Author: By Scottish Government

To read consultation paper click here

Part 5 of the 2016 Act creates a process by which local, place-based communities can seek to acquire a right to buy land to further the achievement of sustainable development in relation to that land. Where an application is successful, the right to purchase the land applies even where the owner of the land is not willing to sell it. It is therefore, like Part 3A of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 (the Community Right to Buy Abandoned, Neglected or Detrimental Land), a form of compulsory purchase. Part 5 of the 2016 Act is currently not in force.

Part 5 of the 2016 Act contains a number of regulation making powers. They allow Scottish Ministers to make regulations about a number of matters that relate to Part 5. The main purpose of this consultation is to explain the Scottish Government’s proposals for how it will use these regulation making powers, to present a broad outline of how Part 5 will work once it is in force, and to give you the opportunity to put forward your views on these proposals.

Under Part 5, Scottish Ministers can only consent to a right to buy application where they are satisfied that certain conditions are met. These conditions, which are in section 56 of the 2016 Act, are of two sorts:

(a) sustainable development conditions

(b) procedural conditions

The sustainable development conditions are explained further on in this consultation. It should be noted that there are no regulation making powers in Part 5 that would allow modification of these conditions as they are fully set out in the 2016 Act.

There are however regulation making powers for some of the procedural requirements. These include the power under section 56(9), which allows regulations to be made about the form and content of the Part 5 community body’s request to a land owner or tenant to seek the transfer of land or tenant’s interest prior to any formal right to buy application. Section 56(9) also allows regulations to be made about the form and content of a response from a land owner to a community body’s request and the circumstances in which owners are taken not to have responded.

In addition to the regulation making powers connected with some of the procedural conditions, there are several other regulation making powers contained in Part 5. These include powers to specify types of land and tenant’s interests which are not eligible for purchase under Part 5, and regulations for governing community ballot processes.

Our proposals for how we will use these regulation making powers are set out in this consultation paper.

Author: By Milan Babic, Open Democracy

In a 2001 essay, Naomi Klein passionately called for “reclaiming the commons” in a world increasingly dominated by corporate power and shaped by a neoliberal political logic. Almost two decades later, this very corporate power is at least up for debate; and neoliberalism is slowly being superseded by a new logic of weaponizing the existing ties of globalization instead of deepening them. At the same time, the call to reclaim the commons found an unexpected answer in the rise of transnational state ownership. Today, some of the largest FDI-transactions ever are being conducted by state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which are rising as the new large-scale owners of assets and equities around the world.

Some observers interpret this unprecedented rise as a direct reaction to the excesses of a globalized financial system on steroids pre-2008: state capital is often portrayed as “patient” capital, representing a welcome alternative to the volatile nature of short-term oriented equity and debt investment. Some sovereign investment vehicles like the Norwegian SWF achieved a reputation of being a role model for sustainable and alternative ways of investing in global markets. Others are being praised for their role in directing catch-up economic development in emerging economies.

But how close is this form of transnational state capital to an idea of public or common ownership? Is state ownership really a viable alternative for a post-neoliberal, more inclusive and emancipatory global economy? While this is an open question, I lay out three arguments in the following that challenge this emancipatory promise – with the hope of stimulating a discussion about the nature of the role of state ownership in a globalized economy.

Transnational state capital often mimics its private competitors

As has already been discussed for a while, sovereign investment tools in the global economy often “have identifiable commonalities of form and function that match the core institutions of Western financial markets”. This is not only the case for the engagement of the Norwegian SWF and Swedish AP Pension Funds in North American stock markets, but also for the immense investments of Middle Eastern funds in European multinationals and infrastructure projects. Research in progress by our CORPNET team in Amsterdam estimates that the lionshare of transnational equity investment by states is actually flowing into the core of the global economy – Eastern Asia, North America and Europe.

New evidence also suggests that states as owners are equally busy with using Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) in order to avoid taxation or regulatory burdens, just like many of their multinational peers do. It is hence fair to say that, at least from a political economy standpoint, state investment capitalizes on and strengthens the structures and incentives of the global political economy without representing a viable alternative to existing practices.

Transnational state capital is often controlled by domestic elites

Forms of state ownership can be equated with “real” public ownership like in the case of most pension funds around the world. However, vehicles of sovereign investment are often rather closely tied to domestic elites who use them, amongst other things, as rent-seeking devices. A well-known example of this is the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which was established by the then-ruler of Qatar in 2005. While the QIA has served as a vehicle of economic development for Qatar, it is also entirely controlled by its ruling Al-Thani family.

Another example is the role that Russian multinational Gazprom plays in the advancement of the (geo-)political ambitions of the current Russian government. Research has furthermore documented the close ties between Chinese corporate and state elites in the transnationalization of state capital. A recent book shows the connection between dominant-party authoritarian elites in East Asian countries and the propensity of these states for aggressive usage of state investment in foreign corporations. These examples illustrate that some forms of transnational state investment are closely tied to the interests of domestic elites rather than being some sort of public good shared by the majority of citizens.

