As we write, the world is gripped by a third assassination attempt on US President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Association dinner – an event he’s avoided since being elected, as it is always associated with ‘roasting’ the President.

The ‘reviews’ of the violence are mixed. The majority of MSM papers show appropriate horror at the drama unfolding. Many social media accounts on the other hand, are immediately jumping into the possibility that it was staged. Trump’s insouciance and the timing - in another week of failure to get any results from the war of choice on Iran - being cited as the rationale.

On the back of that dubiety, many are also reflecting on the deep loss of trust in the public space: not just the media, but our own ability to know what is true. This is not simply the growing evidence of AI surrounding us with fake imagery and artefacts, but in a wider ambience of permanent double-take. Whether it’s having to be on constant alert for scams every time you answer the phone. Or no longer believing any advertisement on Instagram unless it’s comes with a personal recommendation. 

A recent TV series - The Capture - took this tenuous grasp of truth to a new dimension. In a drawn-out struggle between the UK government and the UK military, the prize was to control access to technology capable of completely replacing real-time film footage with Deepfakes. At one point a minister is seen being interviewed on Newsnight while also being filmed standing in the middle of Picadilly Circus. At several moments in the series, remarkable for its prescience we can’t help wondering whether the film and TV industry is becoming complicit in destroying public trust – and in whose interest?

It seems important at this time to keep a distinction between doubting your own government when it is making a rationale for energy costs or war, often shaped by ideology, sometimes by pressure from global dynamics. And waking up to a more authoritarian falsification of reality itself, using multiple means of emotional and psychological control. Yet at what point could one slip into the other?

According to historian, Professor Jason Stanley (Yale University) there are five key signs of ‘reality distortion’ as described here in the 10 tactics of fascism: 

1.     The Leader as the Sole Source of Truth: The leader sets the rules for what is true or false, often dismissing expertise, science, or independent journalism as "elite" attempts to undermine the nation.

2.     "Newspeak" and Sloganeering: Using repetitive, simplified slogans to shut down critical thought and replace complex policy discussions with emotional catchphrases.

3.     Obsession with a Plot: Followers are made to feel "besieged" by an internal or external enemy. This manufactured sense of permanent crisis justifies the suspension of rights and the acceptance of the leader's "solutions".

4.     Mythic Past vs. Decadent Present: Promoting a fictional "golden age" of national glory that was supposedly stolen by "degenerate" forces like immigrants, intellectuals, or liberals.

5.     Disagreement as Treason: Legitimate political opposition or critical analysis is rebranded as a threat to national security or an act of betrayal

See this – now one year old – report in Time Magazine about the alarm being sounded by 31 Nobel Laureates about fascism by stealth. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2025 Democracy Report, 72% of the world’s population currently live under autocratic rule - nearly 3 out of 4 people. 

As we go into our own UK local elections – including national parliament elections in Scotland – let’s be grateful for how far we seem to be from any major threat, and at the same time watchful for the distinct signs of populism borrowing the tools of fascism, 1 – 5, as above. 

Yet there is a risk of complacency when we imagine that the distortion of reality is a new phenomenon. There is more to calling out the lies citizens have been peddled over decades, even centuries, than pointing out charismatic leaders at any time. In the future we may be grateful to the likes of Trump, Putin, Orban - very crude performers of a more broadly broken socio-economic-political system - for making it more obvious what needs changing at the core.

What has this decade of woke-ness been showing us, if not that we have been asleep as those with economic and political power have been decimating our society and destroying our planet. Asleep means: less knowingly colluding with power, more barely aware of what was happening while it was going on. This, again, was less to do with stupidity or lack of empathy (although both are present), more to do with being internally manipulated to allow atrocities to continue. The experience is cognitive dissonance: we are enabling a system we do not approve of.

We think of ourselves as kind, yet we allow extreme poverty on our own streets. We think of ourselves as fair, yet there is gross inequality between races, genders and ages. We love Nature yet we cannot make the choices required to protect it. We love our domestic animals, yet we knowingly sustain an unimaginably cruel animal slaughter industry.

Of course, the proliferation of tools to keep us trapped in these internal contradictions – storytelling through MSM media, work culture, advertising - is only matched by the lack of tools to help us out of it. Any mental health issues that we develop as a result of the culture we inhabit, are treated as our personal problems. We blame our parents, who themselves were subject to the same system, and worse.

We will not be able to change our destiny simply by changing our minds or re-imagining the future – although they are important steppingstones. Just as the imaginal cells, residing in the caterpillar, presence the potential of a butterfly. However, without a successful pupa stage, composting the caterpillar structures and making way for new ones, that potential will not be realised.

We have to actively realise the future: to build the tools, the architecture for new and extensive socio-economic-political structures - ensuring that, once woken, we are able to stay awake and gain traction with others to make change possible. In our socio-political-economic system, this could be structure and culture for:

·      Participative/deliberative democracy 

·      Community wealth building through land reform

·      Cosmolocalism/global commons

·      Technology partnership

·      Fractal organising

·      Ecocivilisation

In addition to these, we should recognise the ontological - that is, being-centred - nature of the shift we are advocating. Following three decades of liberating technology with the internet, there is a change in the way we experience reality, how we feel about life. To keep this development open and plural, we have to figure the role of the arts in everything we do.

Without these – or similar - structures, we will continue peddling dreams.

A current film in our cinemas – Primavera (Spring) – gave us the chance to experience the acutely challenging reality we face. On the surface it tells the glorious but painful story of Italian composer Vivaldi and his struggle to have his music recognised in early 18C Venice. (Alert, the following contains spoilers) 

Yet the writer focuses on the story of a young orphan, Cecelia, who has a special talent for playing the violin, fitting her for the orphanage’s orchestra where Vivaldi comes to teach. Yet, the players, all young women, are not expected to be seen at all as they deliver on his spectacular scores. Worse, when any one of them is selected for marriage by a member of the aristocracy, they are expected to give up playing in exchange for a place in society.

From the SCVO’s (Scottish Council For Voluntary Organisation] report - see the site post, download the summary or full report:

Scotland’s voluntary sector is operating in a world where digital and technology are no longer optional, specialist, or “back-office” concerns. They shape how people find help, how services are delivered, how trust is built, how funding flows, and how risk is managed.

Used well, digital and technology can make charities more effective, resilient and responsive, enabling better outcomes for people without increasing costs. Used poorly, or ignored, they can deepen exclusion, drain capacity, increase risk and undermine impact.

This Call to Action is about what needs to happen next. We are calling on Scotland’s voluntary sector, and those who support it, to take deliberate, sustained action to build digital confidence as a core part of effective, ethical and resilient practice.

Continue reading below or download the summary or full report.

We call on the sector to:

Put people first in all digital change
Design services, systems and communications around real user needs, accessibility and lived experience – not internal assumptions, legacy processes or supplier promises.

Treat digital as a leadership and governance responsibility
Boards and senior leaders must prioritise digital, data, AI and cyber risk as strategic issues, setting clear direction, realistic ambition and sustained investment over time.

Invest in skills, confidence and culture – not just tools
Digital confidence comes from people who are supported to learn, experiment and improve continuously. Technology alone will not fix problems rooted in ways of working, capacity or culture.

Use data to drive insight, learning and impact
Move beyond reactive reporting towards purposeful, ethical and secure use of data that informs decisions, improves services and clearly demonstrates difference.

Approach AI with curiosity and care
Explore the potential of AI through small, safe, values-led experiments. These should be grounded in good data governance, transparency, trust and human judgement, not hype or fear of missing out.

Communicate clearly, accessibly and strategically in a noisy digital world
Reach the right people with the right messages. Focus on accessible, user-centred content and high-impact channels rather than chasing attention, platforms or vanity metrics.

Build cyber resilience as a core duty of care
Recognise cyber security as a fundamental governance issue. Protect systems, data and people through leadership attention, training, planning and ongoing investment.

Focus on reliable, user-centred technology foundations
Prioritise dependable tools, infrastructure and partnerships that enable staff and volunteers to work well, safely and confidently, today and into the future.

What this means in practice

• For boards and leaders:
  Make digital change a standing strategic priority. Invest realistically. Lead with curiosity, humility and intent.

• For managers and staff:
  Champion user needs, build confidence, use data thoughtfully, and keep improving, even in small steps.

• For funders:
  Support core digital capability, infrastructure and skills, not just short-term innovation projects.

• For technology partners:
  Design accessible, secure, transparent tools that genuinely meet charities’ needs, and price them fairly.

Download the summary or full report

No Poetry No Party: Call out for lines to celebrate Scotland at the World Cup.

Scotland’s Makar, Peter Mackay [who featured in our PowerShift event at Celtic Connections earlier this year - editor] is asking for our global army of supporters and the people of Scotland to write a collective poem for the Scottish men’s national football team in their attempt to win the 2026 World Cup. (Well, at least qualify for the second round._

Contributions in English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic can be sent via a bespoke page on the Scottish Poetry Library website. The deadline for submissions is midday, Thursday 21st May.

Peter Mackay will then gather up all the lines and create something encouraging, inspiring, or just plain realistic, to send both the Tartan Army and Steve Clarke’s boys on their way to Mexico, Canada and the USA.

Mackay said:

“It has been 28 years since our men’s national team last qualified for a World Cup, so Scotland’s qualification is a significant milestone in the history of our national sport. We invite the Scottish public to join the party by sending in poetic lines that hit the back of the net.”

Submissions can be made online here: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/scotland-world-cup-poem/

If you are looking for some inspiration, in his capacity as Scotland’s national poet, Peter has already written a poem ‘At the Impossible’ for the World Cup… [English video embedded at the top, Gaelic below. Written version here:

At the Impossible

Translator: Pàdraig MacAoidh
Peter Mackay

We’ve been at the impossible again. Levitating.

Hanging in the air one, two seconds, an age,

longer and higher than should be possible.

The T-shirts were printed before we’d hit the ground.

We have recovered from the worst of times,

walking long miles – five hundred, five thousand –

to wrest bones and ligaments back to fitness

and tip the world over with the last skelf of skin.

And we have held a million breaths

in frantic unison, watching a ball tumble

in its everyday, humdrum perfect parabola,

to fall plump as a rainbow back to earth.

O we’ve been at the impossible but must now –

in Miami, Boston, anywhere, anyhow –

do it all over again. And then yes sir, we shall boogie,

absolutely, to whatever song we choose.

Ris an do-dhèanta

Pàdraig MacAoidh
Peter Mackay

Tha sinn air a bhith ri rudan do-dhèanta a-rithist.

A’ crochadh san adhair, a’ feitheamh diog, tiotag, linn,

nas fhàide nas àirde na bu chòir a bhith comasach.

Chaidh leintean-T a dhèanamh dhinn mus do landaig sinn.

Tha sinn air fhaighinn tharais air na rudan as miosa,

a’ coiseachd nam mìltean fada sin – coig ceud, coig mìle –

gus cnàmhan agus buill-nasg a chur ceart, gus ar corragan a shìneadh,

agus mion-car a chur air an t-saoghal, tharais air a’ bhàr.

O agus chum sin ar n-anail nar milleanan,

air bhoile le chèile, a’ coimhead bàla a’ tùirling

na àrc àbhaisteach mìorbhaileach coileanta

agus a’ tuiteam, meath mar bhogha-frois, dhan talamh.

Seadh, rinn sinn rudan do-dhèanta. Ach a-nis –

ann am Miami, Boston, ge b’àit – tha againn rin dèanamh

a-rithist. Agus an uairsin, yes sir, nì sinn boogie,

ri òran sam bith a tha sinn ag iarraidh.

In the course of our work with The Alternative Global, we engage with a wide variety of conversations each week, or even over a day. While this might mean different organisations, different professions, it also means different discourses: requiring us to wear different hats. One minute we are participating in the campaign for fairer energy. In another hour, we are holding space for a metamodern conversation about agency. Both are intrinsic to a bigger, systemic conversation, but rarely overlap directly: the languages are different.

What is a conversation? A list of topics with an agenda, in which participants have to exchange perspectives to arrive at some conclusion? One that draws clear lines between the thoughts and beliefs of the groups participating? Inviting them to agree, or compete for dominance (think pub as much as hustings)?

Or is a conversation an exploration of the individual minds of those talking? So much so that you could change the subject matter to almost any topic, and get a similar exchange, certainly in terms of styles of thinking. For example, those leading with their emotions and emotional awareness, might approach all subjects in the same way. It would be the same for traditionalists, or strategists, or those with a philosophical approach: their conversation is consistent. 

In these situations, you might get groups aligning on views that would defy the traditional divides of right and left, or class, as often happens in social situations where no-one mentions politics. Instead, you might get emotional, cultural or methodical alignments. For example, people who like to ‘get things done’ often resonate with each other, whatever the subject.

In the party-political world, we imagine that we are exchanging views objectively and that there is a truth to be defined. When we disagree with the opposition, we believe we are competing for what is right, as if the ‘winner’ might be able to own the truth. Whereas, in reality, the winner is only the party that persuaded the most people to agree with them – by both fair or manipulative means. Often for reasons very different from what is written about in the party manifestos.

That doesn’t make truth relative, or dependent entirely on individual perspective. But truth is probably better understood as hiding in the mix of claims that might be made on reality. For example: claims that neo-liberalism (free market capitalism) is the ‘best’ form of economy could pertain - and over a period, dominate - in a mix of competing claims. This wasn’t accidental but an explicit project of right-wing intellectuals who first gathered at Mont Pelerin, taking over media and academic, then political and administrative positions. Subsequently, naming neoliberalism was as much the work of the left, seeking to specify a particular mutation of capitalism as dominant. So strong was this narrative that Francis Fukyama was able to announce its establishment across the globe as marking the ‘end of history’.

That is, until a new moment came when neoliberalism’s achievements began to be repeatedly proven destructive for people and planet. For those that always contested neoliberalism, there were many defeats on the way to this more accepted view today. So what caused the change to occur? 

Was it logic, delivered through statistics over time? No doubt that would be an important aspect of the proof people needed. But is that all? Studies about neoliberalism’s damaging impact on mental health, on security, on social cohesion, on equality and hope for the future will all have played a part in creating the conditions for large scale doubt about neoliberalism’s long-term efficacy. 

Maybe even more than this, is the ‘metamodern’ understanding of neoliberalism as a ‘structure of feeling’ that has become exhausted. Characterized by postmodern cynicism, apathy, and the marketization of all values it has shown itself to be severely taxing on both human and planetary well being. While postmodernism embraced or cynically accepted neoliberalism, metamodernism seeks to move "beyond" it by moving betweena critique of its failures and a pragmatic, often optimistic, engagement with its realities. 

Even where people might not be easily articulating the embodied alienation neoliberalism generates, the desire to get away from it will be playing an important part in how an alternative is received. Much more on this here or here

We’re either stating the obvious here, or proposing a new way to think about what might typically be seen as competing theories of change and the frustrations we experience around lack of progress in any one field. Which is that assessing whether we are succeeding or failing at attaining our goals, cannot be decided by a time-line – whether that be the end of a funding programme, or a date set by other material measurements.

Instead, success can be better assessed by whether or not we are developing ourselves towards our goal, so that the goal is better in sight. And that goal might take on a different form for different people. 

Integral philosopher Ken Wilber proposed that at any moment in time there are at least four core perspectives on reality, that correlate fully: 

·      The individual internal experience of capacity

·      The individual external behaviour and activity 

·      The collective internal experience appearing as values and culture

·      The collective external actions that result in structures of activity

All four are constantly in development, but always coherent within the experience of an individual. In each one of us, the four aspects are fully interdependent and, together, define each of our personal reality. My internal capacity – effected day by day by my experiences of life - defines my behaviour, within my experience of the collective culture and structure. 

Even so, out of the four perspectives, we can assume one of them as our predominant way of observing. Someone might always be measuring their personal capacity; another might be looking at the impact of the cultures or structures around them. All are valid entry points into a wholistic system that nevertheless coheres with the other three aspects as described above.

It’s more difficult to objectively assess the collective reality, as we will, each of us, be observing that reality through a personal lens. For example, one person might look at society as bound by traditions, affected by their own capacity for managing those traditions. Another might find it dynamic, matching their own capacity for dynamism. Wilber’s map of the developmental lines of each of these quadrants and how they cohere, is here.

As you will see, the variables are immense which account for the diverse nature of our communities. Not just in the more familiar difference of age, gender, race and so on, but in our different fits within culture and structure, and our capacity for action. Knowing that, we are freer to think of the possibilities of the future as constantly changing, given each individual has developmental trajectories of their own, as well as trajectories they share with others (cultural development).

James Carse goes some way to explaining this distinction in his book Finite and Infinite Games. Norbert Hires summary of his book reads like this:

·      The goal of a finite game is to win, while the goal of an infinite game is to continue playing.

·      We play finite games within a set of boundaries, within rules made by others. An infinite game is played within our own rules inspired from within.

·      Whatever game we choose, it is impossible to play it alone. We need partners.

·      The winner of the finite game wins power, ranks, and titles. But these only have meaning in relation to others.

·      In the finite game, death is defeat, the end of the game. In the infinite game, the game does not end with death.

·      Atrocities and wars are not the result of evil but are a natural consequence of the finite game.

Within this mind-set there is no losing and no point at which the game is over. Instead, temporal defeats – an election, a football match, a job interview – can always give you the opportunity to learn more about, amongst other things –

·      Your own capacity for the goal you are reaching for, which might be a fit or not

·      The behaviour and actions you chose to contest with and how they worked

·      The values present on the ground upon which you are contesting

·      The structures for participating which either helped or hindered you

Some might read that list as if it is a judgement on whether or not your participation was good enough.We might conclude that while in competition, we came up short in some way. However, an infinite game perspective also prompts us to question whether or not the goal was worthwhile. Maybe the goalposts don't just need to move, but to change?

Trying, and failing, at party politics, for example, has caused many (including ourselves) to stop attempting to win at that game. Instead, we develop Alternative political systems in which more – and a greater diversity – of people can participate and win.

Practically, this means a politics that includes the many different perspectives on reality that Wilber describes, in a much wider, wholistic concept of politics as life itself. One in which we can talk about exhaustion and overwhelm in the same space as jobs and policies. Even when different tasks need compartmentalising to be actioned, we can do so with the overall sensibility of the whole. Knowing that they are inextricably connected. Staying coherent.

At the same time, sudden discomfort or anxiety around any one aspect of our socio-political sphere can prompt the call to develop new capacities in citizens and communities. For example, globalisation caused an era of increased inequality within and between nations. However, since the birth of the internet and the democratisation of information and connection, there is a slowly emerging cosmolocalism, which helps smaller nations and regions take advantage of a global commons that will help them grow better than before.

Another example is the growing danger/potential of AI. We are super-aware of the distortion of such a powerful tool in the hands of a small, macho elite. At the same time, we can also imagine a present and future in which each individual builds their own relationship with AI. From this perspective, we might prioritise finding more time and autonomy to shape the future from where we are (see Mo Gawdat for more on this). This experimentation is not currently coming from government policy, but from all too human curiosity, fear of missing out (FOMO) and the instinct for development, even for Utopia.

Knowing this we try to hold space at all times for the many different kinds of conversations on offer, knowing that the regeneration of our personal, communal and planetary systems depends upon a wholistic perspective of all that life has to offer. In that sense, what better metaphor for an alternative to the current finite nature of a political system that has led us to the precipice, than the infinite potential of Spring?

A great discovery - the Glasgow Zine Library. From their “about” page:

Who We Are:

Glasgow Zine Library believes in the radical power of DIY culture. Established first as a small festival run by two pals in 2013, GZL is now a charity, a self-publishing library and community arts space in Govanhill, Glasgow. GZL is the largest independent zine library in the UK with an international collection of over 4,000 zines. We welcome around 9,000 people each year, across over 150 events, delivered in partnership with hundreds of artists. We are run by a small dedicated local team with the support of over 60 volunteers.

Zines (self-published magazines) are part of the rich history of radical self-publishing. They are small-scale publications that can be made by anyone. Often they are the only records of subcultures, countercultures, and alternative movements.

Zines are used for creative expression and to share information, distribute resources and build community – on topics from fan culture to social justice. GZL was founded to preserve these stories, create opportunities to tell new ones, and celebrate DIY arts culture and zine heritage. 

Our Values

We believe that DIY creativity is a tool for empowerment, resistance, and collective joy, helping communities to envisage alternative futures through shared creative expression. We value accessibility, democracy, and social justice, and we envision a world where everyone benefits from equal access and participation in arts and heritage.

That’s why we are committed to addressing structural barriers to culture, why we prioritise partnerships and opportunities for BPOC, LGBTQI+, disabled and low-income communities, and why all our activities are free or pay-what-you-can. Our space is fully wheelchair accessible, and we programme a mixture of online and in person events, BSL interpretation, live captioning, and audio description – see our access guide.

Our Mission Aims:

• Celebrating and preserving zine culture.

• Uplifting the experiences, practices and imaginations of marginalised creatives.

• Resourcing zine making and DIY creativity

• Building community care, connection and joy

• Democratising access to community arts and heritage

What We Do:

We meet our aims through our activities:

• We have a Zine Collection and archive which are free to visit, read and enjoy

• A publicly accessible library and community space, with a free-to-use Making Room where you can work on your own projects using our arts materials, printer, scanner, desktop with design software, and more.

• We run Glasgow Zine Fest, an annual celebration of zine culture and a weekend-long programme of DIY arts events. Our flagship Zine Fair brings together makers from all over the world to sell their zines.

• We deliver a year-round a Public Arts Programme of DIY arts talks, workshops and other activities – all pay-what-you-can with access provisions.

• We provide a Community-Led Programme, aiming to support local creative groups and events.

• We offer Professional Development Opportunities, such as volunteering, internships, placements, residencies and commissions, supporting people into the cultural sector.

• We offer Venue Hire at affordable rates, providing accessible, creative space and materials.

• You can learn from us: we offer zine-making workshops in the library and at your location for individuals, groups and organisations – a great opportunity for team building and learning new skills!

You can make affordable and accessible community art spaces like this a possibility for others like you in the future, and support us.  

Be a part of our community and become a Patreon member.  

As mentioned above, the Zine Library is hosting the Glasgow Zine Fest (click also banner above), from 19th-24th May in various locations across the city. Events can be booked here.

A cross-post from our friends at the local-news aggregator Scottish Beacon, reporting on their PowerShift event a few weeks ago. Subscribe and support.

“We’re here because we want to tell better, richer stories about our communities; not ignoring the difficulties and challenges, but leaning into those complexities.” 

These were the words of Rhiannon J Davies, founder of the Scottish Beacon, on Friday last week when journalists, campaigners and experts from across Scotland gathered in The Byres Community Hub in Glasgow. The event celebrated the launch of a special one-off magazine, The Power Shift – the result of a collaborative reporting project co-edited by Davies and Mike Small. 

The Power Shift project explores Scotland’s green energy boom and what it means for communities. It has been supported by the Tenacious Journalism Awards and campaign group Uplift.

It also marked the launch of a new environmental journalism network for Scotland, made up not only of reporters and editors but experts, campaigners and researchers like those at Friday’s event. 

Over a series of panel discussions, presentations, and roundtable conversations, attendees highlighted the importance of community involvement in decisions about green energy developments; the need to confront misinformation and climate denialism; how communities can get their fair share of the benefits of renewable developments; and lots more. 

“If it’s going to be done to us, we should gain some community legacy”

The event kicked off with a panel of journalists who each contributed stories to the Power Shift magazine. Jane Cruickshank from the Bellman in Stonehaven reported on wind farm substation developments in local forests. Hans Marter from Shetland News spoke about the piece he co-wrote with Erin Rizatto Devlin which compared the constitutional set-up of the Shetland Islands and the Åland archipelago, an autonomous region of Finland in the Baltic Sea, comparable to Shetland in size, population, and exposure to renewable energy projects. 

Silvia Muras from the Kyle Chronicle shared her reporting on a surge of new windfarm proposals in the North Central Highlands, and Paul Dobson from The Ferret discussed an investigation which found that more than 20 wind farms in Scotland are failing to pay recommended dividends to local communities, potentially costing communities over £50m. 

The panel highlighted how communities can both appreciate the need for renewable energy, while still being concerned about the impact of developments on their own doorsteps – especially when it feels like the wealth they generate does not always benefit the local community. 

“If it’s going to be done to us, which is how it feels at least, we should gain some community legacy,” said Cruickshank. “You have your own personal environment as well as the global environment. It’s perfectly feasible to have concerns for one and also the other – and they can be in conflict.”

Speakers also shared the difficulty of accessing clear and transparent information about new developments in their communities, with Cruickshank comparing her reporting experience to “putting a jigsaw together” and Muras highlighting the practice of ‘salami slicing’, where developments are systematically split into several parts for approval, obscuring the overall picture. 

In this context it can be easy for climate denialism to creep in, most panelists agreed, again highlighting the need for communities to be informed, involved and empowered about developments in their areas. 

“One of the big things allowing it to creep in is the feeling in lots of communities that people are disempowered,” said Dobson. “[They don’t feel they can] register opposition in a way that’s impactful or meaningful; they don’t feel they have any stake in the political system… community wealth building is a bulwark against this kind of thinking.”

“The same wind stripping heat from your home is the thing delivering record profits to shareholders”

Next, attendees heard from a panel of campaigners, each working on different aspects of community energy, wealth and empowerment. 

Flick Monk from Platform shared clips from a new documentary film “highlighting different voices of the energy transition, with the aim of reinvigorating discussion around these complex issues.” Nat Gorodnitski from Uplift introduced the‘Our Power’ campaign, a set of demands for the next Scottish Government aimed at ensuring people in Scotland get a fair share of their energy wealth. 

Josh Doble from Community Land Scotland highlighted the organisation’s current priorities, including increasing community energy and shared ownership; improving community benefit payments; and establishing a wealth fund managed by communities which would enable community organisations to acquire or develop their own revenue-generating assets. 

Daniel Gear from Voar in Shetland provided a powerful insight into the experience of communities affected by renewable developments, telling attendees: “If you live in the central mainland of Shetland, you get up in the morning, open your curtains, and see the largest onshore windfarm in the UK.

“At the same time, a letter comes through the door; it’s your electricity bill and it’s higher than it’s ever been before, and you realise you’re almost certainly going to need help to pay it. You’re in poverty. 

“The newspaper is delivered, you see that the people who own the wind farm are reporting record profits, and you realise that the same wind stripping heat from your home is the thing delivering the record profit to these shareholders, who built something you didn’t really want in the first place.”

The panel discussed the need for local authorities to have greater powers and funding around planning and renewables developments, and once again highlighted the importance of community and public ownership and control.

“Ultimately it gives the government and communities more options,” said Monk. “The crucial question is about this new industry that’s emerging: how are we going to set it up in a way that learns the lessons of the past – privatised oil and gas industries that saw profits go to very few people, pockets of the country very dependent on industries now facing job losses and economic uncertainty?”

“Creating that safe space where people can find nuance”

The afternoon saw Clare Harris from the Local Storytelling Exchange introduce a new film focusing on communities along the east coast, on the line of the Great Grid Upgrade – the UK’s largest energy upgrade in generations and one which has been divisive for the communities most affected. 

The film aims to “try and find middle ground and space we can inhabit together,” Harris said. Tackling polarisation is about making space for people to have challenging but constructive conversations, she told attendees. While the energy transition is widely discussed, far less attention is given to what might come afterwards. “[It’s about creating] that safe space where people can find nuance and say: what next?”

Harris’ primer on polarisation led into a series of roundtable discussions, where attendees discussed how to effectively tackle it, as well as a range of other questions including how to tell better stories; how to amplify community voices; how to build our ‘democratic muscle’; and how to strengthen our information ecosystems. 

Discussions were rich and wide-ranging while also highlighting some common themes: attendees highlighted the importance of getting people physically into the room together, as well as using arts and creativity to explore these issues and move beyond polarisation. Others emphasised how the planning system needs to be improved to give communities as much power as developers.

Communities need to be given agency and power, rather than being “beaten over the head with what’s not working,” attendees suggested, and people need to see tangible blueprints about what local democracy and a “collective people’s movement” can look like in practice. 

“Great, rich nuanced discussion”

In closing, Rhiannon J Davies explained that copies of the Power Shift magazine would be sent to every incoming MSP and to libraries around the country, as well as being distributed in local communities across Scotland by members of the network – from Shetland and the Western Isles to Argyll, Midlothian and Sutherland. 

The wider Environmental Journalism Network will continue to meet regularly, creating a space for complex and nuanced discussions with Scotland’s communities at their core. 

“I’ve really enjoyed today; there’s been absolutely great, rich, nuanced discussion,” said Daniel Gear from Voar in the Shetland Islands. “There’s something about the ability to have this kind of discussion with no agenda other than to examine these complex issues in as nuanced a way as possible… I can’t think of any other space that exists to do that.”

How many of us are opening up our news media each day with real trepidation about what might be happening in the wider world? 

For the first time in a long time, the possible acceleration of catastrophe has become an hourly possibility. Not the climate crisis stealing up on us from the somewhat indistinct future. Not the fear of fascism that threatens our freedoms down the line. But the fear of a nuclear bomb - used as a tactical field weapon, in a war started by a madman - that could change everything we hold precious. Today, right now? 

As citizens – of nations, of civilisations or of the globe – there seems precious little that we could do about it. It’s the proof of our powerlessness in a political system that awards power to leaders through hopelessly inadequate forms of democracy. As a citizen looking on - whatever ‘side’ you align with - we are reminded that one vote, every five years, has left us unable to determine life or death outcomes for ourselves, or for the planet we occupy.

On the other hand, our votes are the vehicles that politicians seek to gain power. Winning them, manipulating them, faking them – transfers of power do not happen (at least in polities that declare themselves democratic) without votes. It would be a mistake to ditch these architectures of accountability and legitimacy: without that we have only lawlessness and tyranny (already showing its head, between elections, in Trump’s America). 

But standard democracy is far from adequate. We need a much improved, evolved democracy that helps citizens experience their own regular agency in the unfolding of the future. 

The Alternative Global was initiated in the midst of the Brexit debate. What we saw during the campaign was not a side-stepping of a political system, but new ways to manipulate it. Using polarising narratives at the national media level and unprecedentedly engaged social media orchestrated by Cambridge Analytica, the Brexiteers got into the psyche of disaffected citizens, persuading them that the EU was a danger to Britain. 

They focused primarily on the 3% of people who don’t usually vote. This was not an appeal to their political intelligence, but a triggering of their emotional need for control over their own lives. 

Without attracting these particularly vulnerable, alienated sections of the population, Brexit would not have happened. To get their votes, they had to seize them at the level of deep emotional instinct: they needed to be recruited. If they’d failed in that task, we would have stayed in Europe. 

One might say that politics has always worked in this way - propaganda is the method  – and we might agree. But the means and technology of propaganda today underline the importance of each and every citizen becoming less vulnerable to manipulation. We must resist the temporary leave of our senses.

Today only 30% of Britons still back the decision to leave Europe. Given the No vote was 52% of the electorate, that means at least 22% of the No vote – roughly 10 million people - regrets the decision they made at the time. What can be done to help citizens protect their self-sovereignty, in the face of this level of manipulation? How can they be given a better chance of coming to decisions that will help them get all of their emotional and physical needs met, in a more balanced way? Rather than being triggered by fear into taking action?

We need a new political culture

To date, there is not much evidence of such a new culture of politics taking shape. Even the most promising political parties lead from the front, mobilising people into followership with the key goal of gaining votes. Even as they might promise a fairer society, they are asking voters to give their representatives the power to achieve that from the top. The means and the ends are separated: using the old system and culture to promise a new one. 

It doesn’t fool too many people. Even today, with populism – of both right (Reform and Restore ref) and left (Green Party of England and Wales) – exciting the mainstream news, only tiny amounts of people sign up to party membership. The data reveals that the vast majority will be much more vulnerable to persuasion from social media than from politicians. In fact, politicians try to learn from social media about how to craft their narratives better. 

