judging panel – consisting of world leading experts from the Flag Institute, the Lyon Court (who maintains Scotland’s register of grants of arms and regulates heraldry) through to comedian Janey Godley and Still Game actress Jane McCarry – whittled the entries down to just five before the shortlist was opened to a public vote.

Flag experts Philip Tibbetts (the Lyon Court Vexillologist) and Lord Lyon are saddened that they cannot attend the unveiling in Maryhill. They said: “It will be present in our mind whilst we perform ceremonial duties for the nation at the Scottish Parliament today”.

They are happy to finally provide official recognition to the Flag of Maryhill by “Adding the winning design alongside the Saltire and other flags in the Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland”.

The flag project has attracted attention and support from across Scotland and beyond with the likes of Tim Marshall, the author of the best-selling book ‘Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags’. He commented: “Flags represent our hopes and dreams, they represent the politics of high power as well as the politics of the people. The world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that can divide or unite us.”

Flags are an ancient art form that developed especially to clearly display allegiance and identity. They have subsequently become the premier medium for expressing social pride, indeed it is difficult to imagine events as diverse as sports matches, military parades or musical festivals without a wide range of flags being flown.

The winning flag, which will be unfurled at a community street party on October 2nd, following which the design will be made available to all at no cost.

Author: The Young Foundation

 Full report here “Why don’t they ask us?” – The role of communities in levelling up.

Executive Summary

 This report has three aims: 

1. To provide an overview of regional development in England from the turn of the century to the present. 
2. To highlight trends of inconsistency and inequality, both between areas and within areas of England, across four epochs. 
3. To propose new approaches that prioritise the self-determined needs of communities and engage them more deeply in the development process – giving them a greater stake in the success of their communities. 

Its key findings are that: 

• Interventions have consistently failed to address the most deprived communities, contributing to a 0% average change in the relative spatial deprivation of the most deprived local authorities areas; 
• The majority of ‘macro funds’ and economic interventions over the last two decades have not involved communities in a meaningful nor sustainable way; 
• The focus of interventions to build local economic resilience typically concentrate on a relatively small number of approaches, which risks missing crucial dimensions of local need, opportunity and agency, and reinforcing gaps between the national and the hyper-local; 
• Interventions have tended to concentrate on ‘between-place’ spatial disparities in economic growth at the expense of ‘within-place’ inequalities that exist inside local authority boundaries, which is where the economic strength or weakness of a place is most keenly felt by communities. 
• Where funds and interventions have had higher levels of community involvement, these have typically been disconnected from the structures where decisions are taken, undermining their aim of building community power into local economic solutions. 

The report poses four essential questions for policy makers: 

1.Through what lens and at what spatial level should levelling up interventions be targeted to have the most impact on and resonance with communities?

2. How can the gap be closed between local community priorities and those of regional and national funds and interventions? 
3. What alternative mechanisms and new approaches are needed if levelling up is to target the most deprived communities? 

4.What are the enabling strategies that tackle chronic problems such as post-industrial economic decline, which need to cut across spatial & governance boundaries? 

5.The funding allocated to level up is not sufficient to counteract the decade long impact of public sector cuts which have reduced the capacity of many places to capitalise on economic intervention; nor is it enough to counteract the financial impact of Covid-19 and Brexit for the most deprived places. A list of recommendations based on the findings of this report is provided in the conclusion

Author: Scottish Financial News

The Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) has committed £50 million over five years to the creation of new woodland and forestry management in Scotland.

As a cornerstone investor of the Gresham House Forest Growth & Sustainability Fund, the Bank’s capital will support wide scale new planting and is predicted to capture 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 over 20 years.

It will also target generating stable returns through the sale of timber and the capital growth of land and trees. Any trees harvested by the fund will be replanted and the timber products generated will enable the provision of raw materials for more sustainable packaging and building materials.

The fund will also aim to generate carbon credits in the form of Woodland Carbon Units (WCU) which will create additional value or be used to offset carbon emissions on a voluntary basis.

Eilidh Mactaggart, CEO of the Scottish National Investment Bank, said: “The Bank is delighted to cornerstone this new sustainable forestry fund focused on new and diverse planting in Scotland.

“Gresham House is an experienced forestry fund manager, and we are very excited to support them in this new venture.

“The new planting element and ability to generate carbon credits represents a novel investment proposition which mainstream investors have yet to fully embrace.

“The Bank’s cornerstone investment is designed to encourage other investors to follow us into this new type of forestry fund. We therefore believe this opportunity to be an excellent fit for the Bank’s ambition to lead the way on innovative mission aligned investments.”

