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Jon’s Blog |
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| 18th May 2011 |
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| A very Scottish election (pt 2) |
Well the campaign might have been boring, but the result was anything but...Im not sure anyone had predicted an SNP victory on that scale. As the dust settles, and the parliament works its way through a month of formalities, we can dig out those manifestos and underline those promises we want to remind new ministers of.
In its first term the SNP administration was anything but radical on Land Reform and community empowerment: whether that was a consequence of being a parliamentary minority well never know. What we do know is that the SNP manifesto took a significantly more supportive stance and contained a number of important pledges:
• a Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill, to make it easier for communities to take over underused or unused public sector assets;
• maintained funding for the Climate Challenge Fund over the next five years;
• a new Rural Innovation Fund to support new community enterprise initiatives in rural Scotland;
• a review of Scotland’s land reform legislation;
• a new Scottish Land Fund.
We look forward to all of these! |
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| 7th April 2011 |
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| A very Scottish election |
My polling card arrived today, 4 weeks to go till the Scottish Parliament election and I have to say i’m struggling to raise much enthusiasm. It’s not that there aren’t enough issues: Scotland, despite its undoubted natural resources, is a land of great inequalities of wealth and health, where a privileged few own most of the country, and many of the rest die early. It’s also a country where the two dominant ideologies of government - municipal bureaucracy and deregulated finance - have both been unmasked as hollow and helpless to deliver a sustainable Scotland - indeed, they are the problem, not part of the solution,
So this ought to be vibrant and passionate campaign, driven by competing visions of a genuinely flourishing future Scotland… but at the moment it seems to be a very small minded affair, with an apparent consensus that those who got us into the mess are beyond redress and the proper business of politicians is to offer the best package of scrimping and saving. It doesn’t help that the Lib Dem vote is in apparent meltdown, leaving the two biggest parties to focus on the middle ground and in particular those disaffected by Mr Clegg’s collaboration south of the border, nonetheless I can’t help thinking that it’s disappointing that, a scant 8 years after the rainbow election of 2003, the Scottish parliament looks like it’s slumping back into a two party affair.
Still, there’s four weeks to go, plenty of time for the campaign to catch fire… I always vote, but it would nice to do it with hope, rather than resignation, just for once. |
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| 14th February 2011 |
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| Warrington! |
A rapid blog this week as I get ready for a trip south of the border, to Warrington in fact, to give a presentation at an event entitled "Civil Society, Communities and Woodlands: Emerging Opportunities". It’s an interesting time for forestry down south, with DEFRA’s consultation* on the future of Forestry Commission England stirring up huge controversy, not all of it well-informed…
On the surface there appear to be significant opportunities for increased community involvement, although less clarity about whether there will be any investment to support it. As with much of what’s mooted under the Big Society banner, there’s a nagging suspicion that it’s all just window dressing designed to distract attention from the real business of Government. It’s certainly hard to take such public minded trifles too seriously when there’s an on-going assault on public services and behind the scenes the Treasury is busy legitimising money laundering**
Don’t suppose i’ll get all the answers in Warrington, but it’ll be interesting listening to the discussion. |
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| 21st January 2011 |
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| Local People Leading is changing. |
It seems a long time ago now, but back in July 2006, when I was Chair of CWA, I met Angus Hardie (then Director of the Development Trusts Association Scotland) and Iain Gulland (then CEO of Community Recycling Network Scotland) in a cafe in Aviemore, for a chat about how our respective organisations might work closer together. We soon identified common ground: the opportunities to network, to share knowledge, experience and information, to collaborate on training programmes, and in particular the need to find a common voice for the community sector when attempting to influence policy. We also recognised that there were a number of other community intermediaries who performed parallel roles for their respective sectors: transport, food, housing, etc, and that we needed to invite them into the conversation too.
From these initial, informal gatherings emerged Local People Leading, the campaign for a strong and independent community sector in Scotland, which has grown to include 14 member networks representing well over a thousand community groups. LPL has done much to raise the profile and link the community sector together but there is more work to do particularly with respect to developing supportive policy, so I’m very pleased that the time has has now come for LPL to formally constitute itself as the Scottish Community Sector Alliance. The Alliance will continue to develop LPL’s overarching theme of community empowerment, will be committed to greater devolution of resources and decision-making to all of Scotland’s communities, and will promote collaboration and mutual support across the community sector at both community and national levels.
Our key priorities will be a national development strategy for the community sector which embraces land reform, public asset transfer and community owned social enterprise, and an improved system of local democracy which enables much wider devolution of power and responsibility over services and resources from local councils to local communities. We don’t imagine these will be easy or straightforward to deliver, but we do believe that in the long term they are essential components of a flourishing, sustainable, empowered Scotland.
