Author: SCDC

Supporting Communities Safely: Advice for community groups, organisations and volunteer networks

A new resource has been published to support community organisations to carry out their vital work safely during the Covid-19 outbreak.

This free, online resource, developed by SCDC and Public Health Scotland, features a range of practical information and advice, such as: 

• How to safely promote an organisation’s services
• Keeping volunteers safe and fit to provide services
• How to get help with complex care needs
• Safely collecting and delivering items
• How to cook and transport hot meals

In towns and villages across Scotland, community organisations and volunteers are fighting COVID 19 and this resource is designed to help them do this as safely as possible.

Whether groups are starting up, or taking stock of an existing service, following this advice reduces risks of indirect transmission of the virus on packaging or other forms of contact when we support people in their homes.

The advice helps those providing services to think how they could break the chains of potential infection from the store to the door.

Mick Doyle, Head of Programme at SCDC, said: 

“Community groups are feeding and providing social support for thousands of households in some form of isolation because of the virus or the economic hardship it has caused. Most have never done anything like this before. We think this resource will help people think through the issues and provide practical advice to make what they do as safe as possible as the crisis continues.”

Communities and public services working together to make social distancing and self-isolation work is key to how Scotland can beat this crisis, and a great example of vital partnership working.

Bill Gray, Organisational Lead for Community Development at Public Health Scotland said:

“This new resource provides up to date and accurate information that will help volunteers, community groups and networks to continue to deliver vital support in the safest way possible.  The resource is a timely example of what can be achieved when national bodies and local organisations work together.”

Groups will be encouraged to raise questions and shape the advice in future.

View the resource here and contact Communications Manager Sam.jordan@scdc.org.uk for further information.

Author: SCA

Community Anchor Organisations

Much of the community sector is made up of informal, often unconstituted and unfunded activity.  Largely sitting under the radar of the local authority and other public bodies, this mass of local activity nonetheless generates the vitally important ‘social glue’ on which our society depends. Alongside this rich texture of informal community life, often there will be a number of more formal and constituted voluntary organisations, many of whom will have specific interests such as running the community transport service, a local food growing project or the locally based credit union and so on.

In addition to all this formal and informal community activity, there is now a substantial body of evidence to support the view that those communities that are most effective in being able to self organise and respond to whatever challenges they might face, all have something in common. And that is the presence of a particular type of organisation (sometimes more than one, working in partnership) which sits under the control and ownership of local people. These organisations are typically well respected within the community and are considered to offer a degree of local leadership on behalf of others when representing the interests of that community to external stakeholders. These organisations may also own a range of community assets (land and buildings) and possess the means to generate their own independent income stream. Typically they play a supportive and nurturing role in relation to much of the informal local activity outlined above.

These organisations have come to be known as Community Anchor Organisations. A term first coined in 2004 in a UK Home Office report  – Firm Foundations – SCA has consistently advocated for this concept to be incorporated into the developing national policy discourse around community empowerment and the renewal of local democracy.

Examples of Community Anchor Organisations

Author: Mike Small, Bella Caledonia

Robert Hamilton, pioneering community development worker, sociologist and political campaigner (1940 – 2019).

This is something I’ve been putting off for weeks, months actually. I don’t really want to write my friends obituary and it’s something I’ve been avoiding through grief and guilt. But now in the Groundhog Day of the covid fugue state, facing death seems not just appropriate but compelling.

Maybe we need to get better at remembering and grieving.

Bob had dementia in his later years and meeting him was a gamble in consciousness and recollection followed by a fear when he left you, would he make it home, was he all there? It was a stark contrast to the man who taught me sociology and politics (Baldwin and Marcuse and Freire).  Bob supported a thousand teenage dreams of me and my friends, listening endlessly and patiently and supportively to our ridiculous ideas. Bob was my mum and dads friend but he became ours with a dissection of politics and society through the endless Eighties into the disappointing Nineties and beyond.

In the 70s and then the 80s Bob would arrive with a serious carry-out at my mum and dads house. These were people who were probably already very well stocked but the addition of a bottle of Black Bottle and a couple of bottles of red wine were a commitment and a statement of intent with a clink.

Bob’s dialectical thinking was slightly different to Hegel’s. The world was separated between people who were “arseholes” and people who weren’t “arseholes”.

