The mood music in the room

“If only you could experience the mood music in that room.”

So said David Farrell, Professor of Politics at University College Dublin, and research leader of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly. David was a panel member at the Shaping Scotland event organised by The Electoral Reform Society Scotland. He was talking about how every participant in the Irish Assembly rose to the occasion to tackle complex political issues, in a toxic political environment, whilst dramatically improving the tone of political discourse.

Change of tone was a common theme of this well attended and actively engaged forum, the purpose of which was to discuss the Scottish Government’s proposal for a Citizens’ Assembly to deliberate on issues of constitution and national values.

“The Citizens Assembly is going to try to change the tone of the debate to one of respectful discussion. We want not just 100 better informed citizens, but a better informed society as a whole.” David Martin MEP

“We need to do better than shallow exchanges. Democracy needs to evolve to meet the challenges of our time.” Dr Oliver Escobar

“We are moving beyond a vote-centred democracy to a voice-centred democracy.” Professor David Farrell

“Politicians allow red lines to kill progress. Party politics is designed to create division where it doesn’t exist.” Lesley Riddoch, Journalist

The mood music in this particular room was one of optimistic curiosity. The questions from the floor examined both general principles and detailed practicalities, but the general subtext appeared to be that people want this to work and were looking to be convinced. This was encouraging given that the assembly has already become a party political football.

Indeed, the panel members were at pains to emphasise the independence of the assembly.

“This is about what can be achieved when we put aside tribal affiliations.” Joanna Cherry MP

David Martin MEP, the Convenor Designate of the Scottish Citizens’ Assemble, suggested that the Assembly could effectively have its cake and eat it. It will benefit from the enhanced status of being sponsored by the Government, whilst operating completely independently from the Government.

This sentiment was echoed by Dr Oliver Escobar, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Edinburgh University. “People criticise these things when they come from the top down for lack of independence. But they also criticise them when they come from the bottom up for lack of influence. You can’t win.”

The mood music in the room was that of citizen empowerment. The most enthusiastic responses, from both panel members and the audience, were reserved for stories of assembly participants rising to the democratic occasion. And there was a strong sense during the questions, and on Twitter, that the presence of the Irish panel members, who “have the deliberative democracy T shirt”, was a huge bonus to the proceedings. Louise Caldwell, who was randomly selected to participate in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (and who features in our film, When Citizens Assemble), spoke convincingly from first-hand experience in response to some detailed questions of procedure - how facilitation worked, the duty of care shown to participants, how media involvement was sensitively handled, how consensus was arrived at, how ballot decisions were made.

“We were all very proud of the work that we had done. We stepped outside of the black and white to sit in the grey area.” Louise Caldwell

“The power is with people who are actually experiencing life, rather than people who are used to commentating on life. You can see the strength that is in inherent to citizens. It is the averageness of the group that gives it its strength.” Lesley Riddoch

The mood music in the room was one of transparent realism. The panel balanced their conviction about the opportunities for positive change with a willingness to acknowledge and embrace the challenges. These challenges include how to balance protection for participants with a desire for transparency and inclusivity through the media, how facilitation works in practice, how the Assembly will deal with what appear to be relatively broad (vague?) topics and questions, and the various issues of process design and administration.

“There are challenges for citizens, challenges for politicians, and challenges for journalists.” Dr Oliver Escobar

“The magic is in the activity of doing it. If you [the media] wait for consensus, you’re going to miss the point. The point is the process.” Professor David Farrell

“Facilitators must be impartial on content, but they can not be neutral on dynamics.” Dr Oliver Escobar

So the mood music in the room was a combination of optimistic curiosity, citizen empowerment and transparent realism. These three notes should combine to make a pleasing democratic chord change.

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You can watch a video recording of the event here. And thank you to Electoral Reform Society for allowing us to borrow their image to illustrate this post.

Patrick writing for De Correspondent on the lie of the political land in Scotland.

This is the English language version of Patrick's third article for the independent Dutch radical journalism platform De Correspondent. It explores political attitudes, new democratic ideas and land reform in post-Brexit Scotland.  

His first article was published on the day of Ireland's referendum on the 8th Amendment to its constitution, and it detailed the mechanics and the deliberations of the Citizens' Assembly that led to the referendum and influenced its construction.

