Why government loves local democracy, contd. (Scottish subscribers only)

Remote control

There are those who would scoff at the suggestion that community councils and the committees they baptise in our names are simply instruments of state remote control designed to manipulate communities into behaving exactly as government would like.

Some would dispute that these venerable institutions are merely the state in flat-pack form, ready to be assembled in village halls by absolutely anybody at any time for any reason. But if not by state design, how did these things come to exist?

Those latest fashions to strut off the political catwalk, community ownership and social enterprise, only acquired cult status when grants appeared, but the contrived enthusiasm of tiny handfuls and a well-orchestrated megaphone campaign is all it takes for government to interpret a crowd with a cause and send in the funders to save the day with solutions to problems we didn’t know we had.

There was no prior demand for communal ownership of the lands now held by the Assynt Foundation and nor was there any groundswell of nostalgia flowing around a Fisherman’s Mission that had died a natural death. There was no entrenched belief that owning fixtures and fittings alone would somehow address any social and economic entropy. There was no BBC “Village S.O.S.” when hundreds of jobs evaporated in fishing and crofting either. A patently unwanted greasy spoon closing didn’t rate in the scheme of things.

Perhaps betraying a more accurate and realistic consensus, the sums raised in public appeals are trifling by comparison. The Assynt Foundation pan-handled less than £30K in a global funding campaign towards the £3 million asking price - mind you, any local control of assets we now enjoy is probably pro rata.

The community groups that now proliferate here are not the needs-based enterprises of yore. They are contrivances of arm’s length agencies through which government launders public money for want of exercising any political imagination. Precisely because it is public money, there is little to no chance of it feeding into the local economy as the pamphleteers would have us believe. Hog-tied by charitable status, this zombie money is not permitted to enter individual pockets except through designated devices like badly-paid admin jobs dedicated almost entirely to acquiring grants for their own salaries.

Most of this supposed deluge of money barely touches the sides before leaving the way it came. There was a time when enterprise money was given to businesses and infrastructure projects but, without anybody really noticing, this has dried up and instead we see money pouring into what are no more than decorative flourishes, and pretty feeble ones at that. I still have no idea what a community woodland is.

For every part-time post a community scheme creates, half a dozen good salaries with expense accounts are sustained in a netherworld of socially useless middle-management. Thus the state and its unelected relations are the chief beneficiaries of their own influence and largesse. Politicians preen for the cameras on opening days before vanishing from view while numerous quangos and far too many urban-based environmental charities clean up. Yet some still insist that state funded organisations are somehow not state constructs.

Many seem to forget that lottery money, too, which Assynt in particular has had shed loads of, is quite explicitly state spending: it is raised and dispensed under Act of Parliament that can be amended only with political blessing. This in itself casts an unforgiving light on popular notions of “empowering local communities”, whatever this actually means. Rather self-evidently, major decisions concerning communal land, assets and infrastructure are made in distant offices by organisations we have no influence on whatsoever. They dictate what grants are available and point to Parliament for statutory validation. Local democracy doesn’t have its day in the sun until the important decisions are made.

Executive incest thus bestows automatic political endorsement on administratively incoherent public meetings, which in turn invite suggestions from absolutely anybody. Absolutely anybody duly steps up to the plinth and before we know it a runt of an idea has been spared the river and is instead bottle-fed and escapes into the community, answerable to nobody who’d admit it.

The question isn’t about whether something is a construct of state or not, but whether it is either useful or tenable. There are many fine state constructs of unquestionable societal utility; health and emergency services, roads, education, sewerage; not all bad, I’d say. There was a time the state produced and supplied electricity and functioning railway; for communities.

Many today would acknowledge that the idea of community ownership has intrinsic merit. It certainly does, but managed by an accountable state with qualified personnel paid well enough to care, not by unaccountable groups of unqualified self-selectees who speak and trade in the name of communities with nothing resembling meaningful consent and who can disappear from sight liable only for £1. The beauty of this is that once up and running, community run enterprises can deflect most scrutiny by quite legally claiming to be private businesses entitled to confidentiality under the same company law they make a virtue of bypassing. You couldn’t make it up, but the state has the means, method and motive.