However, while evidence of the impact of social media is getting clearer, we have very little data on the impact of family and friends, and how they embody the broader culture to shape our decisions. What if the truth about persuasion more generally was more complex and living in our social fabric without ever being measured?

 In almost 30 years of initiating and overseeing the Nation Brand Index, Anholt observed how much work the 50 participating countries do to shape their image globally - yet how ineffective most of it is. The vast majority of citizens grow up with a story about a country – for example, America as the home of freedom - that has been almost impossible to change. What sustained that particular belief? Less political campaigns than cultural entertainments: the instruments of soft power – Hollywood, Netflix, Disneyland – cradled the American Dream through thick and thin. (See today, how Hollywood stars are lining up to prevent Paramount’s take-over of Warner Bros film studios for reasons of political bias).soft 

Until now that is. In this era, social media can reach so deeply into our psyche that Facebook can predict when one of us is going to marry, or come out, before we ourselves can. But is that accuracy successful because we participate so fully in the process? What if we participated more actively in other arenas of data collection – such as in our communities? Might we understand each other better, while also have the possibility of using that information for more collective benefit than the profits of the tech bros?

How we change our minds

For example, have you ever changed your mind about a big issue? Can you remember how that happened? Our guess would be that coming across someone with a different point of view - being obliged to debate the issue, which maybe creates a chink in the armour of your previously secure mind-set – is only a small part of it. 

It’s much more likely, as Sarah Stein Lubrano described in her book Don’t Talk About Politics, that long term exposure to a different way of behaving, amongst people you trust, will open you up to the alternatives on offer.

This is a fundamental part of why community offers opportunities for change that cannot be orchestrated by government. Our current political system replicates the problems that lie at the heart of our current polycrisis. By requiring citizens to choose one perspective over another, particularly in first past the post systems that awards power in a zero-sum game, we end up causing the division we claim to want to heal. 

To win in this way, we are obliged to demonise the opposition, often projecting all our fears onto them to comfort ourselves that we have the higher moral ground. This reactionary, othering practice can only keep the system going. It’s the sign, as Anthea Lawson describes in her book ‘The Entangled Activist’ that we have internalised the culture we loathe. Winning against is our only model. What would winning with look like?

When you take the risk of participating in a place-based community activity, because you live on site, you have a vested interest in the activity turning out well for all involved. Majority groups turning on small groups puts everyone at risk of reaction and aggression. However, in the current everyday life of communities, very little interaction across social and working silos takes place. Instead of place-based, the word community is too often understood as micro gatherings of like-minded people – football clans, religious groups, class-oriented hobbies etc – celebrating consensus.

That extends into work-spaces. Local councils – and other levels of governmental structure (1st Sector) - tend to meet internally with staff and service providers. Occasionally there is outreach, but usually on the terms the majority political party sets, rather than cross-party concerns. Commercial businesses (2nd sector) work independently, sometimes gathering in associations to discuss the conditions for their thriving. 

Charities and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also tend to gather together (3rd Sector ) but often find themselves competing for funds. While they represent the vulnerable people of the community, those people themselves rarely participate in discussions (let alone decision-making processes) that determine how the money raised from government or philanthropy is spent. (Scotland is the only UK country with a goal for participatory budgeting, but it is set at a measly 1% of local government money).

Although few people are aware of the category there is also a 4th sector which describes businesses that are legally defined as social enterprises, in which profits must benefit the community directly. We might know them as CiCs, cooperatives, and ‘for benefit’ organisations, like B-corps. Because these are mission driven companies, bridging the second and third sectors, they are often encouraging community wealth building and reaching out to bring people together.

When The Alternative UK first dipped its toes in the waters of community engagement in Plymouth, 2018 we observed first-hand the fragmentation, but also the potential of bringing people together across these natural groupings. We challenged ourselves to promulgate this three-stage process for our events there:

1.        Reach out to the usual suspects (people, like ourselves, who are already engaged in community work and interested in its development) to offer support and collaboration

2.        Identify, from the groups they serve, who might gain from being part of a wider community conversation - but can’t see the invitation or entry point

3.        Learn about who is not connected to any community conversation, is even indifferent or hostile to it, while nevertheless constituting a significant presence. These disconnected citizens, often open to social media influence, can be the largest number in a community and define its future

You can read about our event here and what has happened since, here . Without making any claims for our intervention, we have nevertheless witnessed the slow flourishing of what we would call a Citizens Agency Network (CAN) in Plymouth that has the potential of addressing polarisation and generating agency. 

However, wider social issues – immigration, cost of living, inner city development – threaten to destabilise the city. Although Reform stood 13 candidates in the 2024 election and failed to win a seat, an independent councillor defected to Reform in Feb this year.

Diversity offers greater stability

What seems clearer than ever today is that political parties are not succeeding in representing the people in their full diversity. We are therefore vulnerable to outside forces controlling our collective futures. Any call for improved community cohesion has to be designed to reach citizens as individuals, willing to understand ‘voters’ as complex, emotional as well as physical beings with important information for the whole of society. 

For some this might feel like an invitation to embrace chaos – for some, an overwhelming prospect. But as Carne Ross (founder of the Independent Diplomat, and subject of the film The Accidental Anarchist) describes in his book The Leaderless Revolution, citizens self-organising, as groups of fallible humans seeking stability and progress, are the best form of resilience. Rather than standing as a front against perceived enemies, they participate as equal citizens, ready to engage with the others, looking to collaborate for the sake of shared gains. 

Since turning The Alternative Global’s attention to Scotland through the launch of Spring, we have seen that the future of renewable energy has revealed exactly these possibilities across the country. Communities of people – both rural Highlands and more urban Lowlands – are waking up to the injustice of immense riches of wind, waves and sun where they live. Coupled with the highest energy bills in Europe, these riches are a source of both frustration and aspiration. Communities differ widely in their response to the moment – as we have been reporting regularly.

As it stands,  we see no political party that fully represents the opportunity of reclaiming Scotland’s power. We also see no mechanisms for communities to come together to deliberate the issues and come to some agreements. Instead, outside forces – national and global interests shaped by the imperatives of the fossil-fuel industries (ref) – are organising to reach individuals through social media, to turn them against developing renewable energy at all. 

This form of outreach is not always partisan (as in Farage’s Reform, trying to turn people explicitly against Net Zero). It is just as often emotional, promoting nostalgia for the past, love of unspoiled hills and mountains as part of Scottish identity, triggering fears about how this might shrink the tourism economy. This framing positions collective community agency as traditional and conservative; it doesn’t rock the status quo of landowners’ power and governments’ capture by the fossil-fuel lobby. Rather than anything new responding to the urgent demands of our future. 

In the face of this political vacuum, Spring has been advocating the use of Ceilidh Theatre to bring people together in a friendly, open and enjoyable way. At our Celtic Connections “Power Shift” event in Jan 2026, we gave citizens a chance to voice their own thoughts and feelings, while also having access to experts to paint the wider picture. Our use of the democratic software platform pol.is, both on-line and off-line, developed nuanced perspectives. Pol.is’s rich mapping helps introduce the idea that communities are always more complex than imagined. 

How Ceilidh Theatre reaches deep

In so doing, Ceilidh Theatre and pol.is promotes the possibility of cohesion arising from our capacity to embrace difference while still being able to come to decisions about ‘what to do’ together. Like groups of friends with very different habits, nevertheless being able to agree on where to go on holiday together.

What we believe will arise from this process, over the course of a year, are groups of communities developing a new kind of socio-political praxis. One that recognises the conditions in which citizens are now subject to immense pressure from outside forces, seeking to manipulate their vote. 

People must Identify their local community as the context within which they might find the space and time to come back to themselves. The aim is to rediscover their own compass and get their emotional needs met by coming together, developing trust and agency. Groups like this might make autonomous decisions about where to put their collective energy for the future whether it is around improving community benefit as compensation, or going hell-for-leather for fair ownership of wind-farms. New ideas might also arise, such as exploring the possibility of a micro-grid for the area.

Such groups might also join forces and begin to share communing praxis – such as Ceilidh Theatre and pol.is - as well as information about how to navigate the challenging future for the whole of Scotland. Could such a group become a political force of their own in the future? Not to adopt old party-political culture and take control of communities, but to represent those deliberated, re-imagined, alternative, community-generated plans for the future of renewable energy in Scotland? 

What seems certain is we need a new political praxis – the application of a theory of transformation – that can bring private citizens back to themselves. How else can we develop individual response-ability to collective outcomes, as we become increasingly vulnerable to the technological hijacking of our future. 

Watch this space.

We are pleased to profile The Glasgow Bell, an outgrowth of the Manchester Mill - both web publications committed to covering their cities with long-form journalism, supported by reader subscriptions.

Here’s an extract from a recent piece on the historic achievement of Glasgow’s publicly owned drinking water - known as “cooncil juice” (council) - and how it’s going to be maintained in the future. Subscribe to the Glasgow Bell here.

Is Glasgow’s glorious water under threat?

When a mains pipe tore open under Pollokshaws Road earlier this year, the tap water in a succession of Southside neighbourhoods cut out. A little reservoir sulking in the pipes at my flat trickled away. Then the tap heads twisted with a parched hiss.

Does this sound like the beginning of something serious, I half-wondered. Water isn’t society until it’s taken away, and then it becomes unmasked as the baseline for everything you need to be civil. Coffee, showers, toilets. But also washing up, laundry, radiators. My neighbours offered some bottled mineral water, and I gratefully poured the dog his first (and last) bowl of Evian. 

At last, by late evening, Scottish Water vans turned up and dumped crates of plastic bottles in the close — simply (and slightly ominously) labelled: “Drinking Water”. Meanwhile, gushing out from the broken pipe nearby was one of the most deluxe municipal water supplies anywhere in the UK — a feed from a great blue beauty of a loch so wantonly romantic that Sir Walter Scott felt moved to write an epic six-canto poem about it. 

The next day, when the taps came back on, the water sputtered, but it was still glorious — the famously fresh “cooncil juice” brought to Glasgow from Loch Katrine up in the Trossachs. Water in Scotland is more than civility; it’s also a common wealth, an asset interchangeable with the famous landscape.

Scottish Water is a public company owned by the Scottish government, and the cost of its work is bundled into the admittedly hefty Glasgow City Council tax (hence the “cooncil juice” nickname). In England and Wales water is a household bill paid directly into private coffers, with very mixed and unaccountable results. 

Most of the Scottish tap supply also comes from surface waters — rivers, lochs, burns — rather than ground waters, which explains its softness. It hasn’t had time to pick up the calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium in the rocks and earth that make for filmy cups of tea and chalky, stubborn lathers of shampoo. 

Glasgow’s tap water is so soft and good it is even promoted to students at the University of Glasgow. The water is also used as a boast by Tennent’s lager, which talks about the Loch Katrine provenance of its biggest ingredient as if its brewers were trekking for miles to the source, rather than simply turning on a tap. 

But all water companies — and all tap drinkers — now face an equal threat: the warming of the planet. Up at Loch Katrine, work has already begun “to secure the next century of water quality” says ecologist Dr Mark Williams, head of sustainability at Scottish Water.

Climate change is going to change the cost and quality of what comes out the tap, he says, unless we adapt the landscape itself to prevent erosion from heavier rainfall and longer dry spells. 

He shows me a picture of a huge exposed gash, or “hag”, in the peat above the northern edge of the loch, taken this year. “There’s a huge amount of peatland in the upland areas that needs improvement,” he says.

“The organic material is being washed out into Katrine. When it rains, you want the water to hold in the peat.” The poorer quality of the peatland has developed over time by draining water for the benefit of sheep grazing, along with the natural vandalism of deer trampling down vegetation.

When combined with the wilder rainfalls that come with climate change, this erosion leads to run-off from the peat, rather than retention of water in the bog. Decay of plant matter in the peat hags also gives off carbon. 

The more all of this happens, the more the water needs expensive treatment to make it fit for consumption, a cost that will ultimately fall on the consumer. Scottish Water’s plan is to create a carbon sink and better drainage in the land around the loch.

“It’s a long term project, and it will see a new native woodland with a mix of upland deciduous broadleaf and Scots pine, birch, and rowan; we’re also managing grazing and restoring peatland,” Williams says.

He adds that Scottish Water regards the Katrine estate as a “real signature area of land, it is an example of us trying to do the right thing.” The 10-year plan was approved last year, and the first phase began in January.

Lovely though Glasgow’s water is, it has still been sanitised on the 34-mile journey from source to city. So I decide to drive up to the loch for a drink of winter water in its purest form.

A soft, gloomy squall has arrived before me. Close to the shoreline, the water chops from black to brown, the colour of wet tree roots. Further up the loch, against mysterious skerries and wooded islets, sheets of water are pulling in grey gusts in the crosswinds. 

Two small boats, the Rob Roy III and the Lady of the Lake, are tied up alongside the grand Walter Scott steamship, and all three idle their engines at the southern pier, waiting for passengers. The “earlier world” of the 450-million-year-old Arrochar Alps that Scott described surrounding Loch Katrine in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ looms high over the scene, poised to reassert total mountain power after the pleasure boat timetable stops at 3pm. 

There are two main types of water here: the wild and the tamed. Just along the tarmac road that snakes for a few miles around the north-east lochside, there are padlocked gates to Scottish Water monitoring stations, and a long stone terrace brings a loud, organised chute of gushing water down from Glen Finglas waterfall, with the banks of the loch itself held neatly by a stone wall. 

The managed side of the water has been in action since the mid 19th century, when fast-growing Glasgow was festering with slums, cholera and typhoid. It really needed a clean drink of water. Victorian engineers stood in this same spot and, in spite of the need to cross several wide and deep valleys, and with no comparable waterworks project anywhere in Great Britain, decided that they could still pull off the construction of an aqueduct all the way from loch to city. They were right.

For their ‘Katrine aqueduct’, which still carries Glasgow’s water supply, they had to bore tunnels and lay three-foot wide cast-iron pipes through whinstone, gneiss and mica slate riddled with quartz veins. Its raised sections were hoisted over rushing rivers and ravines, requiring 3,000 workers to finish it over three years. The work was paid for by the city at a cost of around £1.5m (equivalent to about £176m in today’s money), with the start-up costs loaned to the waterworks company using Glasgow’s own property assets for security. 

Appropriately, it was raining royally on October 14, 1859, the day that Queen Victoria sailed up Loch Katrine to cut the ribbon on this grand new showstopper of municipal engineering. The heavens opened. “Incessant torrents”, in the words of the Scotsman’s reporter at the time. “Down it came in perfect sheets of wet.” 

As the squall settled into a downpour, I could picture the monarch’s short, stout profile heading for the shore in all her dreich pomp. But I found it surprisingly hard to get close to the water itself: the raised stone wall following the road is in the way.

In the end I took a sip from a little waterfall trickle coming from the bracken-and tree-covered sides of Primrose Hill, to the right of the road. It was clean and sweet, but I couldn’t taste it without thinking of the threats Williams mentioned from the past — sheep parasites, for one — nor for those he talked about for the future: algae and other hotter-world poisons. 

More than water

If you want to be assured that Glasgow’s present council juice greatness isn’t just myth or marketing, ask a speciality coffee barista. Matt Cowie, the co-founder of Amulet Coffee, which opened in Partick in the West End a few months ago, is obsessed with the city’s tap water, which he describes as sitting at the “high end of the spectrum” but intriguingly also “a perfect baseline to build an even better water off of”. 

Bottled mineral water is not necessarily as nice as Glasgow tap, he insists. But for his coffee to taste as good as possible, it still needs some tweaks — albeit to a lesser, and less costly degree than the London speciality shop brigade, who have to resort to reverse osmosis to manage the capital’s hard-as-nails water. 

“The future of coffee is all in the water,” he says. “It’s the biggest upgrade you can give yourself after a good grinder. Glasgow is so soft compared to London, it’s infinitely better. It’s already basically distilled.”

Even so, he says, “every morning we batch up 10 litres of our own water, we add magnesium, calcium and potassium”, hardening the tap water a little to a secret sauce level. “Minerals affect the way we perceive the aroma, if the water is too soft you’re leaving flavour on the table.” 

This aspect of specialty coffee is new to me, but water seems to be taken very seriously by most self-respecting practitioners. “All the cutting edge places have excellent water science,” Cowie says. “Greytone in Bristol has amazing water, Zennor filter coffee [in Glasgow] is so good.”

Another nearby Partick newcomer, Kahawa Mzuri, is run by Kieran Darlington, who grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, where many homes don’t have tap water, he says, but instead use water filters and gallon-water butts.  He came to study in Glasgow – and decided to stay.

He is now using his cafe as a showcase for Kenyan speciality coffee, and working with producers who promote ethical farming and trading. Like Cowie, he has a nuanced appreciation for refining the local tap water. “Having some mineral content also helps you perceive different flavours.”

He notes that “Almost all speciality shops will have a water filter attached to their espresso machine. The tap water won’t be the same as what’s in the shop. But what we have in Glasgow is a really good starting point, we can play around with the mineral content without too much difficulty. We’re in a good position here.”

The future of thirst

Throughout the course of my research, I keep coming back to something Mark Williams suggested to me early on: that your view of “good” water depends heavily on where you grew up. Williams, for example, said he’ll forever hold the tap water from Llandegfyd reservoir in south Wales in his heart. I also grew up in south Wales, but took the clarity of its water totally for granted until I spent more than a decade living in London, feeling unrefreshed by the municipal mouthwash effect of every glass from the tap.

After years in Glasgow I’ve come to really appreciate the big lungfuls of tap that you can drink without feeling like a chlorinated fish. And in winter, I love the chilliness of it too, thanks to the temperature of the pipes, of course, but also as a reminder that your thirst is being met by an arm of the sea. 

The mountain auras of Loch Katrine have run down Glaswegian throats ever since Queen Victoria’s dousing on a dour day in 1859, apparently wearing a Stuart tartan dress, white bonnet and a black veil. Onlookers sniffed that she was dressed “plainly”, but it was an appropriate choice to mark an everyday luxury afforded to anyone who calls the city home. 

But the open banks of peat in the Trossachs spell a warning of a possible future — a universal “Drinking Water” treated so vigorously it tastes of nothing but the treatment plant. When work resumes at Loch Katrine on the creation of a new forest, it will be a quieter affair than the bombastic Victorian rock-blasting: instead, it will rely on planting, repairing, and clearing. But it’s no less significant for maintaining Glasgow’s water. As another of Scott’s lines has it: “Within Loch Katrine’s gorge we’ll fight”.

Original article here. Subscribe to the Glasgow Bell here

The kind of protests that loom large in the collective imagination tend to be compact and dramatic. Everybody to Kenmure Street, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s energising and inspiring film about a spontaneous act of collective civil disobedience in Glasgow, documents just such an event.

At a time when mobile phone footage shared by citizen activists is proving increasingly vital in holding authority to account, it also feels extraordinarily prescient. Most obviously in the US, where the film recently won the world cinema documentary special jury award for civil resistance at the Sundance Film Festival.

Bustos Sierra’s debut was the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran, about a group of Scottish Rolls-Royce workers who, in 1974, refused to repair jet engines for the Chilean air force in protest against the violent Pinochet regime. It won a Bafta for best feature film. Unsurprisingly, Bustos Sierra handles his material with confidence.

Everybody to Kenmure Street begins with a black and white montage. Children play in the back courts of tenement slums. Suffragettes demand the right to vote. The intense heat of the Glasgow’s blast furnaces sends sparks flying. Crowds march against the installation of a nuclear deterrent on the Clyde. Riveters raise their hammers in synchronised rhythm in the city’s famous ship yards. Glasgow’s industrial heritage and its proud history of protest are established as the film’s backdrop.

As the film moves from black and white to colour, we find ourselves on a tenement-lined street in the Pollokshields area of the city. It is early morning on May 13 2021. An immigration enforcement vehicle has just pulled up on Kenmure Street, and two Indian men have been arrested for possible infringements.

Priti Patel, the UK home secretary, had been aggressively doubling down on the hostile environment promoted by her predecessor Theresa May. The dawn raid had been approved without the knowledge of the Scottish government in Holyrood because immigration legislation and policy are reserved to Westminster. Among other things, then, Everybody to Kenmure Street exposes some of the tensions in the devolution settlement.

This intrusion into one of Scotland’s most ethnically diverse areas, with a large Muslim population, on what also happened to be Eid al-Fitr – the feast day that celebrates the end of Ramadan – was understandably experienced by many as a deliberate provocation.

As Bustos Sierra’s evocative film documents, it quickly becomes the trigger for an extraordinary act of communal resistance. A kind of social media-enabled mass sit down, it results in an eight-hour stand-off with immigration officials and the police, and the eventual release, without charge, of the two men.

Making extensive use of donated mobile phone footage, Bustos Sierra documents the heartwarming combination of improvised tactics and community-based solidarity that won the day from the level of the street itself.

As the day progressed, the number of protestors grew from a handful to dozens, to hundreds and eventually a couple of thousand. Word spread and a number of well-known figures arrived on the scene, perhaps most significantly, the activist and human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar who eventually negotiated the men’s release.

The power of ordinary people

At its most affecting though, Everybody to Kenmure Street is a film about the decency and moral courage of ordinary Glaswegians. Having looked out of their windows and spotted the immigration van, a small number of residents decided to act.

They came out into the street, challenged the officials present, created an obstruction by sitting down, and began texting and posting on social media. Crucially, just after 9am an activist, known only as “Van Man”, crawled under the police vehicle and attached himself to the axle preventing the immigration officers from driving away.

His timely action allowed others to gather, and he was described by many as the hero of the day. Because he wishes to remain anonymous, his words are spoken, here, by the film’s executive producer, the actor and activist Emma Thompson, who looks directly to the camera while adopting a position that echoes the cramped conditions Van Man endured for eight hours.

The Scottish actor Kate Dickie similarly gives voice to the off-duty NHS worker who tended him for most of the day. “The fact that I’m a nurse,” she explains, “gives me a level of protection that other people wouldn’t experience”. It’s difficult to hear her words without thinking of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old intensive care nurse shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, in January of this year.

The absolute horror of events in that city make the dénouement of Bustos Sierra’s film all the more remarkable. Police Scotland, who by the end of the day were in attendance in high numbers, simply agreed to let the men go in order to avert any kind of violent confrontation.

If all this sounds wildly utopian, Bustos Sierra is careful not to allow his adopted home town to become too pleased with itself. Picking up on some of the threads laid down in the opening montage, he uses the middle section to stress Glasgow’s mixed legacies.

While the city’s radical tradition is certainly honoured, from its early opposition to apartheid to its proud history of trades unionism, the film also stresses that its mercantile and industrial wealth, like that of Bristol, Liverpool and London, was built on the labour of enslaved people.

In this way a connection is made between the brown men held in the van, who are victims of an aggressive immigration policy, and the historical victims of colonialism who were also predominantly people of colour.

Given that our news feeds are currently full of images reinforcing the reality that black and brown lives are less grievable than white ones, this connection seems an especially vital one to make. An important film, everybody should see Everybody to Kenmure Street.

Original piece here, republished under Creative Commons

Delighted to cross-post a Spring essay from the Scottish eco-philosopher Mairi McFadyean. Support her work here.

The spring is finally here. The woodland primroses are out in the woods, and the yellow daffodils are almost out in the garden (my favourite).

We wake in the morning to the song of the birds: blue-tits and great-tits the loudest, flitting through the birch branches outside the window. But almost as soon as the joy rises in me, it is accompanied by a quiet ache. To hear the birds singing is now always also a reminder of loss.

I have lost count of the reports. The data has been clear for years - decades, in many cases.

Earlier this year, the UK government quietly published its ownsecurity assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse - a report so alarming it was originally withheld from publication, and ultimately released only in redacted form.

Its conclusions will surprise no one paying attention: if current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. I read these words and feel not shock, but what I have described elsewhere as a kind of spiritual vertigo.

How are we, as humans, meant to hold this?

Constant background anxiety is a lived reality for many of us. We carry grief for what is being lost, fear and dread for what lies ahead, rage at systems that continue to extract, pollute and destroy.

All of these emotions are complicated by the recognition that even having the space to feel them is itself a privilege.

The kind of hope I am reaching for here is not naive optimism; it is closer to what Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012) call active hope: confronting the full weight of global crises, neither retreating into false hope nor collapsing into despair, and committing to action towards more life-sustaining ways of being.

The philosopher Donna Haraway (2016) calls this ‘staying with the trouble’ - not as a posture of grief or endurance, but as learning to be truly present in the face of such uncertainty. It is recognising that we are never self-contained actors facing a crisis from outside, but are always already entangled - made together with other species, other histories, other damaged and still-living worlds.

This asks not for any answer or resolution, but what she calls ‘response-ability’: the capacity to be genuinely affected by, and answerable to, the complex multispecies entanglements we are part of.

The question is, in the full knowledge of the climate and ecological emergency, in the midst of this heartbreaking reality, what does meaningful work look like? What can I offer to the world?

The environmental crises we face are deeply entangled with questions of meaning, ethics and justice, reflecting not only the material impacts of human activity, but also the cultural narratives, values and power relations that shape how we understand and respond to the more-than-human world.

The stories we tell, the values we hold and the political and economic systems we build shape both the environments we inhabit and the futures we can imagine. Culture, then, is not peripheral to ecological renewal; it is fundamental to it.

I have long been fascinated by how humans make and carry meaning, through music and song, story and poetry, and the knowledge and practices passed down from generation to generation - the so-called carrying stream of tradition.

These threads of memory and practice are more than cultural artefacts; they are maps of living relationships, encoding centuries of attention to land, water, species, seasonal rhythms.

Folk knowledge carries guidance on how to inhabit landscapes responsibly, how to read weather and waterways, how to live in reciprocity with nonhuman life. Music, songs and stories are creative expressions of our relationship with place.

Earlier this year, my collaborator Raghnaid Sandilands and I were invited to University College Dublin to speak as part of an event titled (Super)NatureCultures: More-Than-Human Ontologies and Intergenerational Knowledge Systems in the North Atlantic [link here].

This brought together folklorists, ethnologists and creative ethnographers from Scotland, Norway, Iceland, and Ireland to discuss the entanglement of the living world beyond the human, and the creative and sometimes uncanny ways these entanglements are expressed.

The conversations were rich and often playful - including encounters with fairies, whales, wee birds and eagles - but they also underscored a serious point: our understanding of ‘nature’ is always shaped through cultural meaning-making, interpreted within social, historical and imaginative frameworks.

Going to the very source of the predicament we find ourselves in, we encounter an attitude toward the natural world as something separate from us: inert, external, and existing primarily as a repository of resources to be mastered, extracted, managed.

The philosopher Bruno Latour (1991) famously described the separation of the domains of culture and nature as a founding myth of Western modernity: we have never actually lived this way, he suggests, but we have organised our institutions, economies and politics as if we do.

The consequences are very real. Environmental frameworks that treat ecological restoration as a purely technocratic exercise (counting species, measuring carbon, mapping habitats) alongside heritage frameworks that treat culture as separate from the living world end up working at cross purposes.

Or, worse, they talk past the very communities whose knowledge and relational practices are most essential to long‑term environmental stewardship.

This separation is also evident in rewilding discourse. At one extreme are efforts that emphasise restoring ‘wilderness’ by minimising or removing human influence altogther. Leading advocates, including George Monbiot (2013), stress that rewilding is not about excluding people, acknowledging that landscapes co-evolve with human presence, and that meaningful restoration depends on human engagement.

At the same time, the framing of rewilding often highlights humans as stewards, managers, or restorers - acting upon nature rather than recognising themselves as always already a part of it.

As rewilding practice embraces more relational approaches, it illustrates a broader truth: restoring ecological systems is inseparable from the cultural and ethical relationships through which humans understand, inhabit and care for the living world.

Physical interventions - planting trees, restoring peatlands, improving water retention, reintroducing species - are vital, but their long-term success depends as much on those human relationships as on ecological processes themselves. Nature restoration, in other words, is as much a cultural task as an ecological one.

Haraway (Staying with the Trouble, 2016) helps us understand why. For Haraway, humans and the living world are not separate entities that occasionally interact, but are sympoietic - continuously making one another through relationship. There is no stable, self-contained ‘nature’ to be restored from the outside.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, writing from within Indigneous Potawatomi tradition (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013), offers a complementary vision: a world understood through reciprocity, in which relationships with the living world carry obligations of care rather than ownership. ‘Restoring land without restoring relationship,’ she writes, ‘is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.’

Many cultural cosmologies, particularly Indigenous worldviews, have never imagined such a separation from nature.

The Gaelic traditions of Ireland and Scotland, while distinct in their own historical and colonial contexts, carry a comparable ethic of custodianship: older concepts such as dúchas/dùthchas [see Peter Mackay on these distinctions at our PowerShift event] articulate a sense of place and belonging. Not simply as ownership or residence, but as an ethical capacity to inhabit and belong to a place responsibly within a living web of relationships.

Care for land has been embedded within moral, imaginative and intergenerational systems of meaning: songs, stories, placenames and seasonal practices carried across generations encode deep ecological knowledge and relational ethics - ways of noticing, caring for and living with other species and the land, accumulated over centuries of intimate attention.

The ecological crisis is, at its roots, a crisis of relationship. As cultural knowledge erodes, so too do the ecological relationships it sustains. This is where culture and ecology meet: not as separate concerns, but deeply entangled.

Responding to the global ecological crisis demands more than behavioural change, environmental awareness, or even rewilding. It calls for deep cultural and ontological repair: the recovery, renewal and creative reimagining of worldviews and practices that cultivate care, responsibility and reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

Cultural repair is not a nostalgic return to an imagined past, nor a simple ‘reconnection’ with a separate nature. What is needed is something more fundamental, more radical.

We need to expand our understanding of culture so that our ethical and relational attention includes not just other humans, but nonhuman life and ecosystems - an extension of our very sociality to include obligations of care for and reciprocity with the living systems that sustain us.

This is not just theoretical insight. A commitment to this idea of cultural repair very much guides my current work. Alongside my collaborator Raghnaid Sandilands, I have been working as co-Researcher-in-Residence for the Findhorn Watershed Initiative, a bioregioning ecosystem restoration project in the central Scottish Highlands. The River Findhorn - Uisge Èireann in Gaelic - flows from the Monadh Liath mountains to the Moray Firth.

The project, led by Elle Adams, is built on the understanding that nature restoration is as much about human relationships with nature as it is about hands-on restoration work itself. This means finding ways to restore emotional, ethical and place-based connections that foster a sense belonging, responsibility and care.

Through the lens of human ecology, our work traces the human story and cultural memory embedded in Gaelic place names, music, song, story and poetry, revealing how people once understood and related to this river system.

To understand that the watershed was once known and named by people who had an intimate knowledge of their place - at a time when ecologies were far richer - can help us imagine how it might be restored in future.

In practice, this work involves deep research, mapping music, songs and stories, hosting community walks, workshops and ceilidhs, collaborating with musicians and singers, and creating experiences that invite people to consider different ways of seeing.

We describe our creative practice as cultural darning and mending - weaving disparate threads from the past back into the present with care and purpose. Our work is future-oriented, rooted in an ethical, reciprocal relationship with the land, its people and their stories. While we acknowledge that we cannot mend the whole, it is possible to make small, careful, hopeful acts of repair.

We have also been working to make this case in policy terms. Our recent British Academy paper, Integrating Intangible Cultural Heritage in nature recovery: a place-sensitive approach in the Scottish Highlands (2025) [previously posted here], addresses the intertwined cultural and ecological crises facing this particular region, where contemporary injustices have their roots in historical ones.