In addition to the environmental benefits tree planting brings for biodiversity, flood defence, improved air quality, reduced soil erosion and outdoor recreation, the investment will also support existing and new jobs in rural Scotland.

Managing roughly 140,000 hectares of forestry worth more than £1.8 billion, Gresham House is the UK’s largest commercial forestry manager. The business also manages a forestry mandate in Ireland and expects to complete on a further international forestry mandate in Australia, subject to regulatory approval.

Olly Hughes, managing director, Forestry, Gresham House, added: “This impressive first close is a testament to Gresham House’s long-standing track record in the forestry space and the Bank’s cornerstone investment will help to catalyse further investment in this asset class from institutional and private client investors.

“This flexible strategy allows investors to choose to use the carbon credits generated for offsetting purposes or sell the units to create an income.

“As investors increasingly focus on sustainable investments, forestry is emerging as one of the most impactful solutions, which combats climate change and enhances biodiversity, while also serving as an excellent investment diversifier and producing meaningful uncorrelated returns.”

Author: Giles Fraser

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, life expectancy in the West has risen roughly three months per year. In 1900, a new-born child in the US would, on average, live to 47. Now it is about 79; by the end of the century, it will be 100.

Some will call this progress — in sanitation, diet, medicine — as if more is always better. But the cost of this “progress” is rarely factored in.

£12 billion every year is the latest pledge to fix health and social care, mostly for the elderly. But what are we doing with all these extra years?

It depends, of course. Some will work longer; some will have more time with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Others will be warehoused in care homes, living out their twilight years amid the background smell of stale urine, bored rigid between monthly visits from their guilty children. Many are not like this, but a great deal of them still are. My mother has made us promise we will take her to Dignitas long before it comes to this — and that when we bring her ashes back from Switzerland it will be in a Harrods bag, not a Tesco one. This, apparently, is dignity in dying.

Social care has come a long way since it was conceived in alms houses provided by the church: through Victorian workhouses, state-funded provision in the twentieth century and, more recently, to profit-making private companies. As our population gets older, so the need for such services grows ever larger. It is commendable that the Government is seeking to address the growing cost of social care, albeit through a tax levy that falls disproportionately on the working poor and the young. But the one thing that we are not talking about — and our silence is becoming ruinously expensive — is what a good life, and indeed a good death, looks like.

To put it another way, without a sense of what human life is for, and what its basic natural or even theological rhythms might be, we fall back on the idea that more is always better. Without some sort of agreed understanding that human life exists within fundamental limits, society will inevitably find itself unsustainable.

The idea of growth, of always seeking more, is built into the very nature of capitalism, as it is within liberal progressivism. In a secular society, meaning tends to get replaced by the idea of more; or rather, more becomes the meaning.

It is not a coincidence that just as we are pouring billions into end-of-life care, the fantastically wealthy are seeking their own way of outwitting ageing and death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now throwing his fortune at some comically ludicrous “eternal life” start-up that seeks to keep him alive forever. “Man plans, God laughs”, as the old Jewish proverb puts it. It’s not just that Bezos can’t succeed in this ridiculous vanity project, but that we shouldn’t want him too. Death, after all, gives life its purpose.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being

This means that there is no way of solving the social care crisis in purely economic terms. Because one cannot address a metaphysical question through economic policy. Indeed, the very basic question of what human life is for is one that politicians, still less economists, no longer feel they have any use for.

The first stage to recover a basic metaphysical scaffolding would be to reclaim something of that story in which death has some sort of wider significance, rather than being viewed as just some anticlimactic end. Because if having more — going on longer — is the meaning of life in a secular society, then death is inevitably and always some sort of failure. Whereas we would once have said of the dead that they have passed into glory, we now hear the medics apologise that “there was nothing that we could do”. Death was once — potentially, at least — an expression of some ultimate triumph. Now it is the bitter failure of our technology. And whatever we spend on it, no amount of money will overcome this gap.

Death, then, is the political issue we are not talking about. Even after the pandemic, when the daily death figures were broadcast on every news broadcast, we continue to say little about death other than making the uncritical assumption it is always to be avoided.

And so we are sleepwalking into a state of affairs in which the young will resent the elderly for the burden they place upon them. Of course, we should support the generous funding for social care. What we ought to be challenging is whether the medical technologies that are keeping us alive for ever longer complement our understanding of what human existence is for.

But I see little appetite for that. In a secular society, we have few intellectual or cultural resources to challenge the pervasiveness of more-ism. And to live deeper, more meaningful lives is not the same as living longer ones.