Thus government can claim to be investing in the Highlands when all they are doing is lumbering struggling communities with assets they can do nothing with unless they subscribe to the stifling diktats of a grants system itself now juddering to a halt for reasons well beyond the remit of any community council.

No amount of sloganeering in the name of a notional community will mitigate the financial realities that impact on all businesses, be they community owned or private. In days of plenty, the question of liability simply wasn’t asked as it seemed unlikely to be tested. The Good Fairy just kept coming back. As a result, some seem to have inferred immunity from both public scrutiny and balance-sheet reality, but no matter how much accountability is lost in the maze created by land buy-outs, community associations and trading arms limited by guarantee, creditors will still want their money.

Perpetually struggling organisations like the Assynt Foundation and debacles like the Fisherman’s Mission project exist only because government invented the need, not because anybody really wanted them. They are overtly political constructs which would not have occurred naturally.

So let’s accept that these things are state constructs and a means of control. This in itself shouldn’t worry us too much – there’s much worse - but as construction of pre-fab community schemes that seldom stand up is now out of control, perhaps it’s time we at least stopped the voluntary assembly work; this way it doesn’t look like our fault when they collapse. 

published Am Bratach June 2014

For viewers in North-west Scotland only

A case of arrested develpment 

Many a worthy tome has been penned on the usually tragic events and desperate people who shaped and defined the modern Highlands. Abiding themes of endemic grief and grinding hardship in a land of peerless beauty have been gleefully embraced by artists and writers for centuries. The political classes and urban chatterati in general just love this side of the Caledonian Moat - many even have charming little cottages here.

I’m often astounded at how readily some who have been here but a few short summers seem to know everything about the place and people, despite their contact with these being largely confined to brand new community groups that sustain only with statutory funding and political blessing. How did our communities exist before? Were we just imagining it all?

Many seem to mistake mere proximity for something it can never be, as if post code alone is sufficient to confer a sense of belonging. They buy property and assume that a ready to use lifestyle came with the quarter acre. Economically home and dry, but with no naturally occurring connection through work or family to the place they find, many seem to strive to make it resemble the one they just left, a shadow play of what they alone imagine Highland community once was, based on holiday memories and third-hand experience. They may have worked hard and struggled to get here, but they have never struggled here. Struggling is a tradition in these parts; it gives insight.

Their Community is a homogenised one, measured in precise units, its actions and limits dictated by grant aid, any awkward natural social dynamic completely choked off. It’s easier and probably necessary to have some pity here, but when “community life” is being commoditized, packaged and sold along with the postcards, it’s impossible not to detect a profound conceit. When the views of superannuated holiday makers trump the views of those already here and collar all discretionary public spending without being asked to, they at least deserve some scrutiny. If they have the community backing they would have us believe, I’m sure they can cope, too.

But leaving aside the conveniently ignored impact of a socially delinquent property mania on rural communities everywhere, there is an abundance of comforting benignity to be gleaned from these now officially wild lands. No stone is left unturned by an unquenchable thirst for information about the place we live, even if it’s stuff we already know. If there isn’t something perched on it, growing on it or crawling underneath it, geologists will take a chisel to it.

To temporarily calm fragile nerves, I’ll say now, long may this pursuit of knowledge for its own sake continue. It’s up to us if we think manpower and resource might be usefully re-directed.

Thanks in no small part to, in any order, Beatrix Potter, Blue Peter and David Attenborough, more and more people are taking an interest in our flora and fauna, too, some of which is unique and therefore automatically designated as endangered, though, most isn’t really. Nonetheless, there is a wealth of material and career opportunity here for the dedicated conservationist. Hopefully their exhaustive studies will one day acknowledge that while they may have been amongst the few ever to have drawn a salary from pointing at black-throated divers, they weren’t actually the first to observe them. Until very recently, nobody was really counting and folks just used to leave them alone.

And clinging on tenaciously betwixt deep blue sea and windswept hill lurks that other hardy perennial, us. As we’ve been told by archaeologists and historians, we’ve been kicking around against apparently insurmountable odds for a while now. We have an abundance of accumulated wisdom to help us on our way today, but while we can learn any amount about our distant past and are as good as told what to think and how to feel about it, there is surprisingly little in the way of critical overview of the period after WW2, particularly the 60s to the present.