It argues for bridging the persistent divide between the world of cultural heritage policy (the UK ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage only in 2024) and the world of biodiversity and nature recovery. It makes the case that traditional ecological knowledge, practices and cultural expressions are not peripheral to nature recovery but central to it.

This is not about preservation alone, however: the carrying stream flows forward as well as back. Alongside inherited traditions, new songs are being written, new relationships with place are being formed, and new voices are finding their way into the conversation. Cultural repair is as much about what we are creating as what we are remembering.

This year I am beginning a new chapter of this work - the most personally rooted one yet. Through a Creative Scotland Open Fund project, I will be in residence at community-owned Abriachan Forest, right on my doorstep.

The project, Stories, Songs and Stewardship, is rooted in a simple idea: that ecological care grows not only from data and expertise, but from cultural memory and meaning, shared and kept alive through living creative practice.

Through seasonal gatherings and events shared with the community, the project will explore how the songs and stories we tell about a place shape our connection to it, our desire to care for it, and our sense of being part of its ongoing story.

This is where I come back to a simple idea that has long guided my work: Dig Where You Stand. As Alastair McIntosh (Soil and Soul 2001) writes, if you attend deeply to one place - its history, its ecology, its stories - you will find yourself connected to all other parts of the world, entangled in the wider networks of life and meaning that extend far beyond it. I am deeply glad to be rooted in my home patch.

I believe it is at the intimate scale of place that cultural repair takes root: in the oldest, most convivial of human gestures - noticing, naming, remembering, singing, telling. It begins when someone learns the name of a bird, teaches a child a song, or asks an older neighbour about how a place used to be. These small acts of attention and transmission are the root system from which everything else - care for land, species and place - grows.

There is a wee Gaelic song, a port-à-beul - mouth music, carried in the voice alone - that my daughter sings. Far am bi mi fhìn is ann a bhios mo dhòchas /where I will be, there my hope will be.

I love it for what it is: joyful, playful, full of life. In the song, the singer is keen to meet a friend and visit the piper’s house, where they plan to make merry and dance - and if the piper is not there, they will go and find the fiddler. It is a song about companionship and conviviality, expressing not a wistful, abstract hope, but something tangible, embodied, rooted.

Songs like these have been passed down through generations, carrying memory, identity, shared history, wisdom. To remember these songs, to sing them - to pass them on - is its own kind of darning and mending.

Each morning, listening to the great-tits and blue-tits calling through the branches, I am reminded that life persists even amidst loss and rupture. To notice the wee birds, to learn their names, to learn their songs, to keep showing up despite despair - this is the work. It is here that grief, care and conviviality converge; it is here that hope lives.

Far am bi mi fhìn is ann a bhios mo dhòchas

Far am bi mi fhìn is ann a bhios mo dhòchas

Far am bi mi fhìn is ann a bhios mo dhòchas

Far am bi mi fhìn bidh mo dhòchas ann

Where I will be, there my hope will be.

Where I will be, there my hope will be.

Where I will be, there my hope will be.

Where I will be, my hope will be there

© Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0

With thanks to my friend and collaborator Raghnaid Sandilands for all the conversations, and to Tiber Falzett at the folklore department in University College Dublin - an old friend from our shared days at the School of Scottish Studies. We all share a fascination with birds: those persistent presences that move through song, story and memory, and that arrive, in the older sense of the Gaelic comharradh, as signs - carrying meanings we find ourselves unable to ignore.

Original essay is here

From The Conversation UK:

When brewery and pub chain BrewDog invited customers to become shareholders through its “Equity for Punks” scheme, it appeared to represent a new model of capitalism. It invited beer enthusiasts to invest in the company and become small shareholders. This allowed the Scottish firm to present itself as a community built around rebellion, identity and participation.

For a time, the BrewDog model looked remarkably successful – the company was once valued at £2 billion. But after its sale to American cannabis and alcohol firm Tilray for just £33 million, it is clear that there is more to the story.

The real story here is not about one craft brewer. It is about a broader shift in modern capitalism, where companies increasingly use narratives to mobilise communities and raise capital. But at the same time, the institutional rules of finance still determine who gets what and when.

BrewDog raised substantial capital (said to be £75 million) from thousands of small investors who were already loyal to the brand. Instead of relying exclusively on banks, venture capital or institutional investors, the company mobilised its own community to fund growth. Customers became shareholders, while the firm strengthened its reputation as a disrupter within the industry.

Then came the bar closures, job losses and BrewDog’s sale to Tilray. These developments suggest that small investors from the Equity for Punks programme will see little financial return.

In general, supporters tend to see themselves as partners in an entrepreneurial journey. Yet legally they remain minority investors. And minority investors occupy a very specific position within the institutional architecture of capitalism.

The BrewDog story is a reminder that markets run on stories as well as money. The effect of this has been to blur the boundary between customer and investor.

We believe that people rarely invest only because of spreadsheets. Our research on entrepreneurship shows that economic behaviour is shaped by trust, narratives and shared identity as much as by financial indicators. And the American sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that markets are “embedded” in social networks, meaning that people invest in people – and in their stories.

This resonates with our broader research on how economic exchanges, including investments and purchases, are also often sustained through these factors. BrewDog’s Equity for Punks model captured this dynamic perfectly.

But there’s also a question around what it really means to be part of a community when the balance sheet starts to matter.

Cold beer, cold reality

Community narratives may mobilise people to invest their money, but a body of strict rules and regulations shapes the outcome. Three points here are particularly important.

First, while the equity-public model undoubtedly has appeal, it’s also true that companies operate within legal frameworks that determine ownership rights and the order in which creditors are repaid if the company is liquidated or sold.

Second, lenders and structured investors typically enjoy protections that small retail investors, like BrewDog’s punks, do not.

Third, corporate finance works through a hierarchy, so it should be recognised that this places creditors ahead of shareholders when companies face financial stress. Shareholders are last in line to recoup their money from a company – after lenders, tax authorities, employees and suppliers.

When customers invest in companies they admire, they often interpret their role differently from conventional shareholders. Under BrewDog’s Equity for Punks programme, thousands of customers bought small stakes in the company not just for potential financial returns.

This point resonates with our research on how businesses and communities interact. It shows that economic behaviour is often shaped by the rules, expectations and relationships that surround markets. In practice, this means that people do not make decisions based only on prices or profits.

None of this suggests bad faith on the part of companies like BrewDog. It simply reflects the fact that markets operate through institutions.

Episodes like the BrewDog one serve as a reminder of a basic feature of modern capitalism. That is, when financial pressure appears, institutional rules take over.

All that being said, community-driven investment models will probably become more common. Digital platforms make it easier than ever for firms to mobilise supporters around shared narratives and identities. But at the same time, the institutional rules that govern corporate finance have not evolved at the same pace as these new forms of participatory capitalism.

If modern capitalism increasingly invites people to invest not only their money but also their faith, the gap between narrative and institutional reality will become harder to ignore. Communities may power the stories that fuel entrepreneurship. But when the balance sheet tightens, it is still institutional rules that decide who gets paid.

Original piece here, republished under Creative Commons

As an example, see this video embedded above, where the editor of the National, Laura Webster, is in discussion with a fellow editor Aaron Bastani, of Novara Media, about the assumptions embedded in mainstream media coverage of Iran.

Thanks to both Gerry Hassan and Bella Caledonia for this cross-post - support Bella Caledonia here

Glasgow has recently been much in the headlines. A week ago, the Union Corner building by Central Station burnt down, destroying many businesses and an iconic part of the city centre, and on the same day, Celtic and Rangers fans engaged in their ritual loathing and hatred in an Old Firm derby with a pitch invasion at the game’s conclusion.

Both were met by immediate responses and a welter of commentary. In the former, emergency services responded with professionalism and bravery, limiting the damage and helping to save Glasgow Central Station – much loved by Glaswegians and arguably the beating heart of the city.

Sadly, the city has a track record of excelling in how it springs into action in the face of such disasters, but these events need to be considered in terms of the bigger picture and the historic roots that shaped them.

The Story of Official Glasgow

Context matters in the above. The ongoing fiscal constraints affecting Glasgow City Council are the product of the atrophying and marginalisation of local government, accelerated by the arrival of the Scottish Parliament. Pre-devolution, the abolition of Strathclyde Region by Michael Forsyth in 1996 hurt Glasgow – taking away the redistributive effect of such a large region and how it aided the city.

Add to that, in recent times, the legacy and cost of the equal pay dispute for low-paid women workers which landed the council with a bill of £770 million.

All this is well-kent. But less so are the mostly unintended consequences of 25 years of devolution. Edinburgh has become the political centre of Scotland in a way it was not pre-devolution. Put bluntly, Glasgow has become one of the losers of the devolution era.

Glasgow City Council pre-devolution had an impressive track record of producing big hitters and leaders with national influence.

People such as Michael Kelly, instigator of the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ marketing campaign; Pat Lally and Jean McFadden – all in different ways were successful political operators whatever your opinion on their politics. Strathclyde Region, which existed from 1975-96, produced pioneering Labour leaders such as Geoff Shaw who championed community change and Charlie Gray who in the Thatcher era gave the region a powerful European profile, which contributed to its abolition by the Tories.

Post-devolution, the picture is very different. The abolition of the regional tier removed a layer of local government which could plan and think strategically, while the 32 single-tier authorities have less financial and political muscle.

When the Scottish Parliament came along in 1999, it sucked up power and attention, diminished the role of local government and impacted on Glasgow, which has been hit since then by the lack of any Labour or SNP vision for the city when each respectively have been running the council.

The SNP will have been in office in Glasgow for ten years when they come up for election next year. That is a decent time in which to make a judgement on their effectiveness, and over the course it has been a patchy record in difficult circumstances.

There have been some achievements, but there has been over-reach – such as when SNP council leader Susan Aitken declared that the council would be renamed ‘Glasgow Government’, which seems to have fallen by the wayside – as well as missteps such as Aitken blaming a ‘rat epidemic’ on the legacy of Thatcherism.

Perhaps the biggest issue of late has been the unwillingness of the SNP city leadership to openly make the case for the city to the Scottish Government. This was particularly acute when Nicola Sturgeon was First Minister and Glasgow MSP. The ground of a Glasgow pitch is obvious: the city is a unique, special case and its success vital to the success of Scotland.

This requires a bespoke deal for the city which addresses its financial constraints and its truncated boundaries whereby a straitjacket surrounds the inner core while the wealthy suburbs of the city-region sit outside the city council.

There is a void where there should be vision and championing the city. Why did the SNP have an electoral project for capturing Glasgow at council level and not a commensurate political project to change and transform the city?

Detailed plans were made for the SNP to address its ‘Glasgow problem’ electorally but there were no detailed policies that could have potentially turned the city into a model of SNP governance and a showcase for the Nationalist Scotland of the future.

Much of the above politics goes above the head of most of the city’s citizens and is discussed and conducted by tiny insider groups without public knowledge or engagement.

In so doing for decades the city’s politics, the way political parties operate and its governance, have contributed to a growing democratic deficit and disconnection in the city: a tragic paradox in a place where so many of its inhabitants feel such pride about where they live.

Glasgow Visions and the Future of Hope

Glasgow and its people are filled with ambition. The Glasgow 2020 project I led nearly 20 years ago involved over 5,000 people – a representative cross-sample of the city.

It conveyed the energy, dynamism, and hope of the population, with many of these characteristics most pronounced in women campaigners and community figures who often did not describe themselves as ‘activists’ but lived a life of doing things.

The project drew on the vibrancy and adaptability of the self-organising, self-governing organisations and initiatives in neighbourhoods and areas, some widely known such as Galgael and Govanhill Baths and others that were small-scale, local and less permanent such as numerous DIY and pop-up activities.

One of the starting points of Glasgow 2020 was challenging the grip of damaging, selective stories.

These included the Panglossian stories of optimism told by numerous public bodies that the city needed to be sold, marketed and branded in a certain way. Another dwelt on the miserabilist mindset stressing crime, violence, anti-social behaviour, and strengthened learned helplessness and passivity.

The Glasgow project critiqued the official stories of the city – from the council, public bodies and business organisations – seeing these as part of the problematic account of the city which predicated everything on a consumer version of the economy, of Glasgow as a shopping destination, mass tourism, and culture reduced to an instrumental extension of economic policy.

Glasgow’s official story was its version of the political and economic orthodoxies of the world pre-banking crash; unfortunately, no new city vision, official or unofficial, has come along since to supplant it.

Glasgow’s Successive Big Bangs and the Cumulative Cost

Glasgow’s current state has been magnified by a culture of top-down, and sometimes brutal, dehumanising change which has entrenched powerlessness and a lack of agency.

In the rapid industrialisation and population explosion in the 19th century, the city’s population rose from 77,000 in 1801 to 1.1 million in 1901, making it the fourth biggest city in Europe behind London, Berlin and Paris. This was followed by dramatic depopulation post-1945, followed by deindustrialisation from the 1960s onwards.

Much of the depopulation was planned; the debate a controversial one between different planning visions and ideas of cities, city-regions and the West of Scotland and entailed the two-track policy of ‘growing out’ (overspill, creation of New Towns) and ‘growing up’ (the building of 230 tower blocks many of which have been subsequently demolished). At one point Glasgow had more tower blocks than any city in Europe.

The human cost is laid out in S.G. Checkland’s brilliant account of the dramatic changes the city experienced from 1875 to 1975 in The Upas Tree where he assessed the scale of transformation imposed on people and communities writing:

The bulldozer has been used in Glasgow on working-class areas with a minimum of consultation and almost no resistance. Communities have been disrupted and destroyed by decisions taken from above, bringing great changes in the social fabric of working-class life. 

The writer and theologian Alastair McIntosh has talked over the years of ‘the cumulative psychic damage’ done to people and the city and states:

Glasgow is a battered city with a beautiful soul. It’s not just the past, refugees from the Highland Clearances or Irish Famine coming to labour in the industries made possible by a deep river and nearby coalfields. It’s also in modern times, with the tide going out on the British Empire, and those industries never having been replaced and it has been ground low by intergenerational poverty.

Sue Laughlin of the People’s Plan for Glasgow noted about the present day:

The city is financially stretched because of previous decisions on private loans leading to public debt. That said the continued reliance on private developers is distorting the economic, social and cultural life of the city against public interest.

Alan Sinclair has worked to advance early years support for many years, and observed that young children bear a disproportionate price for the city’s failures:

There is a much larger fire, with much bigger consequences than the one in Union Street. One in four children in Glasgow aged between 27 and 30 months are failing to meet at least one out of five child development measures. Child development is cumulative and sequential. Physically – crawl, walk, run – but that same applies to sound and language or as an older child sight and comprehension.

Glasgow’s Built Environment and the Importance of Culture

This is the backdrop which, in recent year,s has seen growing concern about decline, decay and drift in the city, from the well-being and health of its citizens to the fabric and sustainability of its built environment and Victorian legacy. Niall Murphy, head of Glasgow City Heritage Trust reflects on this:

Glasgow’s problem is to do with construction techniques and how these changed and evolved as the city, which was one of key centres of the Industrial Revolution, surfed the technological zeitgeist during its golden age from the start of the 19th century to the outbreak of World War One. 

Commenting on the recent Union Corner fire, he notes: 

The building which has just been destroyed was traditionally constructed. Therefore, it had a load bearing stone exterior and a timber lined interior as that is how Scottish buildings were traditionally built until Glasgow’s building standards became more sophisticated in the 1890s when municipalisation led to it having some of the strictest building regulations in the world. 

Glasgow has also suffered the twin shocks of the Glasgow School of Art fires in 2014 and 2018 which twice destroyed the precious Mackintosh Building with the aftermath of the second closing a host of businesses on Sauchiehall Street.

Eight years since the last fire there is no agreed rebuild plan for the Mackintosh Building which is a public indictment of the city and national authorities. Meanwhile, no one has been held accountable for the GSA’s scandalous mismanagement. 

Alongside this has been the hollowing out of parts of the city’s once dynamic arts and cultural environment – which had been incorporated in the city’s official story (one version profiling the city’s visual arts as ‘the Glasgow Miracle’).

There was the closure of independent pioneers such as The Arches under the Labour council in 2015, with the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) finally shutting its doors in January 2026. Add to this the ongoing closure of the legendary People’s Palace, and the current insecurities affecting the cultural activities within Trongate 103.

Glasgow still has many innovative artists, creatives and settings but things are getting much harder, reinforced by a cash-strapped council, a national funding formula which benefits Edinburgh over Glasgow (Edinburgh galleries and museums getting direct national funding from the Scottish Government unlike Glasgow), and the perception that Culture minister Angus Robertson prefers funding middle-class well-connected Edinburgh art and culture.

Author Denise Mina describes the emotional condition of the city after Sunday: ‘the sadness is, I think that these buildings – the ABC, art school and the new fire, are not being rebuilt. Private developers turn everything into “student flats” i.e. not for us.’

Mina reflects on the general malaise afflicting large parts of the city:

Walking down Sauchiehall Street is like walking through a carcass because there are so many empty or burned-out buildings. There are years-long projects that feel as if they’ll never be done: the repaving of George Square, cycle routes being carved out. Roads are shut apparently at random with no warning. There are sectarian flags and tags everywhere, by the motorways, on bridges, covering up road signs, and it feels as if we’re all hostage to ball-cupping men.  

Glasgow needs radical change. It needs leadership from within – political, cultural, civic and community. And it needs Scottish political leadership and championing from every part of the political spectrum. This will require major structural and fiscal change; taking on vested and entrenched interests; creating winners and losers.

This is the path deliberately not taken by the SNP and Scottish Government. Without fundamental, bold change challenging the current status quo Glasgow’s future will continue to be of decline and decay, while public agencies pretend otherwise in showy brochures and official prospectuses.

Glasgow and the Power of Collective Action and Stories

Glasgow is complex, filled with paradoxes and contrasts. It cannot be reduced to a single story or monocultural tale. In its recent past, and parts of the city to this day, there can be found the lessons, spirit and resilience needed for a different future.

It can be seen in the self-organisation of the women who organised the successful rent strikes in the early 20th century which changed UK housing law. And in the community activists who stopped the decimation of the city through bulldozers ripping up once vibrant neighbourhoods in the late 1960s and 1970s.

There were the citizens who said enough is enough when their lives were blighted by gang and knife violence and organised, challenged and massively reduced its prevalence in the early 21st century; and the young wave of activists in the present who want a more sustainable, local, humane city: one with less motorways cutting a swathe through communities.

All of these and more offer glimpses of collective agency and assemblies of hope, of people coming together and affecting bottom-up change and a glimpse of the future. 

An additional dimension in this is renewing the generous, open, engaged aspect of the city’s civic tradition which even at the height of ‘the Second City of Empire’ was not just an oppressive leviathan. Rather alternative perspectives existed, even at peak Glasgow, such as the Glasgow: Our City publication discussed in schools and evening classes.

This was supplemented by the prolific film output of Glasgow Corporation from 1922-74 when short information films were made about public health, housing, culture and the importance of public spaces. They showcased the collective power of people and government and contained besides a seriousness of purpose a sense of joy, liberation and possibility.

In today’s cynical, questioning world the tone of such films would jar, but the example of showcasing such local and collective stories in film form is part of the city’s history which should not be forgotten.

Glasgow is unique and this needs to be recognised and cherished. As Denise Mina says:

The city is in transition but gallusness [chutzpah] burns off at a low temperature and the civic faith that we’re going anywhere good is exhausted. People are just sad.

There is a cumulative wear and tear on many of the people of Glasgow who have gone through the full gamut of emotions: anger, rage, resignation, and now, sadness and even trauma. Somehow, the emotional connections people feel for the city and its future must be creatively harnessed. But that will not come from traditional party politics, top-down processes or the official story.

A different Glasgow and future exists and yearns to blossom. But the forces of conservatism cling to what they know and have to be challenged. Glasgow holds a special place in the heart not just of its own citizens, but across the city-region, Scotland and the wider world.

Difficult questions need to be asked – whose Glasgow is it; what should its values be and how do we define success; and how do we address issues of economy, enterprise, sustainability and supporting the people of the city to live happy and fulfilled lives?

Its current malaise is a warning of the void, lack of vision and absence of ambition, which characterises too much of political and public life in present-day Scotland. Glasgow has risen to major challenges in the past and can do so again.

But the current unsatisfactory state of affairs cannot be allowed to go unchallenged with its resultant cost for the people of Glasgow and Scotland and for future generations.

Originally on Bella Caledonia

A Berlin preview of the multipart The Story of Documentary Film, by Edinburgh film-maker and cinema historian Mark Cousins. First extract is from Film Fest Report:

The Story of Documentary Film offers a poetic, generous and deeply informative journey through the history of nonfiction cinema, reaffirming Mark Cousins as one of the great cinematic essayists of our time.

I opened my Berlinale 2026 with a four-hour screening of The Story of Documentary Film, the first instalment of Mark Cousins’s monumental new 15-hour series on the history of documentary cinema. Screening in the Berlinale Special Series section, it proved the perfect way to begin this year’s festival: a true work of passion and joy that approaches documentary film with poetry, tenderness, and intellectual generosity.

This is the next in a series of Herculean tasks that the director has taken on, from The Story of Film and Women Make Film. The Story of Documentary Film is structured both chronologically and thematically and is the result of decades of intensive research, planning and editing.

Alongside canonical classics that offer viewers familiar reference points, Cousins — in his signature style — foregrounds unknown, forgotten, or overlooked treasures, balancing the recognisable with the niche. The effect is an odyssey through global nonfiction cinema that aims to be as internationalist and inclusive as possible.

Cousins’s characteristically simple voiceover provides an inviting entry point into what might otherwise seem slightly nerdy subject matter. Coming from a working-class background that, as he noted in the post-screening Q&A, was not filled with culture, literature, or film, he is committed to welcoming audiences in rather than pushing them away with academic language or gatekeeping cinephilia.

The tone of the series is intimate, curious and occasionally humorous, reflecting that of the man himself, who at one point joked with the audience in the cinema in Berlin that he regretted not cooking for us all during the interval of our four-hour screening. This underscored a serious point; that Cousins deliberately resists the accelerated pacing of streaming culture, instead allowing viewers time to sit, breathe, and reflect on the images and histories unfolding on screen.

One audience member remarked that she had spent three months watching Women Make Film, and Cousins seemed delighted by the idea that viewers might engage with his work at their own rhythm. This openness mirrors the heart of the series itself — a project that invites ongoing dialogue rather than delivering a definitive verdict.

Perhaps it’s Cousins’s early scientific training that informs the methodical structure of this overwhelming undertaking, shaped in collaboration with editor Timo Langer. Through his voiceover, Cousins encourages viewers to question his subjectivity: his selection of films, his chronology, and the very notion of a cinematic canon.

He is acutely aware of who and what have been excluded — which regions, which communities, which forms of filmmaking — and he makes no claim to universality. Instead, he expresses excitement at the prospect of future filmmakers “blowing a bomb” under his version of film history, just as he has challenged those who came before him.

His passions are evident: a deep love for Japanese, Egyptian, and Syrian documentary traditions, and an abiding admiration for Agnès Varda. Yet he does not remain in the obscure. Hollywood, popular cinema, and even fiction films appear as vital reference points — a reminder that documentary does not exist in isolation but in dialogue with the broader cinematic landscape. Cousins insists that we need the popular as much as the forgotten, the mainstream as much as the marginal.

The result is a series that feels both accessible and expansive: rewarding for dedicated cinephiles while remaining welcoming to those new to documentary history. I will certainly be seeking out the remaining chapters when the full series premieres, and I would highly recommend that anyone with even a passing interest in documentary cinema do the same!

Second is from an interview with Cousins in The National (subscribe here):

I ask if he remembers the first documentary that made an impression on him, and he’s quick to zoom in on his childhood.

“I was brought up in a home where there was never a discussion about culture or creativity. I mean, I didn’t even know documentaries were directed.

“Growing up in Belfast, there must have been a Panorama about the Troubles, so when I was a wee boy, maybe about age seven, I remember seeing dead bodies from Belfast in coffins. And there was the shock in that – to see fear and war on TV.

“I knew that there was fear in our community, in our city, but to see that TV could report this was probably the first moment I became aware of documentaries. That documentary had this power to shock. Combined with that, it had a moral seriousness.”

Back in his Edinburgh flat on a Zoom call, I remind him of the Q&A session from Berlin and his pride in showing a large paper chart that outlined the enormous planning behind The Story Of Documentary Film: “I always use charts on big sheets of paper – I’m a visual person more than a verbal person – so any project must start, almost like a child’s, with a big piece of wallpaper to get the shape of it.

"I realised I wanted to tell the story broadly chronologically. I could have done it by themes, but I felt most people don’t know this chronology, so I put the decades along the top from the 1890s to 2020s and then down the side was the most important bit – the parts of the world – the countries, and the continents. It was crucial for me that the project was international and not Eurocentric or Atlanticist.”

He’s passionate that Africa, India and South America should be represented. And he’s an internationalist suspicious of those who say the greatest movies are all from America and Europe.

We talk too about how he has situated the decades quite specifically – rather than randomly – as for example using Egypt when he’s talking about the 1950s, the age of decolonialisation. Or America in the 1960s, the time of Black Panthers. As for the 1970s, he homes in on Scotland because of the arrival of North Sea oil and the first UK feminist collectives being set up in Edinburgh.

We digress into talk on Scottish directors and Scottish documentaries …

“Scotland has always made good documentaries, and it’s exactly 100 years since the sainted John Grierson came up with the phrase ‘documentary’.

“You think too of Harry Watt and Night Mail (1936), most people don’t know he was an Edinburgh lad. In the 1950s, there was Margaret Tait.

“More recently, there’s Emma Davie and Graham Fagen too, with his Robert Burns film, The Slave’s Lament. In each era, Scotland has made interesting work.

“One of my favourites is Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film on Evelyn Glennie – Touch The Sound. We’ve always done good work because the industry in Scotland has never been Hollywood; it’s at the lower budget end: fertile ground.”

More here

The annual report from the independent land researcher Andy Wightman, Who Owns Scotland?, has just come out. [This report from the Scotsman gives it context], Andy’s blog announcing it is below:

SCOTLAND’S CONCENTRATED PATTERN OF LANDOWNERSHIP CONTINUES TO GET WORSE

Today I publish Who Owns Scotland 2025, the second annual report on landownership in Scotland. The first (Who Owns Scotland 2024) was published in March 2025.

In addition to a high level analysis of who owns Scotland, how much they own, the types of legal structures involved and the top 25 landowners in 2025, the report also also tracks the pattern of landownership over time. This blog is merely a brief signpost to the report whose key finding is the now well established trend of fewer and fewer owners owning more and more of Scotland.

Read it here. It is only 16 pages long.

The first good statistical record we have of landownership was published in 1874 by the government. The Return of Owners of Lands and Heritages Scotland 1872-1873 provided an account of the names and addresses of proprietors of land outside burghs of over 20,000 population.

The second data point is 1970 when an Aberdeen University geographer, Dr Roger Millman published The Proprietary Survey of Scotland. the exercises was funded by the Countryside Commission for Scotland, the Highlands and Islands Development Board, the Scottish Landowners’ Federation and two academic funders.

The data and maps from this study were later deposited in the National Archives of Scotland and formed the basis of John McEwen’s book, Who Owns Scotland first published in 1979.

Then in 1996 I published my own book of the same name and have been monitoring the changing pattern of landownership since then with the basic information published on my Who Owns Scotland website.

I now know the ownership of just under 77% of rural Scotland and the pattern (though not the ownership) of a further 5%. The report I publish today contains the analysis of 7872 records abstracted from my database as at 31 December 2025.

At a high level, the pattern remains little changed from the past 50 or more years with:

• 83% of rural land held by private entities,

• 11.3% by public bodies such as Scottish Ministers and Scottish Natural Heritage

• and the remainder by not-for-profit groups such as community bodies and environmental and educational organisations.

The core distinguishing element in Scotland’s pattern of landownership has always been the very concentrated pattern of ownership by a small number of owners. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of Europe.

This contrast is mainly explained by Scotland’s law of inheritance whereby children have no legal right to inheritance land. Across Europe by contrast, children do have such a right and so over the past 250 years or so, large holdings have been split up in to much smaller ones as each generation inherits the land.

This has, in turn led to a strong co-operative culture in the Nordics, France and elsewhere whereby small landowners have established powerful co-operatives.

Since the survey of 1874, this pattern of concentrated ownership (half of rural Scotland was then owned by just 118 landowners) has been very slowly changing. More and more (though still very, very few in absolute terms) owners own more and more of Scotland. This trend continued until some point between 2005 and 2010 (I have not yet established the exact date).

In 2012, 440 owners owned 50% of the privately-owned rural land, 989 owned 60% and 3161 owned 70%.

Certainly from this point onwards the long slow but steady reduction in concentration evident since 1874 goes into reverse. Statistics published in the 2024 report reveal 421 owners owning 50% and similar reductions at 60% and 70%.

Today, the 2025 report reveals further concentration over the past year with now just 408 landowners owing 50% of the privately-owned rural and 877 owning 60% and 2413 owning 70%.

The graph at the top of this blog shows this trend with the red (50%) and pink (60%) bars showing the declining number of owners since at least 2012.

This trend has been driven by existing owners acquiring more land either by buying neighbouring land or (more commonly) by financial investment companies such as Gresham House and others building portfolios of landholdings across Scotland.

This is being driven by the economic returns and favourable tax status available from forestry and the growing speculative market in carbon offsetting and carbon credits with companies such as Oxygen Conservation and others acquiring land across Scotland. Neither of these two examples owned any land in Scotland ten years ago.

Despite the professed desire by Scottish Ministers to tackle Scotland’s concentrated pattern of landownership, nothing meaningful has been done to do so. If it had, then we would see published plans with timelines and targets. We have neither.

Instead The Scottish Government and the City of London Partnership Agreement 2026 was signed in January 2026 and follows earlier agreements in promoting and encouraging “green and sustainable finance”.

It is largely the financialisation and commodification of Scotland’s land by London based institutions that is driving the significant and long standing trend of re-concentration of landownership.

Scottish Ministers need to decide whether their priority is the interests of the City of London Corporation or of Scottish land reform for the people of Scotland.

Scotland is going backwards when it comes to tackling the uniquely concentrated pattern of privately-owned rural land. When I first published statistics in 1996, I fully expected that over time this concentration would slowly be diluted. Instead, it has increased with fewer and fewer owners owning more and more land.

There is an election in May but I am not holding my breath for any answers.

More here.

From the Falling Thermal Minewater Energy Project:

The village of Fallin, near Stirling is set to take a major step toward a sustainable future as the Fallin Thermal Minewater Energy Project announces it has secured a total of £150,000 in funding to explore the potential of heating the community using water from its abandoned coal mines.

The project, led by Fallin Community Voice, has been awarded an initial £50,000 funding from Stirling Council at its budget last week to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study. This critical milestone has successfully unlocked a further £100,000 in funding from the Centre for Net Zero High Density Buildings (CeNZ-HighDB), a UKRI-funded research collaboration involving five Scottish universities.

For decades, the flooded shafts of the former Polmaise Colliery have sat silent beneath the village. This project aims to harness the natural geothermal heat stored in that water, using heat pump technology to provide low-carbon, affordable warmth to the Fallin Community Garden and, eventually, local homes and businesses.

A Legacy Reclaimed: From the Picket Line to the Heat Pipe

The history of Fallin is inseparable from the Polmaise Colliery, which was the heartbeat of the village for nearly a century. Known for its high-quality anthracite and its fiercely resilient workforce, Polmaise was famously the first pit in Scotland to go on strike in 1984, standing at the vanguard of the miners' strike to protect the industry and the community’s livelihood. When the pit finally closed in 1987, it marked the end of an era of heavy industry, but the spirit of the "Polmaise men" remained woven into the fabric of the village.