The distinction was quite arbitrary but normally ran down the following: careerists, sell-outs, managers, Tories, members of the poverty industry were immediately arseholes. Non arseholes were a rarer breed. The analysis was sweeping and memorable.

If you were a non-arsehole you had Bob’s undying loyalty, and one of Bob’s qualities was endless loyalty.

Bob was brought up in Cardross with his mum his sister Margo and his brothers Ian and Leonard. He was a life-long friend to many, a humorous and caustic wit, a voracious reader and a champion of innovative education and community development. His early work was in Aberdeen at the reknowned St Kathryn’s Club and Community Centre run by the Rev Jack McLennan. It was known as St Ks and is now the Lemon Tree.

Bob, and colleagues Edith, Ian Kerr and John Mack arrived in Aberdeen in 1963 having completed a course in Community Education at Moray House in Edinburgh. Bob and Edith lived in the flat above St Ks.  There were many late night discussions there with a whole range of people involved in youth or community work in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. This was the 1960s and ideas of radical pegagogy, community empowerment and libertarian theology were percolating across Scotland.

A lifelong friend, Iain Craik recounts: “I first met him when I was 16 at the Beehive in Aberdeen (early 1964). At this time he ran the Klub in Inverurie before going to Aberdeen University in 1968 to do an MA. This was when we ran the campaign to get Robin Blackburn elected as Rector at Aberdeen University (the summer of 68!). Joe Grimmond was rushed in to stand as the conventional candidate and just won!”

Conter magazine explains:

“In Aberdeen, the left organised behind the New Left intellectual Robin Blackburn, whose 1967 essay on inequality publicised the Economist article that is supposed to have inspired the name of John McGrath’s 7:84 theatre company.”

Bob picked Blackburn up from the airport and they were convinced they were being tracked by Special Branch.

Community Work North

Bob was a Sunday school teacher and then youth worker in Glasgow before doing one of the first youth work courses at Moray House. He was at Aberdeen College of Education from 1974 until the merger of Dundee and Aberdeen colleges of education in 1986. During his time at University he ran an American Summer camp in Spain in the summer vacations. He started at the College in Aberdeen in 1972 as a lecturer with Isobel McPhail before taking over as Head of Dept in 1974.

He was responsible for the creation of Community Work North, the rural apprenticeship training course, an urban apprenticeship training course. The unique features of the two year diploma course being the way in which courses were delivered and the fight against the professionalisation of community work. From 1986 -1991 he worked with Professor Lalage Bown at University of Glasgow in the Department of Adult and Continuing Education teaching Sociology.

Bob worked in a variety of Community Work jobs over a forty year period. During this time he has had responsibility for the delivery of a number of Certificate, Diploma and Degree programmes in Community Work and contributed to other undergraduate and post graduate courses. As Head of the Youth and Community Department in Aberdeen College of Education, and working with local authorities in the North of Scotland, he was responsible for the development of a 3-year work based Community Work diploma. This was funded by the ‘first in Europe’ programme run by the European Social Fund. Subsequently, he was involved in it’s metamorphosis into a work based Degree programme based in the University of Glasgow.

During the late eighties and early nineties he was Chair of CHYP (Council for Housing Young People) in Maryhill in Glasgow, which pioneered the idea that vulnerable homeless young people could have accommodation until such time as they were given a house, rather than the two or three weeks offered by other services. After this he developed the Linked Work and Training Trust Grampian from 1990/91 until 1998 and also the development of LWTT Central which continued until 2002. After this he worked for Age Action Ireland based in Dublin for two years from 1999-2001. He was the Chair of the Poverty Alliance from 1998-2000 and worked for the Richmond Fellowship from 2000-2004.

Bob had a searing analysis of the problems in community work and community education, which he spent his lifetime trying to solve.

He wrote:

“As far as Community Education as an entity is concerned it is in my view, a spent force. That is if it ever was a potent force. A major problem has been the central contradiction of a ‘service’ tied into a power structure through the control exercised by the major employers and funded by the government. Its rhetoric has always been around a commitment to the community’s agenda and often within that to those who lack power. The result of this often conveniently ignored contradiction has been the inability to pursue the logic of a commitment to those with little power and few resources. This would almost certainly cause problems and is usually discouraged. Instead those with a vested interest in the preservation of the status quo have followed the conventional route of attempting to establish an elite group whose major task was to serve that status quo often in the name of democracy. In simple terms they decided whose side they were on and you can be assured it wasn’t on the side of the communities that they claim a commitment to serve.”