His second was published a few days later and it reflected on the momentous result of that referendum, and on the role that a randomly selected assembly of well informed citizens played in the outcome.

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Scottish independence needing more minds than hearts, brave or not

By Patrick Chalmers

From the white sands of Camusdarach beach on Scotland’s sparsely populated west coast, on a clear day at least, a distant slither of land draws your eyes out to sea. Called Eigg for the iconic notch of rock towards its southern end, the island carries a modern tale of how residents freed themselves from rule by absentee landlords. 

It’s some story – one that nationalists like to tell in arguing the case for more powers being given to the people of Scotland. By freedom they mean independence from the United Kingdom’s three other countries – England, Wales and Northern Ireland. For absentee landlords, think successive British governments based in Westminster.

Telling stories is one thing, however compelling. Getting people to listen, let alone to take heed, takes uncommonly inspiring narrators. That’s a tall order right now with plenty of Scots, like their fellow Britons, tied up in knots over Brexit.

Yet crises focus people’s minds, as Eigg residents can testify.

Islanders’ attentions more usually look to vagaries of West coast Scottish weather and tides – far more pressing than politics. Indeed Maggie Fyffe describes a day of splendid sunshine and oil-calm waters as we speak on the phone, the sort when whales might honour the island’s ferry travellers with a splash by.

Fyffe arrived on Eigg with her partner Wes in 1976, invited in by the new owner Keith Schellenberg to create a craft enterprise. They were among a couple of dozen people drawn by the charismatic Yorkshire-born businessman, a former Olympic bobsleigher and vegetarian. Plans for a tourism-led revival ticked all the boxes for reversing an exodus of locals and the place’s gradual demise. The collective future looked set fair.

Things didn’t work out that way – with broken promises of work, and long-lease rentals in renovated housing among many things that soured relations over two decades. Schellenberg eventually sold to a German artist whose own grand plans, and finance, quickly failed.

Leaving limbo

The artist’s prolonged absences prompted residents to realise their island risked being sold a second time in as many years. That galvanised enough to prepare a community buyout. Many were lodged in limbo, living in unsecured tenancies with all the associated the uncertainty. By reviving a previous public appeal for funds, they raised the £1.5 million sought by the artist’s creditors to buy the land in communal trust.

That was 21 years ago.

The time since has been revolutionary for residents, who’ve more than doubled in number to 100 or so. Adults who grew up on Eigg have returned, settling down and starting businesses and families. Patchy power supplies from noisy diesel generators are long gone. Instead Eigg Electric, community owned, supplies constant power from hydro, wind and solar sources, relayed via batteries. 

Each venture has had something of learning independence by doing, says Fyffe, secretary and ex-chair of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, which owns the place.

“Before the buy out, I was totally illiterate about computers. We went to the primary school to do computer lessons,” says the 69-year-old between puffs on a cigarette. From small-scale beginnings, islanders successfully completed their £1.5 million renewable energy scheme.

Like Eigg, but bigger, Scotland’s history is peppered by crises brought by forces from outside. Its residents, both locals and new arrivals, have yet to embrace the idea that a collective response could be to take more powers into their hands. 

The most recent crisis was the global financial crash of 2007-2008, which pretty much destroyed two Scottish stalwarts: the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland. The latter began back when the country was last independent, in 1695. Both were bailed out by Westminster and remained controlled from London.

Two tales of crisis

For all the dented pride and personal losses to investors and bank pensioners, little came of the crisis in terms of powers being brought closer to citizens. Contrast that with what happened in Iceland and Ireland, cultural cousins of Scotland’s. Political fallout in each fired ground-breaking innovations in democracy.

In Iceland, that meant crowd-sourcing a new constitution, even though the project eventually stalled. Scots activists have a plan for the same but can’t do much about without independence.

In Ireland, the indignity of an IMF bailout and accompanying austerity also sparked plenty of anger but also concrete plans for action. Effects from one of the latter still play out in a series of randomly selected public juries. The latest ran its course with Ireland’s vote to abolish the country’s de facto ban on abortion. Scottish activists dream of juries too. One idea they have is for a second chamber in Holyrood, the Edinburgh parliament. Members would be randomly selected from all citizens, not elected, making it more representative than one with members chosen by voters.