By repurposing the flooded shafts that these miners once worked, the project seeks to honor that heritage. Rather than leaving the mines as a relic of the past, this initiative treats them as a vast, untapped thermal reservoir. It effectively re-envisions the miners' legacy—transitioning from the extraction of carbon-heavy coal to the harvest of carbon-free heat, ensuring that the ground beneath Fallin serves the community once again.

 Counsellor Alasdair MacPherson, Lead Volunteer for the Fallin Minewater Thermal Project, said:

 "This is a transformative moment for Fallin. Our village was built on coal, and for generations, our community powered the nation. Now, we have the opportunity to use that same mining heritage to power our own green revolution.

“Securing this £150,000 means we can move from a 'what if' to a 'how to.' It’s about energy security, lowering carbon footprints, and proving that former mining villages can be at the forefront of the Net Zero transition."

“The feasibility study will assess the technical requirements for extracting heat from the mine workings and evaluate how a local heat network could be designed to serve high-density areas of the village.

“The partnership with CeNZ-HighDB is particularly significant, as it connects Fallin with world-leading academic expertise in retrofitting and decarbonising Scotland’s buildings.

“The Fallin Thermal Minewater Energy Project is a community-driven initiative. Once the feasibility study is complete, the results will be shared with the community to help shape the next stages of development.

Naomi Ross from Fallin Community Voice added:

"We are grateful to Stirling Council and our councillors who have ringfenced funding in this year's budget for exploration of community-owned renewable energy options in Fallin. The prospect of harnessing geothermal energy from Fallin's mines in an exciting one. As food and energy prices continue to rise, this is one of a number of options we are exploring, to help find long term ways to improve our village's resilience."

For more information on the project, click here

Thanks to The Drouth for this cross-post from Sc0ttish architect Malcolm Fraser (here’s a recent news story that puts this piece in context, from The Scotsman]:

Is it safe for modernist architecture to come out yet? It’s certainly not safe, from a sustainable point of view, to knock all the modernist buildings down. No matter what the tourists might want in our ‘heritage capitals’. As the Belfast taxi drivers say: ‘There’s two histories here, ye know.’ Malcolm Fraser considers another looming crater in the hollowing out of the city and its potential reconstruction as part of the pretty stage set.

Good Jobs and Embodied Carbon; not More Hotels and Landfill

I knew a man who owned a Highland Inn and marketed it to attract tourists, bikers and kayakers. He didn’t like locals and eventually, madly, barred them, including regulars who, yearly, contributed many thousands each, into his coffers.

Equally, he turned away potential visitors who even interacted with anything vaguely “community”, questioning my friends who rang up for a room and refusing their booking, as they confirmed that they were up for an event at the nearby, locally-owned, community-run Village Hall.

He’s moved on, and we might ponder the truth: that visitors to a Highland Inn might come for the tourist offer but also appreciate local colour, with grizzled Heelanders, in their workgear, ensconced in the corner That a diverse, mixed place is friendly, anchored and interesting, and therefore good for business. As we might even hope that the Heelanders enjoy the parade of visitors.

I experienced an Edinburgh version of my Innkeeper, when a senior Scottish tourism tsar, some years ago, lectured me at an Edinburgh cultural conference that – as my memory paraphrases – the primacy of the booming tourist economy meant that it was my civic duty, as an airb’n’b-blocker, squatting in the centre of my town, to move out, to the suburbs or anywhere, and give my house up to the hordes.

There’s huge local concern around tourism and the Festivals, and that particular cultural cleansing view of a city that sometimes seems no longer ours. The resistance can, at times, tip over into something sour and surly. Pitchforky, we might cry it.

We are so lucky that we live in such a dynamic, historic city, and it’s lovely that folks want to come here; and as we are people who might wish a reputation for welcome – and as travellers ourselves, who love a vibrant, complex, historic weekend away – surliness would be shameful. But what is a vibrant visitor economy if it does not enrich that place, instead of monopolising it? And even that economy might understand – as my Innkeeper might have – that a city hollowed-out for it only is dull, a stage-set.

These matters are to the fore over the fate of two Edinburgh institutions: CodeBase, the tech incubator, whose 900 jobs underpin Edinburgh’s hope for the broad and diverse economy the city needs; and Argyle House, the grand, 60s modernist complex they inhabit. The big US Real Estate Fund that bought the site, presumably on the “hope value” of demolishing it (vile phrase), wants a “mix” of replacements that market forces will direct towards hotel and general visitor economy ones.

I’ve authored an open letter to the Politicians, Amenity Group Leaders and general Edinburgh Civic Worthies named as “Proposal of Application” recipients to the advance Planning notice, and tried to gather the argument against into three headings:

1.Economic 

The strongest part, in many independent economists’ views, of Edinburgh and Scotland’s economy is the unheralded and self-generated tech and crafts infrastructure – techy start-ups, crafts daubers, fiddlers and dreamers – occupying cheap space and doing the real innovation, generating the innovative jobs that Government aye begs for. Argyle House has nurtured two unicorn companies – ie now capitalised at over a billion dollars. Do we really think it’s progress to put them out onto the street for more hotels and executive flats?

2.Heritage and Placemaking

Argyle House is a distinguished modernist building, in a city that continues to erase its recent heritage. In its sturdy, grey monumentality it is characteristically Edinburgh; plus in placemaking it does a nice thing in stepping back from the tight junction at the head of West Port. This is a move that Patrick Geddes, doyen of Town Planning and Edinburgh Hero, would have surely approved, given his adage of “letting some light in”. Plus, I recall a Hibs Supporters Forum where Edinburgh taxi drivers praised it to the skies – local folk with good taste.

3.Carbon and Climate Doublespeak

It is madness, given the seriousness of the Climate Emergency and the ocean of waste that we condemn to landfill, to knock down a sturdy, solid and useful building, condemning huge amounts of embodied carbon. As an architect I find it particularly distressing to see the plans being advanced by a former President of my professional institute, who has proclaimed himself a “Climate Champion”.

WHAT MIGHT THE OUTCOME BE?

Despite the Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Chamber of Commerce banging on about carbon, consultation and economic diversity – the Chamber, for instance, has just published its “Unleashing our Economic Ambition” “call to arms” that is specifically about protecting and strengthening this part of the economy – the assumption is that we will waste our breath in our efforts.

The lengthy strictures in the new National Planning Framework are entirely toothless, with the long pathways of consultation and analysis serving as a sort of displacement activity. They create admin and bullshit consultancies that exhaust those that care, so that the Establishment can attain the appearance of caring before business-as-usual has its way with our city.

Worse than this is the current obsession with “Inward Investment”, so that wealthy Americans adding, here, to the more than £10 billion a year extracted from our Scottish economy is seen as an unquestionably good thing, to be prioritised over our wee, local tech incubators.

WASTE

I was asked to summarise my three points in one and that one was Waste: the sturdy, useful building and its carbon sent to landfill; the cultural cleansing of the city’s 20th Century, modernist architectural heritage; and the 900 significant jobs underpinning a diverse economy, scattered to the wind.

If we accept that a primary purpose of the City is to generate wealth, the question is who harvests a surplus, and we’re continuing to ask our Governments and their agencies for affirmative action to retain that wealth for its people.

Original version - support the Drouth here

From the Jupiter Artland blurb:

Extraction

11 April – 26 July Ballroom & Steadings Gallery

Jupiter Artland, The Steadings, Bonnington House, Wilkieston, Edinburgh, EH27 8BY

From April, Extraction explores how energy systems shape culture, land and belief, through work by artists Carol Rhodes, john gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin and John Latham.

Their practices are set in dialogue with Jupiter’s own layered landscape, where traces of the shale gas industry, North Sea petroleum economy and contemporary renewables are simultaneously visible.

Rather than presenting energy history as linear progress, Extraction reveals a repetitive cycle built on belief, optimism and inevitability. Each energy era produces material wealth, cultural identity and technological confidence. Each eventually becomes residue, memory or monument.

Debates around energy transition are dominated by technological narratives and political urgency. This exhibition instead investigates and reflects upon the emotional and ideological structure of energy systems, considering labour, identity and landscape without nostalgia or triumphalism.

After the erosion of energy systems, what remains is infrastructure, waste, altered land and symbolic fragments. Jupiter’s own landscape is also part of the exhibition – walking around the sculpture park, visitors can encounter views as they gaze in various directions out from the the artland; the historic shale bings – Scotland’s first oil industry – and the landing site for the Forties oil pipeline out to the North Sea, as well as the solar-field which powers Jupiter’s site.

Extraction is not a survey, commemoration or an environmental warning, but a lens offering clarity on how societies build and unbuild worlds through energy.

It invites the viewer to recognise themselves inside a cycle rather than at its conclusion, to reconsider progress, permanence and the future.

With thanks to Bella Caledonia for the cross-post. Support their excellent work here, subscribe here.

The Scottish Parliament’s passing of Community Wealth Building legislation comes at a profound and turbulent time.

Climate breakdown is accelerating, the global economic order is shifting, and the geopolitical conditions that shaped the last seventy years are dissolving.

And these global pressures expose something closer to home—Scotland’s own long‑running vulnerability to extractive economic forces.

For centuries, Scotland’s economy has been shaped by extraction of land, materials, labour, people, and resources. From the Highland Clearances, through North Sea Oil and Gas to mining, steel, and shipbuilding: the wealth created has been too readily dissipated or offshored.

The pattern is familiar: wealth is generated locally but extracted and captured elsewhere. And even today, as Scotland becomes a renewables powerhouse, profits and dividends from our energy boom risk once again leaving communities. This pattern must end.

Every pound that leaks away is a pound lost for wages, for businesses, for skills and enterprise.  The Scottish Parliament’s decision to pass Community Wealth Building (CWB) legislation represents a different approach which puts ownership, control, and local wealth circulation at the heart of our economic development.

A key part of this shift is a return to place‑based economics in which we use what we have more effectively—our people, our scarce public resources, our land, institutions, and productive capacity. This is about improving productivity not only by growing sectors but by strengthening the systemic relationship between economic activity, place, and ownership.

Our future productivity depends on how economic sectors are even more deeply rooted in inclusive ownership models - ones that deeply relate to the communities and regions around them.

The world has taken notice. In countries wrestling with global change, economic fragility and inequality, Scotland’s CWB journey is being watched with genuine curiosity. Some ask me: “This Bill is impressive—but will Scotland be bold? Will it reverse the tide of wealth extraction?”

For many, Scotland offers practical hope: a common‑sense response to an economy that is going wrong. After nearly a decade of Scottish CWB activity, we know CWB works. The challenge now is to make it work at scale.

CWB is not Scottish in origin. The term coined by the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, OH, has since been developed in Preston, Amsterdam, and South Korea: a global movement has emerged. But Scotland has not simply imported it; we have given it a new expression.

Nearly eight years of practice—beginning in North Ayrshire, home to Scotland’s first CWB strategy—have shown what a different kind of economic development can look like. 

Across Scotland, new patterns of wealth are emerging. Public institutions are directing procurement toward local enterprises. Fair work for all workers is gaining traction, though far too many still endure poor pay and conditions. Inclusive and Democratic Business models (Community enterprises, cooperatives, employee‑owned firms, development trusts, and social enterprises) are expanding, though they are not yet central to economic policy and strategy.

More democratic control over land and property is developing, yet financial flows must be stronger and land reform still lacks the strength the moment demands. We have seen some expansion across the country supported by the CWB Centre of Excellence hosted by EDAS, and work by  Improvement service, enterprise agencies, community organisations and public‑sector partners.

In a recent Future Economy Scotland publication by Miriam Brett and myself, we argue that whilst the new bill legitimises and amplifies existing CWB activity, it also provides a platform for new economic development duties. Local CWB plans will ensure effective coordination, deeper and more far‑reaching policy development, and ultimately bolder action.

Some argue the Bill is not radical enough - pointing out that in legislative terms, it does not fundamentally overhaul the system in one swoop.  But we are operating within the realpolitik of a world shaped by multiple crises and decades of neoliberal dominance.

We inhabit an economic order in which extractive models have become deeply institutionalised, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, and where workers and communities are systematically dispossessed of economic agency.

Transforming such a landscape requires a system change to the very architecture of how wealth is produced, circulated, and held.

Of course lofty ambitions can get watered down, lost in bureaucracy, or left to drift. Therefore, the Statutory Guidance outlined in the Bill is crucial. It must clearly set out responsibilities: who does what, and how every organisation plays its part.

Councils need to know how this duty fits within the wider system—what is expected of large anchor institutions, how enterprise agencies should align, and what national government must contribute. And this must be backed by real resources and a refocusing of what we already have.

And the way that this Statutory guidance is created matters. It must be co‑produced—national, local government, businesses and communities shaping the “how” together, updating the approach as learning accumulates, and building a shared long‑term framework that endures. The guidance is how the Bill becomes real in practice.

Scotland is not promising instant transformation. What it offers is something more valuable: a strong platform and a practical blueprint for building a new economy through everyday work. Step by step. Community by community. Action by action.

The economies that prosper in the years ahead will be those who embrace economic democracy, build not just from outwith, but from within- through powerful and grounded circulation of wealth and investment. Scotland through CWB now has a platform to accelerate this transformation. 

Cross-posted from LinkedIn by Daniel Gear, from the Shetland-based energy consultants, Voar:

On Monday 9th of February, the UK Government and Great British Energy launched the Local Power Plan, which commits “up to £1 billion” to support community-owned clean energy, with a vision that by 2030 every community will have the opportunity to own a local energy project.

I’m pretty much the target audience for this. I run an energy transition consultancy. I co-authored the Just Transition Commission’s research report on community benefit and the energy transition. And I live in the South Mainland of Shetland, in a community that - at this very moment - wants to do exactly what this plan says every community should be able to do.

In every analysis I write - and acknowledging the age of techno-tribalism - I feel a compulsion to re-state that I am not against energy developments. What motivates and concerns me is the belief that government and industry are heading down a path that generates more-and-more immovable opposition, not because people are anti-progress, but because the current model of development is extractive, and people can see that it is.

I regularly preach to my colleagues that the energy transition behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: the harder and faster people try to push developments through communities, the firmer the resistance becomes. A different approach is needed, and I had hoped the Local Power Plan would be it.

So, last night, I read the plan… Then stayed up all night writing this.

One million dollars! (or was it a billion quid?)

Before getting into the detail of this, I had to go back and check what Labour actually said in their 2024 manifesto. I was sure that the pre-election Local Power Plan committed to £1bn per year, rather than the £1bn across the ~3 year spending review period. Yes, it did say that; £600 million in grants to local authorities and up to £400 million in low-interest loans to community organisations per year.

That would deliver 8GW of community energy by 2030, a million new energy owners, and 20,000 new projects. That was the offer to the electorate. Admittedly that was before the discovery of the Financial Black Hole, so maybe some of the original commitment was spaghettified.

In the Local Power Plan (shortening now to LPP), the grant/loan split is not specified. The 8GW target, the million owners, the 20,000 projects, none of these appear in the published plan.

This could be because that detail is being held back until the “GBE Capital Toolkit” launches in Summer 2026, following what is described as a “product design sprint” with the sector. “Product […] design […] sprint”. (@Voar employees, consider this notice that this term now falls into the same category as “off island”, or mistaking community benefits with community wealth, and that uttering or writing the term is the linguistic equivalent of pishing in the kirk porch, and will result in your summary dismissal. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER).

It’s unclear whether the £1bn includes the roughly £304 million in programmes already committed, specifically, the £255 million Solar Partnerships Scheme, £16 million Mayoral Renewables Fund, £21.5 million in devolved partnerships, £5 million Community Fund. Whether these sit inside or outside the headline figure is not stated, although the inclusion of detail on these projects probably implies they are already part of the £1bn.

The consent problem

The recent article in the Guardian by Severin Carrell (“Miliband pledges up to £1bn for community green energy schemes”) made a good job of framing the political motivation that sits behind the LPP. To summarise: Ministers hope community ownership will combat growing opposition to energy infrastructure (pylons, wind farms, substations, etc.) particularly in rural areas now being courted by the Conservatives and Reform UK.

Their logic is straightforward: giving communities a stake will help them to support the infrastructure. It’ll grease the wheels. Miliband said the correct words: “we want you to be able to own and control clean energy so the profits flow into your community not simply out to the big energy companies.”

The challenge now is that the mechanism has to actually work in the places where consent matters most - the communities hosting the infrastructure. And this is where the plan risks falling apart.

Gridlock

In England and Wales, community energy projects of up to 5MW can connect to the distribution grid without a Transmission Impact Assessment, or TIA (this was following a rule change - CMP446 for the boffins - in May 2025). This means that a community group in Bristol or Barnsley can now develop a meaningful project and connect it without effectively having to enter the transmission queue.

On the Scottish mainland, that threshold is now 200kW. On the Scottish islands, where I live, it’s 50kW. That means a community in England can connect a project 100 times larger than anything a community can build in Shetland.

Any projects above those thresholds get drawn into the connections reform queue; the Gate 1 / Gate 2 system. The National Energy System Operator (NESO) paused new applications in January 2025, and connection dates for any new projects in this part of the world are 2035 at the earliest (remember the target of 8GW of community renewables by 2030).

This is the thing that should trouble folk who care about public consent for the energy transition: the reason community projects can’t get on the grid until the mid-2030s is that the queue is full of large developer-led commercial projects, many of which haven’t been built yet, in the very communities being asked to accept them.

The grid is booked out by the same model that the Local Power Plan is supposed to provide an alternative to. Communities can’t participate because the developers got there first, which means one of the few options available is for communities to buy into projects that they may not support.

To be fair, the LPP does acknowledge the Scottish barriers. It commits to “working with Ofgem, NESO, the Scottish Government, and network operators” to address it. Don’t forget about the host communities though, otherwise its more non-Newtonian fluid for you.

Community wealth building?

The plan uses the term “community wealth building” repeatedly. It is misusing the term.

“Community wealth building” is unfortunately being chronically sloganised by public bodies up and down the country now, but it’s actually a specific framework, developed by my friends in Democracy Collaborative, and adapted for the UK through the Preston Model, and the work of CLES. Community wealth building has 5 pillars: plural ownership; making financial power work locally; fair employment; progressive procurement; and socially productive use of land and property.

The LPP engages with one of these pillars (asset ownership) and largely ignores the other four. Preston redirected hundreds of millions in anchor institution spend into local businesses. The LPP is focused on grants and loans for hardware.

This irked me, because language shapes expectations. When you tell a community in Shetland or the Western Isles, or the Highlands that you’re going to build their wealth, and what you actually deliver is a few solar panels on a school roof, you disappoint people, you discredit the concept itself and make the next genuine attempt harder.

Rooftop solar on public buildings is the plan’s largest spending commitment (£255 million). I don’t think that’s community wealth building by any definition. When you put panels on a school, the school’s electricity bill goes down which = good. But nobody in that community gets to decide whether the savings go to a nursery, a social housing project, or some other community building measure. There is a difference between an energy efficiency measure and community wealth building, and the LPP blurs it.

Who benefits from the resources of a place?

Britain’s renewable resource is concentrated in the North and West. The demand sits in the South. Communities in Shetland, the Highlands, the Western Isles, and rural Wales are hosting enormous volumes of infrastructure - wind farms, cable routes, converter stations, batteries, transmission lines – mostly to serve demand hundreds of miles away.

Shetland alone has 443MW of Viking operational, up to 2.8GW of proposed offshore wind, three further onshore wind farms in development, and a second HVDC link planned for 2035. Not to mention overhead transmission pylons, battery parks, HVDC substations. And on the demand side there is ammonia, eFuels, all sorts of clever ideas to subsidy-farm-I-mean-provide-jobs-and-save-the-planet.

The communities carrying the heaviest infrastructure burden are precisely those locked out by the TIA [Transmission Impact Assessment, remember] thresholds. They're stuck behind a connections queue full of developer-led projects, and now offered programme funding designed for English public buildings.

If the answer to “you’re industrialising our landscape so multinationals can export our wind” is rooftop solar on a primary school, it doesn’t neutralise the criticism! I’ve written about this before, but Reform UK doesn’t need to fabricate grievances here. The structural inequity is real, and the LPP might inadvertently expose it further.

The view from an organised, ambitious, industrious community

We want to do something with the extraordinary wind resource on our doorstep - the same wind that strips the heat and drives up bills through winter to levels most folk could scarcely believe. Unless something changes (i.e. dedicated grid access for community projects as per Community Energy Scotland’s call), we won’t be able to build generation above 50kW until at least 2035.

And that’s because the grid queue is full of the projects we’re being asked to host (by then there could be 60,000 times the 50kW generation limit built by commercial developers on the Shetland transmission side, that hasn’t yet been constructed as of today). We could fit solar panels to a community building, but let’s be honest, that’s not going to transform anything.

What would actually work

I don’t want to just criticise. For communities in England and Wales with grid access and suitable building stock, some of this plan will genuinely help, and that’s fair enough, it’s probably who DESNZ / GBE mostly had in mind when it was being drafted.

But for host communities at the sharp end, what’s needed looks different. We need a meaningful stake in the generation assets already operating around us; not voluntary benefit funds at £5,000 per installed MW, but structured ownership producing real revenue. The mandatory shared ownership offer promised for consultation in 2026 needs to arrive with teeth.

We need grid connection capacity reserved for community-scale generation in host communities. The Community Energy Scotland proposal for community energy to be designated as “needed” within the connections reform process is exactly right. Communities carrying infrastructure burden deserve priority access, not a decade-long queue behind commercial projects.

We need the TIA threshold in Scotland raised.

And if we’re going to use the term community wealth building, it has to be used properly.

Too late?

This plan arrives when the infrastructure it is meant to build consent for is already being built. And communities feel like they needed meaningful participation five years ago.

Aiming to bolster public support for the energy transition, through a scheme that structurally excludes the communities carrying the biggest burden, is a fundamental miscalculation in my view. You can’t build consent retrospectively, and you can’t do it with a plan that offers the windiest, most infrastructure-heavy communities in Britain the least ability to participate.

Local power is self-evidently a good idea. But can the LPP deliver it? Maybe, with more work. But from Shetland (which is probably irrelevant to UKGov’s masterplan anyway, since it’s full of non-Labour-voting, non-Newtonian people), the answer - for now - is no.

From National Theatre of Scotland [their 20th anniversary schedule is here]

Everyone's got a story to tell…What's yours?

In our 20th birthday year and for the first time ever, National Theatre of Scotland is inviting you to share the real-life stories that you think deserve to be told on Scotland's stages.

We’ll create a shortlist from all the entries and then one incredible story will be selected by public vote and brought to life by a team of leading Scottish theatre artists, for public presentation in 2027.

Everyone has got a story to tell, what’s yours?

To find out more and submit a story, simply click ‘submit a story’ or the button below:

What we’re looking for 

• Real-life stories rooted in history, place, or community.

• Personal or family stories that deserve a wider audience.  

• Stories that resonate deeply through humour, resilience, struggle, triumph or hope.  

Stories can be submitted in written, audio, or video formats, in written or verbal English, or in BSL. 

Who can apply?  

This opportunity is open to anyone living in Scotland who has not previously been involved in professional theatre making or is undertaking training to become a theatre professional. We believe everyone has a story that deserves to be shared and welcome stories of all types, from all walks of life. You don’t need to have any experience of writing or amateur theatre-making to enter.

If you are an existing theatre-maker with a project idea and want to contact NTS about ways we can support you, you can find out more here.

Things to Consider Before Sharing A Story  

This must be a true story, and, if it is about living subjects, you must have permission to share it.   

If this is your personal story, please take care of yourself and the people included in the story by considering whether anyone would feel hurt in the telling of the story, or anyone’s reputation will get damaged.    

Are you happy for your story to be developed into a piece of theatre? If not, do not share your story with us.  

If you are under 18 years old, you will need a parent/guardian to sign consent for you to submit your story.  

We will only develop the chosen story.  We will not use any of the other stories submitted as the starting point for future National Theatre of Scotland productions. However, projects about stories that are already in the public domain that are submitted (but not selected) through True Story, may already be in progress or become commissioned by National Theatre Scotland in the future, regardless of your submission.  

Selection Criteria

A selection panel made up of National Theatre Scotland staff with external panel members as required, will review submissions before a shortlist is put to a public vote.

When deciding on a chosen story, the following questions will be used as guidance by the selection panel:   

• How excited are we about the story?  

• How unique or important does the story feel?  

• How well suited is the story as the basis for theatrical production?  

• How well do the selection of stories and applicants represent the diversity of Scotland.  

Please Note: If there are multiple versions of the same story submitted by different people, only the most compelling version will be shortlisted e.g  a historical story.

Tips For Submitting Your Story 

Before beginning, start with the basics.  Ask yourself:   

• Who is the main character and what’s their situation?   

• What do they want?   

• What gets in their way?   

• How does it all wrap up?   

For more tips read our Guide to Writing a Good Story below.

20 years of compelling real-life stories

Over the last 20 years, the National Theatre of Scotland has gained a world-wide reputation for turning compelling real life Scottish stories into brilliant new plays that have been shared with audiences in Scotland and beyond. 

The soldiers in the Black Watch regiment, deployed to Iraq in Black Watch.  The group of girls from Glasgow, who fought for their friend to be saved from deportation in Glasgow Girls.  The story of Adam who crossed borders and genders to find himself in Adam. The historical exploits of three Scottish medieval Kings in The James Plays. Or the story of Fred Goodwin and the rise of fall of RBS in Make it Happen.

All these exceptional stories have captured the imaginations of audiences over the last 20 years. And our 20th birthday programme also includes Stand and Deliver- The Lee Jeans’s Sit In which will bring the powerful story of the Lee Jean’s Factory workers to life in a new piece of touring gig theatre.

More from NTS here

News of a social centre in Glasgow meets us - Glasgow Autonomous Space, blurb below:

A collectively-run social centre in the Southside of Glasgow 

For decades now, we’ve been losing our community centres, our libraries, our swimming pools and our common spaces to government cuts, with private landlords and businesses getting priority. 

To thrive, we need to be able to be together outside of our homes and without reaching into our pockets.

​Glasgow Autonomous Space (GAS) offers an alternative option: a collectively run, autonomous (independent, self-governed) community centre in the Southside of Glasgow with no bosses and no fees.  

By creating and providing space, support and resources for ourselves -  those fighting against capitalism and its resulting harms - we can build power to make change happen together. 

GAS is run by the people who use it, destroying hierarchies (where some people are seen as more important than others) wherever we can. We are committed to helping people feel welcome, empowered and accountable to one another.

Come get involved.

One of these entry points is their regular community meals/supper clubs (next one Thursday, 26 February, 19.00-23.00). Which - according to this month’s The Skinny mag - are something of a phenomena in the city. The Skinny reports:

In the early days [of the Glasgow Autonomous Space], the 15 or so diners could easily gather around a few tables. Now, each free, weekly dinner welcomes more than 60 people to the Govanhill space.

A volunteer at GAS explains: "We have 60-plus people now and that's made up of migrants, refugees, anyone in the asylum system; we get quite a few people who have experienced homelessness; local people from the neighbourhood. I'd say that pretty much everyone walks to the meal… We’re a mutual aid network based on solidarity, community care and trust… I think it’s such a precious and important third space that you don’t see elsewhere.”

Other supper clubs mentioned in the Skinny piece (not available online) are Cuban Scran and Opn Tble (an artists’ supper club).

From the Scottish Left Review. Subscribe to them here:

The Danish model demonstrates how Scotland’s communities could co-own wind farms, writes Calum MacDonald.

The harnessing of wind energy in Scotland over the past twenty years has been truly spectacular but, unfortunately, the economic benefit at both local and national level has failed to keep pace.  There is a striking lack of Scottish presence not just in the manufacturing supply chain but also in the ownership and operation of the wind farms themselves. 

Even Scottish Power’s portfolio of wind farms is ultimately owned by its Spanish parent company, Iberdrola, and a 2025 report by Future Economy Scotland pointed out that only a quarter of Scotland’s offshore wind farms are owned by companies headquartered in the UK, far less in Scotland.

A striking example of this imbalance of ownership and benefit is the proposed super-cable, recently approved by Ofgem, designed to take 1,800MW of new green energy from wind farms in the Outer Hebrides to the national grid by 2030. 

Only 38MW – less than 2% – of all the power to be carried across the Minch will be generated by UK-owned companies.  The remaining 98% will be owned by companies from France, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Canada. 

Given that existing wind farms on the islands generate an average profit of £100,000 a year per MW, that means that up to £180 Million a year in profit generated in the Hebrides could be flowing from the island to headquarters located overseas, while less than £4 Million a year is retained to benefit the local and Scottish economy.

An even more inexplicable example can be found in the use of the Scottish government’s own forests managed by Forestry and Land Scotland.  This enormous land bank has been leased out for 1,300MW of wind farms over the past twenty years, yet hardly any of the turbines turning in the government’s own forests is Scottish owned and around a billion pounds of profit in the past decade alone has been allowed to trickle through Scotland’s fingers.

The Danish Model

It is not too late, however, to do things differently.  A typical site lease for a Scottish wind farm lasts around 25 years, in keeping with the expected lifespan of the turbines.  At the end of its lease, each wind farm is due to get ‘repowered’ with new and more efficient turbines.  At that point, developers need to apply for new leases and new planning consents to match. 

In Scotland, the entire onshore industry will be going through this process over the next twenty years and this provides a golden opportunity for both the Scottish and the UK government to deliver a policy reset and finally bring a better balance between national economic benefit and international investment. 

Other countries already do it differently and provide easily adaptable models for us to follow.  In Denmark, for example, over 50% of onshore wind farms are locally and community-owned, including by local development trusts, by cooperatives and by municipal companies. 

Furthermore, all new wind developments by private companies are obliged to offer 20% part-ownership to the local host community.  Far from deterring corporate enterprise or international investment, this sensible balance between public and private interest has enabled Denmark to build some of the most successful energy companies in the world, both in the supply chain and in wind farm development and ownership.

Can this be replicated in Scotland?  The good news is that attitudes are at last beginning to change at government level.  Whereas previous policy makers thought of community-owned energy as a nice but niche sector whose benefits were small-scale, it is now increasingly appreciated that, in terms of local economic impact, community owned wind farms can deliver far more than any corporate wind farm can do, regardless of size. 

A good example of this is the Beinn Ghrideag community wind farm in Lewis (of which I am a director) which has returned £10 million in profit to a local development trust in the past decade.  By comparison, Whitelee, south of Glasgow, the largest corporate wind farm in the UK and fully sixty times bigger than Being Ghrideag, has returned just £9 million in community benefit payments over the period.

In terms of sheer economic impact, then, it is clear that such models of community ownership can truly move the needle and that we need new policies to scale up this sector and make it central to Scotland’s – and Britain’s – energy future. 

Signs of a Scottish Reset

This reset can be achieved without huge new public spending or complicated new parliamentary legislation.  Politicians and policy makers can use the powers and budgets they already have to back the community model and grow it to its full potential.

Last year, for example, a coalition of community bodies, led by Community Energy Scotland, met with Gillian Martin, the Minister for Energy in the Scottish government, to press for a change of policy giving local communities the right of first refusal on wind farm sites in the national forest estate when their leases come up for renewal, instead of those sites simply being tendered on the open market. 

Last November, the government agreed that ten of their smallest sites will be offered first to local communities with a grace period of 15 months to come forward with development proposals that are acceptable to Forestry Land Scotland. 

This represents a truly significant and welcome change of approach and it will mean that millions of pounds will eventually return to these local economies which would otherwise have been lost.  It is still only a first step, of course, and we will continue to advocate that the whole forest estate should be opened up in the same way.  There should be no cap on community ambition or potential.

At the same time, we have been pressing the new Labour government to make a similarly radical break from the laissez-faire, hands-off approach of previous UK administrations through a number of new policies. 

One of the proposals which the government is currently consulting on is for private developers to be required to pay a specified annual community benefit per MW rather than for such payments to be left to developer goodwill as at present.  This would formalise current best practice but, of course, would still leave the vast bulk of profits going elsewhere. 