Bob’s work and legacy is important, but maybe more so the integrity he brought to his life.

At a service to remember him in Aberdeen earlier this year organised by his friend Dave Simmers, people remembered him.

They remembered him being arrested and charged on the Springboks demonstration in 1968. They remembered him in the pub in Aberdeen – The Butchers, The Ashgrove Lounge, and others, holding forth with pipe in hand. But mostly they remembered him as someone who would engage you in conversation and genuinely listen. People were asked to bring photos to remember Bob by and they were all the same: pictures of Bob hunched over listening to the other person.

Bob’s legacy is maybe not the huge and innovative work he did in developing and protecting community work, it as a friend to so many and someone who cared and somebody who would listen. That’s a rare thing these days.

Bob was self-effacing to the point of detriment, but his achievements and integrity stand out in an era of opportunism and narcissism.

He loved Iona and Amsterdam and Glasgow and Aberdeen. He loved Old Holborn and Black Bottle and putting the world to rights.

Bob you were loved and admired more than you will ever know and your legacy is love and listening.

Author: Cicely Marston, Alicia Renedo, Sam Miles

Community participation is essential in the collective response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), from compliance with lockdown, to the steps that need to be taken as countries ease UK, about 1 million people volunteered to help the pandemic response1 and highly localised mutual aid groups have sprung up all over the world with citizens helping one another with simple tasks such as checking on wellbeing during lockdowns.2

Global health guidelines already emphasise the importance of community participation. Incorporating insights and ideas from diverse communities is central for the coproduction of health, whereby health professionals work together with communities to plan, research, deliver, and evaluate the best possible health promotion and health-care services.5

Pandemic responses, by contrast, have largely involved governments telling communities what to do, seemingly with minimal community input. Yet communities, including vulnerable and marginalised groups, can identify solutions: they know what knowledge and rumours are circulating; they can provide insight into stigma and structural barriers; and they are well placed to work with others from their communities to devise collective responses. Such community participation matters because unpopular measures risk low compliance. With communities on side, we are far more likely—together—to come up with innovative, tailored solutions that meet the full range of needs of our diverse populations.

In unstable times when societies are undergoing rapid and far-reaching changes, the broadest possible range of knowledge and insights is needed. It is crucial to understand, for instance, the additional needs of particular groups, and the lived experiences of difficulties caused by government restrictions. We know lockdowns increase domestic violence;6 that rights and access to contraception, abortion, and safe childbirth care risk being undermined;6 and that some public discourse creates the unpalatable impression that the value of each individual’s life is being ranked. Identifying and mitigating such harms requires all members of society to work together.

Past experience should be our guide. Grassroots movements were central in responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by improving uptake of HIV testing and counselling, negotiating access to treatment, helping lower drug prices, and reducing stigma.  Community engagement was also crucial in the response to Ebola virus disease in west Africa—eg, in tracking and addressing rumours.10 Coproduction under the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging and risks being seen as an added extra rather than as fundamental to a successful, sustainable response.

Good mechanisms for community participation are hard to establish rapidly. High-quality coproduction of health takes time.  Meaningful relationships between communities and providers should be nurtured to ensure sustainable and inclusive participation. Managing participatory spaces takes sensitivity and care to recognise and harness the different types of knowledge and experiences brought by diverse communities and individuals, and to avoid replicating social structures that could create harms such as stigma.

So how can we create constructive coproduction in the context of emergency responses to the COVID-19 pandemic where time is short? We summarise the key steps in the panel.

