Remote control
There are those who would scoff at the
suggestion that community councils and the committees they baptise in our names
are simply instruments of state remote control designed to manipulate
communities into behaving exactly as government would like.
Some would dispute that these
venerable institutions are merely the state in flat-pack form, ready to be
assembled in village halls by absolutely anybody at any time for any reason.
But if not by state design, how did these things come to exist?
Those latest fashions to strut off the
political catwalk, community ownership and social enterprise, only acquired
cult status when grants appeared, but the contrived enthusiasm of tiny handfuls
and a well-orchestrated megaphone campaign is all it takes for government to interpret
a crowd with a cause and send in the funders to save the day with solutions to
problems we didn’t know we had.
There was no prior demand for communal
ownership of the lands now held by the Assynt Foundation and nor was there any
groundswell of nostalgia flowing around a Fisherman’s Mission that had died a
natural death. There was no entrenched belief that owning fixtures and fittings
alone would somehow address any social and economic entropy. There was no BBC
“Village S.O.S.” when hundreds of jobs evaporated in fishing and crofting
either. A patently unwanted greasy spoon closing didn’t rate in the scheme of
things.
Perhaps betraying a more accurate and realistic
consensus, the sums raised in public appeals are trifling by comparison. The
Assynt Foundation pan-handled less than £30K in a global funding campaign towards
the £3 million asking price - mind you, any local control of assets we now
enjoy is probably pro rata.
The community groups that now
proliferate here are not the needs-based enterprises of yore. They are
contrivances of arm’s length agencies through which government launders public
money for want of exercising any political imagination. Precisely because it is
public money, there is little to no chance of it feeding into the local economy
as the pamphleteers would have us believe. Hog-tied by charitable status, this
zombie money is not permitted to enter individual pockets except through
designated devices like badly-paid admin jobs dedicated almost entirely to
acquiring grants for their own salaries.
Most of this supposed deluge of money
barely touches the sides before leaving the way it came. There was a time when
enterprise money was given to businesses and infrastructure projects but,
without anybody really noticing, this has dried up and instead we see money
pouring into what are no more than decorative flourishes, and pretty feeble
ones at that. I still have no idea what a community woodland is.
For every part-time post a community
scheme creates, half a dozen good salaries with expense accounts are sustained
in a netherworld of socially useless middle-management. Thus the state and its
unelected relations are the chief beneficiaries of their own influence and
largesse. Politicians preen for the cameras on opening days before vanishing
from view while numerous quangos and far too many urban-based environmental
charities clean up. Yet some still insist that state funded organisations are
somehow not state constructs.
Many seem to forget that lottery
money, too, which Assynt in particular has had shed loads of, is quite
explicitly state spending: it is raised and dispensed under Act of Parliament that
can be amended only with political blessing. This in itself casts an
unforgiving light on popular notions of “empowering local communities”,
whatever this actually means. Rather self-evidently, major decisions concerning
communal land, assets and infrastructure are made in distant offices by
organisations we have no influence on whatsoever. They dictate what grants are
available and point to Parliament for statutory validation. Local democracy doesn’t
have its day in the sun until the important decisions are made.
Executive incest thus bestows
automatic political endorsement on administratively incoherent public meetings,
which in turn invite suggestions from absolutely anybody. Absolutely anybody
duly steps up to the plinth and before we know it a runt of an idea has been spared
the river and is instead bottle-fed and escapes into the community, answerable
to nobody who’d admit it.
The question isn’t about whether
something is a construct of state or not, but whether it is either useful or
tenable. There are many fine state constructs of unquestionable societal
utility; health and emergency services, roads, education, sewerage; not all
bad, I’d say. There was a time the state produced and supplied electricity and
functioning railway; for communities.
Many today would acknowledge that the
idea of community ownership has intrinsic merit. It certainly does, but managed
by an accountable state with qualified personnel paid well enough to care, not
by unaccountable groups of unqualified self-selectees who speak and trade in
the name of communities with nothing resembling meaningful consent and who can
disappear from sight liable only for £1. The beauty of this is that once up and
running, community run enterprises can deflect most scrutiny by quite legally
claiming to be private businesses entitled to confidentiality under the same
company law they make a virtue of bypassing. You couldn’t make it up, but the
state has the means, method and motive.
Thus government can claim to be
investing in the Highlands when all they are doing is lumbering struggling
communities with assets they can do nothing with unless they subscribe to the
stifling diktats of a grants system itself now juddering to a halt for reasons
well beyond the remit of any community council.
No amount of sloganeering in the name
of a notional community will mitigate the financial realities that impact on
all businesses, be they community owned or private. In days of plenty, the
question of liability simply wasn’t asked as it seemed unlikely to be tested.
The Good Fairy just kept coming back. As a result, some seem to have inferred
immunity from both public scrutiny and balance-sheet reality, but no matter how
much accountability is lost in the maze created by land buy-outs, community
associations and trading arms limited by guarantee, creditors will still want
their money.
Perpetually struggling organisations
like the Assynt Foundation and debacles like the Fisherman’s Mission project
exist only because government invented the need, not because anybody really wanted
them. They are overtly political constructs which would not have occurred
naturally.
So let’s accept that these things are
state constructs and a means of control. This in itself shouldn’t worry us too
much – there’s much worse - but as construction of pre-fab community schemes
that seldom stand up is now out of control, perhaps it’s time we at least stopped
the voluntary assembly work; this way it doesn’t look like our fault when they collapse.
published Am Bratach June 2014
