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.

"They walk different, they talk different, they think different." Democracy 21 conference.

You can't discuss a reboot of local democracy without discussing both the means to increase citizen participation, and the creation of conducive environments for deliberation. So it was natural for All Hands On to attend the Democracy 21 conference in Glasgow. The organisers also kindly let us screen When Citizens Assemble during the lunch break.

Scotland is a backward nation with respect to local democracy. This is in no way a slur on the attitude or aptitude of Scottish citizens. It is a statistical fact. Scotland has had democratic backwardness thrust upon it via the erosion and demolition of the institutions that make local democracy possible. Several speakers quoted from a litany of statistics demonstrating that, in terms of the number of local democratic entities per capita, and by geographic area, Scotland is "beyond weird", as Lesley Riddoch put it. Switzerland (population 8.5million) has 2,300 Communes. The Faroe Islands (population 49,000) has 34 local municipalities. Scotland (population 5.4 million) has just 32 local councils.

Lesley also made the valid point that the Scottish Government has a tendency to try to bulk itself up, to puff out its plumage to appear bigger to its neighbours and on the international scene. The idea of a more devolved, more granular local democracy is counter-intuitive to that mindset. But the risk of not reinvigorating democracy at a local level is that the nation loses its diversity and authenticity. A reboot is imperative.

Democracy 21 was organised by the Electoral Reform Society Scotland and supported by Common Weal, Nesta, Scottish Rural Parliament, and The Democratic Society, amongst others.

It was attended by roughly 500 concerned citizens and activists. We listened - in fact we mostly listened - but we also discussed ideas for what better local democracy would look like, and the process by which Scotland might get there. "How can power exist at the scale of the community which is affected?" was the overriding question with which we wrestled.

The conference also served as a launch platform for a declaration, co-created by attendees at a series of smaller events leading up to the conference, which is intended to shape the Scottish Government's forthcoming Local Democracy Bill.

This post is not intended as a comprehensive write-up of the Democracy 21 event, but we did want to record some conceptual highlights from the perspective of our project, which is concerned with all things relating to participatory democracy.

What does progress look like?

Democracy is about people having the power to make progress. At a local level it can be difficult to obtain the necessary power to make progress, and there may be debate over the prioritisation of options for progress, but progress itself tends to be practical, easy to identify, and unequivocally good. We citizens focus our efforts on securing the democratic means, but we seldom question the democratic ends.

Katherine Trebeck did just that.

She set the scene for the conference by arguing for a wellbeing economy. In so doing she railed against the narrow conceptual bandwidth that defines the economic progress that we seek to achieve through democratic means. Our slavish acceptance of the economic orthodoxy, and the "hegemonic common sense" of GDP growth and competitiveness are, in her view, as big a democratic failure as the Iraq War.

Whilst we're aiming for better democracy, we should also be aiming that democracy at better, more imaginative definitions of progress.

Bottom up and top down

Fixing the machinery of local democracy requires the striking of an appropriate balance between the bottom up and the top down. This applies to the flow of power, to the flow of money and other resources, and to the provision of services. At Democracy 21 several philosophies were espoused as to how this balance can be best achieved.

This included support for the principle of subsidiarity, whereby the top, or the centre, of the system plays a subsidiary role, only performing tasks and providing services that can not be delivered at a local level.

Willie Sullivan of Electoral Reform Society Scotland used a telephony metaphor. What local democracy in Scotland needs, he argued, is a bottom-up smartphone. What we have is a top-down, Bakelite, rotary-dial relic.

Elena Tarifa Herrero from Barcelona en Comú described the "unimaginable" political change that is being wrought in major Spanish cities via the bottom-up process of "municipalism". She talked about the citizens' platform that underpins the activism, she talked passionately about the feminisation of politics, and she described the resulting "democratic revolution from below". Of all the speakers and panelists she best epitomised the rallying call of the conference to "act as if we own the place".

The challenges, consequences and addictiveness of participation

Lots of good stuff under this heading. And lots of that good stuff from the mouth of Common Weal's Robin McAlpine.