Transnational state capital is concentrated in large, often fossil-fueled state-owned enterprises

While a lot of attention is given to institutional investors, we found in a recent working paper that the majority of transnational state capital is stored in majority-owned companies. This means that large state-owned enterpises (SOEs) still very much shape the landscape of global state ownership. Those are at the same time often either energy-intensive or energy-producing firms that play a key strategic role in areas like national energy security or revenue generation.

Large oil firms like Saudi Aramco, Sinopec or Rosneft, agrichemical multinationals like Syngenta or energy giants like Vattenfall are at the heart of transnational state investment. None of these large, strategically important firms has stood out in the recent past as pioneering or even advocating a transition to a green and sustainable economy and energy supply. A lot of them are, on the contrary, profiteers and carriers of a fossil-fuelled, exploitative and destructive vision of energy production and economic growth: in 2012, nationalized oil companies owned 73% of global oil and 68% of global gas reserves. This makes them rather unlikely candidates for a much-needed radically progressive stance concerning the looming environmental catastrophe.

Rebuilding the Commons after Neoliberalism

The three angles on state ownership sketched above illustrate that reclaiming the commons is not automatically going to be a progressive, let alone an emancipatory project for rebuilding our economies out of the shatters of neoliberalism – if reclaiming the commons simply means state ownership. Large public companies as well as state-invested firms and state-owned vehicles are unlikely to be the tools of a democratic overhaul of the global political economy. Two core messages follow from this:

First, a simple re-nationalization of key industries is not going to do the trick, since the rules of global capitalism, domestic rent-seeking elites and the environmental footprint of large SOEs are shaping the reality of contemporary transnational state capital.

Second, this very transnational and global reality of state capital suggests that even public ownership has become a force for globalization rather than a tool for protecting societies from its impact. The example of the “privatized” British Railways that ended up in the hands of the profiting German, Dutch and French states illustrates that reclaiming the commons cannot be just a matter of more state ownership – it needs to happen bottom-up, involve local ownership initiatives, green alternatives and the insight that we are fated to solve this issue on a global scale.

Nationalization plus protectionism, as currently advocated by many on the left, cannot be a viable, progressive alternative when the problems concern our shared global economy. Localism and an emphasis on the globalized nature of our economies might seem like a contradiction, but they are in fact two sides of the same coin: local alternatives enhance the democratic aspects of public ownership, while awareness of the global inter-twinings of our economic activities ensures that we do not fall for the protectionist trap that ignores or even weaponizes these global relationships for national gains.

Reclaiming the commons locally, sustainably and democratically remains, 20 years after Klein’s call, the better alternative to a simple re-nationalization of firms.

Author: By Branko Milan, Social Europe

At the heart of the crisis of trust in politics lies the corrosion of public service by the ethos of private gain.

There is little doubt that the western world is going through a serious political crisis, which can be best described as a crisis of trust in its political institutions and governments.

Two things often seem, though, to be overlooked. First, the crisis of trust in institutions is not limited to the west—it is general. The crisis in the west just receives more attention because western media are dominant and because it was assumed that economically more advanced liberal societies should not suffer such a disconnect between rulers and ruled.

Secondly, the crisis is longstanding: it goes further back in time than the 2008 financial crash and the malaise created by globalisation. Arguably, its source is the impressive and somewhat unexpected success of introducing capitalist relations into all domains of life—including into our private lives and, importantly, into politics.

The neoliberal revolutions of the early 1980s, associated with the then US president, Ronald Reagan, and the UK premier, Margaret Thatcher—not forgetting the Chinese ‘paramount leader’, Deng Xiaoping—were supported by revolutions in economic thinking, such as public-choice theory and libertarianism, which explicitly began to treat the political space as an extension of everyday economics. Politicians were seen as just another set of entrepreneurs who, instead of taking their skills and risk-taking preferences to banking or software development, moved into politics. It was thought normal that goal-directed, self-interested rational behaviour need not be limited to the economic sphere—it was more general and embraced politics as well.

This view of the world was amazingly vindicated. Not only did politicians often behave in a self-serving manner (which perhaps they had often done in the past too), but such behaviour began to be expected of them. Not necessarily approved of, but expected in the sense that it was not considered odd or unusual that politicians would first and foremost think of their own financial interests.

They could cash out on the connection and power they had acquired in office by finding lucrative jobs in the private sector (José Manuel Barroso, Tony Blair, Jim Kim from the World Bank). They could give multi-million-dollar speeches to corporate moguls (Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton). They could sit on a plethora of company boards.

Or, some, coming from the private sector (Silvio Berlusconi, Thaksin Shinawatra), would openly advertise their political parties as just clientilistic organisations: if you have a problem and want it solved, join the party. I remember seeing in the streets of Milan such an advertisement by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—a movement whose lack of ideology, aside from economic self-interest, was reflected in its banal name, borrowed from football fans supporting Italy’s national team.

