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Scottish politics’ Old Firm

May 30

Posted by Dom in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Equality, Governance, Local government, Parties, Society | Comments off

A few things have happened to me in the last few weeks which have reminded me of the importance of community to every aspect of our lives, and how this can be a wonderful thing.

Last Sunday I joined tens of thousands of other Hibs fans at the Scottish Cup Final in Glasgow. To see half the stadium singing Sunshine on Leith – a crowd made up of people who you recognised from bars and shops and the local swimming pool – underlined what a powerful thing community can be. Hibs went down 3-0 to a Celtic side with a global fanbase and several times more money composed of players from across the globe.  A defeat, but one which cemented the feeling that Leith is a very special place with a very specific identity and community.

A few days later came another defeat dished out by the big boys, but this time it was Edinburgh and not Glasgow putting an end to a long and hard fought campaign. The City of Edinburgh council’s Labour/SNP administration made the decision to sell the local fun pool to a private developer instead of the preferred community option that it should be taken over by a community organisation and run on a non-profit basis with a public subsidy. The council have opted to sell it to a property developer with plans for a generic indoor play zone, despite the area already having indoor play facilities.

Now, to return to the question of Hibernian FC, it has a fine tradition of producing footballers who are then purchased for apparently irresistible  money by Glasgow teams, the rationale being that the payoff is too good to refuse and that it will help the team build and move on in the long term.

As long as I have been a supporter of Hibernian FC this has demonstrably failed to happen, and I am worried that the same will be true of the Leith Waterworld saga. Were that one million pounds ploughed directly back into the local area it would be welcome, but it won’t be. That one million pounds could cover the whole of Leith in safe cycle and walking projects to keep kids fit, or it could be used for community startups or form the basis of a cooperative energy company which would more or less print money for the community to reinvest. Hell, it could even pay for a few metres of the tram line down Leith Walk, which we are in far greater need of than the poverty-stricken residents of Edinburgh Airport are (on this note it is also worth pointing out the council masterplan to develop the greenbelt land around the tram line by the airport when we have a huge number of brownfield sites which are either underdeveloped, underused or contain housing so bad it should probably be torn down anyway).

Leith is not a suburb of Edinburgh – it is a cosmopolitan place in its own right full of wonderful people. We have been let down by decision makers who do not know what the needs and desires of the local community are, in a failure of both democracy and common sense. The decision has cemented people’s dissatisfaction with structures of governance which view our assets as belonging to the city chambers and not to the people of our communities. We may not to be able to afford Leigh Griffiths, but we can definitely afford to invest in our collective resources.

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Scotland 2.0, or why the nation needs a new operating system.

May 28

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Science, Society | 2 Comments

Today a guest post from Lee Bunce, a Green with a keen interest and academic expertise in the relationships between information, democracy and technology. 

Whitelee wind farm creative commons

Scotland is uniquely placed to take advantage of the new technologies that together will shape the future of our planet. It is both geographically and technically well-positioned to place itself at the forefront of  renewable energy and information technology. But to make the most of these new technologies it most avoid repeating old mistakes. Rather than handing the benefits, and profits, over to a handful of corporations Scotland should direct its efforts towards its communities.

Scotland’s renewable potential is well understood. It has some best resources in wind, wave and other renewable energy sources of any country in the world. Perhaps less appreciated is Scotland’s potential to be a leader in technology. Scotland’s ICT industry already directly employs around 40,000 people (according to ScotlandIS ), compared to 11,200 in its whisky industry for example, and its games industry in particular is thriving. Government support combined with access to a highly skilled workforce, as well as geographical advantages such as proximity to both the rest of Europe and America, and indeed its renewable energy sources, could help make Scotland a world leader in the field in much the same way that Iceland is to the north.

Development of these industries has so far been carried out along traditional corporate lines.  Scotland has hugely ambitious targets for renewable energy, aiming for 100% of Scotland’s electricity to be produced by renewables by 2020 . The majority of this energy will be produced by large scale top-down onshore wind projects, which largely means a continuation of the trend whereby the ‘Big Six’ energy companies provide around 99% of UK energy. The Scottish government meanwhile envisages  that around 500MW of this renewable capacity will be community owned, or just around 3% . It’s a start, but nowhere near ambitious enough. In Germany around 65% of its turbines and solar panels are community owned, and Scotland could aim even higher.