In fact, Scotland’s independence activists don’t want for cutting-edge ideas. Their problem is more in getting enough people to adopt them.

Common Weal director Robin McAlpine knows the story. His organisation, its name derived from Scots for common wealth, pours forth ideas for socially progressive government in Scotland, independent or not.

The latest is a book length “How to start a new country”. It lists detailed practicalities for moving from an eventual “yes” vote in referendum to formal independence. That was lacking from debate in the 2014 referendum, when 55% of Scotland voted no. Among the recommendations are for a National Commission charged with giving future voters credible details of what they’re voting for, as free as possible from party political spin.

Ideas are all very nice, of course. That’s what they’ll remain as long as people lack the head space, appetite, or imagination to see them into action.

McAlpine reckons the public wants Brexit sorted before independence ideas get any sort of hearing. Even then, swaying the soft No voters of 2014 will take hard facts, presented within concrete plans and with evidence from real-life examples. Independence talk will best be done outside party politics, and with the volume turned low, or else risk being tuned out entirely.

“We need to achieve a ‘conversation of ideas’, not a fist-fight between opposing politicians… It’s us, having conversations in pubs, at work, at home, out shopping,” he says.

Act as if we own the place

Common Weal is one of a dozen organisations pushing for more grassroots power in Scotland, gathered together since 2016 as Our Democracy. For all the apparent weariness around politics, its call to “Act as if we own the place” certainly draws a crowd. About 500 people paid to attend the all-day Democracy 21 meeting in Glasgow last June, passing up the chance of shopping, Saturday sunshine and World Cup Football group matches.

But independence will take more than the odd conference – the Scots have history when it comes to political disengagement. The roots lie somewhere in the nature of what it means to be Scottish.

A much-quoted passage from Trainspotting, the heroin-heavy black comedy voted Scotland’s favourite film, features the 1996 film’s main character Renton berating fellow Scots’ small-minded politics.

“It's SHITE being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.”

Renton’s rant stands out for placing blame for undersized Scottish ambition full square on Scottish shoulders. It’s painfully true. All Scots know, somewhere inside, that they could control their more of their lives. Yet they, which means me too, like to blame others instead, usually the English. We have a habit of losing – battles, banks, land, shipyards, coalfields, football. It’s tough to break.

That’s plenty familiar from my own experiences. I also know how hard it is to get family and friends to buy into the potential of Scottish independence. I see benefits both for Scotland but also in the creation of another small-nation-scale antidote to political failure at larger levels, like a bonus Scandinavian state.

Those ideas aren’t mine but a mix of other peoples’. I imagine they’d help a bit to promote socially progressive politics in government, local to global, particularly on climate change. They come from more than my being a Scot, albeit one with some English and Irish thrown in. Different bits emerged during more than three decades of thinking politics, begun in Scotland and continued in England, Brussels and other European capitals. Time in southeast Asia, then London again, brought me to the present in rural southwest France.

It’s not about a flag

Yet talking to fellow Scots anywhere, I’m wary of pushing independence. That’s partly down to memories of divisiveness from the 2014 vote. It’s also because I’m that worst of all independence beings: a posh-English-speaking Scot, hence suspect, who lives abroad while advocating change for a place I left years ago, so doubly suspect. I’m wary, too, of anything like waving a flag with politics as they are right now.

Journalist, broadcaster and author Lesley Riddoch’s not so shy. She’s been arguing a case for Scottish independence for years.

Her book “Blossom”, published before the last referendum, took a good-cop-bad-cop approach to saying why Scots should run their own affairs. She showcased examples of independent-minded flair, like in Eigg, alongside galling stories of inequality behind the “Scottish Effect”. That doleful term describes how poorer Scots’ lives fall short of European averages due to compounded deprivations, made worse by drug and alcohol misuse, suicide and violence.

“Scotland cannot blossom while so many are disempowered and stuck in hopeless lives,” Riddoch wrote in the book. Among the remedies she trained her sights on were better housing provision and land reform, ideas she used the case of Eigg to illustrate.

Land questions can seem abstract to anyone not having to worry about where they live, how long they can stay and for how much rent. Those were exactly the ones that finally fired up Eigg residents, their housing often tied to jobs, something quite common in rural Scotland.

