Author: Liz Clark Chair, Hunters Hall Housing Co-op Management Committee

Message from the Coop Chair to members

PREFERRED PARTNER FOR TRANSFER OF HUNTERS HALL HOUSING CO-OP

I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well and that you are managing at home in these challenging times. Please do not hesitate to let us know if there is anything we can do to be of help to you.

We are working hard, within the public health guidelines, to ensure that we stay on track with our work, including, progressing the proposed transfer of Hunters Hall Housing Co-op to a new landlord.

INTRODUCING HILLCREST HOMES

I am pleased that following a thorough evaluation and selection process, the Co-op’s Management Committee, at our meeting on 14th April 2020 unanimously approved HILLCREST HOMES (SCOTLAND) LTD as the preferred partner for our Transfer.

As you may recall, tenant members told us what was important to them for the future of Hunters Hall and the Management Committee followed these priorities in the process of finding a suitable partner. The criteria included that the partner must be able to demonstrate financial stability and high standards of governance as well as:

1. Rent affordability well into the future
2. Sound investment plans for our homes
3. Support for a local group to contribute to decision making affecting our area, including our local lettings policy, and retaining the Hunters Hall brand.
4. How high levels of service, including good quality contractors will be delivered from our local office.
5. Commitment to retaining and developing our staff
6. Improved access to new build homes for Hunters Hall tenants
7. Support for community development initiatives

HILLCREST were selected as they scored the highest and strongly demonstrated all of your priorities, financial stability and high standards of governance.

Here is the HILLCREST offer to Hunters Hall tenants:

1. Rent increases of inflation only for 10 years
2. Enhanced and accelerated investment of £200,000 extra for years 1, 2, and 3 following transfer and shorter cycles for replacing components e.g. new kitchens every 15 years, rather than every 20 years as now with Hunters Hall
3. Support in the establishment of and funding for a constituted Registered Tenants Organisation retaining the Hunters Hall name and retaining the local lettings policy.
4. Ensuring high levels of service from within Hunters Hall, using current contractors where possible and expanding services to provide welfare right and energy advice; tenant participation and community development opportunities.
5. Retaining all staff on current terms and conditions and providing career development opportunities
6. Enhancing opportunities for Hunters Hall tenants to apply for new build homes throughout all of HILLCREST Homes Housing stock
7. Providing community development expertise and access to funding for local community initiatives

 

INDEPENDENT ADVICE

 

As you may recall, the TENANT INFORMATION SERVICE (TIS) provides independent advice and information to tenant members about the transfer. They will ensure that you have plenty of information to help you shape and influence HILLCREST HOMES’ proposal. We would encourage you to contact TIS on their Freephone Advice Line 0800 488 0982 with any questions you may have. TIS has also established a Tenants Forum and is encouraging as many tenant members as possible to join. They will be getting in touch with you separately with more information about this and other ways to get involved.

 

TIMESCALES AND CONSULTATION

 

The Management Committee is committed to ensuring every tenant member has clear information to help them make a decision about whether to vote for transfer to HILLCREST HOMES. Therefore, tenant members will be consulted on HILLCREST HOMES’ proposals on 4 distinct occasions as outlined below, though the planned dates are dependent on public health guidance on Covid 19.

NEXT STEPS

1. Initial Consultation of around 6 weeks June/July

To set out HILLCREST HOMES’ proposals and obtaining tenant member feedback on these. These provides an opportunity to seek adaptations to HILLCREST HOMES’ proposals.

2. Second Consultation of around 4 weeks July/August

To set out any amendments HILLCREST HOMES has made to the proposals following tenant member feedback in the initial consultation.

Independent Tenant Ballot period of 4 weeks August/September

Every tenant will have the right to vote in an independent ballot, which will be run by the Electoral Reform Society to ensure it is fair and transparent. A range of ways to vote will be provided. During the ballot period we will ensure that tenants fully understand HILLCREST HOMES’ finalised proposals and are provided with any further information they need.

4. Members Consultation of around 4 weeks and Two Special General Meetings October/November

If a majority of tenants vote in favour of transfer, Hunters Hall Housing Co-op will hold two Special General Meetings where all tenant members will be invited on the proposal to transfer engagements to HILLCREST HOMES.

A transfer to HILLCREST HOMES can only take place after the above steps have been followed.

 

I hope that the information provided now is helpful in bringing you up to date with progress so far and I look forward to clarifying the arrangements for consultation and feedback events for tenants as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I hope you and your loved ones continue to stay safe and well, and please don’t hesitate to contact Hunters Hall staff if we can be of any help to you. You can do this by telephone on 0131 657 3379 or contact us via email or our website at contact@huntershall.org.uk

Staff are currently working from home due to the Coronavirus ( Covid-19) and we will advise you as soon as we are able to re-open the office at 77 Niddrie House Drive.

Yours sincerely

Liz Clark

Chair

Hunters Hall Housing Co-op Management Committee

Author: Caitlin Logan, Bella Caledonia

“What we are experiencing is giving us a greater sense of community than we’ve ever had. Communities in Scotland are coming together, people are seeing that they are able to help their neighbours. I would be utterly sad if it went away – and I don’t think it will,” says Laura Kane, who helped set up the Glasgow Southside Self-Isolation Support group this March.

Kane is one of many people around the country who have volunteered their time and skills in their local area to help people who are struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. For her, working as a marketing manager in the private sector, this has been a new experience and a hopeful sign of what’s to come. If more people like her can maintain the momentum throughout and beyond this crisis, it might be that the mutually supportive relationships emerging within communities can become a part of the “new normal”.

For others, the virus and its imposed social distancing has thrown a spanner into the works of ongoing efforts to forge connections and reduce the isolation and alienation that already posed a risk to some of Scotland’s most overlooked people and places.

Yet through the chaos there is a shared sense of resolve, if not optimism, that this must act as a wake-up call, that lessons can be learned, and that the potential exists within every community to find new and better ways of working – and living – together.

I spoke to just a few of the mutual aid and community support projects that have flourished in recent weeks to learn more about how they are adapting to the crisis and what their experience has taught them about the kind of future that might be possible after the dust settles.

Edinburgh

Bridgend Farmhouse

Bridgend Farmhouse in South Edinburgh is among countless community organisations which have had to think fast and find innovative ways of offering help after their services were rendered impossible to deliver under social distancing guidelines.

In normal times, the farmhouse operates as a community hub for learning, eating and exercise. “It gives people somewhere to go who are socially isolated and it’s an important part of their routine,” interim manager Lynn Houmdi explains. “It was really difficult to have to shut our doors to those people.”

But the team behind Bridgend Farmhouse quickly began planning a new approach, which would centre around meeting an urgent need for food – both among people who had been in food poverty before the crisis, and those who were pushed into poverty or isolation as a result of it. “We were approached by a local chef who was well connected with other chefs, and we recruited a team of volunteer chefs and a packaging and distribution team of catering managers, many of whom have recently lost their jobs.”

This forms part of a partnership with chef Lewis McLachlan’s Empty Kitchen, Full Hearts programme which is working across the city in response to the crisis. There is high demand for the initiative and 80% of the farmhouse’s deliveries have been organised through local community organisations who know the people in their areas and are able to get the food to those in need.