Steps to community participation in the COVID-19 response

• Invest in coproduction
• Fund dedicated staff and spaces to bring the public and policy makers together
• Create spaces where people can take part on their own terms (eg, avoid bureaucratic formalities or technical jargon)
• Move beyond simply gathering views and instead build dialogue and reflection to genuinely codesign responses
• Invest not only for this emergency but also for long-term preparedness
• Work with community groups
• Build on their expertise and networks
• Use their capacity to mobilise their wider communities
• Commit to diversity
• Capture a broad range of knowledge and experiences
• Avoid one-size-fits-all approaches to involvement
• Consciously include the most marginalised
• Be responsive and transparent
• Show people that their concerns and ideas are heard and acted upon
• Collaborate to review outcomes on diverse groups and make improvements

First, governments should immediately set up and fund specific community engagement taskforces to ensure that community voice is incorporated into the pandemic response. This requires dedicated staff who can help governments engage in dialogue with citizens, work to integrate the response across health and social care, and coordinate links with other sectors such as policing and education. This engagement will require additional resources to complement existing health services and public health policy. Dedicated virtual and physical spaces must be established to co-create the COVID-19 response, with different spaces tailored to the needs of different participants—eg, different formats for discussion, timings, locations, and levels of formality.

Second, those of us working to address COVID-19 in the health and social care sectors and beyond should look to existing community groups and networks to build coproduction. Engagement with such groups is needed to include their voices in local, regional, or national responses to the pandemic. How can we ensure that the most marginalised are represented? How can we ensure front-line providers have a chance to feed into service improvements when they are already working long hours with little respite?

Third, policy makers working on the COVID-19 response should ensure citizens understand that their voices are being heard. Showing how policy responses or local actions address specific concerns will help communities believe that their wellbeing is valued and their needs addressed, which in turn will help increase compliance with restrictions and encourage sharing of creative solutions. Examples of responses to citizens’ concerns have included introducing income guarantees for the self-employed;15 implementing road closures and widening to allow safer cycling and walking;16 and policy changes on home use of abortion medication to reduce risk of infection from attending clinics.17

Institutional cultures that support coproduction must be created in political and health systems.18 We would argue that mechanisms to ensure citizen participation are essential for high-quality, inclusive disaster response and preparedness, and these can be called upon again in future emergencies. All societies have community groups that can co-create better pandemic response and health services and politicians must be supported to incorporate these voices. Such public participation will reveal policy gaps and the potential negative consequences of any response—and identify ways to address these together. Community participation holds the promise of reducing immediate damage from the COVID-19 pandemic and, crucially, of building future resilience.

Author: Hillary Sillitto

Hillary Sillitto, Fellow of the International Council on Systems Engineering, says there are lessons to learn from the civil aviation industry in how Scotland should approach a post Covid-19 review of decision-making.

After reading Source Direct this morning, I want to make a very important point about the retrospective analysis of the decision making process in the Covid-19 outbreak.

Such an analysis is indeed necessary if we are to learn from the experience so as to do better next time. If that is the intent, it is vital that it is carried out in a no-blame, fact-finding culture so that we can all learn from our mistakes and our successes.

If conducted as a blame game, participants will suppress evidence and try to deflect blame. Such behaviour is not inevitable; but it is inevitable in an inquisitorial investigation that participants know or believe will lead to allocation of blame.

The outstanding counter-example to look at for guidance is the civil aviation industry. In the aftermath of World War Two, aviation accidents were frequent, planes were unreliable, navigation aids were vestigial, pilot skills were variable, weather forecasting was less certain than now, and air travel was dangerous by any measure.

It was decided, in an act of incredible far sightedness, that all air accident AND NEAR MISS investigations would be conducted in a spirit of blame-free fact finding. Those involved would not be prosecuted except in cases of gross professional negligence. As a result, both accidents and near misses are reported as accurately as possible, the information is made public, key lessons learned are widely and quickly disseminated AND APPLIED, and the safety record of civil aviation improved steadily and dramatically so that it is now, by most measures, the safest of all forms of passenger transport.

In contrast, political decision making doesn’t seem to get any better over time!

The reason why no-blame reporting works so well in aviation, and why it should become the model for the post Covid-19 review, is that these are  situations that are complex, both in the colloquial and scientific senses. In a complex situation, decision makers are beset by a fog of uncertainty, partly due to an inability fully to understand all the dimensions of the complex situation, partly because things are happening quickly and not necessarily being fully measured and reported, and partly because it’s the nature of complex systems that actions have delayed effects and observed effects have multiple causes. It’s hard to judge at the time which decisions need to be taken “now”, right or wrong, based on best available evidence, and which should be delayed until evidence is clearer. Action usually has to be taken based on weak signals before the evidence is clear. Often decision-makers have to rely on intuition, prior experience, or choose between different courses of action none of which can be proved “right” or even “best” ahead of time.

