Local Leaders In Waiting

Craig DalzellWith the engirdling darkness of winter finally throwing itself back I and several my colleagues at Common Weal have been out and about again talking to local communities, campaign groups and the Yes Movement. In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken to Glasgow Tool Library, Circular Communities Scotland and at a fringe meeting of the STUC Conference organised by the SNP Trade Union Group. Last week though, I was up in Lochgilphead for an event that set me pondering on the potential future of localism in Scotland.Ostensibly it was an event pretty similar to the hundreds I’ve done for Common Weal over the years. The local Yes group, AyeFyne, asked me to come over to talk about our latest book Sorted. My hosts were a little apprehensive about the meeting going in as it was one of the first substantial meetings they had organised in a while and they had seen a few cancellations come through in the days leading up to it due to folk realising that they’d be away for the bank holiday weekend. They needn’t have worried. Word of the event obviously went round the community as many of the folk who did turn up were newcomers to the group. We filled the room in no time.I won’t blow my own trumpet too much as when it comes to the presentation itself. It was a slightly refined and tweaked version of the one I gave to Yes Glasgow Southside earlier this year and which you can watch below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqsU8Ci4ftUWhere things really go me thinking was the Q&A afterwards. I was inundated with questions about topics covered in the presentation and beyond. Far too many for me to answer. In fact, I’ve taken note of the ones I couldn’t answer on the night and posted answers to them over on my personal blog The Common Green if you want to see them there.One of the topics that raised the most passion in the audience was on energy – both interest in the First Minister’s promise for more community energy and how that could be delivered but also dismay at the failures of large schemes like ScotWind to capture the value of Scottish resources or to guarantee secure supply chain benefits within Scotland.Another was on housing – a particular bugbear for almost anyone living in rural Scotland right now. Like myself, the group broadly welcomed incoming tweaks to Council Tax to try to alleviate the pressure being brought down on communities by second home owners and short term lets but they were equally dismayed at the prospect of Scotland falling behind Wales in their reforms to property taxation. This led on to quite a detailed discussion about land taxation and land reform too.Which led us on to the topic that dominated the rest of the night. Local Democracy – or the lack of it.Argyll and Bute is the second largest “Local” Authority in Scotland at almost 7,000 square kilometres. If it declared independence tomorrow, there would be seven countries in Europe smaller than it; three of which would also have a smaller population. Almost all of those European countries have more local democracy than Argyll has and thus grant more power to communities equivalent to Lochgilphead than Scotland currently does.The community in the room last night were entirely switched on to the idea of better local taxation such as our proposal for a Property Tax or work I previewed around land taxation (Tayvallich Estate is just up the road from there, so folk I spoke to were well aware of the failures that led to the community being priced out of their own land) and they were frankly angry that the gatekeepers preventing reform weren’t in London but in Edinburgh. Once I explained how new local taxes could be created within the scope of the Scotland Act – using the process currently being used to create a Scottish Tourist Tax – they clicked on to what they wanted to see. Essentially, they want Holyrood to ask Scottish Local Authorities to look at their area and think about what new taxes they might want or which might be appropriate for their area (a tax on harbour fees might be more useful to a coastal town than landlocked South Lanarkshire, for instance) and then for Holyrood to commit to enabling those taxes as soon as possible. Even better if this could be done from a truly local context so that, for instance, Lochgilphead could charge and directly benefit from its own tourist tax, but that will take a little more in the way of reorganisation – which isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it!This “draw down” model of taxation is the very opposite of the “push up” model of subsidiarity that Holyrood claims to champion – not that they do in practice, and nor does the UK where this weekend we shall see a demonstration that all power is divinely bestowed within a shiny gold hat and passed through its hereditary wearer to His appointed representatives in Parliament who may or may not pass some of that power further downwards at their whim - but until Scotland is independent AND we have a government in Edinburgh willing to build a country based on bottom-up subsidiarity, it's probably the best we can do.One of the loud objections to more local democracy is for folk to point at the worst examples of individuals currently in politics and to exclaim with horror at the though that we want to give power to “more of them” but I saw in that room in a wee hotel in rural Scotland last week the very opposite. I saw local leaders in waiting, who knew exactly how they wanted to lead their communities but without any idea of how to pry power from others to allow them to do so. If you’re speaking to someone who is afraid of “more of them” then perhaps we should ask why we have a system that encourages a few people to rise above their ability while locking out those who could, if those who rose would let them, guide their own communities with far more ability than someone sitting half a country away.As I hinted, upcoming projects I’m involved with in Common Weal will be looking at various potential local tax powers that Scotland could introduce. When we’re ready to present them I hope that folk will look around their own community and think about how they would use those powers if they could. It’s only a small step from there to asking the vital question, “why can’t I?”