The list of politicians who took their own (and their supporters’) money-making to be the normal function of homo economicus once in office is long. We know some of its most prominent members, often by failure—when their activities went a bit too far or when they were unable fully to hide them. We know them through financial scandals and at times jail terms. For example, two out of the last three Brazilian presidents are in prison for bribery.  All five former Peruvian presidents have been jailed for corruption, are under investigation or are fugitives from justice. The daughter of Uzbekistan’s late president has been imprisoned for multi-billion dollar embezzlement schemes. The shadow of prosecution hangs over the former Angolan president’s daughter, and chair of its state oil company, the richest woman in Africa, were she to return to the country.

In Europe, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been subject to investigation in connection with a number of financial scandals, the most serious arising from reportsof illicit financial support for his 2007 election campaign by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl had to resign as honorary chair of the Christian Democratic Union in 2000 after revelations of secret party bank accounts over which he presided.

The US president, Donald Trump, has refused to disclose his multi-year tax returns and failed to put his business dealings into a blind trust to insulate him from external inducements. His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, has been able to parlay political power into wealth way beyond his income.

Politicians, east and west, north and south, have thus fully confirmed to neoliberal ‘economic imperialism’—the idea that all human activities are driven by the desire for material success, that success in money-making is the indicator of our social worth and that politics is just another line of business.

The problem with this approach, applied to the political space, is that it breeds cynicism among the population, because the official lingo of politicians has to be centred on public interest and public service—yet the reality, and the ideological justification for that reality, are entirely different. The discrepancy is moreover easy to spot.  Every government official then becomes seen as a hypocrite who is telling us that he is there because he is interested in the public good, whereas it is clear that he is in politics to line his pockets now or in the future—or, if already rich, to make sure no adverse political decisions are taken against his ‘empire’.

Is it then strange that no trust will be evinced regarding anything politicians say? Is it strange that their every action would be seen as having been motivated by personal interest or dictated by lobbyists? Actually, both the market revolution of the 1980s and the dominant economic paradigm tell us that it should be precisely so. And that that is for the best.

The mistrust of governing elites is thus due to the extremely successful projection of the capitalist mode of behaviour and operations into all spheres of human activity, including politics. It just happens that, if one does so, one can no longer expect that people will believe that policies are driven by the ideal of public service.

The problem has no easy solution. To regain trust, politics needs to be subtracted from the fields where normal capitalist rules hold. But to do so requires that politicians reject the standard set of values implicit in the capitalist system—maximisation of financial interest. How and where are we to find such people? Should we, like Tibetans, look for the new leaders in faraway places untainted  #by hyper-commercialisation? Since this does not seem even remotely likely, I think we need to get adjusted to the idea of continued mistrust, and a wide chasm between the political elite and most of the population.

This could make politics very bumpy for a long time. It is the apogee of capitalism that is responsible for the bumpiness, and for our—inevitable—political malaise.

Author: Milan Babic, Open Democracy

 In a 2001 essay, Naomi Klein passionately called for “reclaiming the commons” in a world increasingly dominated by corporate power and shaped by a neoliberal political logic. Almost two decades later, this very corporate power is at least up for debate; and neoliberalism is slowly being superseded by a new logic of weaponizing the existing ties of globalization instead of deepening them. At the same time, the call to reclaim the commons found an unexpected answer in the rise of transnational state ownership. Today, some of the largest FDI-transactions ever are being conducted by state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which are rising as the new large-scale owners of assets and equities around the world.

Some observers interpret this unprecedented rise as a direct reaction to the excesses of a globalized financial system on steroids pre-2008: state capital is often portrayed as “patient” capital, representing a welcome alternative to the volatile nature of short-term oriented equity and debt investment. Some sovereign investment vehicles like the Norwegian SWF achieved a reputation of being a role model for sustainable and alternative ways of investing in global markets. Others are being praised for their role in directing catch-up economic development in emerging economies.

But how close is this form of transnational state capital to an idea of public or common ownership? Is state ownership really a viable alternative for a post-neoliberal, more inclusive and emancipatory global economy? While this is an open question, I lay out three arguments in the following that challenge this emancipatory promise – with the hope of stimulating a discussion about the nature of the role of state ownership in a globalized economy.

Transnational state capital often mimics its private competitors

As has already been discussed for a while, sovereign investment tools in the global economy often “have identifiable commonalities of form and function that match the core institutions of Western financial markets”. This is not only the case for the engagement of the Norwegian SWF and Swedish AP Pension Funds in North American stock markets, but also for the immense investments of Middle Eastern funds in European multinationals and infrastructure projects. Research in progress by our CORPNET team in Amsterdam estimates that the lionshare of transnational equity investment by states is actually flowing into the core of the global economy – Eastern Asia, North America and Europe.

New evidence also suggests that states as owners are equally busy with using Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) in order to avoid taxation or regulatory burdens, just like many of their multinational peers do. It is hence fair to say that, at least from a political economy standpoint, state investment capitalizes on and strengthens the structures and incentives of the global political economy without representing a viable alternative to existing practices.

Transnational state capital is often controlled by domestic elites

Forms of state ownership can be equated with “real” public ownership like in the case of most pension funds around the world. However, vehicles of sovereign investment are often rather closely tied to domestic elites who use them, amongst other things, as rent-seeking devices. A well-known example of this is the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which was established by the then-ruler of Qatar in 2005. While the QIA has served as a vehicle of economic development for Qatar, it is also entirely controlled by its ruling Al-Thani family.