In the case of the Covid-19 epidemic in Scotland, it would be interesting to see the range of projections that could have been made in early March, based on the known data at that point. It would be interesting to understand how the evidence was building up, and what was the earliest point the evidence was sufficiently persuasive to give policy makers confidence that lock-down was a good decision. It would also be interesting to understand the financial pressures the Scottish Government was under at the time – what would have been the implications of locking down before there was agreement on funding for furloughed workers, and how much did this issue affect the decision making? And lots of others I won’t attempt to enumerate.

After a career working with systems of various complexity, my rule of thumb is that in a complex situation, the evidence is seldom clear enough to provide the certainty most decision makers seek before the situation has become too critical for a rational response!

Whatever the next crisis is, it won’t be same as this one. But the fundamental issues are always the same – decision making in complex situations with incomplete knowledge. The only way to become better at this is practice, preferably in situations where lives are not at stake, so that when lives are at stake people make good-enough decisions at the right time.

So yes, we absolutely need the after-action analysis. It should be conducted through a spirit of learning for the future so we can do better next time, with no attempt to allocate blame to people who were trying to do their best in difficult circumstances. And it should become the basis of scenario planning exercises that should be conducted regularly and rigorously, involving all of the Scottish Government’s resilience actors – and bringing in the opposition politicians as well, so they understand the pressures the decision makers are under, are less likely to offer unhelpful criticism and indulge in point-scoring at the wrong time, and are better able to handle the situation if and when they find themselves in power.

Author: Phil Purnell , Anne Velenturf

More than 100 billion tonnes of materials entered the global economy in 2017 to generate power, build infrastructure and homes, produce food, and provide consumer goods such as clothes and phones. There are now more phones than people on the planet, and the amount of clothes purchased is forecast to reach more than 92 million tonnes by 2030.

Some estimates suggest that 99% of the things people buy is discarded within six months of purchasing without the material being recovered. That’s because we have what you might call a linear economy. It works by extracting resources and manufacturing products from them, that are sold to people and then generally disposed of after a short period of use.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has upended normal economic activity, dipping the global economy into what may become the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Rather than try to revive a system that’s inherently wasteful, the European Commission has vowed to build a sustainable circular economy post-pandemic.

A sustainable circular economy in which production and consumption are optimised and embedded in the natural environment. Anne Velenturf, Author provided

The idea of a circular economy is simple: to make better use of resources, close loops of resource flows by fully recovering materials instead of wasting them, and prevent waste and pollution by better design of products and materials and keeping them in use for longer.

Sounds great, but how might it work? Our research programme supported the implementation of a circular economy in the UK and we discovered that three broad types exist.

1. Closing loops with energy from waste

The first strategy to “close” loops of material flows is energy from waste (EfW) – burning discarded material to generate electricity. This has replaced landfill as the main processing method for household waste in the UK. Local authorities in the UK collect 26 million tonnes of waste per year, of which 11 million tonnes goes to EfW while three million tonnes ends up in landfill. Between three to six times more waste plastic, food and textiles go to EfW than are recycled, as does two-thirds of waste paper and card.

The shift from landfill to energy from waste (million tonnes per year). DEFRA and WRAP/Phil Purnell, Author provided

Burning materials that could be recycled means everything invested in them is lost, such as money, energy, water and labour. Materials such as nutrients in food and fibres in textiles are then replaced by virgin resources, perpetuating the unsustainable impacts of resource extraction.

Although a recent inquiry suggests EfW may have some social benefits – like providing heat to fuel-poor households – it creates fewer jobs than recycling, reuse, repair and remanufacturing and releases greenhouse gases.

But investment in the UK favours EfW. It’s the path of least resistance, requiring hardly any changes to supply chains or how goods are consumed and disposed of. The UK is practically heading for this pseudo circular economy that is effectively unchanged from the linear take-make-waste model, fitting in with the prevailing short-term economic thinking and a singular focus on GDP growth.

2. A circular economy based on recycling

One step up from EfW is the recovery of materials – recycling. In England, the volumes of municipal waste and the proportion that is collected for recycling has remained more or less unchanged (42%) for the past ten years. Some recycling rates have gone up (eg. from 5% to 11% for food) but others have dropped (56% to 53% for paper and card).