Community owned renewable energy comes with a number of benefits. It creates local jobs, keeps money circulating within local economies and builds community cohesion. Projects that are community owned are also more likely to be supported by the communities they serve, which is important at a time when resistance to wind-farms is prevalent. By taking a more ambitious approach to community energy, Scotland reap these benefits on an enormous scale.

Likewise, the way in which information technology works sometimes holds back innovation and progress due to commercial monopolisation. Technology is primarily about knowledge, in particular using knowledge for the benefit of society. Again, development in technology has so far followed the traditional route followed by the rest of the UK, whereby this knowledge economy is built on classic conceptions of private enterprise which commodify knowledge using stringent intellectual property legislation that restricts the use of knowledge and information to those who can afford to pay for it. Again, Scotland could benefit by adopting a more community based approach.

Community here means something different of course. It might mean online communities developing free and open source software that is available to all, or building useful applications based on free and open data. It might even mean communities of artists and musicians using information technologies to make their work freely available under ‘copyleft’  licences, or scientists sharing data and collaborating online. The benefits of adopting this ‘open’ philosophy could be substantial. Relaxing intellectually property laws could stimulate a boom in innovation in technology and beyond as ideas are able to freely spread and developers are able to build on the ideas that came before them.

Supporting free software and open data does not mean being anti-business, as is often claimed. It just means being rejecting business models that do not benefit society in favour of other models that do. Taking free software specifically, this might mean that instead of making a profit by selling expensive licenses to use software while keeping the source code hidden programmers can make money by offering their expertise as a service, providing support or bespoke modifications. The result is that the technological benefits can be spread far and wide (the classic example of this is the GNU/Linux operating system, though there are countless others).

Both these approaches towards new technologies, energy and IT, mean doing something quite different to the economic default.  They mean discarding policies and practices that benefit the few in favour of quite radical new ideas that can benefit the many. Given that the future of these technologies and industries will likely shape the future of Scotland, and indeed the planet, any method of distributing benefits as widely as possible deserve to be taken very seriously.

 

Lee is one of the two founding editors of the Edinburgh green journalism project POSTmag. The text published here is available for reproduction under a creative commons licence with attribution to the author.

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The North is rising

May 6

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Europe | Comments off

I’ve been somewhat sceptical as to some of the overtures being made toward the Nordic countries by the SNP, though their engaging with the prospect of a Nordic Scotland keeps them a step ahead of the Labour party who ideologically might be the expected natural proponents of such a project. The leadership of the SNP itself remains coy about the big scary tax word which overshadows  the Nordic debate – a colleague of mine remarked that every single debate and panel discussion they have been involved in on Nordic economy has inevitably ended with the depressing assertion that you’d never get people to agree to even minor tax increases.

It is then particularly welcome that a group of academics, not Holyrood researchers, have come up with a blueprint for taking Scotland to a new developmental level which it could never possibly achieve under existing Labour, Conservative or SNP policy. The basics are reported here in the Herald, and some of the central pillars of Nordic economy and welfarism have been covered here on Better Nation.

It presents a rather interesting challenge to the constitutional referendum, in that it is a vision for Scotland which has not been directly produced by the Scottish National Party. The usual tendency is for any government or party-produced document to be dismissed as selective propaganda, and often with good reason. You’ll struggle to find a government policy primer in either Westminster or Edinburgh that would hold up to some critical peer review.

What the SNP need to get used to is the idea that Yes Scotland is not a vehicle for SNP policy but for the harnessing of a national appetite for change and innovation. It has improved considerably from when it was first conceived and is starting to find its own voice, which can only be a good thing and which will help to dismantle the myth that an autonomous parliament in Edinburgh is the sole intellectual property of the skirts and suits in the Holyrood tower. The job of the SNP is, after all, to govern the country well with the powers they have. It is up to people to decide what the country could and should look like in the future. A non-governmental vision for an independent state is exactly the kind of thing needed to articulate the opportunity afforded by a small state with a robust and transparent democratic process.

The march of the ‘kippers as the revenge of Yes to AV

May 4

Posted by James in Democracy, Westminster | 4 Comments

Yum! Kippers!The Alternative Vote referendum in 2011 was one of the most cynical episodes in modern British politics – very few of its notional supporters much liked AV, almost all its opponents preferred First Past The Post for perceived selfish political advantage, and the minor point of representative principle which this change would have made was barely discussed.