Jon |
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| 17th December 2010 |
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| Season’s Greetings |
Have to admit i’m not feeling very festive at the moment, all this snow might look very pretty but it’s a pain in the butt if you want to get out and about, grrr…. Anyway, just for once i’m not going to have a rant, instead i’ll use the blog to make a couple of gift recommendations for anyone who (like me) hasn’t done their shopping yet… or maybe just treat yourself!
"The Poor had no Lawyers - Who Owns Scotland (and how they got it)" by Andy Wightman is an epic tale of greed, corruption and lies: the story of the centuries-long land grab by a grotesque cast of crooked and exploitative landowners (aided and abetted by the noble Scottish legal profession), which also sheds light on the ongoing struggle to protect remnants of Scotland’s commons, the muddle that is the community right to buy and why the current SNP government has done so little on land reform.
http://www.word-power.co.uk/books/the-poor-had-no-lawyers-I9781841589077/
"Woodlanders: New Life in Britain’s Forests" edited by Ian Edwards tells the story of people whose lives have been enriched by their engagement with wood and woodlands: through satisfying and valuable work in community projects; by working with wood to make useful, durable and beautiful objects, or for shelter; perhaps gathering woodland materials for craft or fuel uses or foraging for wild food from the woods; or promoting sustainable, low-energy lifestyles and preserving biodiversity. Some have created opportunities for outdoor play in magical settings or simply encouraged kids to enjoy climbing trees and running around, while others have developed creative activities like drama, art or craft projects.
http://www.saraband.net/environment-a-popular-science/212-woodlanders-life-among-the-trees
Happy reading, and enjoy your holidays!
Jon |
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| 11th October 2010 |
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| To those who have, more shall be given |
Well I wasn’t holding my breath for any radical thinking from the Pack Inquiry, but "The Road Ahead for Scotland"* disappoints even against my low expectations. First the good news: there is grudging acknowledgement that sooner or later there will be an end to the astonishing scam by which millions of pounds is paid annually to "slipper farmers" who have long since given up active farming, and tucked away near the the end there is a recommendation of a greater role for LEADER in distributing CAP petty cash.
Unfortunately that’s as good as it gets. You might think that the fact that "for most farm types, the subsidy support that farmers receive is greater than their farm income" would be taken as an indication that there’s something fundamentally and structurally wrong with Scottish agriculture…but that’s not a road Pack wants to explore. Clearly the small print remit of the Inquiry was to come up with some new and/or remodelled justifications for continued agricultural subsidy, and much of the text is a robust defence of maintaining and even increasing current entitlements. Indeed entitlement is a very apposite word here, as that’s the sense that comes across strongly from the pages of the report.
One particularly audacious argument relates to the balance between Pillars 1 & 2. (For those who don’t know, Pillar 1, which contains most of the money, is direct payment to farmers - or ex-farmers - based on historic entitlement and with no direct relation to public benefit, and Pillar 2 is funding for agri-environment and rural development measures which are at least notionally tied to delivering public benefits). Most of us would, I suspect, rather see public money delivering public benefits than just given away on no stronger basis than that SGRPID gave loads of money to the same person last year…but Pack has a different idea:
"A future support regime should involve minimal bureaucracy. The benefit of the current arrangement is that the majority of Pillar 1 support is distributed through a relatively simple mechanism: financial support gets to farmers without too much bureaucracy. Pillar 2 funds distributed through the SRDP are more focused and targeted at delivering specific outcomes, but the majority of these monies can only be accessed through competitive, and therefore more bureaucratic, schemes. Any transfer of support from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 is likely to be accompanied by an unwelcome increase in bureaucracy." In other words, checking that public money (and we’re talking about well over £500 million a year here) is actually spent on delivering public benefit would cost more, and therefore isn’t worth it.
Also, the Inquiry specifically rules out any attempts to force a greening of the industry by tightening the pitifully weak GAEC (Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition) standards. Instead there is a recommendation that a proportion of Pillar 1 subsidies be delivered through "Top-Up Funds" ostensibly directed at tackling fossil fuel usage, carbon emissions and environmental damage (particularly water pollution). However it’s clear from the recommendation for industry self-policing that this isn’t intended to be onerous: "the key being light touch as regards audit requirement. In the first instance it is unlikely that specific outcomes (e.g. carbon emissions per unit) would need to be specified".
Not surprisingly, the NFUS has welcomed the report with open arms…but then they may as well have written it themselves. A rather different perspective comes from Norman MacAskill at SCVO: "we entirely reject the report’s conclusion that there should be no further shift in funding levels from direct support for farmers to rural development measures, including support for village halls and other community facilities, many of which can be accessed by the wider rural community." If this report really does describe the road ahead for Scotland, then it may be paved with gold for some, but it’ll be a very rocky and uncertain path for the community sector to tread. |
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