“In the first two weeks we delivered 100 food parcels per day and we are now working towards 300 parcels per day. We just passed 10,000 meals in the first month,” Houmdi says.

Bridgend Farmhouse is already planning the next stage of its response. “We’re going to be delivering services we normally did online, such as open drop-in sessions; we’re looking into ways of providing laptops to people who would be excluded from accessing things like Zoom; and we are working on ways to make bikes available for key workers.”

Beyond this, the organisation is mindful that the present crisis will “worsen a lot of other issues for people in the community” and that it’s essential to start planning now for how to transition from lockdown and find ways to reduce social isolation. This is something Houmdi hopes will be aided by new relationships which are being formed with community groups and people. “While this is a crisis response, a lot of this will have long term benefits and partnership working is a big part of that.”

Houmdi says she is encouraged by the “incredible” support that has been offered by volunteers and from companies in the form of in-kind donations. “I would hate to think that would dissipate after this.”

She adds: “If you think it will it’s going to be hard to get through this time. Our society wasn’t fair, and people were denied things they needed. If we go back to the way things were, then all of this, all these deaths, will have been for nothing.”

Helping Hands Edinburgh

Working across some of Edinburgh’s poorest areas, the entirely volunteer-run Helping Hands was set up five years ago to offer free sport activities and other help for communities, such as a Christmas foodbank collection. “Solidarity not charity” is its motto, based in the belief that people who live and work in working-class areas are best equipped to work together to support their communities.

In response to the pandemic, Helping Hands volunteers have diverted their attention from their football programme, currently on hold, to deliver 1000s of food parcels per week to those in need.

“But we are so much more than that,” co-founder Jim Slaven says. “By the summer we will have provided 600 new bikes to working-class kids, and we are offering online keep fit classes and mental health videos, delivered by qualified experts who are giving up their time.”

A long-time critic of government- and charity-led responses to inequality and deprivation, Slaven says that this crisis has “provided a moment of clarity” for many people about a glaring absence of support. This is what Helping Hands aims to counter by taking a different approach.

“The fact that working-class communities have been abandoned by the state meant we felt it was important to offer solidarity,” he explains. “This hasn’t just happened with COVID-19 – for thirty or forty years the state footprint in working class communities has become smaller and smaller.”

The voluntary, or “third” sector, he believes, has become little more than a “poverty industry”. By relying on state funding, Slaven says the voluntary sector has become “something of a shadow state”, working for the government’s agenda. “This is why Helping Hands Edinburgh will never take funding from the state.”

Instead, Helping Hands is supported entirely by community fundraising – for example, a young woman from the local area has agreed to run 5k every day in May to raise money for the group’s work – and all this money goes back into the communities where Helping Hands.

While Slaven feels that people are “thankful for the help they are getting”, he says they are also “furious about the fact that the state and voluntary sector aren’t there”.

This moment, he says, could mark a shift in how working-class communities organise themselves when the crisis abates. “People are realising that if we are on our own, we need to get organised and we need to offer mutual support and solidarity in our communities.”

Follow them at: @EdiHelpingHands
More here: https://solidaritynotcharity.com/

 

Glasgow Southside

Glasgow Southside Self-Isolation Support

Glasgow Southside Self-Isolation Support was conceived in direct response to the crisis. On 12 March Rhona Sweeting, who works as a project manager in renewables, posted on the Battlefield Community Project Facebook page suggesting that help could be offered to people who were stuck in their homes. Within 24 hours, over 100 people had signed up and the group grew to cover the whole of the Southside.

“People had a sense that they wanted to do something and didn’t know what to do,” says Laura Kane, one of four people involved in running the group. “Community groups didn’t want to be overrun for requests about coronavirus, so we stepped in to give that support.”

The group has focused its efforts on developing a peer-to-peer support network, helping people to access existing resources and other organisations, and recruiting ‘Street Champions’ to volunteer to help their immediate neighbours. “Over 1000 people have now signed up to volunteer. We’ve fulfilled over 150 requests so far and we are developing long-term relationships. We’re setting up phone-trees and we have lots of streets covered but we still need more volunteers.”

None of the group’s organisers ordinarily works in the voluntary sector, and Kane feels that they have managed to be “quicker off the mark than the third sector”. “They’re still gearing up to deal with this, so it has been down to community groups like ours.”

“That has been sad to see, because the people behind these organisations are some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered, but they have a lot of red tape to go through that we don’t, and the challenges they have are extraordinary,” she says.

A positive to come from this situation, in her view, is that it has allowed people who “rarely get the opportunity” to actively help their communities to step forward. “A nice thing is that people are excited to help. We haven’t seen people come together like this for a long time.”

As far as the future goes, Southside Self-Isolation Support Group hopes that it will be able to carry on its work even after social distancing ends. “People are realising that there are a lot of people who need a bit of help, and it’s really easy to do.”

More details here: https://www.southsidesis.co.uk/

Levenmouth, Fife

Coronavirus Levenmouth Support

Levenmouth is an area with high levels of deprivation, so the need for support in the face of the pandemic is considerable. It is also an area which Buckhaven councillor Ryan Smart believes had the “upper hand at the start of this”, because of a strong tendency to “look after our own community.”

Smart set up the Coronavirus Levenmouth Support group on Facebook, which attracted thousands of local people within 24 hours. “All these people had wanted to do something to help and we wanted to give an outlet for them.”

The group was established as part of a coordinated response in the Levenmouth area, agreed by local charities, community groups, churches, and community councils. “The difference between Levenmouth and the overall Fife response is that this was put in place and led by local people, not the council,” Smart says.

The local partnership also produced a leaflet which went to every house in the area listing the contact details for community organisations, churches, community councils, councillors and national helplines.

While other organisations such as Fife Voluntary Action and Gingerbread are providing direct support, Cornavirus Levenmouth Support aims to facilitate information-sharing and support among community members in an isolating time. “A key thing for us was to make people aware that there is still community support for them. A lot of people have posted videos of them singing or bairns doing dances. Bairns have been drawing pictures for older people.”

He hopes that this crisis can lead to a stronger sense of community in future, and reflects that he has noticed lots of little examples of people “stepping up and not just thinking about me, myself and I”.

“We’ve got to think about the world post COVID-19. Things have changed and certain things won’t go back to where they were before. People know there’s going to be significant changes – the question is whether the good changes can continue.”

People’s Pantry Leven

One of the people leading on the crisis response in Levenmouth is Billy Bain of the People’s Pantry Leven. Established a little over a year ago, the People’s Pantry is a form of food co-op for people who are socially isolated or struggling for food. The Pantry’s 155 members would normally pay £2 a week and use their “points” to shop from the pantry’s stock, saving the average member £20-30 per week.

“In normal circumstances a person would come along, get a cup of tea and cake and chat and then go and do their shopping,” Bain explains. Now, the café is closed, and the People’s Pantry is operating with social distancing measures in place. “This is a strange way of doing things for us, because we’re all about encouraging people to chat.”

While the Pantry has lost some of its ability to tackle social isolation, it has turned its attention to reaching more people with its food provision. “We realised quickly we couldn’t continue with only our members in the current circumstances, so we have opened up to people who aren’t members but are joining us on a temporary basis.”