There are contemporary accounts of events, of course, and there is an avalanche of opinion on anything you can shake a fist at. The decline of crofting and Gaelic and the arrival of electricity have been noted, appraised and generally defeatist conclusions drawn. The effect of the HIDB and the long-overdue hand up the Highlands desperately needed and richly deserved – the names on the war memorials should provide argument enough – has been noted, even if the original idea is posted missing, last seen heading south around 1985. (Of course, the continued existence of development agencies as de facto departments of state could conceivably be interpreted as an admission of political failure, given that in 60 years they have clearly failed to address a long identified demographic tail-spin.)

Compared to the tireless and agonised dissertations on the effects of 1980s de-industrialisation in Central Scotland, there is very little in the way of a parallel functioning synopsis for the Highlands beyond the subjectively inferred and usually pretty ropey narratives politicians appear to glean from the “on this day 25 years ago” columns in the local blats.

Myriad analyses of the Clearances focus on those who left for the New World, leaving those who didn’t as a footnote. A popular view amongst urban dwellers, indeed, a primary draw to these parts, is that it is somehow always behind the times by a decade or so. This can cause both mirth and irritation for us, but by most crude measures, the ones we’ve become all too accustomed to, it is also largely true. Ask your broadband or mobile provider. It’s the same with much else. It isn’t hard to look at the remnants of our fishing and crofting industries and see the tail end of 1980s industrial re-alignment finishing its job. We’re several recessions behind the rest of the country.

Many bemoan the standard of history teaching in schools. Some, quite wrongly, even question its value, but when I realise that our politicians probably understand more about the Highland Clearances than they do about present day strife, it strikes me that we may be missing something, perhaps the very device a knowledge of history might equip us with; a handle on the present. Legend has it that we strive to learn from history, but it seems today that many simply learn history, as if this were a self-defining virtue.

It would be nice if some enterprising academic might one fine day turn an eye to more recent history without seeing it only through the prisms of land reform, point-missing re-runs of Local Hero, unworkable pseudo-collectivism, environmental fundamentalism and sheet music heritage. I’m sure there could be a research grant and Ph.D. in it for someone.

The same extra gravitational forces persist today as a hundred or a thousand years ago. For a while after the wars that denied entire generations of Highlanders their birth, these were held in abeyance, sometimes even appearing overcome, but they never went away.

Unceasing incantation of that wearisome cliché, “promoting sustainable development”, has written its own dismal epitaph. We have seen eminently sustainable communities wither on the vine for want of political imagination and have allowed expensive gimmicks to take up the dismal slack. The few remaining crofters struggle while hobby farmers get their mugs in the paper for having pet cows. Well paid jobs vanish and are replaced with “volunteering opportunities” whereby we can help people on salaries do jobs which might just have been tenable in the days before the crash but cannot be justified while our schools lose teaching hours. Care for the elderly struggles to keep parity with concern for sphagnum moss and sea eagles when public spending budgets are being set.

Through unquestioning deference to labyrinthal check-box development structures propped up by endless in depth and fascinating studies and observations about very little while the obvious shrivels in the corner, we have allowed the inertia of dead-hand environmentalist diktat and cut’n’paste pop politics to claim the day.

Nowhere else on these islands is so much natural resource and human ability not only neglected but actively suppressed, a trend seized on by environmental charities that now have the ear of government and know exactly how to stymie planning applications. Campaigning methods and zeal once reserved for anti-war demonstrations are brought to bear on fragile communities seeking to erect single wind turbines and our politicians pay heed for fear of being deemed anti-environment. Of course, there’s nothing new here in essence; it used to be ministers and priests dishing out the morality lectures, though less earnestly and the dogma wasn’t as cloying.

Struggling communities would do well to be a little less credulous and less prepared to lick the hand of whatever conjuring trickster is in vogue when grants are being dished out. They should instead perhaps take a long hard look and ask why it is that after decades of hideously expensive, one-size fits all “development”, much of which seems designed to prevent just that, the age bulge is still heading north and the shops are getting quieter. The steady flow of young working incomers that once topped up the gap left by departing locals has dried up. The opportunities are not here now.