Another example is the role that Russian multinational Gazprom plays in the advancement of the (geo-)political ambitions of the current Russian government. Research has furthermore documented the close ties between Chinese corporate and state elites in the transnationalization of state capital. A recent book shows the connection between dominant-party authoritarian elites in East Asian countries and the propensity of these states for aggressive usage of state investment in foreign corporations. These examples illustrate that some forms of transnational state investment are closely tied to the interests of domestic elites rather than being some sort of public good shared by the majority of citizens.

Transnational state capital is concentrated in large, often fossil-fueled state-owned enterprises

While a lot of attention is given to institutional investors, we found in a recent working paper that the majority of transnational state capital is stored in majority-owned companies. This means that large state-owned enterpises (SOEs) still very much shape the landscape of global state ownership. Those are at the same time often either energy-intensive or energy-producing firms that play a key strategic role in areas like national energy security or revenue generation.

Large oil firms like Saudi Aramco, Sinopec or Rosneft, agrichemical multinationals like Syngenta or energy giants like Vattenfall are at the heart of transnational state investment. None of these large, strategically important firms has stood out in the recent past as pioneering or even advocating a transition to a green and sustainable economy and energy supply. A lot of them are, on the contrary, profiteers and carriers of a fossil-fuelled, exploitative and destructive vision of energy production and economic growth: in 2012, nationalized oil companies owned 73% of global oil and 68% of global gas reserves. This makes them rather unlikely candidates for a much-needed radically progressive stance concerning the looming environmental catastrophe.

Rebuilding the Commons after Neoliberalism

The three angles on state ownership sketched above illustrate that reclaiming the commons is not automatically going to be a progressive, let alone an emancipatory project for rebuilding our economies out of the shatters of neoliberalism – if reclaiming the commons simply means state ownership. Large public companies as well as state-invested firms and state-owned vehicles are unlikely to be the tools of a democratic overhaul of the global political economy. Two core messages follow from this:

First, a simple re-nationalization of key industries is not going to do the trick, since the rules of global capitalism, domestic rent-seeking elites and the environmental footprint of large SOEs are shaping the reality of contemporary transnational state capital.

Second, this very transnational and global reality of state capital suggests that even public ownership has become a force for globalization rather than a tool for protecting societies from its impact. The example of the “privatized” British Railways that ended up in the hands of the profiting German, Dutch and French states illustrates that reclaiming the commons cannot be just a matter of more state ownership – it needs to happen bottom-up, involve local ownership initiatives, green alternatives and the insight that we are fated to solve this issue on a global scale.

Nationalization plus protectionism, as currently advocated by many on the left, cannot be a viable, progressive alternative when the problems concern our shared global economy. Localism and an emphasis on the globalized nature of our economies might seem like a contradiction, but they are in fact two sides of the same coin: local alternatives enhance the democratic aspects of public ownership, while awareness of the global inter-twinings of our economic activities ensures that we do not fall for the protectionist trap that ignores or even weaponizes these global relationships for national gains.

Reclaiming the commons locally, sustainably and democratically remains, 20 years after Klein’s call, the better alternative to a simple re-nationalization of firms.

Author: Ally Tebbit, The Ferret

Academics and politicians have raised concerns that councils are failing to manage common good funds properly, after an investigation by The Ferret revealed many are worth significantly less now than they were ten years ago.

The figures have prompted critics to call for new rules to improve the management of common good funds and ensure that they are not “frittered away.”

Generating at least £20 million for good causes each year, common good funds are unique to Scotland. Derived from ancient burgh property, the funds are held on behalf of local residents by Scottish local councils. The funds can hold both fixed assets, such as property or land, and “moveable” assets, such as cash, shares or paintings.

Not all councils, or all towns, benefit from common good funds, and some councils are unclear what assets they hold. Where common good assets have been identified they are supposed to be managed separately from normal council resources and used, according to a law first passed in 1491 and still in force today “for the common good of the town.”

Ten years ago new accounting guidance was introduced, in an effort to bring greater transparency to the way councils manage these assets.

One decade on, The Ferret has looked at how the value of common good funds has changed over this time.

Although the total value of all council common good assets has risen since the new guidance was introduced, our investigation has found that many councils funds are worth less, in real terms, than they were ten years ago.

In total, 21 councils could provide comparable data on their common good funds over ten years. After adjusting for inflation, 11 had seen the value of their funds decrease.

Some 27 councils could provide comparable date on their common good funds dating back five years. After adjusting these figures for inflation, 16 had seen the total value of their funds decrease.

Highland Council, which has one of the country’s largest common good funds, has seen it value decline by £2.5m over ten years. Records show that it has used its fund to subsidise extensive civic hospitality costs, including private car hire for the Provost, flights for council staff, and purchases on the online music application, iTunes.