In addition to this, the organisation has consolidated its efforts with the foodbank and Fife Voluntary Action to organise food deliveries to over 200 families in the area so far. The food provided comes from the national charity Fareshare and from Fife Council’s food supplies, while volunteer delivery drivers come from the council local charity Brag Enterprise.

Bain says that other community groups and businesses have also been keen to get involved in helping out. “Lily’s Larder in Lundin Links is sending us ready meals, and we’ve given some food which we couldn’t use to Leven Rotary Club which they’ve been cooking with. One of the Rotary Club members owns Agenda [a bar/restaurant in the area] and has been using the kitchen to get food out to communities and they’ve been making ready meals for us.”

In fact, he says that more people have been asking to volunteer than can be accommodated – something he hopes could be a positive sign for the months and years ahead. “It’s strange considering the social distancing aspect but I think this will bring more people together. I don’t think there will be ‘normal again’, but a new normal, and I hope we are left with communities that are more connected.”

Handmade masks by Marina Nicolson

Shetland

Support for Self-Isolation Shetland

While there are challenges to facing this crisis in a remote area like Shetland, community council chair for Gulberwick, Quarff and Cunningsburgh Amy Garrick-Wright feels that that it enjoys a unique community spirit which has aided in the response. “Shetland has a strong sense of community and there’s a lot of community support. I don’t think Shetlanders are people who like to sit at home – it’s different from other places.”

Garrick-Wright, who is an electrician by day, was inspired to set up the Support for Self-Isolation Shetland Facebook group after seeing its counterpart in Glasgow Southside. “I thought it might give people a sense of community, connection and somewhere to go,” she says.

“I knew this was going to make people who are isolated more isolated, and that people who are struggling would struggle more. I didn’t want people struggling and wondering if people would want to help.”

The group differs somewhat from the one in Glasgow in that it has centred around creating an online community and a place to share information and queries, rather than recruiting volunteers, which was already being organised locally by the Red Cross.

Garrick-Wright identified five other people to help run the support group, which now has over 5000 members. The group has been included in a forum with adult social work, Red Cross, the foodbank, NHS and others, enabling them to pass on information to community members, and on another page moderated by the group, Hame-Aboot Taegither, people are able to share arts and entertainment themed posts to help support people’s wellbeing.

Garrick-Wright is optimistic that this time of crisis might lead to some positive outcomes for the community. “I have a hope that this encourages people even beyond this to help their communities, as they are being empowered to do that by this situation. I’m 35 and I’ve been trying to get people my age and younger involved in the community council but it’s really hard. They don’t have a lot of power, so it doesn’t necessarily attract the kinds of people who are interested in power.”

“It’s great to see this as a way to get people involved. This might get people thinking different about what they can do for their communities.”

More at: https://www.mutual-aid.co.uk/group/support-for-self-isolation-shetland-coronavirus

….

Over the past two months, as the scale of the challenges to come have become apparent, every corner of the country has seen local people rise to occasion by providing an emergency response through community food initiatives and support for coping with social isolation. In the process, many people have become more acutely aware of the untapped strength of communities and of the wider injustices which had left so many people on the brink of crisis in the first place.

What the future holds is likely to be different across the varied and disparate communities of Scotland. One thing is certain, there is no “back” to normal: there is only forward, and if the mutual aid efforts that so many communities have now begun can be sustained, that might just be a good thing.

Rule changes during the Covid-19 pandemic favour property developers and risk shutting the public out from the planning system, according to Scottish civic groups.

They warn that new emergency rules allowing more council planning meetings to take place in private with no public scrutiny could be “normalised”. The rules were introduced in consultation with developers but not community groups, they say.

There are also fears that in some parts of Scotland council officials, or small groups of senior councillors, could make decisions on controversial developments with little or no involvement from members of the public or opposition councillors.

Campaigners are now calling for planning decisions that are not critical to public health, or the national economy, to be put on hold while public gatherings and official meetings are restricted to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Local authorities have been urged by the Scottish Government to relax planning restrictions on businesses where planning can “contribute to economic and social recovery” during the Covid-19 outbreak. Councils across Scotland have suspended or restricted the normal operation of planning committees.

Along with new emergency rules, senior planners at the Scottish Government have issued guidance requiring developers embarking on major new projects to undertake online consultation instead of public meetings. Major development proposals are being allowed to progress after online-only public consultation events.

The rules were introduced after consultation with industry bodies representing property developers, such as the Scottish Property Federation and Homes for Scotland. However, key groups representing communities in the planning system said that they were not contacted by civil servants when they were drawing up the new regulations.

The campaign group, Planning Democracy, has written to MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government and Communities Committee, expressing concerns about the changes. “The government appears to have taken the easy option to reduce public engagement, albeit temporarily, and renege on democratic commitments,” the letter said.

“Including the community sector in initial discussions might have gone some way to dispelling the inevitable public suspicion surrounding new regulations or relaxations of rules.”

Planning Democracy’s chair, Clare Symonds, told The Ferret: “Again the planning system is captured by the interests it is supposed to be regulating and relegates communities to the bottom of the pile.

“There are hugely powerful vested interests in the world of planning who would be happy to see a gradual dismantling of the planning system. We must ensure that none of these changes lead to long-term damage to the interests of local communities and to the environment.”

Short-cut executive processes aimed, properly, at keeping crucial services operating should not be used for important planning decisions.

Her concerns were echoed by Terry Levinthal, director of the Edinburgh conservation group, The Cockburn Association. He has written to the City of Edinburgh Council about its decision to suspend the planning committee and increase the number of decisions taken by delegated officials.

“We believe that short-cut executive processes aimed, properly, at keeping crucial services operating should not be used for important planning decisions,” Levinthal said.

“The suspension of council’s planning committee and development management sub-committee should also mean the suspension of decision-taking on applications, with perhaps the exception of minor householder applications. Determining a planning application is not a critical public health or strategic economic decision.”

In coming months, the City of Edinburgh Council is due to take decisions on high profile projects such as the Quaich Project in West Princes Street Gardens, and the future of the much-debated city Christmas market.

Levinthal argued that “civic and public regard” should be “placed above any short-term administrative processes that might result from the current public health crisis.” There was also unease within The Cockburn Association that the new arrangements could persist.

“Our concern is that emergency measures put in place, reasonably, to deal such situations tend to remain in place, with the justification shifting from crisis management to recovery management and then beyond, until the changes are normalised,” Levinthal said.

“When given the choice of making speedy decisions for the benefit of industry comes across participation and community engagement, the former always wins out.”

Levinthal added: “No doubt, the call to stimulate the economy after Covid will be used by many to call for even more deregulation, describing the statutory planning system as an impediment to recovery or growth. The fact that communities rely on it to protect amenity and ensure civic benefit is seldom heard by politicians.”

The Ferret has previously published details of undeclared meetings held between Scottish politicians and developers at the annual MIPIM property conference held in Cannes.

We have also revealed how the Covid-19 crisis has led to the weakening of environmental inspections at thousands of industrial sites and the relaxation of limits on pesticides at fish farms. Scotland is also the only nation in the UK to have rolled back freedom of information law because of coronavirus.