If something doesn’t give soon, future histories of remote communities in early 21^st century Sutherland will make for just as grim reading as those of the early 18^th, but without even contrived nostalgia for solace – the craic is not something born of a committee; it does not recognise the chair. The outcome will be much the same. As if to underline the timeless irony, owning the land will mean nothing.

Those who are truly of the place, have lived and breathed it, grown with it, loved it and shared its joys and sorrows will disperse, just as those two centuries ago did. The communities we are presently being invited to buy our own membership of will exist only in the dimming imaginations of the dinner parties in leafiest suburb in the British Isles.

abridged version published in Am Bratach 

The democratic surplus

On the 19^th September, it’ll all be over bar the shouting, though I suspect there’ll be a lot of that.

I’ve purposely not engaged in much face to face debate on the matter other than with fellow Yes supporters – I know, pointless indulgence, but some become too animated for me.

For those prepared to accept that neutrality is now suspended as an option, the information necessary to reach an informed decision has been freely available for a long time and many, if not most, are tiring from the custard pie approach to fact trading. There are less than 6 weeks to go and I am saving my energy for the last fortnight.

This apparent negativity, supposedly a trait peculiar to my stubbornly oppositionist cousins, isn’t down to any lack of passion for the matter at hand, though, anything but. Nobody is going to change my mind and I am not about to attempt to browbeat those who openly declare their opposition as I’d have no more chance than they. Bombarding a political opponent generally has the opposite of the intended effect. Early agreement to disagree is the best approach to my mind. Please don’t construe any latent civic-minded magnanimity here; I’m not like that. It’s just that I find nothing upsets a mortal foe more than indifference to their views.

I pay no attention to opinion pollsters who in April 2011 were giving Labour a 10 point lead in Scotland and yet still claim that their margins of error are in tiny decimals. I don’t necessarily believe they are that far out on the Yes/No side of things – though the preambling questions and general methodology in their polls present a perpetual intellectual challenge here - but I am convinced their assessment of the intentions of the legendary undecided is flawed. It seems not to have occurred to them that many may well be merely politely invoking the principle of the secret ballot and saying nout. Given the febrile atmosphere that will exist, or at least threaten, whatever happens, this might be for the best. But above all, I’m not about to listen to those who need the validation of others’ opinions gleaned from statistically meaningless samples to inform their vote. Can people not make their own minds up on such a binary and fundamental issue without checking their mobile for guidance? If it’s democracy they want, they’re missing something vital.

Everybody has – or at least should have – their own reasons for voting as they presently intend. My experience is that while details may be broadly the same, individual perspectives differ wildly, even amongst those who agree with each other. Some nationalists, particularly some in the SNP, get up my nose and cite all the wrong reasons. Some of my best friends are unionists.

I could rabbit on from now to polling day and beyond about just why I believe Scotland should indeed be an independent country. If I was forced to offer one random line of argument only, it would probably be to point out that Burkina Faso, a dreadfully impoverished but resource rich country, with a fortieth of the per capita GDP, is somehow  independent and nobody seems to be complaining, let alone suggesting re-absorption by France.

The economics and much more have been tossed back and forth from political trebuchets for what seems like an eternity. Accuracy has been a secondary consideration and casualties have been largely amongst spectators and commentators – Salmond and Darling are still standing while many an academic,  business person and celebrity, never mind less accomplished politicos, have been flattened by their own rhetoric and hubris. The issues that make the difference are likely to be, to our political classes anyroads, trivial and narrowly personal, selfish even – perhaps so, but ain’t that the way?

The decision we are being asked to make concerns no more or less than how we wish to be governed. Most political narratives these days have it that the primary urge of all societies should be to have more democracy, and who could argue with that? And just as in the campaign for devolution, the primary objective is to address what is now seen as a democratic deficit.

Like so many nationalists, I was never content with the devolution settlement; not just because it wasn’t enough, but because, as we know, it was rigged to ensure that nationalists could never form a government. Ask the fathers of devolution how that went. Westminster couldn’t even rig a safety device in its own invention, yet another reason to doubt its competence to rule.

Unlike a lot of my fellow travellers, though, I can’t join in the generally uncritical applause for the devolution model itself. I’m surprised it has been so popular in the Highlands particularly because from the   perspective of many small communities on what are called the peripheries, well recognised processes of decline are grinding away relentlessly, faster now that we have three governments from Westminster through Holyrood to Inverness now fully geared up to cutting spending, even while we are being told the UK economy is back to pre-Crash levels now that London’s property market is booming again.