The Tories in particular objected because they feared AV would make an outright majority permanently beyond them, and that they’d have to deal again with the Lib Dems in 2015 if they wanted to stay in office, a strange concern given how small an obstacle the yellows have proved to the Tories’ promotion of a hard-right economic agenda.

The logic of the Tory opposition also assumed that those people who still plan to vote Lib Dem (for reasons most people find hard to ascertain) would have given their second preference to Labour, and that Labour second preferences in Lib-Dem/Tory marginals would flow to Team Clegg despite their coalition record.

The first of these ideas is less plausible than the second, given that the residual Lib Dem voters are hardly the left of the 2010 cohort of Lib Dem voters. No matter. The partisan calculation in Tory Central Office was of a divided centre-left and a united (Tory) right. No more.

For all that the ‘kippers are undoubtedly correct to say that they will have led some to vote who would have abstained, and for all that some UKIP votes have come from non-Tory parties, the fact is that the march of Farage’s ragtag army disproportionately splits the vote on the right, and that most UKIP voters would be likely to have put the Tories second in 2015 had the AV vote passed. There’s no principled satisfaction here from seeing the Tory maths collapse, merely schadenfreude at the irony. Without UKIP voters’ second preferences, that second Cameron term now looks much less likely, despite the growing realisation that Ed Miliband will flounder in the heat of a proper election campaign. And Britain, with or without Scotland, will still have a grossly unrepresentative Parliament elected under rules that belong in the 19th century, not the 21st. Regrets? Surely the Prime Minister is starting to have a few.

Over your cities Green grass will grow

Apr 19

Posted by Dom in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Governance, Holyrood, Ideology, Parties, Society, Westminster | 1 Comment

The Labour party have looked about them, taken stock of the post-Blair wasteland and identified the enemy. which apparently is those well-known destroyers of democracy and oppressors of the common people in the Scottish Green Party.

At Scottish Labour Conference in Inverness this weekend there will be a fringe event entitled ‘Green Splinters’, staged with the express aim of finding out why some people have realised that they would rather vote Green instead of Labour.

Labour peer Lord Bassam, who I am told by Sooth Folk has a flatteringly obsessive distaste for the Greens, tweeted: ‘In Inverness to discuss countering the Green threat to progressive politics.’. It is hard to think of a more obtuse statement given the situation that many people in England find themselves in. I have no idea how much Lord Bassam knows about Scottish politics or the Scottish Green Party, but I would wager that it is significantly less than he thinks.

The Green vote is not a strictly socialist vote, and it is not an anti-Labour vote. The Green vote is a vote for people actually doing their jobs with competence and enthusiasm, and for an ability to bring new ideas into an intellectually moribund arena. Green politics is socialist in certain aspects, normatively seen it embodies the values and aims of social democracy, but it is marked above all by its ability and tendency to challenge institutions from a citizen-based democratic perspective.

Green politics in Germany is a case in point. The German Green Party as it now exists was born from a coalition of environmental and democratic organisations instrumental in the downfall of the German Democratic Republic, combined with the West German Green Party. After first breaking into German regional parliaments, in the late 1990s it provided crucial support to an SDP government looking to form a parliamentary majority.

In Sweden too the Greens have been able to pick up votes from the intellectual middle class and disillusioned former supporters of agrarian and socially liberal parties where those parties have drifted to the right. They often get a hard time from the officially socialist and social-democratic parties respectively, but for the maths to work it is actually in the interests of the red left to work with the Green left in order to form workable governments, rather than expend resources trying to exterminate them and claim 45 per cent of the vote and a lifetime in opposition.

Now the fact that this event is even taking place caused a squeal of delight amongst many in the SGP because it means that the Greens have gone from being a party nobody in politics cared about to one which is obviously threatening the hegemonies enjoyed by institutionalised Labour and unimaginative nationalism.

It would, however, be sad if the Labour party were to decide that keeping the Greens at bay were more important than trying to build workable alternative governments at Westminster and Holyrood.

There is also the crucial matter of Labour failing to embrace either electoral reform or the environment to any significant degree. And devolution, childcare reform, progressive taxation and urban planning. We need a future democracy which looks quite different from today, and all tomorrow’s parties should try to work together to make it happen. The Greens have the ideas and they need viable partners to make it happen.

We’d rather be friends than enemies, but if Labour want to be enemies they should consider the fact that it is a civil war they might well lose.