Scottish Greens communities spokesperson, Andy Wightman MSP, was disappointed that “none of these changes increase the openness or transparency of the planning process”. It was “particularly concerning that the planning process now risks excluding members of the public,” he said.

“The Coronavirus (Scotland) Act gave local authorities the power to exclude the public from their meetings on health grounds, but there is no reason why meetings that have moved online should not include the public to some degree: the technology is there and indeed being used,” he added.

“Some of the changes to the planning system are designed to be temporary, but changes that exclude communities from decision making are not helpful and should be rescinded as soon as possible.”

Covid-19 has also delayed Scottish Government plans to consult on the regulation of short-term lets, as well as other measures to reform the planning system.

The Scottish Government stressed that the new planning rules were temporary. “Public consultation events cannot take place as a public gathering just now, so the new legislation allows that crucial engagement and community influence to happen through online methods,” said planning minister, Kevin Stewart.

“We supported that with guidance on pre-application consultation, and engaged with community representatives in developing that guidance.”

He added: “In a letter published earlier this month, the chief planner and I have already made it clear that this is a temporary, pragmatic change during the emergency period and that we retain our commitment, not just to return to the previous arrangements, but to further enhance this community engagement as part of our wider reform of the planning system programme.”

Homes for Scotland, which represents house building companies, pointed out that protecting citizens from coronavirus was everyone’s number one priority. “In terms of longer term social and economic recovery, building the homes that Scotland so desperately needs will be of fundamental importance,” said planning director, Tammy Swift-Adams.

“We have therefore worked with the Scottish Government to find pragmatic temporary solutions to the new challenges the pandemic has placed on the planning system and wider regulatory consents process. On pre-application consultation, our priority has been to ensure that no member of the public, local authority staff or applicant is put at risk.”

She added: “Alternative public consultation arrangements have been put in place to protect those participants for public health reasons. The pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to local and national governments and we commend all efforts to ensure it causes minimum disruption to people’s lives.

“Making decisions in the public interest is a core duty of local authorities and it is positive to see many of them coming forward with emergency decision-making arrangements.”

David Melhuish director of the Scottish Property Federation, a trade association for commercial and residential property companies, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced unprecedented change to society, including the functions of local authority services. The extent of economic damage and impact on people’s livelihoods is beyond anything seen in centuries.

“Our members are responsible for delivering new and regenerated places for people to work and live, and investment for the wider economy. The planning service is key to unlocking these activities.

“We have therefore engaged with the Scottish Government constructively on how to support the planning service functions during this crisis, including on new, temporary approaches to support community engagement for pre-application requirements and procedures.

“Our discussions proposed pragmatic, responsible solutions to ensure the planning service does not grind to halt during this lockdown, causing a backlog that would take months to kick-start after the government allows wider business activities to resume. This lag would pose longer-term risks to jobs and recovery.”

Author: Michael D Higgins

The global loss of life and disruption to our daily lives resulting from the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in living memory. We have learned through tragedy that we have a shared, globalised vulnerability common to all humanity. We are learning how we, as a matter of urgency, must make changes to improve resilience in a range of essential areas: employment, healthcare, housing. We have been forced to recognise our dependence on our public-sector frontline workers, and the state’s broader role in mitigating this crisis and saving lives.

The coronavirus has magnified the scale of our existing social crises and has proved, if ever proof were required, how government can act decisively when the will is there. It has shown us how so many are only ever one wage payment away from impoverishment, how those in self-employment or workers in the ‘gig’ economy lack security and basic employment rights, how private tenants in unregulated housing markets are at the mercy of their landlords, how many designated ‘key workers’ are appallingly undervalued and underpaid. Averting our gaze to these grim truths is no longer an option.

Years of eroding welfare states in many societies have had to give way, under pressure from the virus, to significant welfare actions as emergency measures. These reflect the impact decades of unfettered neoliberalism have had on whole sectors of society and economy, left without protection as to basic necessities of life, security and the ability to participate.

There is now a widespread, recovered recognition not only of the state’s positive role in managing such crises but of how it can play a decisive, transformative role in our lives for the better. The erosion of the state’s role, the weakening of its institutions and the undermining of its significance for over four decades has left us with a less just and more precarious society and economy.

As we respond, and thinking of the labour market, there is no precedent for the asymmetric mix of mobilisation and demobilisation of labour we are now witnessing. Writing in Social Europe recently, Jan Zielonka astutely remarked:

[T]he coronavirus has exposed the scale of the public sector’s neglect after a long period of neoliberal folly. Today no one in Europe dares to claim that private hospitals can combat the virus better than the public ones. Underpaid nurses from these public hospitals are now more precious than private health consultants.

How regrettable it is that it has taken a pandemic in which thousands of lives have been lost in so many countries to establish, or rekindle, widespread appreciation of work in the public sphere, of the public sector and the importance in the economy of the public good—and, in terms of our shared future, the state’s benign and transformative capacity.

Many concerned citizens had hoped, even mistakenly believed, that progressive political-economy paradigms would flow from the 2008 financial crash. As the ‘free-market’ economist Milton Friedman correctly identified in Capitalism and Freedom, ‘Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change … When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.’

New ideas are now required—ideas based on equality, universal public services, equity of access, sufficiency, sustainability. New ideas are available for an alternative paradigm of social economy within ecological responsibility.

Fortunately, we now have a richer discourse, thanks to scholars such as Ian Gough, Mariana Mazzucato, Sylvia Walby, Kate Raworth and others who advance an ecologically sustainable and socially progressive alternative to our destructive, failed paradigm.

Mazzucato has recently proposed that any firm-level financial assistance provided to recapitalise major companies should be conditional on a ‘greening’ agenda for its receipt. Such a suggestion is a useful contribution as we forge ahead with an eco-social paradigm which now represents our best hope for a sustainable future.

Brighter horizon

Out of respect for those who have suffered greatly, those who have lost their lives and indeed the bereaved families, we must not drift into some notion that we can recover what we had previously as a sufficient resolution—that we can revert to the insecurity of where we were before, through mere adjustment of fiscal- and monetary-policy parameters. That would be so wholly insufficient to the task now at hand. A brighter horizon must be put forward which offers hope.

The coronavirus provides us with an opportunity to do things better. This crisis will pass, but there will be other viruses and other crises. We cannot let ourselves be left in the same vulnerable position again. We have, yet again, learned lessons in relation to healthcare and equity, in relation to what is necessary in terms of income and the necessities of life.

On the most basic level, we should recover and strengthen instincts which we may have suppressed, which the lure of individualism may have driven out, displacing a sense of the collective, of shared solidarity—allowing the state’s value and contribution to be derided and disregarded, so that a narrow agenda of accumulation could be pursued.

The coronavirus has highlighted the unequivocal case for a new eco-social political economy—of having universal basic services that will protect us in the future, as Anna Coote and Andrew Percy have suggested, and of enabling people to have a sufficiency of what they need, as Ian Gough has contended.

We also need, as is now urgent and as Oxfam’s recent report shows, global solidarity if we are to avoid healthcare collapse in many developing countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa. We require enhanced attempts at the global level to build a new international architecture, to reverse the policy of fragmentation and institutional damage that has in recent years affected the United Nations and other multilateral organisations.