Holyrood has of course achieved a lot, and it was better than nothing, but in its present form, it contains an essential imbalance. In 1999 we were given what amounted to a fully functioning government in terms of apparatus, but with one hand tied behind its back when it came to major decisions, particularly economic ones. As a result it had spare capacity and by heck have they learned to utilise it. The state now intrudes in our lives in a way unimaginable a decade ago. 

We now have more political representation than is tenable or useful. We have Community Councils, Regional Authorities (nee, The Coonsil), Holyrood (see; Toon Coonsil), Westminster and Europe – with China and the US keeping us right. We have too much government and I’d like one less. Westminster would be a start. My hope is that independence will address a democratic surplus that is choking us to political death.

published in Am Bratach, August 2014 

http://www.bratach.co.uk 

The problem with people power

Save us from local democracy

Eighteen months ago, I joined Assynt Community Council. I’d never joined a committee before, but as everyone who is anyone here is wildly enthusiastic about them, I just had to see what the attraction was. I’d heard the CC was always a good place to learn the basics. I felt a certain obligation, too, it must be said; after many years complaining impotently from the side-lines, it probably was high time I put money where my mouth was – though, as is customary in voluntary politics, not my own money.

So, with assertions blaring in lieu of democratic collateral, I took my first tentative step on a mission to manipulate the local community and environment in a way that precisely coincided with my vision of how things should be ordered. I lasted 15 months before my meagre aspirations evaporated, meekly resigning in weary exasperation, defeated and deflated.

The evenings huddled in our designated Community Room at the back of Lochinver Village Hall were, by and large, too tedious to even remember, let alone recount, other than to say that they gave flesh to a long held fear that community councils had evolved into something that is anything but democratic and of dubious value to any community.

The organisation I had joined seemed little more than ceremonial apparatus, an enabling tool with which government can delegate tasks and decision making it finds dull or distasteful to innocent volunteers, thus releasing the salaried state from the clutches of much of the political responsibility we invest in it through the ballot box.

One of the matters arising for which our quite arbitrary collective wisdom was ostensibly sought involved lending community support to a £3 million pound Lottery application by the Scottish Wildlife Trust with others – they intend to create a “living landscape”, if you please, in Assynt and Coigach. Nobody really understood a word of it, nor indeed why this project needed community support as they were clearly going ahead anyway, but we rubber-stamped a large, wide-reaching and overtly political project in our community’s name without asking anybody and with no thought to any future ramifications, let alone questioning the profound conceits on which it was based. Professional environmental campaigners pitching for their own salaries put on a professional presentation and the CC nodded approvingly in an automated process that could have been conducted by a computer more efficiently; and as the option of refusal wasn’t on the table, why ask?

On the last Thursday of each month, we dealt with traffic, planning, deer issues and much less besides. We man-handled lots of facts, of course, but that was it - persuading Highland Council Technical Services to reply to an email hardly counts as a victory of democracy in action. Any affirmative conclusion merely revealed more administrative obstacles, so we avoided saying anything too affirmative or conclusive. There was little provision for usefully making representations on anything significant to what was a supposedly representative body. This “grass-roots democracy” carries all the weight and substance of a blancmange.

But while these faux democratic devices might not serve communities well, it’s easy to see why governments humour them. Seeking the pro forma validation of self-selecting volunteers – like me, remember – is dined out on by politicians as “giving power back to local communities”, when they and we know that all we do is formally concur or acquiesce in the community’s name. Call it anything you like, but don’t call it democratic.

But while systemic impotence renders CCs relatively harmless in themselves, the same doesn’t necessarily follow for the ever growing number of fund-seeking groups anointed with community blessing by sole virtue of the CC having been socially press-ganged into issuing a letter of support or chairing a public meeting. Such groups have recycled over £20million here in the last 15 years. Nobody seems entirely sure why. Many here have produced much more with much less, and many more could if given the chance and a fraction of the money.

And with our being complicit through default and an overwillingness to abandon our critical faculties the moment the funders’ medicine show hoves into view, dissenting voices are silenced with the immortal words “it was what the local community wanted”, a casual assertion passed off as reality with the agreement of three people in a shed on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the basis of “presumed consent”.