Changes in recycling rates for materials collected by local authorities. DEFRA and WRAP/Phil Purnell, Author provided

Textiles are particularly poor. The average UK citizen buys 26.7 kg of clothing annually – the most in Europe – and one million tonnes are discarded each year in England. Most binned clothes are incinerated, and increasingly less are recycled (from 17% to 11% since 2010). The recovered fibres are normally suitable only for lower-value applications, such as carpets and insulation. New clothes rarely contain more than a few percent of recycled material, sustaining demand for virgin natural resources.

In a circular economy that relies on recycling to close loops, people aren’t forced to change how much stuff they buy, but manufacturers and waste management companies would change more radically. For example, drinks bottles often use different plastics for the body, cap and label. If these mix in the recycling process they reduce the quality of the recycled material, but separating them is awkward. All products should be redesigned to ensure they are recyclable.

Manufacturers should use more recycled material in new products too, creating markets for recovered materials. Massive investment in recycling infrastructure would be required though. Just to meet plastic packaging recycling targets, more than 50 new recycling plants would be needed in England.

Although recycling normally is less energy-intensive than processing virgin resources, it still uses a lot of energy which produces carbon emissions. Even if all recycling used renewable energy, the new infrastructure would require vast amounts of virgin materials to be built. In developed countries the total amount of materials within the economy has to be reduced.

3. A sustainable circular economy

To achieve a truly sustainable circular economy, consumption and production practices would need to change together. A sustainable circular economy involves designing and promoting products that last and that can be reused, repaired and remanufactured. This retains the functional value of products, rather than just recovering the energy or materials they contain and continuously making products anew.

We have to do more with less material and consume responsibly. For example, people in the UK should buy fewer new clothes and wear what they already have more often. Repairing and restyling our favourite clothes can also help to use them more and waste less.

New ways of consuming opens up opportunities for circular economy business models, such as leasing clothes and producing things that people need on demand only. Business models based on reuse, leasing, repair and remanufacturing could generate four times more jobs than waste treatment, disposal and recycling. They generate local economic activity, helping to strengthen relations within communities.

The transition towards an increasingly sustainable circular economy radically changes the purpose of the economy. Anne Velenturf, Author provided

A sustainable circular economy represents a new economic model in which the aim shifts from narrow GDP growth to “multi-dimensional progress” – the broader strengthening of environmental quality, human well-being and economic prosperity for current and future generations. Only such a circular economy could potentially regenerate the environment.

How we use resources has transformed our economy and society in the past. A circular economy offers us a chance to deliver sustainable benefits for the future. Let’s not waste it.

Author: Rutger Bregman

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip … Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.

I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates … The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.

My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.

Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country’s radio market at the time. Peter was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran away to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned five years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain’s certificate. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son learn a useful profession. “What’s easiest?” Peter asked. “Accountancy,” Arthur lied.

Peter went to work for his father’s company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that’s when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.

It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. ‘My name is Stephen,’ he cried. ‘We’ve been here 15 months.’

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”

In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.

There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.

The boys had set up a commune with food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire

No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

When they arrived home, they found the police waiting to meet them. They were arrested and thrown in jail

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges.

Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a plan. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material. And being his father’s corporate accountant, Peter managed the company’s film rights and knew people in TV. So from Tonga, he called up the manager of Channel 7 in Sydney. “You can have the Australian rights,” he told them. “Give me the world rights.” Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his old boat, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the movie. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.

The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. “Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects,” His Royal Highness said. “Now, is there anything I can do for you?” The captain didn’t have to think long. “Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.” The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.

While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

• This is an adapted excerpt from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind

Author: PD Smith

Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has a unique view of gardening: “I have come to understand that deep existential processes can be involved in creating and caring for a garden.” For her, a garden – such as her own at Serge Hill, Hertfordshire – is far more than just a much loved physical space. It is also a mental space, one that “gives you quiet, so you can hear your thoughts”. When you work with your hands in the garden, weeding or clipping, you free your mind to work through feelings and problems. By tending your plants, you are also gardening your inner space and, over time, a garden is woven into your sense of identity, becoming a place to “buffer us when the going gets tough”.