Transformative actions

Transformative actions are required. The recently published, meticulously researched analysis by Ireland’s National Economic and Social Council (NESC) of the ‘just transition’ is a seminal document, offering a useful intellectual framework for the wider challenge we face as we attempt to forge a new path to an enlightened political economy, founded on ecology, social cohesion and equality. That report recommends a ‘purposeful, participative and multi-faceted approach to governance; appropriate social protection for those at risk from transition impacts; supportive arrangements and sectoral measures, and inclusive place-based development and investment’.

I support NESC’s call for the establishment of a social dialogue and deliberative process, which should be framed in the wider context of discussions as to how we embed the just economy and society now so urgently needed and desired by the citizenry.

Successful crisis management is no guarantee of durable reform. We therefore need to embed the hard-earned wisdom from this crisis into strong scholarly work, policy and institutional frameworks—this is the great challenge from a political-economy perspective. It will require, as NESC identifies, determined action by all governments, setting out priority actions, the sequence of interventions and timeframes for implementation, as well as consideration of what resources are needed.

Understandably, much current economic commentary focuses on the cost of the pandemic, but we must also reflect on the systemic weaknesses it has exposed in how we organise our society and economy. How can we address these frailties? How can we do things better, to realise the paradigm shift that is urgently required?

Our challenge is therefore to draw on the lessons of solidarity and ingenuity as the coronavirus confronts 21st-century society and its world economy with a new kind of emergency hazard—galvanising that sentiment across the citizenries of the globe which recognises the inherent flaws of our current model, and embracing a new paradigm founded on universalism, sustainability and equality.

What is a further, real basis for hope is that, within such a framework, it is possible to respond together to the coronavirus, climate change, the impact of digitalisation and an inequality which threatens democracy itself.

Author: Lauren Brown, SHN.

A century after its opening, the Logie housing scheme in Dundee remains one of the city’s most popular locations and is a powerful vindication of the municipal housing pioneers who believed that ‘homes fit for heroes’ should be more than an empty promise.

With its central broad boulevard sweeping majestically down towards the River Tay the low-density estate and its revolutionary district heating scheme, gardens and inside toilets stood in marked contrast to Dundee’s decaying overcrowded tenements.

Remarkably, plans for the Logie Estate were put forward even before the ground-breaking Addison Act of 1919 which kick-started Britain’s first faltering municipal house-building efforts.

The Logie Estate was the first housing estate in Europe – let alone Scotland – to have a district heating system which supplied central heating and hot water to each house.

Designed in 1917 by the visionary Dundee architect James Thomson, whose 1920’s plan for Dundee’s waterfront informs the current regeneration, the estate’s aim was to have just 20 houses per acre, a dramatic improvement on the overcrowded 80 per acre seen within Dundee’s busiest areas.

The homes cost £230 each to construct and the rental cost for a two-room home was one shilling and three pence, whereas the cost for three rooms was one shilling and nine pence.

For John Mulloy, former group chief executive at Hillcrest Housing Association, the estate can teach lessons to housing providers in the present day.

He said: “The Logie Estate was built in 1920 in the aftermath of WW1 and in response to Lloyd George’s promise of homes fit for heroes and what had by then been widely accepted as a chronic housing crisis in the UK. Dundee had some of the worst housing in Scotland – which was really saying something.

“The Dundee Council Conservation notice says the estate has ‘aged gracefully’. More than simply being the first Scottish council estate, it demonstrates lasting virtues of placemaking and town planning with its wide, tree-lined main boulevard and in the original architect’s own words ‘space in profusion for gardens and allotments’. The latter now sadly grassed over in large communal gardens. Even today there is an enduring sense of place in Logie.”

It was intended that the new homes at Logie would be well spaced out, obtain high levels of sunlight, have no outbuildings to block out light or limit air-circulation and all would have indoor plumbing.

A coal-fired boiler house was also built in the scheme. Acting as a public wash-house for the surrounding area, it ensured not only warm and hygienic conditions in the scheme but a strong sense of community for the residents.

The design of the houses also heralded an era of change in architecture in Scotland. The two-up, two-down design was a direct contrast to the tenement buildings which encompassed most of the surrounding areas.

On January 29, 1920, the Housing Committee of Dundee inspected the homes which had been built. An article in The Courier noted that all the properties had a living room and either one or two bedrooms. The paper described the kitchens in wonder as “practically another room” – an example of the relatively generous size of the rooms.

The living conditions of the houses at Logie Estate were a dramatic improvement on those found in a 1905 study of the city centre tenements carried out by the Dundee Social Union.

City inspectors then visited more than 6,000 homes and reported filthy living conditions, which exacerbated the problem of disease in the city and contributed to high child mortality rates at the time.

The estate has stood the test of time, improvements have respected the integrity of the design with extreme care taken over the detailing of the garden fences, gates, address plates, railings, steps and paths that have given the scheme an enduring sense of unity.

The district heating system lasted a total of 50 years, in the 1970s the heating boilers were removed when the houses were fitted with central heating. The buildings housing the district heating system were retained with some used as a small, industrial units and some later as the central lounge and kitchen for the dispersed sheltered housing.

The homes are still regarded as exemplary and they continue to attract the attention of town planners from far and wide.

“Generous open and garden space and lasting simple architecture were not its only landmark merits, added Mr Mulloy.

“Logie Estate had the first ever district heating system in Europe which because of its poor insulated pipework melted snow on the pavements and steamed the roadways.”

“But the centenary tells us of the lasting value of good quality, well-designed council housing and its continued relevance to the housing shortage and affordability problems that beset the UK today.”

Jimmy Black, a former housing convenor at Dundee City Council, said: “With its district heating system, spacious estate layout and perfect location beside a beautiful park, Logie was the ideal model for council housing.

“Dundee built some really excellent housing in the early days, Stirling Park and Fleming Gardens being other examples. All three estates are still easy to let and very attractive, particularly Logie. I’ve no doubt that Logie was dear to build, but worth every penny, unlike the long demolished and very expensive mistakes which came later.”

He added: “By today’s standards the houses are relatively small, and living in four in a block accommodation means neighbours really need to be considerate about noise. Taking out the district heating scheme probably seemed sensible at the time, just like closing railways and stopping the trams, and I believe this revealed dangerous asbestos in the pipes.

“But by the overcrowded, dangerous and insanitary standards of early 20th century Dundee, Logie must have seemed like another world. James Thomson’s legacy in Dundee is immense, and his Logie estate was magnificent.”

Author: James Kirkup, Social Market Foundation 

According to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance to King Louis XIV, the art of taxation consists of plucking the goose so as to obtain the greatest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.

In France, Poland and Denmark, they’re trying a different approach during the coronavirus crisis: geese that don’t provide enough feathers can hiss off. Those states have declared that companies that have used tax havens to reduce their tax liabilities will not be eligible for state aid to get them through the current downturn.

Britain hasn’t — so far — announced anything so stark, but quieter echoes of such thinking can be detected in the Government’s emergency bailout measures.

