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