There was a discussion about the practical challenges to participation in rural Scotland, arising from a lack of access to transport and/or a lack of access to appropriate technology.

Robin highlighted the need to manage the tension between, on the one hand, the intimacy and intensity required for good deliberation, and, on the other, the desire to be as inclusive as possible to as many people as possible.

He also floated the idea of getting comfortable with asymmetry. Getting comfortable with the notion that empowered Community A will make different decisions in similar circumstances to empowered Community B.

There was a comment from the audience to the effect that ordinary people, given political agency, tend to rise to the challenge of participation with the confidence and the innate skills to make good political decisions. Robin ran with this idea, drawing on his observation of participatory democratic processes and the effect of participation on the participants. "They walk different, they talk different, they think different."

From the perspective of All Hands On, that was a fitting conclusion. Radical, participatory democracy doesn't just transform politics, it transforms people.

Pilot film screenings (and the wisdom of crowds.)

There was no red carpet and there were no paparazzi. Fittingly, there was not a whiff of elitism about our premiere.

We showed our pilot film - When Citizens Assemble - to audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow. And we combined these screenings with expert panel sessions to discuss the issues raised. In the process we made some friends and maybe influenced a few people too, in the nicest possible way. We were grateful for the healthy turnout in both locations, we were encouraged by the warm reaction to the film, and we were bowled over by the quality of discourse.

When Citizens Assemble was filmed in Dublin in July 2017. It documents the context, the purpose and the deliberations of the Irish Citizens' Assembly, which was convened to make recommendations on the possible liberalisation of the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The 8th Amendment gives an unborn fetus the same right to life as its mother and, at the time of writing, is effectively a de facto ban on abortion.

The purpose of this film, indeed the purpose of this entire project, is to demonstrate that ordinary citizens, given the opportunity and a conducive environment, are perfectly capable of making well-considered policy decisions. This is a topical issue in Scotland. The introduction of citizens' assemblies to tackle specific issues, and the possibility of a citizens' second chamber to the Scottish Parliament are both live discussions. So Scotland felt like a good place to give our first film its first public airings.

In Edinburgh the film was shown to an audience of civil servants in the Scottish Government building on Victoria Quay, at an event kindly organised by Doreen Grove and Angie Meffan-Main. With the added stimulus of input from panel members, Dr Roslyn Fuller and Maia Almeida-Amir, there was a high-energy discussion about the merits of sortition and assemblies, and the potential to apply these ideas to policy making in Scotland.

The Glasgow event was organised and supported by our friends at Common Weal. And we were grateful once again to Maia and Roslyn who joined our own Patrick for the panel session, which was chaired by Isobel Lindsay.

The conversation was notable not just for the quality of the contributions from both audience members and the panel, but also for the quality of the listening and a universal willingness to consider alternative points of view. It was all a far cry from the adversarial politics that we have come to know and loathe. Finding consensus in the pursuit of progress is a refreshing change from conflict in the pursuit of power.

There was a lively discussion about suitable issues to be addressed by citizen assemblies - including universal basic income, a second chamber to parliament, and "hot potato" issues where career politicians fear to tread. There were questions about how the principles of random selection and citizen participation can work at scale, which drew an informed response from Roslyn. Maia talked from first-hand experience about the case for over-representing minority groups in order for their views to be adequately represented. Echoing one of the Irish Assembly participants featured in our film, Maia also challenged the idea that young people lack the appetite and sophistication to tackle complex political issues - witness the social media savvy of Parkland students in Florida. And there was much talk of the need for genuine political authority to be given to assemblies, alongside the tools and environment for deliberation. Amen to that.

Patrick described these screenings as being akin to planting acorns. Judging by the reaction to the film, and the constructive, forward-leaning responses of both audiences, those acorns have been planted in fertile soil.

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Dr Roslyn Fuller is a renowned democracy academic and author of Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose.

Maia Almeida-Amir is an intersectional feminist activist who also took part in the Citizens' Assembly on Brexit. She is completing an MA in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Edinburgh.

Common Weal is a 'think and do tank' campaigning for social and economic equality in Scotland.

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