A Highland Council spokesperson said: “In recent years considerable investment has been spent on refurbishmen of two Inverness common good Fund owned properties. The highly successful restoration of the historic grade A listed Inverness Town House has been commended in the UK Natural Stone Awards, 2018 and also 1-5 Church Street in the city centre.”

Aberdeenshire Council’s common good fund was worth £9.5m in 2012-13, but in 2017-18 the fund was worth just £2.8m – a drop of 275 per cent after adjusting for inflation.

At Inverclyde, the local common good funds were worth £2.1m in 2007-08, but in its most recent accounts, the fund is now worth just half of that, after taking into account inflation.

Other councils which have seen significant declines in the values of their common good funds include Stirling, South Lanarkshire, Falkirk, Midlothian and Dundee councils.

Professor Richard Kerley, an expert in public services management at Queen Margaret University said: “These figures do tend to suggest that some councils are not managing these assets effectively.

“Austerity means that councils are struggling to balance the books and there appears to be a risk that in some places these resources could simply be frittered away over time.”

Councils have a great deal of leeway over how common good funds are spent. Often they are used to provide small grants to local community groups and good causes.

But an analysis of spending records shows that some councils charge common good funds for all sorts of services linked to the maintenance, repair and administration costs incurred for managing land and property.

For example, in Ayr, the majority of the £2.3m towns common good spending over the last three years has been spent on other council services, described as “grounds maintenance”, “responsive maintenance”, “caretaker recharge” and “central support costs”.

Similarly, many councils charge common good funds tens of thousands of pounds each year to cover the costs of running public services such as CCTV systems, or for civic hospitality, taxis and event fees.

Dundee City Council officials have already run into criticism for paying for a portrait of the Lord Provost from the local common good fund.

Andrew Ferguson, a local authority lawyer who has just published the second edition of his book on common good law, explained the rules that govern how councils can use common good funds.

He said: “The rules on what local authorities can spend common good money on are quite loose. The local government (Scotland) acts of 1973 and 1994 say that, in administering the fund, councils have to have regard to the best interests of the inhabitants of the former burghs, or in the case of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, the city as a whole.

“They also need to take into account the best value provisions of more recent legislation such as the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, and all councils’ activities are of course subject to internal and external audit.

“Beyond that, however, councils have fairly free rein.”

He said councils would also be bound by any internal policies that they had put in place to govern spending.

But then Ferguson went on to highlight a relatively recent change in the law that specifies that councils should consult local residents on any proposed change of use of common good property – including how money held in the funds is spent.

“More recently, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 says they need to consult on any proposed change of use of common good property, and the guidance that came out last year makes it clear that would include changing the rules about what the council was going to spend the money on.”

To date, The Ferret has been unable to identify any example of a single local authority undertaking a public consultation on how surplus cash in common good funds should be spent.

 North Lanarkshire council published its first draft of possible common good assets in May.

 Green MSP, Andy Wightman, told The Ferret: “Long before I entered Holyrood, I’d been calling for reform of the laws that govern how common good funds are managed in Scotland. This work seems to reinforce the case that there is more for MSPs to do in this area.

“Even now, some councils seem not to know for certain what common good assets, if any, they hold. In theory they certainly should be consulting residents directly on how surplus cash in these funds is spent.”

Author: Lesley Riddoch, The Scotsman

Visitor numbers are up. Orkney leads the shift to electric cars and renewable energy. And now, Spain Greece and Croatia are so impressed with Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE) they plan to set up similar growth-creating quangos of their own.

Why? Because the Highlands has reversed centuries of population decline to regain its 1850’s total of 470,000 folk – and these southern EU member states believe HIE and its predecessor the Highlands and Islands Development Board are largely responsible.

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Now it would be churlish not to express delight that the “basket-case” Highlands have proved doubters wrong. HIE and more particularly the HIDB have indeed pump-primed much of that economic development and the University of the Highlands and Islands, with its digital learning and dispersed campuses, has been another positive development.

But it would be mistaken to presume the job-creating quangos have single-handedly produced a miraculous pan-Highland population increase – as I think they would be first to admit. It would be wrong to presume population growth is happening beyond Highland towns and cities like Inverness, Aviemore, Nairn, Dingwall, Fort William, Oban, Kirkwall, Lerwick and Portree (though that is obviously welcome); wrong to presume that the region’s age profile is irrelevant and absolutely wrong to think the 1850 population total is as good as the Highlands and Islands can get.

While the population of Highland towns is growing, more remote areas are facing a modern clearance thanks to long-term leases for locals being replaced with short-term lets for tourists; unaffordable land and empty glens caused by Scotland’s archaic land ownership patterns; the loss of East-European seasonal labour endangering seasonal businesses; worry over the impending impact of Brexit-related tariffs on fisheries and agricultural produce and cuts in services like public transport, elderly care and childcare – until recently there was just one nursery in the whole of Sutherland. It would be troubling if the decision to use HIE as a role model by Mediterranean states, gave the impression that all’s well in Highland (and indeed wider rural Scotland) and prompted Scots to question the need for urgent action to stop another generation of young Highland Scots giving up and moving out. Yesterday, a Sunday newspaper spent five pages questioning the success of community landownership in Scotland on the basis of one problematic forestry scheme on Bute. Is this really the Highlands’ biggest issue?