Author: Stephen Burgen, The Guardian

Community initiatives boosted as government signals change in policies that favour energy giants

Spain’s growing energy cooperative movement has received a boost after the government announced that some of the latest allocation of renewable energy will be in small lots, rather than large tranches that only big energy companies can afford.

The move signals a change of attitude after successive governments have given in to the demands of the power giants.

It comes as cooperatives in rural and urban areas are trying to break free from the major electricity suppliers that have exploited high demand during the recent heatwave to push prices up to record levels.

Cristina Alonso, energy spokeswoman for Friends of the Earth, welcomed the government’s apparent change of heart as “a favourable measure – but not one that actually promotes energy communities because it doesn’t define what they are. These need to be defined as democratic and genuinely autonomous.”

Solar installation has accelerated rapidly since the abolition in 2018 of the so-called “sunshine tax”. The rightwing government imposed this on self-sufficient consumers in 2015 for, in effect, depriving power companies of income. Consumers were also obliged to give their surplus energy to the grid free of charge.

With no oil or gas and not much coal, sunshine is Spain’s greatest energy resource, and yet it remains underexploited. According to the Spanish Electric Network, in 2020 renewables accounted for 43.6% of energy production of which only 6.1% came from solar power, with the bulk coming from wind (21.7%) and nuclear (22.2%).

Germany has three times as much installed solar power as Spain even though it had about 1,896 hours of sunshine in 2020, compared with almost 3,000 hours in Spain.

In countries where most people live in single-family dwellings, any individual can generally decide to install solar panels. In Spain, however, 66.5% of the population live in apartment blocks, usually a mix of owner-occupiers and tenants, so the situation is more complex.

To get around the problem of trying to get everyone to agree to invest in renewable energy for a multi-occupied building, one solution is to install solar panels on the roofs of public buildings such as schools, as well as factories and warehouses, that can supply electricity to neighbouring homes and businesses.

The NGO Sustainability Observatory has proposed a rooftop campaign that would produce 15,400GWh, enough for 7.5 million people, on an investment that it says would be recoverable within six years.

This is what Athletic Bilbao football club is offering its neighbours. When the club built a new stadium in 2013, it installed 300 solar panels and through its offshoot Tekathletic supplies electricity to 200 homes and businesses within a 500-metre radius at prices 25% below the going rate.

Something similar is happening in Zaragoza, where the NGO Ecodes has teamed up with the power company EDP and the local authority to initiate the Solar Neighbourhood project.

EDP has supplied and installed solar panels on the roofs of two municipal sports centres, each of which generates 50kWp, enough to supply 200 homes and businesses in the vicinity.

Cecilia Foronda, the head of energy at Ecodes, explains that participants in the scheme do not pay up front for the installation, in recognition that people who are not homeowners are not motivated to invest.

Participants pay a monthly quota of €6.90 (£5.90), which goes to repay the cost of the installation, and enjoy electricity prices that are about 30% cheaper than the market rate. The quota is waived for those least able to pay.

Foronda says Ecodes is seeking European funding in order to replicate the scheme in six other Zaragoza neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, Som Energia (We Are Energy), which was founded in Girona in north-east Spain in 2010 and claims to be Europe’s oldest energy cooperative, has about 70,000 members.

The co-op, which is run democratically, acts as an umbrella for smaller co-ops across the country, says Albert Banal-Estanol, its president. Members pay a €100 joining fee that is later reimbursed.

When individuals want to install solar panels on their homes, Som Energia encourages them to form a local cooperative and then buy in bulk as it is not only cheaper but creates an energy community that in turn helps spread the word about self-sufficiency.

“Last year we had a project that cost around €5m and we asked members to contribute, money that would be paid back from the income we get from selling excess electricity to the grid,” says Banal-Estanol. “We set a deadline of 15 days but we raised it all in one day.”

“We want to extend this model but at the same time we’re not obsessed with growth,” he says. “We just want to see renewables grow.”

Now that the big power companies can no longer rely on the government to stymie the spread of the cooperative movement, they are getting in on the act, offering to fund rooftop installations for communities in order to hang on to their customers.

A genuine energy community, Alonso says, has social and environmental objectives, as well as economic ones. If it’s simply a case of a company supplying electricity from renewable sources “the company still owns the installation, you have a contract with them, and the only difference is the electricity comes from solar panels.”

“The big power companies are reconfiguring themselves from selling electricity to selling services,” says Foronda. “But we need to ensure that energy self-sufficiency is in the hands of citizens because it empowers them.”

Author: Stephen Boyle, Auditor General for Scotland

Ten years on from the Christie Commission, Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, discusses the continued need for change in Scotland’s public services.