Therefore, we are also using the government’s consultation to press strongly for the adoption of the Danish policy, cited above, and to require corporate developers to offer local communities a 20% share in every new or ‘repowered’ wind farm.  Over time, this would dramatically change the landscape of the green economy in the UK, making it many times more beneficial to frontline local communities as well to the whole economy of Scotland and the UK.

To purchase their offered share, of course, communities will need to get financial backing from commercial lenders, just as the existing community-owned wind farms must do to develop their own wholly-owned schemes.  But with public bodies such as GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund standing behind these communities, commercial lending should not prove too difficult or expensive to raise. 

Indeed, banks I have talked to would be keen to invest at large scale in projects that would be so clearly community-friendly as well as climate-friendly.

These new policies have the potential to mark a radical break from past failure, delivering greater community empowerment, more social fairness and stronger local enterprise.  The current openness of both Scottish and UK governments is encouraging but to get these reforms over the line we need the support of interested community activists, trade unions, local authorities and members of all political parties.

The upcoming Scottish elections provides the ideal forum for these ideas to be debated, demanded and locked in to the political manifestos of all parties.

Calum A MacDonald is Chair of Community Energy Scotland and Founding Director of Point and Sandwick Trust. He was the MP for the Western Isles from 1987-2005.

Original at the Scottish Left Review. Subscribe to them here.

Some excellent posting on community power and renewables in Scotland on Stop Climate Chaos Scotland’s blog - see material below. Please subscribe and support to SCCS.

Scottish communities need obstacles to local energy removed

By Liz Murray, policy manager for Community Energy Scotland

Since locals on the Isle of Gigha installed four wind turbines some years ago, the benefits across the whole island have been huge. The hundreds of thousands of pounds earned from selling their locally generated electricity to the grid has come directly back into the community, which has used the cash to help fund housing developments and restorations, business unit development, moorings and tourism accommodation.

As the development manager of the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust said: “The turbine income has been absolutely essential to the success of Gigha.”

“We have grown our population from 90 to 170; we have been able to build decent housing that has retained and recruited young families to live here; we are now able to protect and restore the famous Achamore Gardens; and our new camping and motorhome facilities ensure we provide a much better visitor experience whilst reducing car-borne traffic and protecting our beautiful island.”

There are other stories like this in Scotland, where local communities own and control their own renewable energy developments. Different things are done with the money in different places – that’s what being in control is about.

But the common factor is that the income generated from community-owned renewables stays in the locality, is invested in things that benefit people across the area, and in many cases is used to bring in further income.

Research has shown that community-owned wind provides 34 times more financial benefit to local people than privately owned windfarms. And community energy projects also generate tenfold additional local employment and income impact, over and above the energy project itself.

There’s so much potential, but there aren’t nearly enough stories like that of Gigha. 

Scotland’s rural and island communities, which have some of the hardest to heat homes and the least access to the gas network, are paying some of the highest energy bills in the UK – with people in northern Scotland paying more than those in any other region for standing charges and the unit price of electricity. Yet these places also have some of the best renewable energy resources – particularly wind. 

Inhabitants in these places are seeing large-scale renewable energy infrastructure operating or being built on their doorsteps, but they aren’t feeling any positive benefits from these big developments. While public support for renewables remains very high, it’s no wonder that some Scots are starting to push back against large-scale, corporate-owned wind farms.

For Scotland to have more stories like Gigha, we urgently need the obstacles to community-owned energy to be removed. Only this way can the benefits of Scotland’s renewable energy revolution be more fairly shared.

The Just Transition – the fair move away from climate-polluting fossil fuels to a greener future for all – needs to be made a reality not just a catchphrase. And ownership is fundamental to how ‘just’ the Just Transition to renewable energy is.

So what could be done to ramp up community ownership of renewable energy? There are actions that both the Scottish and UK governments must do.

Community groups wanting to set up renewables locally need more support, including legal, commercial and planning advice as well as money to pay for the enormous amount of time that many locals currently give voluntarily to make their plans a reality.

Once they have a project plan they, crucially, need to know they’re going to get access to the grid. Recent moves by the National Energy System Operator have set this back in Scotland and we urgently need the UK government to fix this or community energy projects here risk coming to a standstill between now and 2035 just for this reason alone. 

Complete community ownership may not be practical for all communities and, in that case, there are other alternatives to help share the profits being generated by larger scale, privately owned renewables projects.

Developers should be required to offer at least 20% shared ownership to communities on all commercial projects. For those communities in the vicinity of a commercial windfarm but not wanting to take up shared ownership, a community benefit fund is the next best thing – and this should be made mandatory. Currently it’s optional. 

A Scottish Community Wealth Fund – in addition to local community benefit funds and made up of compulsory contributions from all energy developers – would complement this and fundamentally shift the dial on fairness. Funds from this would be available to all communities across Scotland, to use to make people’s lives better, since we’re all paying for the transition one way or another. 

A Scottish Community Wealth Fund would be a pioneering national approach to building equity, fairness and certainty into the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. A fund like this would help ensure the past mistake of letting Scotland’s oil wealth go into corporate hands would not be repeated.

Community Energy Scotland is pushing at both Scottish and UK level for all these changes because, through our members, we can clearly see the huge benefits that come from community ownership of energy: from insulating people’s houses and keeping local facilities like cafes and pubs running, to providing public transport where it otherwise would not exist.

With the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Plan currently being finalised and the Holyrood elections coming up in May, there’s a huge opportunity right now for all parties in Scotland to firmly get behind these ideas. We need to make sure the Just Transition really is fair and that it is done ‘with’ the people of Scotland and not ‘to’ them.

Original here

Why the rush to build enormous power-guzzling data centres could screw up Scotland’s energy ambitions, damage the environment and leave people in the dark

By Dr Kat Jones, director of APRS, a member of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland

We only need to look across the Atlantic for a taste of what’s to come. Scotland and the UK are about to be deluged by a wave of applications to construct scores of new data centres, with some proposed ‘hyperscale’ developments requiring as much energy as half a million homes.

Data centres are causing an energy crisis in parts of the US, with 13 states on the brink of rolling blackouts due to data centre energy pressure on the grid. Residents in the areas with data centres have soaring bills due to the enormous strain on the transmission network. In Ohio the grid watchdog has said there should be a moratorium on new connections for data centres.

On top of that, many developments are deploying polluting gas or diesel generators to ensure constancy of power supplies.  

The Scottish Government’s recently published draft Climate Change Plan (CCP), which lays out the policies and pathway to 2040 for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, has a strong section on increased production of electricity from renewable sources.

This is important both to replace residual fossil fuel use (like the gas plant at Peterhead) and, in due course, aging nuclear stations—but also to provide for rising demand, as heating, transport and industry are increasingly electrified. It includes some actions to help reduce demand for energy.

However, it is notable that the largest source of likely energy demand is not mentioned in the climate change plan: data centres.

The Scottish Government has been marketing Scotland as a location for data centres since a 2021 action plan. But now, with an energy crunch in the US caused by power-hungry data centres, and powerful grass roots campaigns successfully opposing them, American companies are looking elsewhere for the power and water they need to expand capacity.  

A look at Scotland’s planning portals shows that data centres with the energy capacity of nearly one and a half times the entire peak power demand of Scotland are going through planning processes right now. Yes, you read that correctly. And this could just be the tip of the iceberg. 

Only one of the sites touted in that 2021 action plan has so far actually reached the planning permission stage. There could be many, many more coming.

Of course, all of the proposed developments in planning couldn’t go ahead due to the vast amounts of energy required – they just would not get the grid connections. But there are indications that 1GW-2GW of data centre demand are likely to be built in the UK.

Even this is vast – it would increase our energy use by 25% to 50%, which makes a mockery of attempts that other industries, businesses and individuals are making to improve efficiency and reduce energy use. Scotland’s current winter peak gross demand is just over 4GW.

Importantly, data centres are not well suited for being powered by renewables because they need constant power 24/7. Data centres could reduce constraint payments – which are paid to wind farms to turn off turbines when the wind is blowing and there is not enough capacity in the transmission grid to export the energy out of Scotland. But then, the centres will rely on energy imported from elsewhere. This is likely to be from fossil fuels.

Many data centres are building batteries on-site to provide back-up, but these are generally designed to store energy for a maximum of four hours – most have just two hours of storage. This could bridge the times of day when prices peak (around teatime) but they will not cover energy requirements for the hours and days when there is a lack of wind.

That needs long-duration storage: pumped-hydro, hydrogen and such like, which is expensive to build and are needed to help balance the grid for the rest of Scotland’s economy.

Data centres will make it far harder to meet our energy targets for renewables. With Torness nuclear power station (giving a constant baseload of 1.12GW) due to close in 2028, now is precisely the wrong time to be adding inflexible energy-guzzlers into our system.

The renewable energy being created in Scotland is already spoken for. It is part of the decarbonisation efforts of the whole UK. This is why transmission connectors are being built to transport energy to England.

The crisis in the US is a harbinger of what is to come to Scotland if we allow these centres to be built. There is not enough production of gas turbines in the world to keep pace with the demand from data centres, which are increasingly building power generation capacity on site (bring your own power, or BYOP, as it is known) due to strain on the grid. 

Energy bills have sky-rocketed for consumers, diesel back-up generators are being run as a matter of course, rather than in extreme emergencies, and retired nuclear power is being brought back into operation. Jet engines from old airliners are even being used due to demand for turbines outstripping supply.

The same will happen here unless the Scottish Government and local authority planning committees have the foresight to properly consider and manage the issue.

A parliament committee recently met to discuss the energy section of the CCP today. And Edinburgh City Council is shortly due to discuss an application for a hyperscale data centre at the Gyle, on the west side of the city.

This application has been able to progress without an Environmental Impact Assessment (as have five out of eight others which have reached this stage in planning), and this is despite a plan to build diesel back-up generation just upwind of the city centre. 

It is vital that the Scottish Government’s new CCP takes into account the serious impact that building hyperscale data centres will have on Scotland’s climate ambitions and its citizens.

Original here

From Bella Caledonia - thanks for the cross-post - here’s a review of David McCrone: Changing Scotland: society, politics and identity.  Edinburgh University Press, 2025.  Subscribe, and support/donate to, Bella Caledonia.

By Dennis Smith

David McCrone, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Edinburgh University, might be described as the godfather of Scottish sociology (as in sociology applied to modern Scotland). 

His pioneering work Understanding Scotland: the sociology of a stateless nation has dominated the field since it first appeared in 1992.  Along with his late colleague Frank Bechhofer he played a key role in developing the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey.

His new book Changing Scotland may represent the summation of his career (though he warns against predicting the future).  Its title encapsulates its message, with its neat equivocation between active and passive. 

We (who inhabit the land) change Scotland more or less consciously and intentionally; but Scotland is also changed by external forces of which we have little understanding and even less control.

As a sociologist, his work is heavily data-driven: his book contains lots of tables and graphs.  But it also theoretically informed and cautious.  Data can be understood in different ways and our understandings (which are rarely unanimous) change over time. 

His methodology is structuralist in the sense proposed by the linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure. This works on two axes – synchronic (looking at the totality of structures operating at a given time). And diachronic (looking at historical changes in individual structures). 

But societies are more complex than languages.  Though individual languages evolve continually, core linguistic structures have barely changed in thousands of years.  Social structures, in contrast, have changed rapidly in recent centuries and the rate of change is accelerating.  The number of potentially relevant factors expands exponentially.

Into this mix McCrone presents a radical thesis: ‘modern Scotland has been transformed since the 1970s’ (p.1), which he sets out to explain.  Given the rate of change, sociology must be flexible in its methodology and tentative in its conclusions.  He claims that ‘Scotland sits at the nexus of three key concepts: civil society, nation and state’ (p.13), which, between them mediate society, culture and politics.

This approach rules out one-way causalities (not least economic determinism): factors interact over time and are changed by these interactions.   Most importantly, people can – and do – change their interpretations: meanings are never static.  These conclusions will annoy dogmatists of many colours.

This commitment to following empirical data leads several sacred cows to the slaughter.  While willing to use the concept of social class, McCrone emphasises that it operates in three dimensions – structure, consciousness and action –  and ‘it is uncommon to find all three in alignment’ (p.127). 

Similarly, ‘“politics” is neither the cause nor effect of social change; rather, it is the medium through which social change is read and expressed’ (p.199).  And – of course – different people read and express themselves in different ways, diachronically and synchronically.

McCrone follows the historian Dauvit Broun in tracing the development of Scottish consciousness to the late 13th century, crystallised in the nuanced conception of sovereignty expressed in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath. 

He interprets this national identity as intentional and forward-looking, more concerned with routes than roots: it might also be pictured as a precarious balancing act that somehow never quite toppled over.

All identities are unique, but Scotland’s historical trajectory has been more unique than most.  After centuries of suspension between the poles of England and France, the Reformation (1560) and dual Unions (1603 and 1707) brought Scotland firmly into the ambit of the British Empire. 

Its economy became thoroughly globalised and imperialist: ‘by 1913 Scotland probably had the most globalised economy in the world’ (p.264, quoting Jim Tomlinson), and it was exceptionally hard-hit by the inter-war recession.  This led to high levels of emigration (much higher than Ireland’s in the decades after 1945) and deindustrialisation proceeded apace despite government attempts at attracting inward investment. 

In the 1980s, the Conservatives abandoned economic dirigisme in favour of market forces: Mrs Thatcher did not intend to deindustrialise the UK or to transfer much ownership and control overseas, but that was the unintended consequence of her policies.

This sets the background for McCrone’s radical claims about the transformation of Scotland, in economics, society, politics and culture.  Demographically, slowing emigration and increasing immigration outweighed a fall in the birthrate to produce a modest increase in population after 2000.  Better education, greater equality for women and the growth of the service sector transformed the structure of the workforce. 

But Scotland’s distinctive institutions generated social understandings notably different from those in England.  The actual structure of the workforce is broadly similar in both countries, but many more Scots identify as working-class.  Alongside this, there has been a marked shift in how people prioritise their multiple social identities: on average Scots now place more importance on national identity and less on class.

McCrone is at his most interesting, but also elusive, in the closing chapters where attention switches to politics, culture and prospects for the future.  This is where tensions between data and rhetoric become visible. 

As a social scientist, he knows that data are fuzzy, incomplete and sometimes conflicting (just like human beings themselves).  Trying to track social change, sociologists ask batteries of questions, regularly repeated.  Trends are detectable but rarely clear-cut (and impossible to summarise in a short review).  Meanwhile, an author must produce quotable conclusions.

A few examples will have to suffice.  The proportion of people identifying as Scottish has not changed greatly (partly because it was always high), but the meaning of Scottishness has clearly changed.  The correlation between Scottish identification and constitutional preference (specifically on independence) has strengthened. 

Attitudes and identities in Scotland and England continue to diverge, related to the changing valences of Scottishness, Britishness, Englishness and Europeanness, where new and unpredictable alignments appear. 

McCrone argues strongly against traditional perceptions of Scotland as deviant, abnormal and even pathological (Tom Nairn takes some stick here): on the contrary, it is England and the UK that are exceptional by the standards of modern European democracy.  ‘The task … is … to account for the “abnormalities” of the British state’ (p.255).

One reason for this divergence is differing national mythologies, where myths are understood as ‘truths held to be self-evident’ (p.235).  The idea of Scotland as more egalitarian, e.g. in education (the lad o pairts), may be ‘mythical’ but it has real effects in shaping Scots’ sense of themselves. 

In a country where the mass media are overwhelmingly owned and controlled elsewhere, and thus project ‘alien’ stereotypes, Scots may be unusually conscious of the mythical aspect of identities (including their own).  Such self-knowledge may induce a sense of precarity but may also have advantages.

Another cause of divergence lies in the unswerving commitment of Westminster to an absolutist conception of sovereignty (famously queried by Lord Cooper in 1953).  Here McCrone makes his most significant political statement.  His closing chapter,  ‘Where to now?’, starts with an epigraph from Neal Ascherson: ‘For most people, devolution and independence are little more than different uniforms that can be buttoned over the single reality of self-government’. 

Sovereignty is not the same as independence: there is a crucial difference between having a right and choosing to exercise that right.  Voters are evenly split on the issue of independence but survey data shows substantial agreement that sovereignty belongs with the Scottish people, not with Westminster.  It is for Scots to decide how their sovereignty should be expressed: external interference may not be welcome.

McCrone is open-minded on the form that future socio-political structures may take:  ‘genuine nation-states hardly exist’ (p.241) and we can ‘think in terms of degrees of state-ness’ (p.31).  The European question looms ever larger: ‘“Being European” has entered the politics of Scotland and England, and relations with the British state are changed utterly’ (p.262).

McCrone concludes that ‘the past has become a poor predictor of Scotland’s future’ (p.268).  This is surely right.  Changing Scotland depends on choices made by voters; but it also depends on natural, technological and geopolitical factors (climate change, AI, etc.) far beyond Scottish (and possibly human) control. 

Something of McCrone’s own position may be guessed from his Preface, which is dated St Andrew’s Day 2024 and (channelling Michael Marra) figures himself as apprentice to the late Neil MacCormick.  For me, sociology can’t quite fill the philosophical gap left by MacCormick.  But it’s a good start.

Original piece here. Subscribe, and support/donate to, Bella Caledonia.

From the latest edition of Scottish Affairs [subscribe here], an open-access introduction to a special issue on the fate of Scottish universities [read/download here], extract below:

Scottish universities occupy a paradoxical position in the contemporary landscape of higher education. They are, by any international measure, among the most successful and globally respected in the world.

Scotland's record of world-class institutions per capita rivals that of any nation: several universities consistently rank within the top 200 globally, with strong reputations in science, medicine, environmental research, and innovation (Universities Scotland, 2025).

They are major employers and civic anchors, contributing not only to Scotland's economy but also to its intellectual and cultural life. The country's long-standing commitment to widening access and maintaining free tuition for Scottish-domiciled students embodies what appears to be an egalitarian and progressive vision of higher education, though the extent to which this vision is substantively realised rather than symbolically performed remains contested.

Yet beneath this admirable surface lies a growing sense of strain. The sector faces profound financial challenges that threaten its stability and its capacity to sustain excellence. The University of Dundee's widely publicised difficulties are symptomatic of deeper structural problems.

At the heart of the crisis lies the funding model that underpins the Scottish Government's commitment to free tuition. While socially progressive in principle, it leaves universities without sufficient baseline income and dependent on premium-fee international students – a market increasingly volatile in a post-pandemic, geopolitically uncertain world.

Against this backdrop, questions of purpose come sharply into focus. What are universities for? How can they reconcile their historic civic missions with the demands of financial survival, global competition, and the growing expectation that they deliver social, emotional, and economic outcomes simultaneously?

The massification of higher education – long regarded as a democratic achievement – has also intensified these pressures, stretching resources, altering student demographics, and raising difficult questions about quality, academic standards, and the meaning of a university education.

Alongside these issues lie others that speak to the intellectual and moral core of the academy: what does it mean to sustain academic freedom in a climate where speech is increasingly regulated, and where universities often appear to take ideological positions on contested political and moral questions?

What happens to knowledge production when emotional comfort or ideological conformity begins to eclipse intellectual challenge and pluralism? What does increasing corporatisation and marketisation mean for the traditional truth-seeking mission of the university?…

…Across these diverse contributions, several themes recur:

• the fragility of academic freedom;

• the ascendancy of emotional governance and managerial culture;

• the loss – and possible recovery – of moral social purpose;

• and the unresolved tension between inclusion and intellectual challenge.

Collectively, the papers suggest that the future of Scottish higher education will depend on restoring balance – between finance and mission, between care and critique, and between management and scholarship.

What is particularly striking, however, is that these shared concerns emerged entirely independently. Contributors were invited on the basis of their expertise and experience but were given complete freedom to decide their focus.

Yet, as the essays arrived, we were struck by how consistently they identified the same underlying patterns:

• the dissonance between managerial and collegial forms of governance;

• the intrusion of business models into academic life;

• the rise of the therapeutic and the emotional as governing frameworks;

• the encroachment of consumerist cultures;

• the erosion of purpose;

• and the cravenness of university management in accommodating rather than challenging these shifts.

That such resonances appeared without coordination suggests that these are not isolated grievances but symptoms of a deeper, systemic malaise within the sector – one that demands honest scrutiny and debate.

More from Scottish Affairs here - and how to subscribe. Also, see this other free paper by Robin McAlpine, “Universities in Scotland: The Silent Coup”

Happy to cross-post this piece on Community Wealth Building from The Scottish Beacon - part of a series from this excellent community news aggregator (in conjunction with Community News Media). Support the Beacon here:

It rains in Fort William. It rains a lot. Sitting in the shadow of Ben Nevis, Fort William might be the Outdoor Capital of the UK, but when the West Highland rain sets in, the 12,000 people who live here need a roof over their head, and a warm place to come together.

For nearly thirty years, that place has been the Nevis Centre.

“Most people don’t live here because of what’s inside – there’s so much that goes on outside,” says Katie, a local mum and board member. “But we also don’t have the weather for that all year round. So it’s fantastic to have a space inside when we don’t have the sunshine.”

On those days – and there are many – the Nevis Centre glows like a beacon. Step inside on a wet Tuesday and you realise you aren’t entering a leisure centre, but the living room of Lochaber.

Inside the rain is drowned out by the tiny clatter and giggles in a tap dance class, the crash of bowling pins, and chaotic laughter of children chasing each other with toy lasers in the soft play, while their mums catch their breath over a cup of tea in the café.

With the nearest comparable facility 90 miles away, the Nevis Centre is a lifeline.

“We don’t have a town hall in Fort William,” says Chris Heardman, Chair of Linnhe Leisure, the charity that runs the Centre. “This is our town hall. This is our village hall.”

Everything for everyone

Hiding inside this cosy community space is a vast 700-capacity hall – home to the biggest stage in Scotland outside Edinburgh – and several large studios. These spaces are hired out for a vast array of activities and events, with commercial hires subsidising affordable community rates. 

The Centre wasn’t always run this way. The charity took over from a private company. “Instead of putting the money back into the centre, they were putting it into their pockets” says Chris, leaving the community with a building in need of some love. That is when the community stepped in, taking on a 127-year repairing lease, replacing a model of extraction with one of investing in the community.

Today, there are no shareholders. “Every penny we make goes back into the centre,” says Chris.

There’s an incredible variety of activities happening in the Nevis Centre, and demand for the space is enormous. They host concerts, conferences, and national festivals like the Royal National Mòd. “We could literally sell this room out probably ten times over because the demand is so high,” says General Manager Mark Ewen. “The challenge is trying to make everything fit.”

The revenue from a sold-out concert or a packed trade show subsidises the weekday evening Glee Club, youth drop-in sessions, community sport, art clubs, and the warm, welcoming space for the Montrose Group – a lifeline for adults with learning disabilities who come for meals, bowling, and silent yoga.

Getting the balance right between income generating commercial bookings and subsidised community bookings is an ongoing challenge for the Centre. “We work really, really hard with people to try to make sure that things are affordable,” says Mark. “What we generate as a company we put back in to support these things.”

More than bricks and mortar

The economic impact is staggering. Chris estimates that events like the Mòd can “bring about £15 million into the area,” filling every hotel and B&B in town.

But the community impact is just as big. Around 29% of the local community uses the centre every week, and for nearly 75% of them they have no alternative, with other options too far away.

“It’s like a gigantic town hall,” says Chris. “It’s a place where everyone can come together.” 

Sitting in the café, Katie agrees. She’s been taking her children to the Centre since they were babies. “Space to come together in community and actually see how much we have in common is so essential.”

In an area facing genuine challenges with social deprivation and rural isolation, the Centre is an essential shared space. “It’s a large community, but it’s a very small community because everybody knows everybody,” Chris says. That means when something happens, that can affect everybody, meaning a space to come together is vital.

“I have made friends here, I’ve kept friends here, we’ve kept each other sane here,” says Katie. For her daughter Lana, 12, the Centre is a social anchor: “After lockdown people were unconnected, this place brought people back together. I’ve made so many new friends during the clubs. If I didn’t have the centre I’d feel quite isolated.”

Mark and his team step up to the need not just to provide spaces, but to fill them with connection and care. In the games room, young people who might otherwise be at home gaming alone, or sitting in McDonald’s, have a dry, safe space where they can hang out together. “We try to kind of use it as a chance to talk to them, as well and give them an opportunity for them to talk to us,” says Mark.

These spaces are essential. Chris puts it plainly: “If you take away all our clubs and classes, there is nowhere else for them to go.”

The power of the network

Running a facility of this scale in a rural area comes with a unique set of challenges. Scottish Rural Action (SRA) makes sure they are never alone.

SRA acts as a bridge between rural and island communities across Scotland, and national policymakers, ensuring the needs and challenges of these grassroots organisations are heard and supported. “Our job is to shine a light on them,” says Artemis Pana, SRA’s National Coordinator. “To help them get the resources they need to take control of their own futures.”

In 2023 SRA hosted the Scottish Rural and Islands Parliament at the Nevis Centre, bringing 400 people who live and work in rural and island Scotland to discuss the issues that matter to them. This was a unique opportunity to share experiences, knowledge and ideas with people running similar organisations and buildings, realising their struggles weren’t unique. 

For Mark, it was eye-opening: “Regardless of the size of the building, we all had the same issues and concerns.”

The value of solidarity through these connections is not to be underestimated. “The benefits of being part of Scottish Rural Action is that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet,” says Chris. “You can go to a tiny place on Raasay with a tiny community hall, and they are having the same problems. It’s a morale boost. You don’t feel isolated, you don’t feel as if you’re the only person that’s struggling.”

SRA connects and amplifies these rural voices, turning individual challenges into a collective call for policy change. “Bringing everyone together allows you to share knowledge,” Mark says, “and have a bigger voice.”

The cliff edge

Despite their huge impact, the Nevis Centre walks a financial tightrope. The cost of living crisis has hit hard, and the current funding model is broken.

“The electricity is just one example,” Chris says. “It’s gone from £33,000 a year to £76,000 in three years. And that extra £40,000, where do you get it from?”

“We can’t simply transfer our increased costs for utilities onto all the local groups,” Mark says. “It’s not sustainable for them.”

Meanwhile, funding from Highland Council has dropped from £230,000 to £91,000, while their costs have doubled. Meanwhile funding applications are exhausting the organisation’s precious capacity. Chris describes spending 30 hours on an application for roof repairs.

“We actually live month-to-month on what we’ve got and there is no spare cash anywhere for anything,” says Chris. “The funding that Highland Council gives us every year – we don’t know until the end of March whether we’re actually going to get it for the next year. So we could be looking at another 90-odd thousand pounds that we’ve suddenly got to find from somewhere.”

Then there is the Fort William 2040 Masterplan, a Highland Council vision promising them a new building in fifteen years. But for the team holding the current building together, it feels like a frustrating limbo, and more uncertainty. “I don’t think this centre actually has 15 years,” says Chris, “we would like to have assurances that we are going to get the building that we actually need, and not what they want to give us.”

A model for the future

The story of the Nevis Centre is a story of Community Wealth Building in action: local control, local reinvestment, and economic and social value returned to the community. But for this model to survive, the system needs to evolve.

They need more understanding and recognition of the work they do, and the value it creates for their community. They need long-term, secure funding to give them the certainty they need to invest. 

“Listen to us, understand us,” says Mark, “and provide the reassurances that we need so we can continue to grow and strive, and be the vital community asset that is already here.”

Outside, the rain is still falling on Fort William. Inside, the lights are on, and singing soars to the rafters of the hall, the roof over Lochaber.

Read more from our series This is Community Wealth Building and what we’re calling for to support Community Wealth Building across Scotland.

All photos in this blog by Laura Vroomen / Scottish Beacon

Last Sunday afternoon in central Glasgow, a bunch of newly made friends got together and put on a bit of an event called PowerShift. I say ‘bit of’ because our audience (a sold-out full house) were a core element of the event, participating in dance, mapping games, singing and deliberating power. 

By the end of the afternoon we had collectively given birth to a new genre of socio-political activism – Ceilidh Theatre. (An update on Augusto Boal’s forum theatre? We had him over our shoulder). 

By means of a lovely pile-up of playful encounters, we introduced the complexity of the climate dilemma in Scotland and helped each other to see multiple perspectives, without forcing a debate. We took uncomfortable truths, improvised dramatic scenes, and laughed squirmingly at ourselves. We sang along with the young musicians, sharing their pain and hope for the future. 

By the end we weren’t necessarily any wiser about how we were going to get to a more just transition. But we were much more up for being part of communities that were committed and determined to do so. It felt like a new ‘we’ was forming: one that saw itself as capable - through community – to decide what was best for itself. In the words of E.M Kane who led the music with her band on that day:

I summon the right to roam

The power that I hold in my home

I summon the Cailleach* to be reckless

As the future is bold

You summon the riches but we keep

Nothing for our own

Commit to the action

Pour a wee dram

And here we go

*Cailleach is the goddess of winter, she brings the endings so as to restart the cycle in Spring.

Outside our window at the Royal Concert Hall, there was a loud gathering of Iranians, calling for the return of the Shah. Bizarrely they were flying American, British and Scottish flags together, as if calling for the white chargers to come and rescue them. In reality, the US has now turned predator and the former allies have now turned on each other. It was a poignant – and loud – reminder of the mess we are in.

So what were the key elements of this new “ceilidh theatre” genre and can anyone do it?   We started with the formation of a Consortium of organisations – each a different kind of agency of change. The Spring Consortium is made up of media makers ( Bella Caledonia, Scottish Beacon, The Daily Alternative), Artists (The Necessary Space theatre network), deliberative technologists (CrownShy) and political entrepreneurs (Alternative Global / Spring). 

We knew that we wanted to make some form of intervention into the increasingly complex discussion around Scottish renewable energy. But with a view to improving democracy and getting justice for the people of the Highlands and Islands who we’ve written about here and here. Several people made reference to The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil which mobilised people in the 1970’s (It’s Scotland’s Oil!).  Simon Sharkey suggested taking a spot in Celtic Connections and, with two months to prepare, everything snowballed from there.                                   

The Consortium gave rise to the Spring Collective – a collection of dramatists, improvisers, musicians, comedians – who co-created the PowerShift event. Simon took the lead and wrote the meta-script for a wild mix of dance, deliberation and improvisation; EM Kane pulled together some musicians, tasked specifically to give us the youth perspective on the present day; Pippa Evans (who worked with Spring’s first outing in 2024led the improvisation; the Spring Consortium resourced the speakers. Media brokered media. A film crew (Hazel Falck) and a graphic scribe (Eddy Phillips) popped up to offer their services. Because this was a first-time experiment, everything was pro bono. 

The conceit of the meta-script was that everyone was acting out a role, rather than appearing as themselves. Even the audience get some pages to read out – an irony that becomes part of the story. This helped us all to experience our play as phenomenal – it could happen anywhere, at any time – even as we are taking part in real time. Although we were short on space, the ambition was to integrate all the pieces – including the audience – into the space we’ve got. So that we are all part of what is unfolding and emerging.

What follows is a step-by-step description of the event, not a review, so that you can imagine how it felt to be part of the action and maybe replicate it yourselves. 

On opening, the afternoon was described as a game of two halves: the first was the company setting up the complexity and tone of the current dilemma round renewable energy in Scotland. The second inviting the audience to set their own tone and narrative. After a few introductions we set the scene thus: 

Scene one. The call to adventure. (5-8mins)

Someone walks onstage and places an old vinyl record on a turntable. 
“For these are my mountains….” Streams out of the speaker. A video of oil rigs and flames burning gives way to windmill farms and freezes frame on a giant windmill in the Scottish hills.

A young punky Celtic youth walks on with a mallet and destroys the record. 