What’s needed is a wider perspective.

Firstly, urban growth can easily conceal the hard fact that half an hour down the road, “remote” Highland and Island communities are really struggling.

Last year a report by the James Hutton Institute predicted the working age population in Scotland’s rural areas will plummet by a third by 2046, pushing communities in remote corners of the Highlands and Islands into a “spiral of decline.” It found “sparsely populated areas” – defined as those more than half an hour away from a town of 10,000 folk – account for almost half of Scotland’s land mass, but just 2.6 per cent of Scotland’s population. These places are projected to lose more than a quarter of their population in the next 30 years, with Western Isles, Argyll and the Southern Uplands among the worst affected.

Yet the picture is so different in the Highland capital. In 1861, the population of Inverness was 12,509. In 2018 it was almost 70,000, with a quarter of the Highland population living in or around it.

So, let’s call a spade a spade. The Inverness/Black Isle/Nairn corridor is doing well – picking up southerners looking for the best quality of life in the UK and young Highlanders pushed out of more remote glens – not because land there is irredeemably infertile and fit only for use as a grouse moor, rich man’s playground or re-wilding but because centuries of paternalistic ownership mean there’s no available, affordable land, therefore no affordable housing and therefore no feasible way for younger folk to take advantage of the jobs and business opportunities that absolutely do exist. Planning presumptions all too often mirror that man-made, unnatural emptiness.

So, let’s think again about the levels of population we should expect in the Highlands and Islands and reconsider the date chosen to illustrate the scale of the present population surge.

The 1850s saw the Highlands on its collective knees after seventy years of clearance and widespread starvation as a result of the potato famine. Is this a suitable benchmark for the carrying capacity of the scenic, energy-rich, culturally-vibrant region today?

We should be comparing and contrasting the Highlands and Islands not with the region’s own broken past but with the thriving present of its neighbours – like Tromso, the capital of Arctic Norway.

Situated on an island amidst barren fjords, it lies more than a thousand miles north of Inverness. Yet the population of this truly remote city matches the Highland capital with 77,000 folk. Arctic Bodø has 30.000 residents, Alta 20,000 and sub-Arctic Trondheim a whopping 196,000 residents.

The relatively high population base of remote Northern Norway has been achieved not by the actions of specific quangos, but by the fact Norway escaped feudalism, therefore has the largest and most diverse number of individual landowners in Europe and land prices that are a fraction of those demanded for the tiny parcels available in Highland Scotland. Folk in Northern Norway were also aided by the abolition of nobility in 1821, the nationalisation of rivers for hydro power straight after independence and a long tradition of ultra-local democratic control which prompted investment in light industry.

Let’s be clear. Scotland’s community buyouts have boosted highland and island populations and provided jobs with secure, affordable and properly insulated homes in remote areas where private owners miserably failed.

 The problem is that rural Scotland cannot be fixed, acre by acre, or buyout by buyout. Community control delivers speedy relief for the communities able to jump hurdles and take over control, but places a strain on volunteers and leaves Scotland’s highly dysfunctional systems of land ownership and distant democratic control unchanged and intact.

 So, let’s imagine what the Highlands might look like if Holyrood and Westminster politicians were as bold as community activists, delivering the modern equivalent of the Crofting Acts, or the high rates of taxation that prompted one-fifth of Scottish land to be sold in the 1920s or Tom Johnston’s hydro-electric revolution in the 1940s.

 The Highlands urgently needs release from outdated feudal structures to grow sustainably. Governments not quangos can deliver.

Author: Scottish Government

To read consultation paper click here

Part 5 of the 2016 Act creates a process by which local, place-based communities can seek to acquire a right to buy land to further the achievement of sustainable development in relation to that land. Where an application is successful, the right to purchase the land applies even where the owner of the land is not willing to sell it. It is therefore, like Part 3A of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 (the Community Right to Buy Abandoned, Neglected or Detrimental Land), a form of compulsory purchase. Part 5 of the 2016 Act is currently not in force.

Part 5 of the 2016 Act contains a number of regulation making powers. They allow Scottish Ministers to make regulations about a number of matters that relate to Part 5. The main purpose of this consultation is to explain the Scottish Government’s proposals for how it will use these regulation making powers, to present a broad outline of how Part 5 will work once it is in force, and to give you the opportunity to put forward your views on these proposals.

Under Part 5, Scottish Ministers can only consent to a right to buy application where they are satisfied that certain conditions are met. These conditions, which are in section 56 of the 2016 Act, are of two sorts:

(a) sustainable development conditions

(b) procedural conditions

The sustainable development conditions are explained further on in this consultation. It should be noted that there are no regulation making powers in Part 5 that would allow modification of these conditions as they are fully set out in the 2016 Act.

There are however regulation making powers for some of the procedural requirements. These include the power under section 56(9), which allows regulations to be made about the form and content of the Part 5 community body’s request to a land owner or tenant to seek the transfer of land or tenant’s interest prior to any formal right to buy application. Section 56(9) also allows regulations to be made about the form and content of a response from a land owner to a community body’s request and the circumstances in which owners are taken not to have responded.