Ten years ago, the Christie report set out an inspiring agenda for change that would put people at the heart of public services. Unlike many reports, it has shown remarkable longevity. Its ongoing relevance reflects that fact that the need for change persists.

Scotland remains riven by inequalities: in wealth, in education, in health and in opportunity. We face huge challenges in renewing our society and our economy in the aftermath of the pandemic. While climate change looms larger and more frightening than ever.

Concerted action has been taken to try and implement progressive policies in areas such as community empowerment and self-directed support since Christie was published. But audit work consistently shows a major implementation gap between policy ambitions and delivery on the ground.

For example, a 2017 progress audit on self-directed support found that, after seven years, not everyone was getting the choice and control over their care the SDS strategy envisioned. There was no evidence that authorities had made a transformation in service

In a similar vein, my joint report earlier this year with the Accounts Commission on improving education outcomes found that progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap between the most and least deprived school pupils had been limited.

What needs to change? There is no single or simple answer. The Christie report said that ‘experience tells us all institutions and structures resist change, especially radical change’. So, have we spent the last ten years witnessing protectionism and bureaucratic inertia? Or have the challenges of managing rising demand for public services in a period of austerity been too great to get anything else done? I don’t think either is correct. Instead, there is something more complex going on.

Christie challenged us to make a shift towards prevention and deliver improved long-term outcomes for individuals and communities. But we still measure the success of public services by short-term, service-specific measures. Waiting times are important when you are waiting in A&E, for example, but tell us nothing about whether the nation’s health is improving.

We’ve recently seen Scotland’s drug deaths reach record levels. People in the most deprived parts of Scotland were 18 times more likely to have a drug-related death as those in the least deprived. How much more effective could spending have been if interventions tackled the root causes of drug addiction in our communities?

We all need to rethink radically how we measure success and hold organisations to account for their performance. Public audit has to be a part of that change. Changing how we report and assess performance and how we help the Parliament and the public hold leaders to account won’t, on its own, deliver the transformational change that Christie highlighted – but it would certainly help.

For now, there’s a mismatch between the Scottish Government’s vision- Opens in a new window of a more successful Scotland – where poverty is reduced, and economic growth is sustainable – and how we assess public sector performance. I am not convinced that public sector leaders really feel accountable for delivering change that demands different organisations work together. There is much talk of collaborative leadership. But in my discussions with public sector leaders, it’s clear that too many of them still don’t feel truly empowered or sufficiently emboldened to make the changes they think are needed to deliver Christie.

Our collective appetite for risk-taking and innovation, and how we hold public sector leaders to account, also needs to shift. If every ‘failure’ results in hostile media and political scrutiny, we will never encourage creativity, entrepreneurial thinking and risk-taking in how we deliver public services. I’m not suggesting accountability isn’t important, far from it. But we have to give our leaders the space, time and incentives to take managed risks. That’s something that we as auditors also need to reflect on as we do our work.

We should be optimistic, despite the tragedy of Covid-19. The last 18 months have proved that the public sector can deliver transformational change of the kind that Christie envisaged. Since last March, we’ve seen public bodies disobeying organisational boundaries and delivering ‘Christie’ at scale and pace. It’s been truly impressive and shows what can be done. We all owe them an immense debt of gratitude.

But it’s also important to ask why that happened. The answer? Because it was life and death. There was a clear imperative that trumped everything else. It would be another tragedy if the same urgency wasn’t now applied to poverty, education, health and strengthening our communities.

Christie was clear that building services around people and communities would only work if more recognition was given to the role that the third sector and local communities play in improving lives in their local area. Here there has been progress. The Community Empowerment Act has given individuals and communities important new powers to influence the services they need. Scrutiny bodies are also increasingly focused on how the public sector reflects the aims of the Act in its work. That’s all great, but I also know that the third sector can feel like a poor relation to mainstream public services. And many community groups also still feel that barriers are put in their way to taking part in changing services for the better.

The Christie report was an ambitious, visionary document. Over the last decade, we have striven to live up to that ambition but have fallen short. His clarion call cannot wait another 10 years. We all now need to work collectively to address the barriers that have hindered progress and make changes to improve outcomes, if we are to help future generations and be remembered as good predecessors.

Author: Take One Action

Take One Action nurtures communal exploration of the stories, ideas and questions at the heart of positive social change. Through film screenings, conversation and enquiry, we bring people together to inspire a fairer, more sustainable and more fulfilling world, in Scotland and beyond our borders.