While Rishi Sunak has offered furlough schemes for salaried workers and support for many of the self-employed, the Treasury has so far declined to offer a specific package for people who are self-employed and paid through a limited company of which they are the sole director. That arrangement can have tax advantages to contractors, who pay themselves dividends instead of a salary.

(In the interests of transparency, I should note that some columnists use such a device for their journalistic earnings. I am not one of them.)

The refusal to include self-employed directors in the bailout has caused no little distress and anger; some of those people are contractors to big companies who have insisted that they will only pay fees to limited companies, not to contractors personally.

Yet the Treasury’s view, rarely stated explicitly, is not too far away from that of the French, Poles and Danes: if you choose to minimise your tax bill and pay less in to the state, you go to the back of the queue when the state is dishing out cash.

That’s an interesting place to start a conversation about tax after the crisis. Here, I do not mean the level and allocation of taxation. Those are second-order questions. I mean the purpose and nature of taxation. Never mind how much tax you pay, ask yourself why you pay it.

Historically, the point of taxation has shifted. Originally a tithe extracted by monarchs to support their households, tax became a levy imposed to support certain national endeavours (UK income tax was famously a temporary measure introduced by Pitt the Younger to fund the war against Napoleon) and then… what?

Whatever you think tax is now for, it is a fact of life in any modern economy, because such economies need a state and that state must be funded. But current taxation everywhere goes well beyond that needed to provide a de minimis state that offers nothing more than national defence and the rule of law. Taxes fund services and social security, healthcare and education, a range of activities that would have been unimaginable to Pitt.

But describing the things tax does is not the same as answering that question about why we pay it. Because there are two distinct answers to that question. For some, tax is transactional: you pay in and you expect to get something back.

Anecdotally, I know this idea of transaction is widespread and powerful. I used to work for a newspaper that often argued for a smaller state that spent less and lived within its means. Yet when the Coalition government of David Cameron moved to remove child benefit from higher-earners, we were inundated with angry letters from readers arguing that they had paid their dues in tax, so they deserved to get a regular handout from the Exchequer — even if they did use it to buy a slightly nicer bottle of wine in Waitrose.

Likewise the state pension. Any politician who dares to question perks such as the winter fuel allowance and the seriously expensive triple lock of guaranteed annual rises immediately faces a storm of fury from recipients insisting they have “paid their stamp” and are thus entitled to endlessly rising living standards. Never mind the fact that their “stamp” was spent years ago and their pension payments are funded from taxes levied on today’s workers.

Is tax just a mandatory subscription fee you pay to provide yourself with services you might or might not want and might or might not use?

Another way to see tax is an insurance premium towards a group policy. This view is closer to the narrow financial facts of tax: the amount we pay in is not related to what we get back.

If you’re a privately-educated high-earner who drops dead at 60 without reaching a hospital, you may well contribute far more to the Exchequer than you receive in direct services. And if you’re born disabled or develop a complex chronic condition that limits your ability to work, you’ll very likely cost the state more than you pay in tax.

Government responses to the Coronavirus crisis show that insurance policy paying out, and might just shift, a little, the way politicians talk about tax. By and large, politicians tend to speak of tax as a necessary evil, something they try to do to people without them noticing too much. Hence the continued resonance of that Colbert quotation I began with: it’s used again and again in books and articles about tax, and with good reason — it’s still relevant today.

If you present tax as that necessary evil, tax avoidance and evasion make a certain logical sense. Especially if you believe (rightly or not) that you pay more in than you get back.

That belief is most often found in “self-made” people who have made money in business and appear to believe that their success exists almost wholly separately to wider society. If you built your firm through hard work and grit, who can blame you for losing sight of the social and economic infrastructure that was a necessary condition of your success? Roads, courts, clean air, policing, defence — take them away and see how long any business lasts.

(Some small-state conservatives still recall Ronald Reagan’s joke: “The 10 most terrifying words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But as the historian Ian Morris has pointed out, in reality the 10 scariest words are “There is no government, and I’m here to kill you.”)

We don’t just pay tax so we can get stuff. We pay tax so that people — including us — can get stuff when they need it. Like an insurance policy, it only works through the pooling of risk — and contributions. Part of the reason a country like Germany has been able — so far — to absorb the coronavirus crisis better than others is a history of taxation levied and used to provide insurance against disaster: the Germans have almost too many ventilators and testing facilities, tax-funded precautionary capacity that now looks more prudent than wasteful.

Which brings us back to the companies that decide to skip a few premium payments by routing profits through off-shore subsidiaries, lending money between units and all the other clever wheezes. As voters wonder why their states’ insurance policies aren’t paying out as they expect during a fundamental challenge, is it any wonder that politicians feel little urge to help such firms?

But let’s go back to Colbert’s geese for a moment. It may well be politically expedient and even emotionally satisfying to let tax-efficient corporates go under right now. How many tears will be shed in the UK if Richard Branson loses his airline and his island?

But letting the noisiest geese starve won’t bring in so many feathers. The really interesting question about tax after the crisis is whether there’s now a chance to persuade more companies — and maybe some people too — to pay more tax.

If the crisis is demonstrating that tax is an insurance payment that can help protect everyone from grave harm, what is the social status of tax avoiders? The idea of shaming companies over their tax records is now old, and largely ineffective: there are lots of firms whose tax arrangements are famously ruthless and mean, yet how many have been successfully shamed into ending those arrangements? Most just use a fraction of the money they save in tax to employ a few more top-drawer PR folk to answer questions from annoying hacks and politicians, then carry on as before.

What hasn’t been tried enough is approval, the positive moral pressure of acclamation. Some companies don’t pay enough tax, but some pay lots.

According to PWC’s annual Total Tax report, Britain’s biggest 100 firms paid £84.7bn in tax last year, 11.7% of total government receipts.

Yet how many of them talk about their total tax contribution, about how many nurses or ICU wards they funded last year?

HM Revenue and Customs in recent years has experimented with behavioural science to get us to pay our taxes in full and on time. Self-assessment payers get bombarded with messages telling us “by this point in the year, most people have already done their tax return”, and so on.

The aim is “social proof”, the creation of a clear norm that people incline to meet. I wonder if the coronavirus crisis might just offer the chance to do something similar with tax on a much grander scale, part of a new social contract between businesses and the society that is now bailing them out and paying their furloughed workers’ wages.

I’m all for naming and shaming those who don’t pay their fair share of tax. It establishes that paying tax is an intrinsically good and selfless act, something made vividly clear by Covid-19. But we should make much more use of that. Since paying tax is a good thing to do, we should dwell more on those that do it the most.

Let’s have official league tables of the biggest taxpayers, with the winners celebrated and recognised: badges, honours, the lot. Hell, why not name hospital wards after those who did most to fund them? Imagine if the eight new Nightingale hospitals had been named for the eight biggest individual taxpayers in the UK on those league tables? And think how the companies and plutocrats who came lowest on the list might respond. There is more than one way to pluck a goose.

Author: The National

Govanhill Baths in Glasgow

IT’S Good Friday, the sun is shining and birds are singing full-throated songs of spring. Close your eyes and you could forget we are living in the midst of lockdown.