Next a raucous folk punk song: to give you the flavour, here are some lyrics:

WE WON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN

An extract from the lyrics by EM Kane

Welcome to my croft on the brae

It’s lived many lives, seen many days

From the mountains to the land

The sea and the soil

You’ve taken from this hill

We won’t let it happen again

We won’t let it happen again

What do I know?

I’m just a city boy

I drove my car up north

On dirty accessible oil

It’s not that I don’t care

That I worked, sweated and toiled

It’s just what could I do?

To take my little holiday up north

But they won’t let me do it again

They won’t let me do it again

This is not music as interlude between talks, but music as the engine, framing the narrative and setting the energetic field. When did you ever go to a political event and find yourself in a musical? Not just in the chorus, but with a chance to take a lead?

Scene Two: 

‘A man reading from the script explaining how ‘it’s not that complicated’. Cue Mike Small of Bella Caledonia (his explanation of the wind dilemma in this week’s blog, here). 

Scene Three: The polarisation game. In which we give a live experience – the audience on their feet, running from one end of the room to the other - of having to choose between two things that shouldn’t be competing:

Apple Pie or Ice Cream

Renewables or mix of nuclear, fossil and renewable

Community ownership (100% of profit) or corporate investment (5% community benefit)

Local grids or UK grids

The audience are given a chance to speak up, but the host still reduces the result to binary percentage points, announcing a winner. It’s annoying – deliberately. A staged war of words ensues, interrupted by Scotland’s Makar, Peter Mackay. Peter offers us some words on belonging, making the distinction between duthchas,(where you come from) dualchas (who you came from) and gnathas (the social norms and expected behaviours) still relevant and powerful in this debate.

An extract from Peter’s poem which he spoke in Gaelic and English. (More in our blog here).

We will become our mistakes,

the caverns emptied out of the bedrock,

the scores dug in the sea bed,

the silence of empty ruins, images, words.

Or else we’ll become our vision, 

the work to mend, plant, tend and keep,

a land where - a miracle - crops grow each year,

a shore not eaten away by the storms.

Following quickly on we offered a panel of experts: 

1.        Josh Doble from Community Land Scotland who offered this killer fact: in Scotland, 64 per cent of people would support a community-owned energy development in their area, but only 40 per cent support a private enterprise.

Of course, this could be because, on average, community-owned turbines generate 34 times more income for local communities than privately owned ones. Or it could be that community-owned turbines mean empowerment, with local people making decisions that work for their local area, whilst contributing to the wider energy system. The danger that anti-Net Zero narratives will polarise this nuanced debate is palpable

2.        Connor Watt from Platform added to the complexity by referencing the oil and gas industry in Aberdeen, full of local Scottish workers. Contrary to the representation that they are at war with the renewable industry, Connor shared the reports that these workers are only too happy to retrain for renewable energy systems.

3.        Indra Adnan, in her role as a futurist, invited the audience to consider three words that they may not be familiar with today, but will be commonplace in years to come:

a) Fractal organising where small groups of citizens working together in deeply relational ways at community level, pattern match with others doing the same across the region, country, even globe. Technology makes it possible for them to connect, share information and grow the narrative, prompting quantum social change 

b) Cosmolocalism: the phenomenon of the past 30 years where we all have our feet on the ground where we live, but our head in the wider communications cosmos, able to source ideas, experiences and blueprints from across the globe.

Finally c) Ecocivilisation the third horizon vision taking shape from many corners of the globe.

After a brief Q&A we cut short to a character called Boaby Garage, to ensure we had many voices in the room. Here’s a few of the lines that were accompanied by barrel-house piano..,

Life is hard I understand

You feel connected to your land

When shooting grouses near your houses I completely understand

So leave the heavy business stuff to me.

In 1707 we all made a decree

That Scotland and England - one happy family!

Don’t be a bloody idiot you need my southern money

So leave the boring business stuff to me.

The whistle was then blown on the first half and the audience invited to write down scenes they wanted to see improvised for the second half. A short interval was followed by a chance to dance the Dashing White Sargeant with a ceilidh band. Until you do that in the middle of a political gathering, you won’t know how much this changes the way your listen afterwards. When energy is embodied like this, our openness to becoming more engaged in our wider lives changes significantly. Dance is a positive energy.

Next Pat Kane led the whole audience in the Mapping Game. Instead of choosing one of two options, Pat invited people to find their place on a spectrum of opinion along a line between, at one end, Positive about the future of Energy in Scotland and, at the other end, Negative about the future of energy in Scotland. He then asked various people along the spectrum to say why they had chosen that position. It was instructive to hear so many nuanced perspectives.

We then pulled a second, perpendicular axis from that line (creating four quadrants), asking people to step forward if they felt personally able to make a difference or backwards if not. Again, fascinating to see how some felt powerless on their own, yet others felt taking solo responsibility was the best way to engage communities. The net result is a room full of different perspectives – one we can observe together - not requiring any resolution, other than to acknowledge diversity. And how difference need not stopping you from working together towards the future.

At this point Stuart Lynn from digital democracy developers CrownShy stepped up to explain how the technology pol.is could replicate that live experience of complexity we’d had, in an online form. Unlike most polls - where participants usually only get the chance to respond to the host’s statements - with pol.is we get to make the statements too. This gives rise to a fully co-created mapping of perspectives. Pol.is can then do the work of seeing what people agree on and disagree on – often surprisingly. (See here for the current pol.is in which anyone can take part).

Pippa Evans and Simon Sharkey then hilariously improvised some of the scenes suggested by the audience in their brief interval. Improvisation is a great way to look difficult issues in the eye. For example, one audience member asked them to improvise ‘invisible social class’, which they did in a surprisingly humane way. Another asked for ‘the magical green energy machine’ which had everyone in the audience pretending to be windmills.

Again, while this may feel lightsome, it had the very real effect of binding people in the room. Not simply through laughter, but through acceptance of tension as inevitable. This wasn’t a barrier to a broader sense of solidarity, palpable in the room.

We closed the event with a second original song by E.M Kane,  a soulful ballad called Regrow, We Go which the audience could sing along with. Again, some lyrics:

Regrow, we go

I summon the right to roam

The power that I hold in my home

I summon the cailleach to be reckless

As the future is bold

You summon the riches but we keep

Nothing for our own

Commit to the action

Pour a wee dram

And here we go

Regrow, we go

Next steps for the audience were offered as 1) invite the ceilidh theatre to your community 2) take part in the pol.is on communities and renewable energy or 3) sign up for news and links to local community action where you are. All information here.

As people were leaving the most ubiquitous word was ‘inspiring’. Breathing life back into the world of socio-politics is exactly what we intended, and hope to do more of.

if you’re interested in participating in Powershift in any way, please visit the action and info page at www.spring.site/powershift

More from our SOLD-OUT gig at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival on Jan 18th, 2026, titled #PowerShift: the real energy question. We wanted to quickly bring you some instant creative highlights from the day. We have videos and photos to come…

With accompanying slides from his presentation, here’s a prose overview from Mike Small, editor of Bella Caledonia, of the tumult that’s brewing between Scottish communities and the “renewables revolution”.

Mike Small:

The Echo

The Scottish renewables revolution feeds into a dysfunctional, even dystopian UK energy system. The crisis in the Highlands and Islands has echoes of age-old issues of power, poverty and democracy.

Scotland is in the midst of a renewable energy revolution. It’s a revolution that could (and should) produce clean energy, thousands of good jobs, a reliable source of income for rural communities, and conquer fuel poverty.

But it does none of these things. It is creating uproar and outrage by communities swamped by wind-farm proposals and the accompanying infrastructure, and shocked by the industrialisation of the Highlands and Islands, with little benefit to see for it.

The story has echoes of John McGrath’s seminal play of the 1970s which recounted the history of economic change in the Scottish Highlands, from the Clearances in the 19th century through to the contemporary oil boom at the time of its first production.

The echo is of communities without agency facing enormous changes over which they have little or no control. The story holds the same questions: who is the Highlands for, and what is the purpose of energy production?

The echo is of communities without agency facing enormous changes over which they have little or no control. The story holds the same questions: who is the Highlands for, and what is the purpose of energy production?

Gigantism and Late Britain

If you wanted a metaphor for everything that is wrong with Late Britain, here it is. Endemic fuel poverty sits alongside enormous corporate profit, while a moratorium on onshore wind in England, maintained by the Conservatives for fourteen years, is in stark contrast to a Gold Rush for renewables in Scotland.

We have a crisis of over-abundance of supply alongside people in the coldest parts of the UK unable to adequately heat their homes.

If we stand back from this crisis, we see that the problem is one of gigantism, an addiction to growth, and an inability to stand up to corporate power. The onshore renewables industry is vast – frequently foreign-owned – and far distant from the demand it is supposed to supply, leading to massive costs of distribution.

Meanwhile, something called ‘The Grid’ stands like a figment of an Iain M Banks novel: that is, a gigantic piece of technology that is woven into the fabric of everyone’s lives and is considered an unquestionable good whilst being unable to fulfil even its most basic purpose. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of this entity: landscape, ecosystems, serenity, peatlands, birdlife and wildlife.

The Grid is a testament to centralised Britain, decaying and archaic but completely unquestioned. It is based on an outdated energy system that is no longer fit for purpose.

It’s becoming very clear that energy infrastructure, like political power needs to be radically decentralised.

Who Owns the Wind?

None of this sits neatly acoss the lines of party or constitution. The problems we explore here are presided over by both an SNP government in Edinburgh and a Labour one in London.

The question of who owns energy companies in Scotland is highly relevant despite attempts to ridicule it.

 The questions of Who Owns the Wind? And Who Owns the Tides? Are highly relevant here. The answer is, not you or I!

 Like all of the questions that face any movement for self-determination the issue of Who Owns the Land and where does power lie, needs to be faced. Seizing the means of (energy) production is an essential part of renewing the renewables revolution.

 This could take different forms: micro renewables owned by community trusts; district heating systems run by municipalities; large-scale projects owned at a national level. This offers the prospect of revitalising Scottish rural communities and funding sustainable housing and infrastructure.

 Limits to Growth

 Earlier this week the media reported, in gushing tones: ‘Berwick Bank wind farm secures ‘monumental’ UK contract backing in huge Scottish energy boost.’ It would, the paper said: “deliver the biggest single procurement of offshore wind energy in British and European history.”

This project could become become the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

According to the report, the Berwick Bank wind farm, located about 24 miles from the Scottish coast in East Lothian, “will have an estimated capacity of 4.1GW, which could generate enough electricity each year to power every household in Scotland twice over” and “Up to 307 turbines could be constructed across an area four times the size of Edinburgh.”

 But we already have a surplus of energy in Scotland. We have an abundance. If we could build another five ‘Berwick Banks’ only this time ten times the size of Edinburgh, would this also be good?

 We need to radically re-think who and what energy is for. We need to Democratise Energy and Liberate Technology. We need to re-imagine energy as a public resource rather than a private commodity.

More from Bella Caledonia

If you’re interested in participating in Powershift in any way, please visit the action and info page at www.spring.site/powershift

More from our SOLD-OUT gig at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival on Jan 18th, 2026, titled #PowerShift: the real energy question. We wanted to quickly bring you some instant creative highlights from the day. We have videos and photos to come…

But here is some eloquence - from Peter Mackay, the Scottish Makar (or Scottish national poet laureate), dwelling on the relative powers of the Gaelic language and culture in articulating the relationship between communities and renewable energy.

First part is his presentation, second is a poem - rendered in Gaelic and English.

Cuimhnich cò às thu: Remember who or where you are from

 In an article in the short-lived 1990s journal Scotlands – a very interesting attempt to try and make sense of the plurality and diversity of this country at one of those many critical moments in its recent history – the poet Donald MacAulay wrote a great article on Gaelic language, and how it understands the relationship between the individual, the community and place.

Traditionally, MacAulay argues, there were three different ways in which a person could be ‘placed’ within Gaelic culture: through dùthchas, or where you are from, your native place; dualchas, or who you are from – your kin; and gnàthas, measured against the norms of personal and social behaviour. So the Gaelic question ‘Cò às a tha thu?’ [‘Where are you from?’] is literally ‘Who are you from?’ – as a child I once, wrongly, answered it with ‘mac John Angus Alaig Rodaidh’, my patronymic.

And the common imperative ‘Cuimhnich cò às thu’ [remember who/where you are from], delivered to those who were emigrating, contained a whole host of obligations and weighted expectations.

What to do with this knowledge? Can this be carried over into contemporary discussions about land, place, renewable energy in Scotland? I’m wary of this: cultures and languages, like the natural world, can be viewed as resources and strip-mined, the topmost layer extracted and exported for consumption elsewhere.

This does not seem satisfying. It can lead, on one level, to slightly jarring Gaelic names of restaurants in the city (those oddly disconnected genitives) or misspelt tattoos (which direction does the accent go?); on another it can lead to a desire – expressed from the 1870s onwards at least – that Gaelic should, like Latin, be treated as a dead language, not spoken but used as a resource to give depth and nuance to other languages, primarily this one here we’re communicating in.

The act of taking meaning out of context, of stripping words and ideas from one language and transporting it into another is entirely at odds with the deep imbrication of value that MacAulay describes.

And of course I’m wary of this too – growing up on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis there was a suspicion, mostly rightly I suspect, of decisions being made in committee rooms and board rooms in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, even Stornoway, decisions being made for or over the people who live in places, rather than by them.

 And rightly there was a suspicion also about the voices of those who would pontificate about the islands without having lived on them for almost 30 years – the voices of people like me.

What does this all mean? Well, yes, there needs to be even more of a shift to local decision making, land ownership, possession of the means to profit from renewable energy, more local power which will come with more local responsibility, a mature and serious democracy that involves as many people as possible in making decisions, sometimes tough ones, about the places they live in.

Without those places being seen, from somewhere else, primarily as a resource, with the need for a sustainable and – why not? – even prosperous future for the communities that live there.

There is a Gaelic proverb often used in articles of this type which makes the point that the natural world should be seen as a common good, not private property: “Slat à coille, bradan à linne, fiadh à fireach – trì ‘mèirlean’ às nach do ghabh Gàidheal riamh nàire” [A rod from a wood, a salmon from a pool, a deer from rough ground - three ‘thefts’ no Gael was ever ashamed of].

But, of course, this all has to be done sustainably too (only one salmon, please), and in the age of microplastics and nuclear waste it perhaps needs to be extended to the understanding that what we put into the natural world should be carefully thought through, as well as what we take out. Those ‘norms of social behaviour’ are always changing, and we should be careful that those changes are positive – and ideally bring people together.

For COP 26, one of those other focal points where these discussions happened then tailed off somewhat, I was asked to write a poem, and so I tried to think through this proverb for the times we are living in. Here is a version of it, ending – I find myself surprised – with some hope: 

 Chan eil e gu leòr a-nis nach bi nàir’ oirnn

slat a gheàrradh à choille a mhàireas fad bheatha,

’s a chleachdas sinn gus duircean-dàireach a chur

a thigeas gu bàrr agus sinn nan dust.

Fanaidh iad seo bèo nas fhàide dhuinn’ cuideachd:

an tiona brot a’ meargadh sa mhòine, an fhleodrainn

orainns a’ dubadaich am measg nan creagan,

an sgudal niùclasach a’ cunntadh sìos, dìog air dìog.

O tha tìde air ar cùlaibh leis an teanga fala;

tìde a’ sgaoileadh romhainn mar fhàsach. Eil sin ceart?

Cha bhi càil air fhàgail dhinn ach ar mearachdan,

na tuill loma a sgiùrr sinn san domhainn,

gearraidhean air grunnd na mara

an samchair de dh’fhaclan, ìomhaighean, làraichean.

Neo: cha bhi càil air fhàgail dhinn ach ar leirsinn,

an obair chruaidh ud de chàradh ’s cur, de dh’àrach ’s glèidheadh,

talamh far am bi fàs ann an ath-bhliadhna,

cladach nach tèid a chaitheamh leis an stoirm.

 No longer enough not to be ashamed

of taking a stick from a wood

to last a lifetime of planting acorns

that will bud when we are all dust.

For these things will outlive us too:

the soup tin rusting in the moorland, the orange

float bobbing among rocks,

atoms counting down tick by tick.

For time is behind us with its bloodied tongue.

O it stretches before us like a desert. Does it?

We will become our mistakes,

the caverns emptied out of the bedrock,

the scores dug in the sea bed,

the silence of empty ruins, images, words.

Or else we’ll become our vision,

the work to mend, plant, tend and keep,

a land where - a miracle - crops grow each year,

a shore not eaten away by the storms.

If you’re interested in participating in Powershift in any way, please visit the action and info page at www.spring.site/powershift

From our SOLD-OUT gig at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival on Jan 18th, 2026, titled #PowerShift: the real energy question, we wanted to bring you some instant creative highlights from the day. We have videos and photos to come…

But here’s something beautiful - two song-lyrics written especially for the event, by the brilliant young singer-songwriter E.M. Kane

REGROW, WE GO

[Lyrics: Eleanor Kane]

It’s a Sunday

It’s a sunny day for once

Seems like a braw time

To up and scale the mountain

Regrow, we go

If it asked you,

Would you answer for the wind?

Or let it pass through you?

We all struggle, let’s begin to

Regrow, we go

Take a tight five

Put your hat down

Ink your quill

Ask a question

And be ready for the answer

Regrow, we go

I summon the right to roam

The power that I hold in my home

I summon the cailleach to be reckless

As the future is bold

You summon the riches but we keep

Nothing for our own

Commit to the action

Pour a wee dram

And here we go

Regrow, we go

WE WON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN

[Lyrics: Eleanor Kane]

Welcome to my croft on the brae

It’s lived many lives, seen many days

From the mountains to the land

The sea and the soil

You’ve taken from this hill

We won’t let it happen again

We won’t let it happen again

What do I know?

I’m just a city boy

I drove my car up north

On dirty accessible oil

It’s not that I don’t care

That I worked, sweated and toiled

It’s just what could I do?

To take my little holiday up north

But they won’t let me do it again

They won’t let me do it again

Tell me now, what the hell have you done

It’s a pretty sweet setup there

Don’t wanna spoil it none

I covered it with sheep

They covered it with deer

Now they want to change

But that change is unclear

I love my car

These are my mountains

I rode them fast and far

They are my braes

I want to see

I want to see

The Misty Highlands

I want to keep my dirty car

I want to keep things as they are

The sun, the sea, the air

Are just solutions

We can’t make change happen without access

We still can be Scottish

And commit to our power

We only be as radical as technology allows

We can only look to the future

If we listen to each other

And we won’t let it happen again

On Jan 18th the Spring Consortium will have its first outing at Celtic Connections, Glasgow festival of music, dance and workshops (tickets here). Called Power Shift, the event introduces ceilidh theatre – a new form of participation, somewhere between Theatre of the Oppressed, Showstopper and, well, a ceilidh.

As we’ve previewed in recent editorials, the subject we’re exploring is the abundance of clean energy in Scotland coupled with the highest fuel bills in Europe.  It’s a complex and varied history. There are fully community-owned windfarms, earning £100,000 per megawatt generated at one end of the scale. And then there’s corporately owned wind farms, compensating communities with £5000 per megawatt and less, at the other end.

There are many suggestions for good responses to this injustice: as many as 7 new manifestos for change (see blog this week) have come up from the large and deep field of clean energy activity.  Take this one from Community Land Scotland, published last November which focuses on land reform as the first step to energy regulation. 

But our aim in Power Shift is not to stage a protest demand, but to generate an energy in the room for action on a number of fronts. Firstly participation: there is a myriad of different perspectives on the issue, but citizens are not being consulted. The danger is if communities turn against the massive rush for renewables, driven by Westminster in the interests of Net Zero across the UK, it is an open door for Reform who want to drop renewables altogether.

But it’s difficult to organise across the Highlands and Islands – it’s a vast, mostly rural territory. Communities are having some success at gathering separately but it’s tricky to get momentum or traction. Ceilidh theatre will whip up the energy in the Green Room at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, with music, dance, comedy and improvisation. 

Then we’ll introduce pol.is – new tools for thought mapping – as a way to capture ideas arising. Both in real life on that day and on-line, nationwide, over the months leading up to the election. That way we can take part but also see each other, in our plurality, and find the common and uncommon ground that helps us to come together.

Secondly, at various points in the afternoon we will have a chance to listen to and question experts on land trusts (Josh Doble) , community buy outs, political strategy (Mike Small) and more. Then Scottish Makar (poet laureate) Peter Mackay will take us into the world of deep belonging with the land and history. With these new resources, we will be able to generate new stories about the future together. These stories will live in our imaginations – and our local and social media - as genuine alternatives to the frustration and helplessness offered by the mainstream papers.

Thirdly, having gathered together, enjoyed the conviviality of theatre, we will walk away with a range of options for further action. Join a land trust in your local area, start a conversation about land buy-outs, envision building a micro-grid or your own wind turbine. Once you can understand the wind around your ears as your power, enabled by the power of community organising, there will be a new energy available to all of us.

How does this change anything, in the bigger picture? When your daily head is filled with the reality of revived imperialism in the shape of Trump’s America, having taken over Venezuela and now shaping up to take over Iran, Cuba and Greenland? Each of these targets motivated by the addiction to oil, itself a planet-destroying fuel? Surely we are powerless?

No, we are not. Reclaiming our own attention from the media frenzy, turning instead to a new story about the clean, regenerative fuel futures and – significantly -embodying that new story as dance, poetry, participation… This what we described last week as the onto-shift. Getting a new feel for the future which we will build on again and again. The role of improvisation in these events is precisely for each of us to experience that hidden in our own bodies, the internal energy that will fuel the future. A better future, with ourselves embedded in its very fabric.

So how does this tiny shift in the corner of Glasgow Concert Hall make any difference on a bigger scale? We can quote Margaret Mead’s well known saying, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has". But we can still ask her: how? For this we need to think more about soft power than hard power. 

Hard power is coercion, forcing results through controlling – people, environments, nations, media – largely through the use of guns and money.  Soft power is influence and attraction – drawing people into a new story, shaping behaviour, establishing relationship. One is not more effective, or better (we all need both to be effective as parents, for example). American soft power – the American Dream – played at least as big a part in the States’ global domination over the centuries, maybe more. Both are tangible forms of power. 

More on that here.

However in this age of seemingly inescapable misery caused by the polycrisis, any story offering hope has a different kind of traction. It attracts, engages, causes new relationships to rise within previously fragmented fields. Particularly a story that is not simply an inspirational idea, but one based on practical, physical and scalable activity. 

Powershift works like this on a number of levels.

1.        People coming together in an age of division, experiencing joy and sharing tools

2.        People feeling energised and hopeful within a wider, depressed society

3.        People acting autonomously in the face of corporations and governments who claim their hands are tied

4.        People originating new forms of democracy that help them understand each other better

5.        People designing new clean energy plans for the future, in the face of escalating carbon disaster aka resilience prepping

6.        People learning from each other, but also the wider internet, how to become energy efficient from where they are – rural or urban – through wind, sun, water and light. This is where cosmolocalism is more than localism

7.        First regional, then national, then global networks of people sharing intelligence and vibe – profound resonance arising from the onto-shift

Of course, none of this is guaranteed at our event. We could have a low turnout due to weather and seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Any one of our great contributors – Simon Sharkey, Pippa Evans, E.M Kane, Pat Kane and others - could be prevented from taking part. Our sound system could break down. But from the moment we conceived the event, all of the above becomes possible. And it will still be possible whether our event is successful or not. 

The only thing any one person can do is show up, ready to be part of a new story that in turn, makes history.

Let us know if you’d like us to show up in a community near you.

Indra Adnan, Founder / Co-intiator of The Alternative Global

From the National, this op-ed is part of our media promotion of #PowerShift: the Real Energy Question, a “ceilidh theatre” event at this year’s Celtic Connections festival, starting 3pm Sunday 18th January 2026, in the Green Room at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Here’s the explainer, and here’s where you can get the remaining tickets (hurry!).

The article surveys Scotland’s relationship to the current Trumpian geopolitics, then turns to our vision of community energy (in both senses) within contemporary Scotland.

It’s tough to emerge from the warm blanket of Xmas and New Year, into the global gangsterism of Trump. And if only it were a disheartening though far-off spectacle. The Caligularity isn’t just enabling its enforcements in waters nearby Scotland, but also from the Scottish land-mass. 

How do we feel about US military forces raiding tankers in the gap between Iceland and Scotland, enforcing an American oil blockade of Venezuela regarded as illegal by UN experts? And those forces’ use of John O’Groats civilian airport in Wick as a staging post to their mission? 

Feels supine to me. That’s one reserved power (military affairs) which leading Scottish politicians won’t currently be yearning to repatriate.

The whole drama of American force—which veteran BBC foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen is now flatly calling “imperial America”—is creeping its way towards Scottish shores. 

Trump’s ambitions to possess Greenland (a principality of Denmark that had itself been slowly moving towards full independence) scrambles the post-war consensus around respecting national sovereignty. (Or, if we consider the many covert operations and coups the US has perpetrated since WWII, it tears away the veil.)

It also lays down a gauntlet to the indy-minded in Scotland. In terms of the North Atlantic trade and military front opening up, due to Arctic polar ice-melt, Scotland could not be more militarily strategic (remember the second series of Netflix’s The Diplomat for a’ that). 

But add to this the continuing commitment of indy-supporting parties to the removal of Trident from sovereign Scottish territory - a missile system that is essentially controlled by America. In light of current events, opportunities open up for Trumpian diktats—ones that might more usually be found in lurid airport thrillers. 

Here’s some uncomforable questions. Would the Orange One be more likely to impinge on a sovereign Scotland’s nation-state territory, in order to protect the American nuclear deterrent, than if we were still under British jurisdiction? Would sentiment for his Scottish roots (and properties) blunt, or sharpen, his blade? 

Though as Swinney effectively responded to the BBC’s Nick Robinson in a recent interview, maybe this prospect makes European member-statehood for Scotland - and its protective umbrella - seem more attractive than ever. Particularly as we witness Westminster’s deepening vassalage to American interests? 

So many questions, and many more to come—for as long as the possibly-demented Trump, and his steely cadre of advisors, run an ever-more imperial American ship of state. 

The estimable Scottish socialist writer Jonathan Shafi has made some valiant attempts to place Scotland, and the independence prospect, in this situation—and in the wider crises behind it. 

“The kind of world that Winnie Ewing wanted to ‘stop to get on’, does not exist today”, Shafi writes on his Independence Captured Substack. “It is being phased out with each passing week”. 

For example, the US state is currently disengaging from many supranational organisations (like the climate body IPCC) that an indy Scotland would actively want to join. Assuming these organisations indeed persist, as geopolitics becomes a multipolarity between separate US, Russian and Chinese spheres. 

Given the current crises, and their roots in oligarchs’ strategies over access to fossil fuels (Trump and Putin), the energy question for Scottish independence is central. 

For the moment, let’s bracket off oil and gas extraction, as it contributes to a baked-in climatic crisis that threatens to subsume all others. Renewables are enough to contend with. 

As Shari grimly summarises: “The so-called green transition has been a process of expropriation: vast offshore wind reserves are leased to multinationals. Revenues flow out, while local economies remain stagnant…The Scottish Government operates as an interface for corporate lobbying and outsourcing, constrained by fiscal dependency and ideological conformity.”

All of that faces a commonsensical, street-level response: don’t we have enough energy resources in this blessed wee country to ride out many of these storms? What is the best democratic and sovereign model available, that can ensure we do so? 

The SNP advisors’ antennae are already raised to these themes - see the party’s early electoral slogan “It’s Scotland’s Energy”. But as Shafi notes, particularly in renewables, the pace of development has a bias towards foreign corporate (and large commercial) interest. 

This column (and this paper) have paid particular attention to the resistance and disruption such a bias is causing, particularly among communities in the Highlands and Islands. 

You’ll know the critique. There’s crippling domestic fuel bills, while mega-turbines and marching pylons carry “clean energy” out of the locality. There’s messed-up lifestyles, with jangled communities receiving a pittance of compensation payments. There’s the weirdness of turbines being paid to be switched off, as an inadequate energy grid can’t cope with the sheer bounty of electricity. 

All of this, in the memorable words of Common Weal’s Robin McAlpine, is causing Scottish citizens to “hate to do what they want to do”. Feeling they have to resist, or call a pause to, a net-zero target that they otherwise resoundingly support. 

In short, we have a huge opportunity with renewables: we can provide some genuine geo-political (and geo-economic) autonomy for life in Scotland, over the rest of this century. 

Yet the popular appetite for something visionary and fully-systemic here is being frittered away. 

There is an electoral opportunity coming where an independence majority can be resoundingly represented in Holyrood. Yet the disempowerment and alienation with politics-as-usual - partly expressed in the strong Faragist showing in the Scottish polls - is corrosive to an ambition for “eco-civilisation”, as many are calling the next needed paradigm shift. 

Scottish independence can be one of the many instruments of that shift. But maybe, sometimes, we need to operate at a different social level—not just being transfixed by the national-stage indy process. 

What dreaming about the different forms of power in Scottish communities can we unleash, by means of creative collaboration? What does political imagination look like when institutions stall?

Along with a consortium of other artists, creatives, technologists, researchers and democratic innovators, I have been helping to develop the #PowerShift event at Celtic Connections, happening next Sunday Jan 18th, 3pm, at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall [tickets here].

It’s an experiment - using drama, music, tech, poetry, improvisation, expertise and a willing audience - in unleashing emotions and visions around communities and renewables, in this current Scottish moment. 

Experimental, but not without precedent. We’ve been looking occasionally over our shoulder at John McGrath’s seventies classic The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil. But while land and natural resource are shared themes, there are differences. 

How do our endlessly flexible communication technologies figure, in how we represent these energy developments? What do older generations owe the young, as the former’s blithe consumerisms have trashed the latter’s future? Where should our emotional drives lead us, when so much passion (and protest) is exploited by culture warriors?

We are calling #PowerShift “ceilidh theatre”, in the spirit of the Brazilian radical Augusto Boal and his “forum theatre”. Boal used interactive drama to help localities see their conditions anew, and decide what to do about them.

Our version will feature laughs, soaring verses, yearning young musicians, as well as strongly-coloured Scottish comestibles. The aim is to play with the possibilities of Scottish community power, especially as they might be capable of owning and running their own renewable energy farms (of which there are already shining examples). 

We have to stop gazing at oligarchs, and start attending to empowerments that are sitting right in front of us. Ones that can save the planet, as well as our inner and collective selves. It’s a power shift, starting in your head, and in the heads around you.

#PowerShift: The Real Energy Question is at Celtic Connections, in the Green Room at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, at 3pm on Sunday, January 18th 2026. Click on www.spring.site for info and HERE for tickets

In the course of our research for the PowerShift event, we’ve come across a lot of Scottish (and UK) manifestos for community energy, many pointing at the Holyrood Parliament elections in May this year. Hopefully helpful to share them here.

• Community Coalition on Energy (SCCE) Manifesto: Titled "Manifesto for a Fair Energy Deal for Scottish Communities", this document outlines recommendations for increasing community ownership and benefits from renewable energy. This was also promoted by the Scottish Community Alliance, Community Energy Scotland, and Development Trusts Association Scotland (DTAS).

• Solar Energy Scotland Manifesto: This manifesto calls for clear national targets for solar energy, a commitment to 9GW of solar by 2035, and updates to building standards for new homes to include solar as standard.

• Community Land Scotland Manifesto: This manifesto for action addresses community rights and land reform in the context of the energy transition.

• Scottish Renewables 2026 Manifesto

• Holyrood 2026 – A Manifesto for Warm, Healthy Homes from the Existing Homes Alliance

• Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) Manifesto: This group published a manifesto with several chapters and proposals for the 2026-2040 period, covering an accelerated transition to clean energy, low-carbon homes, and a circular economy.