In addition to the regulation making powers connected with some of the procedural conditions, there are several other regulation making powers contained in Part 5. These include powers to specify types of land and tenant’s interests which are not eligible for purchase under Part 5, and regulations for governing community ballot processes.

Our proposals for how we will use these regulation making powers are set out in this consultation paper.

Author: Jamie Callaghan, Fife Today

Campaigners and politicians have highlighted the transformative impact the reopening of the Levenmouth rail link could have on the local area. 

Following Transport Secretary Michael Matheson’s announcement that the rail line will be reopened, campaigners who have fought for years celebrated the news. 

Dr Allen Armstrong of the Levenmouth Rail Campaign (LMRC) said the news “exceeded our expectations”.

Speaking to the East Fife Mail earlier this week, he said the group were hoping that Mr Matheson would be announcing a further study into the possibility of reopening the line. 

 “We’re absolutely over the moon. It exceeded our expectations. We thought that the Transport Secretary would agree to the next stage of the study, but it opened with ‘we’re reopening it’ and, even more, it’s going to take place within five years. 

“We’re almost emotional. The campaigners have been banging our heads against the wall for five years. We hope we’ve played a major role in this.”

The Transport Secretary, MSPs and councillors all paid tribute to the efforts of LMRC. 

Cllr Colin Davidson, deputy chair of regional transport authority SEStran, said: “The rail campaigners have kept this whole issue alive. They’ve hit the buffers so many times, but they’ve continued to come back.”

 He also paid tribute to officials at Fife Council, Transport Scotland, Peter Brett Associates and SEStran, for their work “behind the scenes”.

Cllr Davidson added: “This means life changing opportunities. The area has been maligned for so many decades. This rail line will make the difference in turning the area around. I think we’re going to see an ecomonic boom in this area.”

Fife Council co-leader and local councillor David Alexander and area convenor Cllr Ken Caldwell both spoke how important the news was.

“The campaign started the day the rail line closed,” Cllr Alexander said. “I was 12 years old at the time. I am delighted. Not often has Levenmouth won in the last few decades – Levenmouth has won this time. This is truly transformational. We’ve won.” 

Cllr Caldwell added: “This is fantastic news. We’ve fought long and hard. It’s brilliant and the Levenmouth Blueprint is the icing on the cake. When we were chapping doors for all the election campaigns, the two most common comments we got were ‘when is the rail link happening’ and ‘we’re the forgotten corner of Fife’.” 

Leven MSP Jenny Gilruth described the announcement as “truly significant”, adding: “I would like to thank the Cabinet Secretary for his commitment to Leven’s railway. He’ll know how much this means to me as I never missed an opportunity to make the case to him directly.

“The people of Levenmouth will now expect action – and who could blame them after half a century. I will be watching closely to ensure that Fife Council and Transport Scotland now work to take Leven’s railway forward at pace. This is a great day for Levenmouth.” 

Local MSP David Torrance also paid tribute to LMRC, as well as former MSP Tricia Marwick, who also campaigned for the reopening of the line. He added: “This will bring huge potential to the area, not only allowing residents in the area to travel out with the area for employment, education and leisure, but will also bring huge economic potential for investment and tourism within the area with the backing of a good reliable public transport system.”

North East Fife MP Stephen Gethins said: “The rail link will bring real benefits for future generations, connecting people and businesses based in Levenmouth and the surrounding area, including the East Neuk, to the main rail network as well as opening up the area to inward investment and tourism. 

North East Fife MSP Willie Rennie said the “staunch support” of local people had “persuaded the authorities that there would be a powerful economic, social and environmental benefit with the reopening of the line. I’m delighted with this progress. Let’s get it built now.”

Fife MSP Claire Baker added: “This is a very positive announcement from the Cabinet Secretary and is testament to the determination and commitment of LMRC.”

Author: Branko Milan, Social Europe

At the heart of the crisis of trust in politics lies the corrosion of public service by the ethos of private gain.

There is little doubt that the western world is going through a serious political crisis, which can be best described as a crisis of trust in its political institutions and governments.

Two things often seem, though, to be overlooked. First, the crisis of trust in institutions is not limited to the west—it is general. The crisis in the west just receives more attention because western media are dominant and because it was assumed that economically more advanced liberal societies should not suffer such a disconnect between rulers and ruled.

Secondly, the crisis is longstanding: it goes further back in time than the 2008 financial crash and the malaise created by globalisation. Arguably, its source is the impressive and somewhat unexpected success of introducing capitalist relations into all domains of life—including into our private lives and, importantly, into politics.

The neoliberal revolutions of the early 1980s, associated with the then US president, Ronald Reagan, and the UK premier, Margaret Thatcher—not forgetting the Chinese ‘paramount leader’, Deng Xiaoping—were supported by revolutions in economic thinking, such as public-choice theory and libertarianism, which explicitly began to treat the political space as an extension of everyday economics. Politicians were seen as just another set of entrepreneurs who, instead of taking their skills and risk-taking preferences to banking or software development, moved into politics. It was thought normal that goal-directed, self-interested rational behaviour need not be limited to the economic sphere—it was more general and embraced politics as well.