Andy Wightman equates land ownership patterns directly to equality and fairness. The land rights campaigner and Green party Member of the Scottish Parliament says Scotland has “the most concentrated pattern of private land ownership in the developed world”. Not least is the fact that 432 landowners hold half the country’s land, a figure reformers like to wave at their opponents.

Wightman says Scots land law is unlike virtually any other European country’s. The place saw nothing of the revolutions or democratic reforms that empowered other European peasantries and their commons. His book, “The Poor Had No Lawyers”, lays out the sorry detail of how things came to be this way in Scotland. It’s basically a tale of concerted theft over centuries by the rich and powerful, usually ignored or abetted by distant government. Making things worse today, fiscal and monetary policies set in London inflate land and house prices across the UK. The effect is that poor people overpay in rent and struggle to buy houses or land on which to build them or start a business.

Scotland getting its own parliament in 1999 brought land questions closer to home. The new assembly enacted a law giving rural communities first right of refusal on land for sale. 

Those who’ve benefited are in community land buyouts, each with personal stories of increased autonomy. The Scottish government wants a million acres of land (400,000 hectares) in community hands by 2020, its stated aim being to boost local level control and democratic accountability. The target moved a bit closer with the recent community purchase of Ulva for £4.4 million – a West coast island similar to Eigg but with far fewer year-round residents.

Yet wholesale land reform, rural and urban, has yet to come.

Back on Eigg, Fyffe confides that even after the buyout, independence remains a mind game.

“Right at the beginning, when we bought Eigg, there were a few years when people talked about ‘they’re’ as opposed to ‘we’re’. It took a few years to get used to the idea.”

Fellow Scots, those who’ll decide any future independence vote, have still a way to go.

Act as if we own the place. Local democracy workshop.

“Scotland is one of the least democratic countries in Europe.”

— Andy Wightman, MSP

This statement from Green local democracy spokesperson, Andy Wightman, set the tone for a forthright and illuminating Our Democracy workshop in Edinburgh. The session, attended by Phil, had the brilliantly evocative title, "Act As If We Own The Place". And the event was imbued with a suitable sense of urgency and a palpable collective frustration, but also with a desire to channel these emotions into constructive principles and policies.

Our Democracy is a coalition between the Electoral Reform Society, Common Weal, the Scottish Rural Parliament and the Scottish Community Alliance. And this event, one of several, set out to generate a series of proposals for radical reform to be included in the Scottish Government's forthcoming Local Democracy Bill.

The event consisted of scene-setting addresses from a distinguished panel, a Q&A session with the audience, and a workshop session in which attendees and facilitators co-created a series of local democracy principles around the themes of scale, process and structure.

The output from the panel session is summarised in the graphic below. It is fitting that, at its heart, is the idea of a more 'intimate economy'. Much of the discussion was about the means by which the scale of local democracy in Scotland can be reduced to levels that are more consistent with those across Europe, thereby increasing participation, relevance and empowerment.

And here are a selection of observations from the panel members, all of whom gave good quote. Apologies if any of these are paraphrased rather than verbatim quotes. Every attempt was made to ensure the latter, and the intended meaning has definitely been preserved in each case.

Andy Wightman, MSP

The state of local democracy in Scotland? Short story - not good.

We have a history of rampant municipal corruption.

It is difficult to talk about issues such as structure, process and the allocation of political power at election time, when politicians are more concerned with offering 'tasty apples'.

Local democracy should not be confused with community empowerment. 

We need hard-wired, statutory, universal powers for communities without the funds or motivations to make things happen.

Lesley Riddoch - Journalist, broadcaster, PhD student.

The collapse of democracy in Scotland is the collapse of small town democracy.

I love watching people change when they can have ideas and see them realised in their lifetime.

We need to flush the system through with real democracy.

The formal and informal systems operate in parallel universes. The formal system is large, funded, anonymous and unlovely.

Mette Gundersen - Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities

Citizen participation in political decision making is essential to the functioning of the democratic process.

We have three values for local democracy. Free and open elections. Citizen involvement and debate, both person to person and via critical media. Trustful and transparent decision making.

Neil McInroy - Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES)

The economy is a social construct, but we are detached from it.

We need to democratise wealth, and not just through the process of getting a job. 

We need a 'new municipalism', participative as well as representative, relational as well as transactional.

This is an age of experiments, and the form of our structures should follow their function.