After the exhilaration of the CC, I suffered a degree of withdrawal, so I attended an Extraordinary General Meeting and the AGM of the Assynt Foundation – though strictly as a non-combatant. The EGM was called to discuss their proposed hydro project, for which there appears to have been an uncharacteristic outbreak of consensual enthusiasm. But while it would address both practical and ideological imperatives, the over-arching terms of reference were very clear: they pretty well depended on this for any meaningful survival.

We were told the grants would dry up by 2020 at the latest and that they were six digits in debt treading deep water. The hydro project would involve  mortgaging the estate for 20 years to raise the £2.8 million loan they need to put in to a £7 million partnership with a clearly reputable but undeniably outside private interest.

This was not in the triumphant prospectus of 2005, when we reclaimed the land for future generations. Nor did it march in military two-step with the visions of the Great Land Reform Act, that unimpeachable panacea to the endemic woes of the Highlands, beloved of all parties and none.

Their AGM was a few weeks later. It was pretty well devoted to enshrining the gravity of a desperate financial situation in the constitution. It was a far cry from the same hall a decade earlier when the first public meeting was held and hundreds cheered and punched the air in rather overwrought revolutionary fervour. 3 staff and a mere 3 of 8 directors presided over 33 members - barely the state-decreed 10% quorate - in an atmosphere of pervasive gloom.

And this is where it really struck home. We are now at a point where the very last willing volunteers are left stressing themselves over situations they had no hand in creating, the original protagonists having long stepped down in quiet despair. The more pragmatic knew they were wasting their time; the more charitable and patient wasted time for them. And so people feel they have failed somehow. I’d say we’ve been failed. It won’t be the first time in Highland history.

As a community, we now have a massive and growing liability and practically no scope to deal with it. We are at the mercy of external influence like never before, and all in the name of democracy and empowering local communities. To put a tin hat on this, Assynt now also boasts a defunct community group saddling another with as yet undischarged debts in excess of £65,000.

Far worse than this, though, is a social toxicity that didn’t exist even a decade ago as a result of herding people who might share no more in common than a post code into running unnecessary organisations contrived simply to make grant funders feel needed. There is no Highland tradition of formal community mobilisation of the sort that now proliferates here, but we are as good as being told that this is how we should organise ourselves.

Until recently, a lot of this debate was theoretical, but the electoral roll of Assynt is now in debt and nobody seems sure where the buck stops. We’ve exhausted pretty well all funding avenues - and leaving a number of funders with their fingers burned on the way. It has been more than hinted at that we have a reputation and little wonder.

But is this our fault? Or could it be that we had too much faith in those whose livelihoods depend on making sure budgets get spent and will steam roll through any half-baked scheme with minimal scrutiny before vanishing immediately after the opening day? Two dimensional views of community and an artificial democracy trumpeted by politicians and funded by development agencies has moulded the Highlands into a tacky replica of itself. It has manifestly failed by its own unsustainable lights.

The communism-lite of community ownership and social enterprise is not the Highland way and never has been. It patently doesn’t work and seems almost designed to fail. The nauseating idea of “creating a social hub” is an alien one and, as Lochinver Mission Ltd has shown, wasn’t hankered after by enough people. We neither need nor want to be told where, when and how to congregate, let alone taught how to be members of our own community, but a noisy few wanted their precious social hub nonetheless and we’re stuck with the liabilities.

The irony doesn’t let up. Development agencies now depend on economic stagnation – by definition, if the local economy was working as it could and should, there would be nothing for them to do. Local democracy is now nothing of the sort and simply facilitates central diktat. And a horribly shallow understanding of what community actually means is stifling the very individual and social forces that nurture it.

We thrive as autonomous individuals who cooperate as a community, not as identikit replicates forced through a state-issue template that dictates what the individual within a community should do by bribing us with symbolic democracy and an auction of arbitrary grants pinned to purely asserted narratives. The machinery of local democracy was supposed to serve communities; it seems communities now serve the machine. Perhaps we should stop holding community meetings and get back to just meeting our own communities, rather than the ones government invents for us.

Published in http://www.bratach.co.uk May 2014

and http://www.scottishreview.net July 2014