This view of the world was amazingly vindicated. Not only did politicians often behave in a self-serving manner (which perhaps they had often done in the past too), but such behaviour began to be expected of them. Not necessarily approved of, but expected in the sense that it was not considered odd or unusual that politicians would first and foremost think of their own financial interests.

They could cash out on the connection and power they had acquired in office by finding lucrative jobs in the private sector (José Manuel Barroso, Tony Blair, Jim Kim from the World Bank). They could give multi-million-dollar speeches to corporate moguls (Barrack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton). They could sit on a plethora of company boards.

Or, some, coming from the private sector (Silvio Berlusconi, Thaksin Shinawatra), would openly advertise their political parties as just clientilistic organisations: if you have a problem and want it solved, join the party. I remember seeing in the streets of Milan such an advertisement by Berlusconi’s Forza Italia—a movement whose lack of ideology, aside from economic self-interest, was reflected in its banal name, borrowed from football fans supporting Italy’s national team.

The list of politicians who took their own (and their supporters’) money-making to be the normal function of homo economicus once in office is long. We know some of its most prominent members, often by failure—when their activities went a bit too far or when they were unable fully to hide them. We know them through financial scandals and at times jail terms. For example, two out of the last three Brazilian presidents are in prison for bribery.  All five former Peruvian presidents have been jailed for corruption, are under investigation or are fugitives from justice. The daughter of Uzbekistan’s late president has been imprisoned for multi-billion dollar embezzlement schemes. The shadow of prosecution hangs over the former Angolan president’s daughter, and chair of its state oil company, the richest woman in Africa, were she to return to the country.

In Europe, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been subject to investigation in connection with a number of financial scandals, the most serious arising from reportsof illicit financial support for his 2007 election campaign by the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl had to resign as honorary chair of the Christian Democratic Union in 2000 after revelations of secret party bank accounts over which he presided.

The US president, Donald Trump, has refused to disclose his multi-year tax returns and failed to put his business dealings into a blind trust to insulate him from external inducements. His Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, has been able to parlay political power into wealth way beyond his income.

Politicians, east and west, north and south, have thus fully confirmed to neoliberal ‘economic imperialism’—the idea that all human activities are driven by the desire for material success, that success in money-making is the indicator of our social worth and that politics is just another line of business.

The problem with this approach, applied to the political space, is that it breeds cynicism among the population, because the official lingo of politicians has to be centred on public interest and public service—yet the reality, and the ideological justification for that reality, are entirely different. The discrepancy is moreover easy to spot.  Every government official then becomes seen as a hypocrite who is telling us that he is there because he is interested in the public good, whereas it is clear that he is in politics to line his pockets now or in the future—or, if already rich, to make sure no adverse political decisions are taken against his ‘empire’.

Is it then strange that no trust will be evinced regarding anything politicians say? Is it strange that their every action would be seen as having been motivated by personal interest or dictated by lobbyists? Actually, both the market revolution of the 1980s and the dominant economic paradigm tell us that it should be precisely so. And that that is for the best.

The mistrust of governing elites is thus due to the extremely successful projection of the capitalist mode of behaviour and operations into all spheres of human activity, including politics. It just happens that, if one does so, one can no longer expect that people will believe that policies are driven by the ideal of public service.

The problem has no easy solution. To regain trust, politics needs to be subtracted from the fields where normal capitalist rules hold. But to do so requires that politicians reject the standard set of values implicit in the capitalist system—maximisation of financial interest. How and where are we to find such people? Should we, like Tibetans, look for the new leaders in faraway places untainted  #by hyper-commercialisation? Since this does not seem even remotely likely, I think we need to get adjusted to the idea of continued mistrust, and a wide chasm between the political elite and most of the population.

This could make politics very bumpy for a long time. It is the apogee of capitalism that is responsible for the bumpiness, and for our—inevitable—political malaise.

Author: Scottish Land Commission

The range, nature and applicability of funding models to support community land ownership

This report was commissioned by the Scottish Land Commission (SLC) to scope the range of funding models available to, and being used by, community landowning groups. The research is informed by the desire of the Scottish Government to make community landownership a normal option for communities across Scotland. Funding can be a barrier to achieving this goal and in an environment of limited public funding there is a need to consider alternative options.

The overall objective of this study was to scope the range of potential funding models that may be available to support community acquisition and development of land and building assets. In particular, the study was intended to inform the range of options available beyond direct government funding. The study was also intended to consider whether there are international examples of different ‘public interest’ finance models that could be applied to this context.

The study was conducted in the context of a rapidly growing community ownership sector, which is being promoted by Government policy through a combination of legislation and funding. The Scottish Land Fund is now in its third iteration with an annual budget of £10m per year for the period 2016-21. The Scottish Government reported that 403 groups owned 492 parcels of land totalling 562,230 acres in June 2017. 

Full report