It was Wordsworth who said that to walk through a garden is to be “in the midst of the realities of things”, to be immersed in the primal awareness not just of nature’s beauty, but the eternal cycle of the seasons, of life, death and rebirth. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed modern technological life had alienated us from the “dark maternal, earthy ground of our being”. He grew his own vegetables and argued that “every human should have a plot of land so that their instincts can come to life again”.

The fast and unremitting pace of modern urban living, with its smart technology and instant feedback leads to a “devaluing of the slower rhythms of natural time”. We have become disconnected from nature: “the pace of life is the pace of plants”. Informed by literature as well as psychoanalysis, Stuart-Smith’s beautifully written book is filled with insights into the joys of gardening, but also the remarkable therapeutic benefits that tending plants can offer, not just to people who feel they have lost their place in nature, but to everyone: “As we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care towards the world.” She argues for a greening of our lives – bringing green spaces back into housing developments and encouraging community gardening schemes, such as Incredible Edible, founded by Pam Warhurst and Mary Clear in Todmorden, in Calderdale, “a radical experiment in urban foraging” that has created more than 70 food-growing plots around the town.

This is a life-affirming study of the special pleasures of tending your garden and growing things, from planting the seed and watching it grow each day (“seeds have tomorrow ready-built into them”), to cropping home-grown vegetables and cooking delicious meals with them. Even the chores like weeding and watering have their unique joys: “watering is calming and strangely, when it is finished, you end up feeling refreshed, like the plants themselves.” Her heartfelt arguments for the benefits of nature and gardening for our mental health are informed by research in neuroscience and the evidence of patients who have improved through therapeutic gardening. It has been estimated that for every £1 spent by the NHS on gardening projects, £5 can be saved in reduced health costs. Gardening brings together the emotional, physical, social, vocational and spiritual aspects of life, boosting people’s mood and self-esteem.

Stuart-Smith agrees passionately with Voltaire’s conclusion to Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” – we must cultivate our gardens. For, as she says: “In this era of virtual worlds and fake facts, the garden brings us back to reality.”

• The Well Gardened Mind is published by William Collins

Author: Megan MacInnes, Scottish Land Commissioner

With the Community Right to Buy for Sustainable Development coming in to place this weekend, Land Commissioner Megan MacInnes looks at what it means for communities and for land reform.

Today marks the launch of the latest in the Scottish Government’s land reform toolkit – the Community Right to Buy for Sustainable Development. This is the most radical and final part of the measures to promote community ownership introduced by the Land Reform (Scotland) 2016 Act.

Building on the original community right to buy powers introduced in 2003 and the right to buy abandoned and neglected land in 2018, this new measure gives community bodies the right to buy land or assets if – in doing so – they further the achievement of sustainable development. Unlike the already-introduced rights though, this new one focuses on the aspirations and concerns of the community rather than the condition of the land, and most importantly doesn’t require a willing seller. The right to buy is absolute; a compulsory purchase power granted to communities.

This right has been much anticipated across the country. It applies to rural and urban areas and is applicable (within certain limits) to both public and private land. To understand why it is so needed, we only need to look back at the evidence we at the Land Commission published as part of our review of the impact of the scale and concentration of land ownership in March 2019. This included evidence of the concentration of decision-making power and reports of some landowners obstructing the expansion of local businesses and restricting the supply of land for housing for local residents or those who wanted to move in.

The Commission made a number of recommendations to address these adverse impacts, including a public interest test for significant land transfers, a statutory review process based on the Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement, and that decisions related to the right to buy for sustainable development take account of the effects of concentrated land ownership.

Fundamental to the future of our most fragile communities is that they are able to sustainably develop. This doesn’t just mean survive in inadequate housing, with insecure jobs, on the fragments of land in between larger holdings, but that these communities – my community – are able to set their own course and have access to and control of the assets they need to do so.

However, this new right to buy is not a blanket compulsory purchase power. There are a number of steps and conditions community bodies must meet and Scottish Ministers, who will ultimately decide to grant this right or not, will have a reasonable amount of discretion. Communities will need to be able to demonstrate that alternative ways to buy the land, such as through a negotiated transfer with the current owner, have failed. If exercising the right is the only route available to them, they will also have to meet a number of requirements. These include being able to demonstrate that the transfer will further sustainable development, it is in the public interest, it will result in significant benefit to the community, and that not granting consent to the transfer is likely to harm the community. The mechanism also contains a number of safeguards and appeal opportunities, to balance these private and public interests.