Established in 2008, Take One Action is an Edinburgh-based, independent charity founded by film lovers, cultural activists and globally concerned citizens who believe that shared cinematic experience can catalyse lasting change. Our annual programme of activities welcomes upwards of 5,000 audience members each year and includes a 12-day festival in Edinburgh & Glasgow, two weekend festivals in Aberdeen & Inverness, a network of local film clubs and a series of individual screenings, talks and training opportunities.

The 2021 edition of our festival will take place in Edinburgh, Glasgow and online from 22-26 September; in Aberdeen from 22-24 October; and Inverness from 29-31 October. We will present some of the most inspiring, challenging and urgent international cinema exploring social and environmental justice, alongside workshops, conversations, and a treasure trove of special online content that encourage us to think and act beyond the stories we see on screen.

Through debate and innovative presentation, our activities bring individuals, communities, campaigners, filmmakers, politicians, academics and artists together to explore the connections, systems and cultures underpinning social, cultural, environmental and economic inequality – and empowers them to envisage tangible action.

Our work is independent, values-driven, widely recognised for its artistic and social merits, and delivered through partnerships with a range of charities, grassroots groups and NGOs who support local creativity, opportunity and action.

Author: Jim Hunter, Press and Journal

Reacting to last week’s finding that nearly 300 village and small town post offices have been lost in Scotland’s north and north-east over the last 20 years, Caithness, Sutherland and Ross MSP Maree Todd said such places have long been “at the heart of rural life”.

I’m with Ms Todd on the importance of post offices, not least because I was born and grew up in one – a claim that isn’t quite the stretch you might think.

From the 1940s until the 1980s, the post office in Duror, a small community near Ballachulish, was run by my late mother and operated from what had formerly been a ground floor bedroom in our family home.

This post office, when I first got to know it in the early 1950s, contained lots to interest a little boy.

Delicately-balanced scales on which letters could be weighed with the help of diminutive brass weights. Much larger scales for parcels – with, alongside, a set of lead-filled weights that ranged from one ounce to five pounds.

A date stamp and its ink-soaked pad. A big black book containing sheet after sheet of stamps of differing values. A drawer with neatly filed postal orders, wireless licences, dog licences and other items.

A neighbouring drawer from which there could be extracted a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ha’pennies, pennies, threepenny bits, sixpences, shillings, florins, half crowns, 10 shilling notes, pound notes.

And, in a corner, out of sight behind the counter, a pile of musty-smelling mailbags – all the more fascinating because of the thought, correct or not, that mailbags were put together in Britain’s jails by teams of prisoners.

Each afternoon at about three, the letter box that had taken the place of one of the panes in our post office’s window was opened and its contents added to such letters and parcels as had already been placed in the day’s outgoing mailbag.

The bag was then secured. First its neck was folded in the regulation manner – prior to having wrapped around it a generous measure of officially supplied string.

Once this had been knotted tightly and any surplus cut away, a candle was lit. Next, a stick of shiny brown wax was held over the candle flame in such a way as to ensure that melting wax dripped over the newly tied knot at the mailbag’s neck.

When enough wax had accumulated, a dampened brass implement was firmly applied to it. This left in the cooling wax a seal bearing a royal crest and an inscription. “Duror PO”, it read.

Once all this had been accomplished, the bag was taken by bike to Duror station where, as was dinned into me when I was old enough to be entrusted with this task, the mails were to be handed over to no one other than the British Railways guard in charge of the train that would take them on to Oban and points south.

As shown by her insistence on these formally laid down procedures, post office responsibilities were taken seriously by my mother who – though paid just £2 a week to begin with – was part of a nationwide organisation which, unlike today’s wholly privatised postal service, was a government department presided over by a cabinet minister.

A Postman posing for the camera next to a Postal Van in 1961.

Something of what this entailed is reflected in my mother being subject to the Official Secrets Act. Her post office was the Duror people’s principal point of contact with the UK state.

Here folk came weekly with booklets containing the detachable slips of paper they exchanged for family allowance or pension payments. Here mothers called to collect the National Dried Milk, concentrated orange juice and cod liver oil supplied free of charge to households containing young children.

And here in the bygoing, as in the nearby shop where Duror’s post office migrated on my mother’s retirement, all sorts of news and views could be exchanged.

Its shop has gone from Duror. So has the six-days-a-week post office I knew 60 and more years back.

Does this matter? Postal orders are as obsolete as dog licences. Surely it’s more efficient – more economical – to send emails instead of letters; to have your old age pension paid automatically into a bank account you can access instantly from home? And aren’t we better off without a nanny state supplying parents and their kids with orange juice?

Maybe. But I think there’s more than nostalgia for the 1950s wrapped up in my conviction that, with the closure of our rural post offices, something of national, as well as local, consequence has been destroyed.