• “It's Scotland's Energy”: paper from the SNP government - Commentary by Willie Thompson from Scotonomics

• Scottish Parliament Community Wealth Building Bill (2025) - Response from WeAll Alliance Scotland

• GB Energy: Our Mission And Vision (2025)

How does change – for the good - happen? If we had an easy answer to that question, change would be at our fingertips, and we would not be in the midst of a polycrisis.

Instead, we have indications. We might say ‘change is complex and systemic’—it evolves. Or that change occurs at tipping points. Both describe the confluence of many kinds of activity – direct action, plus network building, plus good media, plus receptivity of the people, plus, plus. Deep change happens slowly because it’s hard for these alignments to cohere: they are rare and often happen when you least expect it ( Arab Spring is a good example).

It might be easier to talk about how change does not happen. When thinking about the climate crisis for example, necessary change has not come about through information alone. We’ve known the scientific factsand also the solutions to breakdown for decades. However, too many corporations prefer to stay locked into the profitable models of the past, defying the new intelligence.  As a knock on, the vast majority of people are living lives deeply entangled in the lifestyle that caused the problems and can’t shift their habits.

In the global north, extreme consumerism and mobility depend upon ever increasing levels of energy consumption. Instead of cutting our energy use down, governments – fearful of losing popularity in a competitive field – try to nudge us to be more energy conscious without causing a backlash. 

However, most of us are living stressful lives, focused on success or, more commonly, survival: unless we are obliged or compelled to cut down, we won’t. There is little or no capacity for change as we remain dependent on unhealthy food, working too long hours to develop personal agency, our minds shaped by media that keeps us in thrall.

What we do have capacity for however, is dreaming. Isn’t that why social media is so addictive – it gives us connection to ideas, fantasies, confirmations of what is going on deep in our souls. Possibilities of new destinations, identities and relationships. It’s similar in many aspects to how both Hollywood and advertising captivates us—but, thanks to data sharing, doing so in ways that seem ever more tailored to our own desires. 

Living in our own SoMe bubble compensates us massively for what we can’t find in real daily life: but with so little connection to reality, it plays its part in disabling change. We are ‘prisoners of hope’.

Politicians, meantime, unable to face the reality of a dying planet, distract themselves and citizens with promises of growth in the economy. Meaning, more freedom to consume in the years to come. Shortcuts such as nuclear energy, or AI-accelerated production have us dream of abundance, even as the earth slips from beneath our feet and the sky falls down. 

All this continues because, as Margaret Thatcher taught, TINA – there is no alternative. The neoliberal socio-economic-political system is described as the ‘end of history’ and all that is left for the future is ‘hard choices’ – mostly at the cost of the most vulnerable. According to this credo, without the untrammelled energy of the most risky, most selfish, most manipulative actors, there would be no economy. 

What this adds up to is a lack of political will to change. It means continued reliance on the 1% who established their dominance in the early stages of capitalism, and continued through inherited wealth and compound interest. Backed up, without consent, by the lack of capacity in the 99% to do anything about it. 

When the Zeds (Zack Poplanski and Zohran Mamdani) talk about a new political paradigm they are pointing at the possibility of the relationships between these elements shifting. They offer themselves as political actors with the political will for radical change. They suggest they will achieve their aims through taxing the growth of the 1% to help redistribute resources. And when that happens, they will address the capacity of the 99% to help the planet. 

It’s good to hear: yet at the same time, nothing much can change unless they – or similar – get into power. It’s strangely (and unintentionally) top down and linear as a solution. And, in reality, a stalemate.

To really change the paradigm we might have to start outside the place of official power, which is itself so compromised by inequality, wrong structures and practices. When communities – naturally diverse, loosely structured and heaving with desires – can come together for their own collective advancement, they can be a social force in their own right. 

Change in that sense, might be less about establishing power and more about getting needs met. Both physical needs – warmer houses, sufficient healthy food, enough space; and emotional needs – security, belonging, autonomy, dignity. Our collective vision is likely to have more to do with joy and confidence, than growth evidenced on a graph.

One might say that social entrepreneurs – who have the common good woven into their constitutions - are the harbingers of a wider system; although the 4th sector is not yet thriving. At the same time, unless we bring together the wider, pluralistic collectives, including those who might be less active, a significant section will always be vulnerable to polarisation by deliberatively divisive forces.

When we want to develop our capacity for change, how can we appeal to such a wide collective, knowing that politics itself has a limited draw? Only around 2% of people ever join political parties, whereas 40 – 65% of people are regularly turning up to watch football and 68 percent are actively engaged in the arts. Can we tap into that huge commitment to energy and creativity to generate a new vision for the future and more agency for change?

On Sunday, January 18th 2026, 3pm-4.30pm, the Spring Consortium is going to be having a go at doing just that, as part of Celtic Connections in Glasgow. Here is the blurb:

Power Shift: The Real Energy Question

Step inside an electrified afternoon at Celtic Connections. A collision of presentations - some song and poetry, provocations and collective imagination, maybe even a ceilidh! - all powered by the urgency of Scotland’s energy future and our part in shaping it.

Across the country, communities watch turbines turn and pylons advance, wondering why the clean-energy gold rush feels like something happening to them rather than with them or for them. 

Why is it Scotland will have the highest output of renewables in Europe and the highest bills?  Why should saving the world mean struggling to survive the month? Why do we feel powerless, trapped in loops of despair and learned helplessness? 

Yet there’s a spark, a sense that Spring is coming even in the depth of our political and planetary Winter. Musicians, storytellers, technologists, activists, futurists, neighbours will gather. 

We’ll shake off the cloak of winter and test new ideas the way bands test riffs—loud, collaborative, unafraid. We’ll imagine futures where local power isn’t a metaphor but a lived reality, where agency shifts back to the people, where wind and tides fuel not only our grids but our communities’ confidence.

Expect participation. Expect debate. Expect to surprise yourself.

Tickets available here

If we all love the outcome, we will be taking it around communities in the Highlands and Islands. Each of these events will be topped by a local engagement with the community through pol.is. And tailed by a facilitated collaboratory, in which locals can deliberate the findings of the Power Shift event to make priorities for action.

For those living in Scotland – or planning an early visit in 2026 – please come and contribute your voices and dreams. Book here.

Scottish artist Nnena Kalu has won the Turner Prize 2025.

The Glasgow-born artist, 59, was presented with the award at a ceremony on Tuesday evening in Bradford, this year’s UK City of Culture. Along with the prize, Kalu received £25,000.

She was recognised for her installation Hanging Sculpture 1–10, commissioned by Manifesta 15 Barcelona and installed in a disused power station, as well as for her contribution to Conversations, a group exhibition at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

Kalu is known for large-scale abstract drawings and hanging sculptures made through repeated lines and the wrapping of materials, creating vividly coloured, cocoon-like forms. Hanging Sculpture 1–10 comprised ten bright, monumental works suspended from the grey concrete pillars of the industrial site. For Conversations, she presented works in pen, graphite and chalk pen on paper.

The jury, chaired by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, praised Kalu’s “bold and compelling work”, highlighting the “lively translation of expressive gesture” across her sculpture and drawing. They also commended her sense of scale, composition and colour, noting the “powerful presence” of her work.

Kalu is a resident artist at ActionSpace’s Studio Voltaire programme, which supports learning-disabled artists across London. She was shortlisted alongside Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa. Works by all four artists are currently on display in a free exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford until February 22.

Her win comes a year after fellow Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur took the Turner Prize in 2024. Named after painter JMW Turner, this year’s award coincides with the 250th anniversary of his birth.

See this interview with Kalu’s facilitator in the Guardian

#PowerShift: The Real Energy Question (at Celtic Connections)

Date: Jan 18th 2026, 3pm GMT

Location: The Green Room, The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 2 Killermont St, Glasgow G2 3NW

Tickets: £13.82 (click here)

By the Spring Consortium

Step inside an electrified night at Celtic Connections. A collision of presentations - some song and poetry, provocations and collective imagination, maybe even a ceilidh! - all powered by the urgency of Scotland’s energy future and our part in shaping it.

Across the country, communities watch turbines turn and pylons advance, wondering why the clean-energy gold rush feels like something happening to them rather than with them or for them. 

Why is it Scotland will have the highest output of renewables in Europe and the highest bills?  Why should saving the world mean struggling to survive the month? Why do we feel powerless, trapped in loops of despair and learned helplessness? 

Yet there’s a spark, a sense that Spring is coming even in the depth of our political and planetary Winter. Musicians, storytellers, technologists, activists, futurists, neighbours will gather. 

We’ll shake off the cloak of winter and test new ideas the way bands test riffs—loud, collaborative, unafraid. We’ll imagine futures where local power isn’t a metaphor but a lived reality, where agency shifts back to the people, where wind and tides fuel not only our grids but our communities’ confidence.

Expect participation. Expect debate. Expect to surprise yourself.

Buy tickets here

What is the Spring Consortium?

Too often, taking action in the face of the current polycrisis lacks traction. Approaching a problem from one perspective can have limited effect. Is politics broken because of the mainstream media? Or is it our technology? Or do we need new stories through the arts?

The Spring Consortium was pulled together in Scotland to integrate a number of different forms of action so that we can have a deep and lasting impact whenever we act.

The current group was convened to address the opportunity of Scottish energy futures. While we currently have the best resources of clean energy in the UK, we have the highest fuel bills in Europe. The issues are complex and the threat of polarisation around Net Zero weighs heavy.

Can we reimagine a Power Shift in which communities’ come together, their lives transformed?

Our consortium consists of:

• The Scottish Beacon – network of local newspapers in Highlands and Islands

• CrownShy – civic and democratic technology

• The Necessary Space – theatre company

• Equitable Energy – research, advocacy

• Take One Action – film festival

• Bella Caledonia - media platform

• The Alternative Global – system convenors for ecocivilisation

More details on the event to be found at Spring and the Celtic Connections website

Powerful piece from the Scottish civic news aggregator the Scottish Beacon by editor Rhiannon J Davies, on December 5, 2025. It’s a summary and reflection on their “Power Shift” series, reporting on prospects for (and struggles with) renewable energy in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Scotland’s shift to green energy promises prosperity, but our Power Shift investigation reveals a stark divide: while some communities thrive on renewables, others feel sidelined, overwhelmed and unheard in a system where wealth too often flows outwards.

On the windswept island of Tiree, a four-hour ferry ride from Oban, a solitary community-owned wind turbine – affectionately known as Tilley – has powered local development since 2009. In that time it has generated £4 million for a community of just 650 people, funding harbours, childcare, youth services, housing, broadband, a petrol station, business units and more.

“We’ve got a wind turbine right now that is providing the vast majority of funding, which allows my staff and I to be here to do all of these things,” says Tiree Community Development chief officer Phyl Meyer.

But the project is increasingly fragile. After multiple repairs, Tilley is now uninsurable, and a serious failure would wipe out the Trust’s main income stream. “If that turbine breaks tomorrow,” says Phyl, “we are not insured for loss of business. There will be a cliff edge that we will fall off without more core funding.” The trust is now considering solar arrays as a more reliable source of future income. 

The wider system is also stacked against the island. Tiree currently produces far more electricity than it uses, yet residents can’t buy power directly from their own turbine. Tilley’s output must be sold to an energy supplier, which then sells it back at a profit. To change this, the Trust is developing a local energy co-operative based on the ‘Energy Local’ model, allowing members to use locally generated electricity first at an agreed internal rate.

The hurdles are mainly technical: finding a supplier willing to facilitate the scheme, agreeing a pricing structure, and completing the island’s long-delayed rollout of smart meters. Current regulations also limit such schemes to a single transformer, so the first pilot will be small. But if UK-level rule changes go ahead, Meyer says the co-op could eventually expand across the whole island – finally allowing every household to benefit more directly from the renewable energy produced around them.

Tiree’s experience captures both the promise and the precarity of community energy – and it reflects a mixed story across Scotland. The reporting from our Power Shift project found places where renewables have become a vital source of local funding, and others where people feel overwhelmed or shut out. These contrasts show that the issue isn’t simply success or failure, but an imbalance and sense of injustice. 

What the Power Shift series has revealed

We heard from many that communities feel things are being done to them, not with them. In Lewis, some people are “angry” at being squeezed out of interconnector space while global firms dominate the wind rush.

A resident in Beauly captured the strain many places feel under rapid expansion: “We are drowning under a mountain of planning applications… It’s horrendous, with huge negative impacts on mental health and wellbeing. It is tearing our communities apart.” And in Carsphairn, 80% of the land is now forestry or wind, leaving roads overwhelmed and residents feeling unheard by distant corporate owners.

Concerns weren’t rooted in opposition to renewable energy itself. Rather, people questioned whether the benefits were being shared fairly and whether communities had any real influence. What they wanted was clearer democratic processes, a stronger local voice, and a system where wealth generated in their areas stays there instead of flowing outwards with not enough reward for local people.

Genuine community ownership as a proven path to equity

One solution to the division is community-owned renewables. Research from Platform London and Equitable Energy shows how community-owned projects generate vastly more local value than corporate developments of similar size.

They found that Tilley – a single 900kW community turbine – delivers over 100 times more economic value per unit of capacity than the privately owned Beinn an Tuirc wind farm, despite being only around one per cent of its size.

In Shetland, the community-owned Garth turbine on Yell produces around 90 times more value per megawatt for local people than the multinational-owned Viking Energy development beside it. The three small community turbines on the Galson Estate on Lewis support 18 employees and have delivered £600k to community organisations, with more on the way from West Coast Community Energy.

The Scottish Community Coalition on Energy is calling on the Scottish Government to make this a national priority and set a target of 1GW of community-owned energy in Scotland by 2030. In their manifesto recommendations they argue that, to build public support and deliver a just transition, Scotland must “enable and support increased community ownership and shared ownership of new and existing electricity and heat infrastructure, and fair distribution of the wealth that is being generated and consolidated through renewables.”

Flick Monk, Community & Public Energy Campaigner at Platform says: “Right now, the energy transition isn’t serving Scotland; communities are given little say over local projects, private developers extract wealth to overseas shareholders, and communities get crumbs in return. But community energy ownership – where communities own and operate their own wind, solar and hydro projects – can be truly transformative… 

“Scottish Government support for community and public ownership remains woefully inadequate, stymieing this huge opportunity. We need a clear 2030 target for community and public energy, backed up with long-term financial support from both governments.

“We also need local councils to play their part in local energy generation, following tried and tested examples in Europe where local municipalities own wind and solar farms to fund public goods and services. Scotland is an energy rich nation, and our incredible natural resources should be ensuring warm homes, decent public services and resilient local economies.”

The need for fairer financial mechanisms

Reporting in this series has shown that current community benefit payments are too small, too variable and too detached from real impact. The rate of £5,000 per MW per year hasn’t risen since 2010; meaning it’s now worth around 40% less in real terms. Shetland’s experience shows £5k/MW is no longer fair for large, high-output sites. The equivalent today would be closer to £7,500 per MW, and some campaigners are calling for higher, production-linked payments.

Working with local people

Across Scotland, we’ve seen how division often grows because communities feel overwhelmed or sidelined, but when people are involved early and meaningfully in decision-making, outcomes improve for everyone. As one Shetland respondent to our survey put it: “Actual community engagement would be ideal – instead of false engaging when the project is already going ahead.”

Over the past year, the Local Storytelling Exchange and Sustainability First, has explored this more deeply with people living along the east coast of the UK – from Aberdeenshire down to East Anglia – all of whom face National Grid upgrade proposals in their areas. 

They worked with residents of varied ages, backgrounds and political views. What united them was a desire for clarity, fairness and a genuine say in shaping major changes. 

As Clare Harris, Scotland lead for the Local Storytelling Exchange, explains: “These sessions saw residents talk honestly about how energy developments made them feel; some felt passionately that a modernised energy system was essential for all our futures.

Others were vehemently opposed. During in-depth discussions over the course of the past year, they have discussed how they want communities to be engaged in the changes that are happening where they live and the ways in which they want to shape community benefit.

“These were not easy discussions; but what has come through is a sense that big changes need to be fair, collaborative and leave a lasting positive legacy. Communities, whoever they include, need to be meaningfully consulted, early, clearly and honestly.They need to be heard. More than that, however, they need a stake.” 

East Lothian offers one example of how community-led engagement can give people that sense of control. A cluster of large-scale developments – including Eastern Green Link 1 – has pushed local leaders in East Lammermuir Community Council (ELCC) to bring developers and residents together and to share joined-up information throughout the planning process. Information, they say, is power. 

ELCC is also one of several councils forming the new charity East Lothian Community Benefits, set up to manage the substantial funds being offered as part of the projects. Its focus is ensuring the area is left better than before. Landscape-scale nature regeneration, improved local transport and a programme to insulate and heat local homes all form part of the community’s ambitions. “We’re at a critical moment,” says ELCC chair Chris Bruce, “and need to bring pressure on big developers to think differently.”

Strengthening local journalism also matters. In news deserts, tensions can too easily be inflamed on social media without trusted information. The hyperlocal outlets that make up the Scottish Beacon can help communities navigate complex planning processes and technical jargon and cut through misinformation.

As Sarah Ade, editor of the Glenkens Gazette says: “Hyper-local, independent news – especially in print format, like the Glenkens Gazette – is of huge value in today’s fast-paced, primarily digital world. It offers readers the chance to find out about, and contribute to, discussion on topics of genuine impact to them and their community. It offers a platform for people to unite in a shared vision and to share values; it offers a sense of community in an increasingly fragmented world.

“And as an independent news platform, it offers a voice that is purely there to raise issues relevant to the community it serves, in a non-sensationalist way that fosters constructive debate on issues of great importance and so brings communities together instead of fragmenting them.”

Fixing the infrastructure to share the benefits not the burdens

A fairer energy system also depends on fixing the infrastructure that determines who gains and who loses from Scotland’s rapid expansion of renewables. Scotland paid £252 million in constraint payments in the first two months of 2025 alone, heading towards nearly £1.8 billion a year simply to switch turbines off when the grid can’t take the power.

That is money spent not generating energy, while households in some of the windiest parts of Europe remain in fuel poverty. Better local infrastructure such as household battery storage, community-scale storage and load-shifting schemes would allow excess wind to be used locally, reducing bills and strengthening energy security.

Grid access is another fault line. On Lewis, community developers are being squeezed out of the planned 1,800MW SSEN interconnector – one of the starkest examples of inequity uncovered in the Power Shift series. One solution would be to introduce mandatory community allocations or “community first rights” on new grid capacity, ensuring local projects are not pushed aside by corporate-scale proposals.

Beyond the cables themselves, communities are calling for investment in the everyday infrastructure that makes large energy projects viable. On Lewis, up to 1,500 incoming workers are expected to place new pressure on schools, healthcare and transport, yet local services face cuts rather than reinforcement. 

A joined-up investment model – one that requires energy developments to contribute to the public infrastructure they rely on – is also essential if the transition is to share benefits rather than pile on burdens. For many communities, this imbalance is increasingly understood as a question of environmental justice: who pays the price of Scotland’s energy expansion, and who reaps the rewards?

As Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift says: “Right now, the energy system isn’t working for people in Scotland. Communities are seeing wind farms go up – but the profits go elsewhere, while energy workers have for years been promised green jobs but most are still waiting.

“Now is the time to demand that more of the work and the wealth generated by renewables flows to communities here, particularly as so many people are struggling with unaffordable energy bills and strained public services.

“This is an enormous chance for Scotland to build wealth and resilience – whether that’s through communities owning a share of new projects or creating a wealth fund from renewables so that everyone benefits.

“Scotland’s politicians need to know that the status quo is unacceptable and that people demand a fairer energy system. If the country is going to generate all this power in future, it should own some of the rewards.”

A just transition means enabling communities to lead

What the Power Shift series makes clear is that Scotland’s renewable transition isn’t struggling because communities oppose clean energy – it’s struggling because the structures around that transition are uneven, opaque and too often designed without the people who are most impacted by the infrastructure. Ultimately this is about ownership and power.`

The challenge is to build a system where those outcomes aren’t dictated by geography, but by a consistent framework that values local involvement and keeps more of the wealth circulating where it’s generated. 

Fairer grid rules, increased benefits, stronger community stakes in ownership, better investment in public infrastructure and a more transparent planning system are all essential. When done right, community-owned renewables is an opportunity for meaningful community wealth building, a topic currently being discussed at Holyrood – but that means a more strategic approach to putting communities first. 

The opportunity is still enormous. Scotland has the resources, the expertise and the public support for a cleaner energy future. The question now is whether we can design the transition in a way that communities recognise as theirs – not something done to them, but something built with them, and ultimately, something that leaves them stronger.

Original piece here. Support Scottish Beacon here

Crowdfunder for a new Edinburgh location for Pianodrome, the circular-economy music venue made from recycled old pianos [our previous coverage]. Here’s their pitch below, for the current fund raiser:

Who are we?

The Pianodrome is the world's first 100-seater amphitheatre made entirely from disused pianos. Since our first Pianodrome amphitheatre was built in 2018 we have continued to create unique playable, community-centred sculptures, activating them with hundreds of events and saving over 670 pianos from going to landfill.

Our new home

Pianodrome now hosts two locations in Edinburgh. The first, a warehouse in Granton, houses our workshop and is the base of operations for our Adopt a Piano program. And now, with great excitement, we have moved our original Grand Pianodrome into the glorious St. Oswald's Community Centre, a Victorian church in the heart of Bruntsfield. 

With the building under community ownership, the St Oswald's team has welcomed and supported us in realising our dream  - we are so thrilled about our shared long term vision for the space as a hub for creative community. The opportunity to create a thriving jewel of connection and creativity in a central, accessible location is astounding and we are all in! 

Our background

We create unique, interactive sculptures and performance venues entirely from up-cycled pianos and then activate the spaces through local, community-focused events and festivals. 

The Pianodrome is the world's first amphitheatre made entirely from up-cycled pianos. Through our sculpture workshop and 'Adopt a Piano' scheme we divert tons of use-able material from landfill every year, challenging people to re-think what is deemed as waste, and creating the conditions for resilient community-centred activity. 

Our work is a direct response to our throw-away culture, and is a positive community-centred approach to the climate crisis.

The Pianodrome has inhabited and invigorated temporary spaces such as derelict theatres, museums, warehouses and botanical gardens on a short term basis: now we have finally found a location where we can set up permanently.

At Pianodrome Bruntsfield we will develop a hub where music, dance, theatre, science and more can be brought to the heart of the community.

We need your help!

A project of this scale needs a huge amount of energy, time and money. 

So far, our team has made amazing progress bringing life into the building. With the help of over 600 volunteer hours and a dedicated team of workers we have uncovered, scraped, sanded and varnished a beautiful wooden floor, repainted the doors and walls, cleaned and tidied and installed our Grand Pianodrome in the space with beautiful lighting to boot.

To go further, we are raising funds to help cover the costs of setting up our permanent community hub in this beautiful building.

What do we need the funds for?

We need a building warrant! Having the correct licenses will allow us to operate full time. This involves hiring architects, structural engineers, electricians and plumbers and coordinating all these different elements. 

We need heating! An old church building in Scotland isn't the most amenable place for a lot of the year: we want to install efficient, environmentally friendly ways to heat the space and make things cosy. 

We need light! The existing lighting system from the '80s is on the blink and needs updating. We would like to build a bespoke, low-energy lighting rig to illuminate this beautiful building and the Pianodrome within. 

We want to work in collaboration with artists to create fittings and infrastructure in keeping with our ethos, for example railings allowing safe access to balcony and stage spaces built entirely from piano parts. Any additional funds will be used to make improvements such as installing additional toilets, fitting out a warm cafe space and creating additional break-out spaces.

Please consider donating generously to help us make this a vibrant, warm, creative hub for all those who encounter it.

A bit more about Pianodrome CIC

Our work demonstrates how local and free materials, which would otherwise be seen as waste, can be transformed into valuable community-centred works of art. Each year we divert over 100 pianos from landfill. Those in good condition are cleaned, repaired and tuned as part of our ‘Adopt a Piano’ project - a rescue home for old pianos. Those beyond repair are carefully dismantled in our ‘nose-to-tail’ upcycling method, then turned into unique furniture and sculptures.

Our new home is a major step towards a carbon free model of music played on acoustic instruments and in natural light. We aim to create a resilient community hub which inspires and comforts the people who use it, operating at low cost financially and environmentally. By generating the conditions for creative community through practical action we can find positive approaches to mitigating against the impacts of climate change.

More from the crowdfunder here.

images from Community Land Scotland website

From Community Land Scotland [full PDF here]:

The May 2026 Scottish Parliamentary election comes at a crucial moment. Scotland is facing multiple and overlapping crises: housing shortages and depopulation, climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, a cost-of-living emergency, deepening inequality and rising political disillusionment increasingly threaten the fabric of our society. Doing more of the same will not deliver change at the speed or scale that we need.

This election is a chance to take bold steps to address these issues. The best answers and solutions often come from the communities themselves. With revitalised democracy rooted in communities, people can have real ownership of land and resources.

They can build affordable homes, generate clean energy, restore nature and support thriving local economies.

Strengthening community ownership and control is not just a fair approach; it is the key to putting Scotland’s future in the hands of its people and ensuring a more equitable and sustainable future.

Key Asks for the 2026 Election

1. A national target for community ownership

   Scotland should commit to 10% of the nation being in community ownership by the end of the next Parliament. This requires a clear plan to expand community landownership and reduce the concentration of private landownership — including a new Land Reform Bill introducing a meaningful Public Interest Test on all large-scale ownership and fair taxation to deliver land reform outcomes.

2. Modernised Community Right to Buy legislation

   The Community Right to Buy framework must be refreshed to reflect today’s ambitious community landscape and Scotland’s rapidly changing land market. This should include full implementation of the recommendations arising from the 2025/26 review.

3. A Scottish Community Wealth Fund

   A national Community Wealth Fund should be established and seeded by new benefit payments from renewables, energy storage, and transmission developments. The fund would ensure all of Scotland’s communities share directly in the renewable-energy revolution.

4. A stronger Scottish Land Fund

   The Scottish Land Fund should be strengthened with a £25 million commitment by the end of Parliament, including a ringfenced allocation for land acquisition. This is essential for diversifying ownership and realising the Land Fund’s transformational potential.

5. A national Community-Led Housing Fund

   The current Rural & Islands Housing Funds should be reconfigured into a national Community-Led Housing (CLH) Fund, with a budget of £55 million to be spent by the end of the next Parliament. A ring-fenced amount should be reserved for fragile, rural and island communities. Eligibility for the new CLH Fund should mirror the criteria already in use for the Scottish Land Fund, widening access to affordable housing delivery across all communities.

More here.

Above: From the Instagram pages of Supertouch, Hometown Soundsystem, and House Arts Collective

A fair-use excerpt from Scotland’s The National newspaper - subscribe for the full article here.

IT is 2pm on a Saturday in an old garage just off Maryhill Road in Glasgow. A crowd of twenty-somethings are bundled on the pavement outside amid a haze of fog-machine vapour and cigarette smoke. The garage doors vibrate from the techno bass inside, setting off a nearby car alarm.

An older couple from the flat upstairs spontaneously accept an invitation to join. They are in their forties and wouldn’t ordinarily

find themselves dancing among art school types. Later, they say it was “some of the best music” they’d heard in a long time and offer to stay behind to clear up after the party ends, epitomising, in the organisers’ words, “the beauty of pure Glaswegian culture”.

The event, which took place last month, was a daytime party collaboratively organised by some quietly renowned forces of Glasgow’s grassroots art and music scenes: Supertouch, a DIY techno promoter; Hometown Soundsystem, a sound system collective; and House Arts Collective, who provided their space and an accompanying exhibition curated by resident artists.

Events like these are not rare in Glasgow if you know where to look. Amielle, one of the founders of House Arts, compares the city’s DIY culture to “70s New York” where

“it feels like everybody you talk to is an artist”. It is, of course, a romantic comparison.

Amielle founded House Arts Collective alongside three fellow Glasgow School of Art students “out of desperation” during the pandemic. Its members, now totalling 16, pay a small fee for their studio space in the house, which covers rent and maintenance costs of the building […]

Want to read more from this article? Subscribe to The National here. Contact the author, Evie Glen, here

A cross-post blog from the Centre for Technomoral Futures, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Subscribe to the EFI’s newsletter here, and the CTF’s here. (Disclaimer: Pat Kane, editor of the Daily Alternative, is an associate of the EFI).

I - Alice Ross - am a researcher approaching speech technology from a feminist/anarchist angle. I value autonomy, accessibility, sustainability, and exploring what we stand to lose or gain in adopting new technologies: Who is empowered? Who is disenfranchised? I’m also someone whose development was shaped by grief.

Voice as data

At the Centre for Speech Technology Research here in Edinburgh, and labs like it worldwide, my colleagues work on improving the smoothness and fidelity of text-to-speech (TTS), towards the goal of accessible communication for all: enabling people with MND, paralysis, or injuries to express themselves with the full range of their own voices, and people with visual or reading impairments to access text-based resources presented engagingly in their preferred language.

But elsewhere, TTS models are used to produce misinformation, deepfake pornography, fraudulent phone calls that terrify and scam relatives by impersonating their loved ones. It also produces ‘generative’ video that undermines the creative work of human voice actors and film, animation and video game makers. They can also become part of a kind of contemporary necromancy.

Voice as relic

In 2021, the documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain attracted widespread controversy over its brief use of a synthetic voice trained using publicly available speech data from the film’s late subject. Critiques focused on the filmmakers’ failure to disclose, or consult Bourdain’s widow about, their use of AI [Yang, 2021].

Commercial speech synthesis platform ElevenLabs, launched in 2022, recreates famous speakers’ voices for use in the ElevenReader App. “We’re partnering with the world’s most iconic voices,” claims a webpage offering the vocal likenesses of Dr. Maya Angelou (1928–2014), Prof. Richard Feynman (1918–1988), and Judy Garland (1922–1969), among other trademarked products available [ElevenLabs, 2025].

And in the private sphere, ‘griefbots’, using text and speech data from a deceased person to train models with which loved ones can interact, are a productive current topic of research and development. Proponents frame them as a novel therapeutic tool, able to support the mourning process and emotional regulation through continuing ‘habits of intimacy’ [Krueger & Osler, 2022].

Voice as individual

When we consider the prospect of using a person’s voice data after their death, one obvious objection concerns their consent. Best practice when collecting any data is for consent to be informed (participants must know, specifically, how their data will be used and who will have access) and revokable (they have the right to opt out and withdraw their data from future work); this is clearly not in place in the above cases.

What ‘partnership’ can ElevenLabs conceivably have with Judy Garland, who died in 1969, before this technology was even imagined?

On this point, the case of celebrities – whose voices were broadcast and well-known during their lives – may be seen as distinct from ‘ordinary’ individuals. Indeed, consent is frequently discussed in the scholarship on griefbots, which are more likely to be modelled on non-celebrities, deployed on a small scale with few users, and (hopefully) not for profit.

But dismissing any individual’s rights around their identifiable data sets a problematic precedent. From Scarlett Johansson’s high-profile legal battle to prevent OpenAI using a ‘sound-a-like’ of her voice for its chatbot [Jones, 2024], to the spread of abusive deepfake imagery exploiting popular streamers’ likenesses [Twomey et al, 2025] - these examples normalise the attitude that celebrities are public property.

This may be a step towards limiting the autonomy of women and minoritised people. More vulnerable people will withdraw their personal data from internet discourse (and thereby, modern public life) when the risks of exploitation are demonstrably high.

Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living

There is nothing new about memorialisation: across cultures and throughout history, humans have treasured reminders of loved ones and created tangible sites – grave markers, reliquaries and shrines – in their honour. Enthusiasts will declare that the griefbot is simply a new, interactive memorial, but this fails to consider the importance of somatic and communal mourning practices.