It may in the end be that these new powers are rarely applied, and rightly so. This tool is designed to operate within the much broader framework of existing community empowerment and land reform measures. This begins with the Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement, which includes provisions to strengthen community engagement over land use decision-making, and is now being supplemented by our Good Practice Programme and series of protocols. When these softer engagement and negotiation-focused tools are seen as part of the spectrum of rights that ultimately provides communities with compulsory purchase powers, then each one of them is strengthened as they help encourage land owners avoid a forced sale.

Another question the launch of this final piece of the community right to buy puzzle leaves us with is: where next for community ownership? We’ve previously emphasised the need for the normalisation of community ownership and the support community groups receive across the country; in urban and rural areas, and in the south as well as the north. As we’ve seen from the slow uptake in communities using the right to buy for abandoned and neglected land, these new measures take time to settle in and for communities to feel confident enough to start to use them. A period of implementation of these new measures, and reflection on what works and where gaps remain, is definitely – in my view – time well spent.

Nevertheless, the impact of COVID-19 and the restrictions have many of us re-focusing locally to our own communities for help or to offer help as a volunteer and has reiterated the importance of communities and community resilience. It has never felt so important that communities are able to exert influence and control over the things that matter to them with community ownership as a routine option. This suggests to me that we are only just beginning to grasp the impact increasing community ownership of land and buildings can, and will have, on shaping our futures.

RESIDENTS of Scotland’s highest village have a “clear vision” of the future as their buyout bid from one of the country’s biggest landowners moves forward.

Around 200 people live 467metres up in Wanlockhead, a former mining village currently owned by the Duke of Buccleuch.

Residents hope to purchase more than 3860 acres of what is now part of Buccleuch’s Queensberry Estate.

Now a feasibility study and business plan from the Wanlockhead Community Trust (WCT) reveals what the future could look like in the area, which lies one mile from Dumfries and Galloway’s boundary with South Lanarkshire.

It shows how the community could change and develop over the next few years once the buyout is complete – something that could happen within months.

The newly published plan proposes new campsites and festivals to develop the economy plus continued gold panning as well as increased tree planting and other measures to care for the land.

The Wanlockhead Inn, which is Scotland’s highest pub, already runs the increasingly three-day heavy metal Wildfire Music Festival, but it’s hoped that community ownership could provide villagers with opportunities focused around heritage tourism, cycling and mountain biking and the arts.

Part of the area is also said to be ideal for “voluntourism”, in which visitors interested in “wildlife, nature, reforestation, countryside access and environmental management” get involved in local projects.

The document states that attracting higher visitor numbers is crucial to a sustainable future. Experts say a dedicated development officer will be needed for at least three years, with costs reaching £40,000 a year. It says: “The land asset has existing income streams from a number of sources, including gold panning, rental from one house and from wayleaves and licenses.

“These are not sufficient to support a development officer to help access and deliver development funding and projects. The trust’s focus must therefore be on developing and growing the visitor economy to support other ongoing efforts, bringing employment and jobs into the area and securing those that are

already there.”

The 40-member WCT had initially aimed to purchase as much as 14,000 acres of land from Buccleuch. This was revised after lengthy talks involving the Scottish Land Commission and Scottish Land and Estates, which represents landowners.

An agreement in principle has now been reached and it is hoped that a final deal will be struck later this year.

Lincoln Richford, WCT chair, said: “This feasibility study represents many years of work as well as Wanlockhead’s highest aspirations regarding land ownership and land use.

“We believe it offers a clear vision and pathway for our community to develop a successful and sustainable future.”

The report – paid for by the Scottish Land Fund in partnership with the National Lottery Community Fund and Highlands and Islands Enterprise – was prepared by Edinburgh consultants Urban Animation.

Director Richard Heggie said: “Community land ownership has proven to be a successful route towards resilience and sustainability for places across Scotland. Wanlockhead now has the opportunity to join these communities in taking control of its land and its future.

“We wish the people of Wanlockhead every success in their exciting and transformational venture.”

Funding for the buyout will likely be provided by the Scottish Land Fund and other backers after the village holds a future formal vote endorsing it.