But in Glasgow’s Govanhill the normally packed-out ice-cream shop on Victoria Road is shut and there are no young people playing cricket in Queen’s Park. In Allison Street the shopkeepers re-stock fruit and veg wearing masks and the familiar hustle and bustle, the spill of people on to street corners, is gone.

With its network of tenement-lined streets, this is one of the most densely populated parts of Scotland, as well as one of the most diverse – about 40% of residents are from ethnic minorities….read more

Galson Estate in the Western Isles

“AT a time of crisis, community will look to their own,”says Lisa Maclean, manger of Urras Oighreachd Ghabhsainn (the Galson Estate Trust) in Lewis. “I fully believe it’s all about trust.”

The estate – which was bought by the community under right to buy legislation back in January 2007 – stretches across 56,000 acres of coast, agricultural land and moor in the north west of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It takes in 22 villages running from Upper Barvas to Port of Ness with a population of nearly 2000 people. Now, in these extraordinary times, every single one of them is accounted for to ensure if they need support, they will get it…. read more

The Stove Network in Dumfries

HOW do you respond to lockdown when all of your activity revolves around uniting people in a physical space? That was the question that started forming in the mind of members of the Stove Network, an artists’ collective in Dumfries that aims to build community cohesion through creative endeavour.

For the network, which was involved in plans to bring the town’s run-down High Street back into community ownership, their cafe was the hub of their work….read more

 

 

 

Author: Frank Rennie, Professor of Sustainable Rural Development, Lews Castle College, UHI

What makes a place special? We probably all have places that we consider to be our ‘favourite places’, but what is it that makes them so? Is it the scenery? The people there? The wildlife or the sense of space? The last factor is critical, even in crowded places, for a space does not really become a place until we interact with it. The Space acquires layers of meaning by our interaction, and thereby becomes distinguishable from other spaces. It becomes a Place. The interaction might be due to the fact that we (or our ancestors) went hunting there, or fishing, or gathering berries. It may be a good harbour, or a sheltered place where a village has grown up, or a farm. In any case, layers or meaning are built up. The handing-down of these meanings and these stories is a major part of what contributes to our heritage. At each telling of the story, the story-teller (and the hearer) will each have subtly different understandings of the story. These nuances affect what makes the place distinctive for us, or ultimately what makes it unique, and what makes it ‘special’ (they are not all the same).

Perhaps the most simple (yet arguably the most complex) distinction is in the relative positioning of place. It is so automatic that we describe a place in terms of its distance or direction from another known place that we scarcely stop to think about it. Although we generally use the same units of measurement (e.g. miles or kilometres) our ideas of distance are strongly culturally shaped. I have often been aware of getting directions in the city to ‘take bus number X and change at…’ in order to travel a distance that is barely 15 minutes away by foot. Similarly, in some rural areas, we think little of ‘popping into town’ for a quick message, even though that might mean a forty-mile round trip. To go back further in time, before the creation of an efficient road network, travel around areas like the Highlands and Islands was arduous over land, (often by foot) whereas travel by boat was easy and flexible. That placed islands at the centre of things, not as isolated, hard-to-reach lumps of land.

Another method of differentiating places is by naming, and here, although the localisation of place is more specific, we increase exponentially the difficulties of perceiving the heritage of landscape. Places are often named in the vernacular, but people change, the dominant language may change, and certainly meaning, or understanding of meaning, will change. A place may be named after a farmer, or a funny event, or even a major battle, but with time the farmer dies, the funny event loses its context, and the battle becomes an embellished folk-tale (recounted differently by the winners and the losers). But the place name remains, perhaps unchanged from the original, frequently mangled into phonetics or (mis)translations, but either way listed on a map like a fossil of our intangible cultural heritage. A detailed consideration of the maps of our favourite place will often produce a mongrel nomenclature, such as Gaelic spellings of Norse place names, recorded by monoglot English-speakers, which were then type-set by Dutch cartographers who knew none of those indigenous languages. There are some wonderful cartographical howlers, but I have written about them elsewhere and now is not the time to elaborate.

The combination of all these factors, topography, positioning, culture, people, and many more variables, is what contributes to making a place distinctive. Many of us like our own space, by which we may actually mean, the place where all these variables conspire to make us feel more comfortable, or more creative, or safer. For some people this ‘special’ place is perhaps far away, somewhere that we return to in our imagination, and if we are lucky at holiday times. Others of us are fortunate to inhabit that special place, literally and metaphorically. The local place names are familiar signposts, not simply ink on a map, but a tangible link with the family who live in that locality, whose children went to school with ours. The changes in that landscape are not simply measured in the recognisable alterations occurring during a single life-span, but are rooted in the anecdote and history of that place. Highland author, Neil Gunn, wrote about ‘the other landscape’ by which he meant not simply the landforms that we currently all see, but also the hidden landscape of meaning, of utility, of history, and of heritage that is largely oblivious to the visitor but is embedded in that landscape.

In those situations, what might be regarded as the orthodox conventions defining a ‘sense of place’ are subverted, or reversed, and how could it be otherwise? The village that is described as being ‘at edge’ is actually at the centre of things. The island described as ‘remote’ or ‘isolated’ is only so if your frame of reference is focussed elsewhere. When you are in that island, in that community, you are a central component of that place and your perception of that place is added to the mosaic that we use to perceive and identify that place. It is the cities of the south that are remote and quaintly strange (even superficial?) to our world view.

That world view is increasingly dominated by a globalised media that overwrites the narrative of place and the importance of place in our lives. Like the place names on a map that are re-written and changed by each successive cultural invasion, the meanings and the importance of place are being changed by this superimposed dominant narrative. This has political implications, of course, as rural houses become holiday homes, and urban service solutions are grafted onto rural localities with a very different population structure, infrastructure, and social requirements. That is for a different discussion, let’s stick with the conceptualisation of place.

In his classic work on ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said explored the construction of the ‘western conceptions of the orient’. No-one from the north and west of Europe can read this work and not discover surprisingly similar correlations. In one way, Said was fortunate, for ‘east’ and ‘west’ of the globe have been conventionally (if arbitrarily) defined for hundreds of years. In the biggest hegemonic land-grab in human history, the Greenwich meridian placed London at the centre of the world, and from this point we have measured longitude in each direction (until they meet, thereby proving the fickleness of the decision). Not so for our definitions of ‘north’ and ‘south’. North of what? Where does north start? For convenience, the equator is sometimes used, but how often have we heard the London-based media talk about ‘the north’ when they really mean somewhere around Birmingham, or ‘the north-east’ when they mean Newcastle, without stopping to consider that there is a great deal more further the north, even within their own country? I sense this slipping into the political again, so let us return to the topic of a ‘sense of place’.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to get a good idea of the multiple layers, or perspectives, of a place is to consider a longitudinal study of a specific locality. From an islander’s perspective, and most crucially from the perspective of my own village, this would entail a multi-facetted study to consider what is important at every different stage from the prehistory before written record, to what we consider we can reasonably know about the immediate future. My recent writing has done this for the village of Galson on the north-western coast of the Isle of Lewis, and I hope to publish it as a book this summer. This involves an epistemology of place (a system of place-based knowledge) that requires multifarious disciplines, including (but not exhaustively) geology, botany, history, archaeology, ornithology, climatology, and several other ‘ologies too esoteric to mention here.

The re-combination of these, and many other disciplines, will be different for every individual person who takes time to consider a place in four (or more) dimensions. A particular emphasis will be laid upon one aspect of importance or another, as new information is added to the sum total, and as other knowledge is (deliberately or accidentally) left out or reinterpreted by radicals or revisionists. In our personal interpretation of place, in ‘the other landscape’ that we each might observe, there is a gradation of association and emotion that speaks to all of us. It gives voice to the feelings that the land is ‘bleak’ or ‘beautiful’; it configures descriptions that are pejorative, like ‘remote’ and value-laden, like ‘isolated’ as well as the hyperbole of the ‘best’ beach or the ‘unique’ vista. The narrative of place is more than social history, it is natural history also, and the interaction of these with the cumulative actions of the wider world. For certain, there are unique combinations of perception that may be special for each and every one of us. There are some places that seem to hit all of our buttons and pull all of our strings, so that the location acquires an almost mystical persona-of-place that imbues it with a certain grace. Not ‘grace’ in the religious sense, but a profound elegance and charm that can be so amplified and so personalised that it becomes a ‘special’ place for us. In certain cultures there is a specific term for this unique resonance of a place; for some people, their heritage includes ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’ sites that encapsulate those intangible properties that set a location apart from the ordinary and make it particularly memorable or pleasant. Others are content to appreciate the quality of the light, or the peace that they find there.

For me, islands in general have that attraction. In this island, and in this particular village, that combination of factors coalesces for me into an intimate vibrancy that I have experienced nowhere else. I recognise that there are many such villages and other ‘special’ places that other people will recognise. Personally, I am content to be here, in the present iteration of this place, and for this place to nurture me in ways that I am sometimes slow to realise. I can only hope to reciprocate.

Author: Hans J Marter, Shetland News

A PETITION urging the Scottish Parliament to halt Highlands and Islands Airports Limited’s (HIAL) plans to introduce remote tower technology at five airports in the region is quickly gaining support on the parliament’s website.

The petition, initiated by Benbecula Community Council and supported by former Benbecula councillor Alasdair MacEachen as well as former HIAL employees John Doig and Peter Henderson, has already gained over 300 signatures since it went live on Thursday.

The petitioners feel aggrieved with the way HIAL reached the decision to go ahead with its remote tower air traffic management strategy (ATMS), and they are demanding an independent assessment of the project.

Last December the government-owned company announced it would go ahead with its controversial plans to make air traffic control at seven of its airports – including Sumburgh, Kirkwall and Stornoway – redundant, and replace it with remote tower technology installed at a new Combined Surveillance Centre (CSC) in Inverness.

In addition, air traffic control service at Wick and Benbecula’s airports would be downgraded.

Ever since, HIAL’s move has been criticised by politicians of almost every persuasion from across the region, as well as by local authorities. Shetland Islands Council has said it is “very concerned” at potential job losses and safety implications.

Remote tower technology was first introduced in the north of Sweden in 2015 where it reportedly works well at smaller airports.

Doubts have been raised that the online technology is robust enough to perform reliably in the islands communities in the north of Scotland, and in particular at a busy Sumburgh Airport with its two runways and significant levels of traffic comprised of scheduled flights, charted oil industry flights as well as offshore helicopter flights.

While agreeing with HIAL’s assertion that the changing regulatory environment of aviation “requires change”, the petitioners believe that the airport operator’s approach is the wrong one, and will not result in a more “sustainable and cost-effective service”.

They believe it will ultimately compromise the quality of the current service.

The petitioners wrote: “We believe that quality of service of scheduled flights to the communities served at the seven airports may be compromised due to the potential for an increase in flight delays, cancellations and airport closures at Stornoway, Inverness, Sumburgh, Kirkwall and Dundee.”

They also said that “existing digital remote towers do not support cross runway operations”, and made the point that “safety critical local knowledge of geography, weather, facilities and much more will be lost” as remote air traffic controllers “will lack such awareness”.

Acknowledging that ageing infrastructure and outdated methods of controlling air traffic need to be modernised urgently, they reminded HIAL that the majority of air traffic controllers employed by the company are opposed to the proposed project and have said they would refuse to relocate to the new centre.

“We believe the technical feasibility of this project has not been proven,” they said, adding that no-one on the HIAL board that approved the project has civil aviation qualifications.

The petition can be found on the Scottish Parliament’s website. The closing date is 6 May.

The public petition committee will the decide what to do next. It could decide to take oral evidence from government, public bodies and the petitioners themselves, and, potentially, make recommendations to the Scottish Government.

HIAL has been contacted for comment.

Author: Ben Wray, Source Direct

The site of the boy-billionaire the Duke of Westminster giving over a measly £12.5 million of his estimated £9.5 billion in inherited wealth to the NHS sums up the way the gross inequities of present-day Britain are displayed as generosity.

It’s the same sort of ludicrous mentality which leads Health Secretary Matt Hancock to unveil a badge for care workers, rather than a 20 per cent pay rise and proper PPE. Britain was a country that in 1974 raised the top rate of tax on earned income to 83 per cent. Now, Ministers hector 20-year-old millionaire footballers for not being charitable enough. The rise of the charity society is a sign of the shameful decline in collectivism, of ‘each according to their ability to each according to their need’ being a matter not of rights but of gifts.

It was Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who was in charge when the NHS was first built after the war, who described charity as “a cold grey loveless thing”.

“If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim,” Attlee said.

Let’s be clear, solidarity between communities is a great thing, but we have undergone a great regression in our thinking when the NHS officially responds to the Duke’s “gift” – 0.1 per cent of his inherited wealth – by saying we are “incredibly grateful for this most generous donation”. Would the £3.5 billion the Duke managed to avoid paying in inheritance tax due to utilising a “loophole” not be more useful to the NHS? The tax dodging super-rich steal a three-course meal from the table with one-hand, and then are lavishly praised when they hand back a cold roast potato with the other. In a paper for Tax Research UK last year, professor Richard Murphy found that there is an £18.5 billion annual tax loss to UK coffers “arising from the tax haven activities of those who are subject to UK tax upon their income”.

And all of this goes on while we live in an era of corporate bailouts. The supermarkets got away without paying business rates this year due to the Covid-19 crisis, which for Tesco was over £500 million saved in unpaid tax. Meanwhile, they raked in huge profits from the rush to buy food as sales jumped 30 per cent, and handed out a big fat dividend to shareholders of £656 million. I’m sure its largest shareholder, global asset firm and master tax-avoider BlackRock, will be happy. And then we have the absurd sight of Richard Branson pleading for a UK Government bailout for his airline, at the same time as he moves VirginGalactic, valued at $1.1 billion, to a British-administered tax haven, the British Virgin Islands.

Is it any wonder that Britain’s economy and public services are so fragile to this pandemic? We have an economic system where the super-rich have few responsibilities to their employees or to public services, but the state has many responsibilities to protect the profitability of the super-rich. Remember that for every donation to the NHS, the PFI and outsourcing firms have taken many multiples of that cash out of the healthcare system for profits. The real sickness in Britain is not the virus – it’s that the mentality of the UK ruling class can easily be identified in a Charles Dickens novel.