Cindy Milstein argues that the ‘collective work of grief’ builds empathy and interdependence, essential for the struggle against capitalist alienation [Milstein, 2017]. We are motivated to improve quality of life for all when we appreciate life’s fragility and death’s finality, including when we come together to share and witness the pain of loss.

As Judith Butler writes: “Open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential” [Butler, 2015].

Memorialisation is also a long-established site of inequality, in terms of who is remembered and how: wealthy capitalists were buried in ornate marble mausoleums on land that could be used to house the living.

Language modelling technology, known for its compute- and resource-hungriness, will perpetuate that injustice, not democratise grief, as fine-tuning a personalised model demands the large corpus of someone with a hefty digital footprint – the more training data, the more convincing the output.

Livable lives and grievable deaths

‘Griefbots’ and other AI-enabled reanimations risk doing a disservice to both the living and the dead. A death that does not preclude returning as a chatbot ghost – a puppet that turns our unique human self-expression into statistically probable sequences – is not a good death.

And a life where our (work and) leisure time is spent gazing into small screens, ‘interacting’ with artificially generated characters to the point of neglecting the complicated, living creatures around us, is not a good life.

For millennia we have held on to what we can of the people we love after they die, but this new development is calculatedly addictive, as well as ecologically and socially destructive. It’s hubristic and subtly dehumanising: if we feel we have the right to put words in another person’s mouth, and make them talk, tirelessly, with the chatbot’s documented tendency to sycophancy, how much does their death matter?

Whether the purpose is grief support, entertainment, or profit, that is too much power over another person’s likeness. We can learn from loss, and from realising what we stand to lose.

references

• Butler, J. (2015). ‘Judith Butler: Precariousness and Grievability—When Is Life Grievable?’. Blog, Verso Books, accessed: 07/08/25

• ElevenLabs, ‘Iconic Voices’, accessed: 07/08/25

• Jones, N. (2024). ‘Who owns your voice? Scarlett Johansson OpenAI complaint raises questions.’ Nature.

• Krueger, J., & Osler, L. (2022). ‘Communing with the dead online: chatbots, grief, and continuing bonds’. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 29(9-10)

• Milstein, C. (ed.) (2017). Rebellious mourning: The collective work of grief. AK Press.

• Twomey, J., Foley, S., Robinson, S., Quayle, M., Aylett, M. P., Linehan, C., & Murphy, G. (2025). ‘"What do you expect? You're part of the internet": Analyzing Celebrities' Experiences as Usees of Deepfake Technology.’ arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.13065.

• Yang, M. (2021). ‘Anthony Bourdain documentary sparks backlash for using AI to fake voice’. The Guardian

Alice Ross is a PhD student at the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing, looking at speech technology and human-computer interaction. Supervised by Dr Catherine Lai and Prof Lauren Hall-Lew, her project aims to explore the experiences, attitudes, and concerns of people who have speech difficulties in new contexts such as voice interfaces and videotelephony.

Alice’s background is in Linguistics, and she worked in video game development at Rockstar Games for almost ten years before returning to academia […]

Pleased to print Mike Small’s overview piece from the Scottish Beacon, for the PowerShift series in the Herald this week - a series of articles reporting on the upheavals and aspirations of the renewables revolution in Scotland, particularly as it affects community life, prospects and empowerment (or disempowerment). [We’re deeply involved in this space - keep an eye out for developments…]

As the world leaders have gathered in Brazil, to discuss the climate catastrophe facing us at COP 30, communities here in Scotland have been trying to navigate the path of decarbonising our own energy supply. 

The UK and Scottish governments have been implementing a policy of a huge shift to renewable energy over the last twenty years – from fossil fuels (oil and gas) to renewable energy (wind, tidal and solar). Up until now, the vast proportion of this renewable energy shift has been offshore wind, but now onshore wind is also coming onstream at scale. 

Recently, this shift has seen a huge backlash as communities face an overwhelming amount of planning applications from giant corporate energy companies, many of whom feel this process as something done to them rather than with them.

Entering this mix, where rural communities feel beleaguered and attempt to protect land rights, ecology and community is another factor –  a resurgent right in the form of Reform UK, who reject Net Zero as a concept in itself and engage in climate denialism. 

What was previously a place of consensus has become a deeply contested, and at times weaponised issue. At a time when clean energy is an absolute must for us to play our part in the fight against climate change, the manner of its roll-out is putting the whole process in jeopardy.

The People’s Voice

The Scottish Beacon is a local journalism collaborative that brings together community-based news publishers across Scotland. Partners spoke about how divisive this issue has been, even causing family rifts – which is why we decided to tackle this topic together to try and get a true picture of what was happening across the country. 

So, to get a sense of how this was playing out on the ground, The Scottish Beacon surveyed people across Scotland. We had responses from 67 distinct locations across Scotland, covering everything from major cities to small villages and islands. Analysis of all the survey responses revealed six clear areas of concern: environmental impact; frustration with the planning process; lack of community voice; questions over money and ownership; the emotional and mental toll; and a feeling that the benefits were not being felt fairly.

What became immediately clear was that most people weren’t opposed to renewable energy itself. Their frustration lay in feeling ignored or pushed aside as developments gathered speed. One respondent in Lerwick wrote: “We are not all against green energy, but smaller community projects would be far more rewarding than destroying vast peat wilderness.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, environmental worries dominated, particularly in rural areas. People described hillsides turning into industrial corridors and peat bogs being carved up for access roads and turbine platforms. For many, it wasn’t the presence of one development that troubled them most, but the cumulative effect – wind farms, pylons, substations and BESS [battery energy storage system] units appearing, with no sense of an overall plan.

Concerns about the planning system weren’t far behind. Many felt overwhelmed by the volume of applications and struggled to understand how decisions were made. Several communities told us they were trying to respond to multiple proposals simultaneously, with little support. From Beauly, one resident wrote: “We are drowning under a mountain of planning applications… It is tearing our communities apart.”

Money and ownership came up again and again alongside a sense of injustice. People asked why those living beside turbines still faced some of the highest energy bills in the country, and why so much of the infrastructure was owned by companies based overseas. One respondent from St John’s Town of Dalry put it starkly: “The blight on the landscape only benefits rich investors and not the people.”

Running through all of this was the emotional strain. Many spoke about the sheer exhaustion of constantly responding to developments, the sense of losing control over their surroundings, and the upset caused by long-standing community divisions. In Rothienorman, a resident described how: “The mental health and stress of trying to participate in the planning process of these projects is taking its toll on our residents and because we have no idea of how the ECU [the Scottish Government Energy Consents Unit] makes its decisions, we have no way of knowing how best to object to proposals.”

Yet the message from most respondents was not anti-renewable. Respondents recognised the need for clean energy and the urgency of climate action. What they wanted was a transition that protected the landscape, shared the benefits more fairly and respected the knowledge and experience of people who live in these places. As a Shetland islander from Whalsay wrote: “Our beautiful unspoiled land has been destroyed bit by bit. The benefits to locals are negligible.”

Such responses speak to a process that is at times dysfunctional, with huge payouts to corporate energy companies to not produce energy, while communities languish with both the environmental impact and fuel poverty. At the same time, most of these companies are foreign-owned and the actual benefit in terms of job creation for the local economy seems minimal. To many, it feels like there is nothing ‘just’ about this transition.

Who is Benefiting from the Power Shift?

As Neil McInroy has written: “The expansion of the sector is vital to a successful green transition. But with the scale and speed of this growth in renewables, questions arise over who owns these resources, and who truly benefits from them.”

One recurring theme in this whole episode – and a key question from who is benefitting – is the issue of foreign-ownership. As Sarah Ade, editor of Glenkens Gazette put it: “One frustration voiced by locals is that almost none of this infrastructure is Scottish-owned; Windy Rig belongs to Statkraft, the Norwegian state energy company, Shepherds’ Rig is owned by Boralex of Canada, Other wind farms involve Danish and French companies, and even Scottish Power, our ‘national’ electricity company, is owned by the Spanish giant Iberdrola.”

The prospect of a much talked about ‘Just Transition’– the idea that the workers and communities from the oil and gas sector could and should be re-employed in the renewable industry; and the idea of clean and affordable energy – is the prize at stake in this energy revolution. But questions are being asked about this whole process, who benefits and why we are not seeing the outcomes for communities, taxpayers and the environment that we might expect.

It’s important to note that it’s not all bad. There are many examples of highly successful and impactful community-owned projects that can be replicated, several of which were highlighted in a report by Equitable Energy Research CIC. 

These include Tilley, the community owned wind turbine on Tiree, which returns over 100x more economic value to the community than the privately-owned Beinn An Tuirc 1-2 Wind Farm, despite being around 1 percent of the size. In Shetland, the Community-owned Garth Community Wind Farm in Yell returns around 90x more value per MW to the community than the privately-owned Viking Wind Farm, despite being 100 times smaller. And the Orkney Community Wind Farms, wholly-owned by Orkney Islands Council, are set to deliver £5.5 million in revenue each year, helping to support public services across the islands. 

But if the business-as-usual model prevails, then the vast potential of the renewables revolution will be wasted. Large sectors of the renewable energy industry is foreign-owned (none of the proposed wind farms include ownership participation from Scottish entities), and the Community Benefit Payments – direct payments paid annually to communities – have not been updated since 2010 when £5,000 per MW per annum was established as an industry benchmark by Forestry and Land Scotland. The system of conversion to renewable energy seems at best un-strategic and at worst incoherent.

The scale of the revolution is vast. The renewable energy sector is huge and growing. According to Equitable Energy Research the combined capacity of operational onshore and offshore wind projects in the Highlands and Islands is around 5 GW. If all projects currently in the pipeline were to be built, the total capacity could exceed 25 GW. 

But despite the fact that we know that “community energy generates 100x more wealth than corporate counterparts,” the actual amount of community-owned onshore wind is pitifully small. The amount of onshore renewables in community shared ownership in Scotland is 0.2% contrasting with 52% in Denmark. This has led to calls at the Public Petitions Committee at Holyrood in June to make offering community shared ownership mandatory for all new wind farm developments. 

Netty Sopata, editor of Fios, the North Lewis newspaper reports: “In Lewis, while global corporations secure prime access to a new £billion interconnector to the mainland, local community energy groups – which have already proven their power to generate income, jobs and resilience – are being pushed to the margins. It raises questions about who benefits from the renewable transition: multinationals chasing profits, or islanders who have fought for community ownership of land and energy for decades.”

In Sutherland, Kyle Chronicle readers are seeing an unprecedented number of planning applications for renewable energy developments and for transmission infrastructure. As editor, Silvia Muras writes: “The proposed developments are of such a scale that they would dwarf the small, dispersed crofting communities and transform the area into an industrial landscape. The Kyle of Sutherland is a stronghold of endangered species such as Fresh Water Pearl Mussel and Atlantic Salmon, and home to wildlife such as Red Squirrel, Pine Marten, Hen Harrier, Osprey, Curlew and Golden Eagle.

“Despite having several operational wind farms and hydro schemes at our doorstep, standing charges in Sutherland are among the highest in the country, and as many as 65% of households were living in fuel poverty in 2023.”

These examples, from Sutherland and Lewis, are mirrored across the country, from Dumfries to Shetland, from Uist to the North East, where communities are facing the same issues: overwhelmed by the scale of proposals, an inability to get grid connection, under-funding for community renewables, or entanglement in an opaque planning system. Perhaps worse, rural communities face ongoing fuel poverty while enduring the impacts of industrial development.

The Scottish Community Coalition on Energy state: “There is growing opposition to new clean energy infrastructure, threatening Scotland’s climate targets and the UK’s clean power targets. The UK Government plans to build the majority of new onshore wind capacity before 2030 in Scotland, but 53 community councils in the Highlands recently supported a joint statement calling for a pause on energy infrastructure developments, and 10% of Scots are against the development of onshore wind.”

They have now released a manifesto ahead of the Holyrood Elections 2026 urging a shift towards community-owned renewable energy. The manifesto argues for:

• Increasing the CARES funding package for community energy to £15m/year, rising each year.

• Using public land to boost community-owned energy. 

• Updating the National Framework Agreement for the Supply of Electricity to allow local authorities and other public bodies to buy energy directly from community energy groups.

• Establishing a Scottish Community Wealth Fund to equitably distribute a portion of the wealth being generated by Scotland’s natural renewable resources.

The Narratives

The problems of the rollout of onshore renewables have become a political crisis with rural communities in open revolt as the gap between the promise of clean affordable energy (and jobs) and the reality has become all too clear.  

The crisis has led to a clash of political narratives about what’s going on and how it might be resolved. These include a backlash against renewables in and of themselves, with an outright rejection of the goals of Net Zero itself, and climate denialism from some in Reform Scotland and the Conservative Party, to those of a Scottish nationalist persuasion such as the campaign group Believe in Scotland who argue that Scottish communities are effectively suffering to generate energy for the England.

While the Labour government argues that the ‘pain’ of bringing connectivity up to speed will be short-lived and followed by reduced bills and lower-carbon energy. Others argue that the issue is one of ownership, both of the means of production and the equipment and technology that produces wind energy.

A wide range of actors are involved in Scotland’s renewable energy transition. Major companies such as SSEN, Statkraft, SSE Renewables, Scottish Power Renewables, EDF and Ocean Winds lead much of the infrastructure and generation work. Alongside them, community organisations – from local land trusts to development trusts and national groups like the Scottish Community Coalition on Energy – push for local benefit and democratic control.

Government bodies also play a role: Scottish Renewables represents the industry, while Local Energy Scotland manages CARES, supporting communities to take part in the shift to net zero. Together, they form the complex mix shaping Scotland’s energy future.

Ultimately, the renewable energy revolution has failed so far to deliver on its potential and promise, and as such has become political dynamite as we enter the year of the next Holyrood elections. 

More from the Scottish Beacon

In this video, author and journalist Dominic Hinde discusses his new book Drifting north: Finding a sustainable future in Scotland’s past. Part memoir, part environmental history, and part travelogue, Drifting north takes us on a climate-focused road trip through Scotland — from the treeless Highlands to the lowland cities.

Along the way, Hinde explores how Scotland’s history as a pioneer of fossil capitalism continues to shape today’s global energy transitions, and what lessons the country offers for a post-fossil-fuel world.

Drawing on his recovery from a near-fatal accident, Hinde weaves together personal experience with the larger story of deindustrialisation, stagnation, and the urgent need for renewal.

The result is a compelling narrative of connections — to place, energy, and the possibility of building a more sustainable future.

Buy Drifting north: Finding a sustainable future in Scotland's past, from Manchester University Press.

See also this intro article on the book from The Scotsman

An event - details at the end of the blog, tickets here - organised by the Scottish activist film platform, Take One Action. Promo text:

Join us to explore what it might look like to have a radical social centre in central Edinburgh, and to explore together all the different things that a space like this could offer!

There is a long international history of social centres, and they take many different forms. We’re going to look together at global examples, from Brazil to Birmingham.

We’re also going to hear from the founders of Pelican House in Bethnal Green in London, one of the prototypes for this model, to hear their story.

One of the key features of a radical social centre is that it should offer free meeting and organising space for local community and grassroots groups.

We are going to hear provocations from different people and organisations about what else an Edinburgh centre could offer, from performance space to a public diner, from a creche to migrants’, tenants’ and workers’ rights clinics, from a garden to a newsroom or community journalist-in-residence.

And we are going to work together to design our own imaginary social centres – in the hope of making this a future reality.

Join us to imagine together, and for a meal prepared using sustainable local ingredients. There is also a fund to support with travel and childcare, just contact us at rachel@takeoneaction.org.uk.

BSL interpretation will be provided, and you can find more venue access information here – we will be in the Binks Hall. This event is supported by Edinburgh’s Regenerative Futures Fund.

Mon 1 December | 7:00pm - 9:30pm

Greyfriars Charteris Centre, 138/140 The Pleasance, EDINBURGH, EH8 9RR United Kingdom (Show on map)

Delighted to cross-post this piece from Heckle magazine - visit here, and support their platform here (as well as support the strikers here). Thanks to Bella Caledonia for the tip:

Edinburgh-based workers at video games giant Rockstar North yesterday walked out in solidarity with dozens of co-workers fired in what has been called “the most ruthless and blatant example of illegal union busting in the history of the games industry”.

Rockstar Games last week fired more than 30 workers in Edinburgh and Dundee, all of whom were active members of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB).

The move comes as workers at the studio come under pressure to deliver work on Grand Theft Auto VI, the next entry in one of the world’s biggest and most profitable video game franchises.

Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, ranks as the second best-selling video game of all time, with more than 215 million copies sold – generating more than $8.9 billion in revenue.

The sixth instalment in the series is hotly-anticipated and has been reported to have a development budget of between $1 billion and $2 billion. Industry analysts expect the game to break sales records on its release and potentially rake in more than $10 billion.

Originally set for release in late 2025, Rockstar announced in May this year that the game would be postponed until May 2026 due to delays in the development process – and yesterday announced that it would be delayed again until November 2026.

Video games workers turning to unions

The video games industry is notorious for practices like “crunch”, where workers are forced to work extensive periods of mandatory overtime in order to get projects over the line on time.

Growing opposition to these practices has led many games workers to join unions like the IWGB, which has campaigned against “reliance on overtime or crunch culture” in the industry as well as a range of improvements in pay and conditions.

Rockstar had claimed to make big internal improvements after damaging reports emerged in 2018 of serious crunch during the development of Red Dead Redemption 2, when some US-based workers were reportedly told to work up to 80 hours per week, while others averaged between 55 and 60 hours.

However, workers at Rockstar North last year complained through the IWGB that their employer was harming their work-life balance by forcing them back to the office five days a week, breaking a previous promise to continue hybrid working options introduced in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

Speaking to Heckle outside Rockstar North’s offices yesterday, IWGB organiser Fred Carter said Rockstar had sacked dozens of workers – some of them relying on the company for visas or healthcare benefits – because the studio is “scared of a union”.

“They’ve alleged gross misconduct in the press and we know this isn’t true,” he said. “Every worker who was sacked in the UK was a member of our union. I’ve never seen such a blatant, ruthless, brazen act of union-busting in the games industry.”

The union is demanding the reinstatement of the sacked workers with full compensation and for management to be held accountable for their firing.

Carter said: “We’re fighting back with everything we can. We’re pursuing robust legal action to reinstate our members. We’re fighting back with demonstrations and public support.

“We’ve been outside the Take-Two offices [Rockstar’s parent company] this morning with a protest in London. We’ve been outside Rockstar North in Edinburgh with a massive protest, with workers from the company walking out to support their co-workers who have been fired. We’ve had speeches and solidarity from unions across the world and in Edinburgh.”

He added: “I think this is a tipping point for the game sector in the UK.”

Scotland as a leader in games development

The Scottish Government has sought to present Scotland as a global leader in games development and has welcomed figures showing there are now 130 video games companies in Scotland, which collectively employ 2,125 people and took in £340 million in revenue last year.

Abertay University in Dundee – where Rockstar North’s forerunner, DMA Design, first created Grand Theft Auto in 1997 – was the UK’s first university to be recognised as a ‘centre for excellence in computer games education’ and many of its graduates work at Rockstar today.

However, the games industry has in the past few years seen mass lay-offs and little recruitment, while workers at both small and large employers have complained of overwork and low pay – issues which are driving workers to unionise in a sector with little history of industrial organising.

When Scotland hosted a major European games industry summit in September, John Swinney boasted that the games industry “demonstrates our nation’s capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship” and welcomed the summit’s focus on the role of AI in games development.

But there was little mention of the workers who power the industry and their anxieties, along with those of workers in other creative industries, of being replaced with AI in pursuit of profit.

Traditional trade unions have also failed to defend games workers’ interests. The largest games workers’ union in the UK is a branch of the IWGB, a grassroots union founded in 2013 which focuses on precarious workers and has much smaller resources than the likes of Unite and the GMB.

Rank-and-file trade unionists from across industries have, however, shown their solidarity.

‘An injury to one is an injury to all’

Support for the fired Rockstar workers from the wider trade union movement has been “fantastic”, Carter said, with a range of union flags and banners on display at the rally.

“This is a company that takes a huge amount of money in UK tax relief and clearly decided to put profit over the lives and livelihoods of the workers who build the games,” he said.

In 2019, think tank TaxWatch UK said Rockstar North had paid £0 in corporation tax between 2013 and 2019 despite making an estimated $5 billion in profit and claiming over £42 million in tax relief under a UK government scheme for video games companies.

Following his demotion from Secretary of State for Scotland, Edinburgh South’s right-wing Labour MP, Ian Murray, is now a junior minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport responsible for that generous tax break for businesses mistreating their staff.

Carter said: “We need to show them that an injury to one is an injury to all. This is an affront to the trade union movement in the UK. This is union-busting of a style of days gone by.

“It’s the kind we see in American companies like Amazon and we know that we can’t let this happen in the UK.”

Readers can show support by donating to the workers’ solidarity fund, writing to their MPs and MSPs, and passing solidarity motions through their unions, he said.

“And above all, organise your workplaces so this kind of thing can’t happen again.”

Addressing games workers, he added: “This is something that’s happened because the union was strong here. We were building and reached massive numbers here.

“This is what they do when they’re scared – but this is also something they can’t do if workers stand up together. This is why you need a union.

“We’ve seen the membership grow at Rockstar over the last week. We held a call with the Game Workers Branch on Tuesday night with almost 200 members in attendance.

“This is a movement you can join. This is one that’s growing. Organise your workplace so this can’t happen to you and this can’t happen to your colleagues.”

Originally from Heckle magazine - support their platform here (as well as support the strikers here)

From the Guardian, republished under their Open Licence terms:

No other European country has such a narrow base of proprietorship as Scotland. Half of all privately owned rural land is held by 421 people or entities. The roots of such disparities lie in the past. The 18th- and 19th-century Highland clearances emptied the glens and readied them for private takeover. On the continent, and eventually in England, the great estates were broken up by inheritance and land taxes. By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.

The passing of a land reform bill, its supporters say, will change that. But doubts remain. Its proponents say the legislation could allow the Scottish government to intervene in private land sales and require large estates to be broken up.

At its heart is the so-called transfer test. This would see Scottish ministers notified before any land sale over 1,000 hectares. However, they lack an explicit veto. If they wanted a more democratic constraint, they could have adopted the Scottish Land Commission’s 2019 proposal for a public interest test – forcing big buyers to openly justify their purchases.

Scottish ministers point out that by getting landowners to tell the government before any large-scale sale, they can give community groups a chance to put together a rival bid. But many big estates lie in sparsely populated upland areas where communities lack purchasing power.

In theory, new “lotting” rules in the bill could diversify ownership by potentially splitting large sales into smaller plots. Yet the land reform expert Andy Wightman argues that such powers will rarely be used – and even then, existing landowners can simply buy the lots back.

Mr Wightman, a former Green MSP, argues persuasively that the pattern of ownership results from a free market in land which privileges those with the deepest pockets. His reasoning is that Scotland’s land should be regulated as a shared resource in the public interest.

Devolution has made this debate possible. Before 1999, Scottish land reform would have stalled in the Lords, where rich landlords literally sat in judgment. Despite more than a quarter of a century of argument, Scottish ministers are reluctant to adopt a more radical shake up.

Craig Dalzell at the Common Weal thinktank suggests that a local land levy would make hoarding costly and fund community investment. The same council powers were used for Scotland’s tourist tax.

Common Weal argues that Scotland should emulate Nordic nations, where smart taxes ensure smaller rural holdings. Significantly, they also encourage more sustainable patterns of forestry, farming and recreational use rather than absentee rents or speculation.

Scottish land reform became a flashpoint in the 2014 independence campaign, because it raised questions of power and sovereignty that drove the wider debate. Yet it was the ruling Scottish National party that last month voted down attempts by opposition MSPs to place a cap on the amount of land that a single entity could own unless they could meet strict limits.

No doubt SNP ministers feared scaring off investment, particularly in forest land brought for carbon offsetting, or being accused of confiscatory nationalism.

The Scottish government’s reasoning – that ownership caps would be “a gift to those who want to maintain the status quo” – got it backwards. By refusing caps, Holyrood preserved the status quo itself. How tightly Scotland retains old structures of land and power depends on whether its democracy has the courage to break the bond.

Cross-posted from the excellent new eco-journal Sower, Subscribe to and support them here.

A universal student experience, often replicated after graduation, is one of having virtually no money. That’s why me and my university friends met every Sunday evening at the free community dinner. School desks inscribed with lewd drawings were pushed together like a game of Tetris to create larger tables, and people from all over the city exchanged stories about their lives and, on the odd occasion, numbers too.

When the bell tolled, everybody stood in line for the accommodatingly vegan-vegetarian buffet. The entire operation was run by volunteers. Some picked up leftover produce from the market in the town centre the day before, while others helped turn those ingredients into entreés for attendees. My favourite role was helping to clear the buffet by eating any leftovers.

Similar community dining experiences are growing in popularity across the world. In 2022, the UK’s largest community dining organisation, FoodCycle, served nearly 500,000 meals to 62 communities. The Garnethill Multicultural Centre in Glasgow hosts three different community dining experiences a week, one specifically for asylum seekers and another for the elderly. Last month, a restaurant with a sliding scale model opened in New York, USA, with cheaper meals offered to those living in the local area.

The idea of people coming together to eat might seem like a wonderful idea on the surface, but it’s also a response to something more sinister. One in ten people in the EU are unable to afford a proper meal every second day, and a third of children in the UK live in homes where there is not enough access to healthy and nutritious food. As people can’t afford basic nourishment, restaurants, too, are struggling with people no longer able to afford the experience of eating out.

While charity or pay-what-you-can models offer a way for the needy to eat, they’re a symptom of a failure in social policy. That’s why the food charity Nourish Scotland are pushing for the reintroduction of public diners to Scotland: diners subsidised by the state to provide affordable, nutritious, and filling meals that are accessible to everyone regardless of their financial status.

“There's an element of universality, dignity, and quality that comes with something being a public institution or a part of public infrastructure,” said Anna Chworow, deputy director at Nourish Scotland. “Which is not always present when you're talking about a voluntary initiative, soup kitchen, or a community meal.”

The movement behind public diners has already gained some traction. When Nourish Scotland published a report on public diners last year it received cross-party support on a motion in the Scottish Parliament from four MSPs. The charity announced in the summer that they’re involved in a research project testing pilot diners, expected to be opened in summer 2026, in Dundee and Nottingham.

Public diners already have a history in the UK, where so-called British Restaurants offered places to eat during the wartime period of the 20th century. At their peak, there were 2000 situated across the UK, all of which were subsidised by the government. For comparison, there are around 1450 McDonalds in the country today. “Before we had a national health service, we had a national restaurant service,” said Chworow.

An exhibition by Nourish Scotland demonstrating the history of British Restaurants, and how similar concepts exist in countries like Poland, Turkey, Mexico, and Singapore, is currently travelling around Scotland to raise public awareness. “We somehow seem to think, ‘Oh, no, the state couldn't do that’, and when you say, ‘No, actually, it has done that—and within our living memory’, it just allows people to go, ‘Oh, maybe we could do this again’,” said Chworow.

Chworow didn’t even realise she had personal experience with public diners until scouring the Polish government’s financial records as part of her job. She noticed the name of a restaurant—a milk bar—she’d often eaten at while growing up in Poland, but had never realised the “good honest food” her mother had often sent her to eat had been state-subsidised. “It's just a lovely testament to how embedded [milk bars] are in the infrastructure of the country,” she said. 

Access to proper nutrition, however, isn’t the only issue when it comes to food. Over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food production, with meat especially bad for the environment. Guidelines published by world-leading experts on health, sustainability, and social justice emphasise “a plant-forward diet where whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes comprise a greater proportion of foods consumed” for the best human health and sustainability outcomes.

As public diners would be state-subsidised, there could be national guidelines on how to encourage people to make healthier, more sustainable choices. Small interventions like putting plant-based options first on menus or providing information on the climate impacts of food can nudge people to choose more sustainable meals. The report publishedby Nourish Scotland found that public diners could act as a model for how to make tasty food without focusing on meat.

"You can see it from a feminist perspective as well, I think, [to] massively alleviate the pressure on women in the home to do all that free, unpaid labor [of cooking]" — Benjamin Selwyn, professor of international development

It’s only because of my friends, many of whom I attended the Free Café with, that I learned to cook vegan meals properly. Although somebody should be at The Hague for what was slopped onto my plate at school in the UK, and I sometimes question if my mother ever truly loved me based on the meals she served, a lack of imagination is a big factor limiting dietary change. Without a herbivorous community to help me, I’d have still thought of vegan food as salads without meat and not known what a lentil was or that tinned beans didn’t have to come in a tomato sauce.

More broadly, public diners could be a guiding light for a better food system. In a piece for The Conversation published late last year, Benjamin Selwyn, professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex, wrote: “subsidised community restaurants could serve seasonal dishes made with locally grown plant-based food, produced on farms that encourage wildlife through widespread tree cultivation, the use of cover-crops, and improvements to soil health.”

Democratic input would also be important to make public diners work. Different demographics have cultural practices that should not only be reflected in what food is served, but also how it’s served. In places with large Muslim communities, for example, public diners should be accessible after sunset during Ramadan. Public diners could also act as a place of cultural exchange, where those from different backgrounds meet and explore cuisines from all over the world. 

“A public diner in Glasgow looks very different from a public diner in the middle of Fife because the demographics are different,” said Chworow. “I don't think that the diners would be successful unless you embrace and enter into a dialogue with the customers who would be eating there.”

Selwyn agrees with Chworow that public diners need to be democratic institutions. He said public diners could “shift the balance of power a little bit against capital” and “empower workers by making them less market dependent,” meaning they wouldn’t have to rely on an income as much as they do now to eat. “It would be about changing society in a meaningful way rather than just providing something that people need,” he said.

He believes that trade unions and other collective organisations will play a big role in ensuring whether these institutions are built. “You can see it from a feminist perspective as well, I think, [to] massively alleviate the pressure on women in the home to do all that free, unpaid labor [of cooking],” he said.

At their peak, there were 2000 public diners situated across the UK, all of which were subsidised by the government.

With all of the different facets of public diners taken into account, Chworow said it’s important that the right balance is struck between them. While public diners could help to meet climate goals, for example, that shouldn’t be their main focus as it comes with certain connotations that could turn people off. 

But if public diners are so great, why did they disappear in the first place? Bryce Evans, a professor of modern world history at Liverpool Hope University who has written a book on the history of British Restaurants, told Sower in an email there were three main reasons they were shut down: the political will to keep them disappeared after the war ended; private retail trade rallied hard against state-subsidised dining and urged a return to the free market; and the central government cut funding. 

The UK government recently announced it would hike fees for students, and this week the US government cut funding for those unable to afford food, demonstrating how the Western world is moving away from state-supported necessities. If the political will to keep public diners didn’t exist in the post-war period, when the government built up huge social safety nets through the construction of council houses and free national healthcare, what chance is there in today’s world?

When I think back to my time at the Free Café, the people who attended were largely the same demographic: white, middle class, and environmentally conscious. The beauty of a public diner would be the universality—that, in theory, you could be seated next to somebody who depended on the state for survival, and on the other side could be somebody who wasn’t King Charles. Although, Charles aside, it’s a lovely vision for the future of food that centres community spirit, the concept might not translate as well as you might hope into the public consciousness.

People who eat more frequently with others are more likely to feel happy and satisfiedwith their lives, yet most meals eaten aren’t a community experience. In many cases, community meals are associated with charity, as, sadly, they often are somewhat charitable in nature. During the Covid pandemic, for example, small community food organisations stepped in to help people who, for financial or health reasons, could no longer get their own food.

Adele Wylie, a PhD student at the University of Reading, studied how the pandemic shaped people’s access to food. After seeing how widespread food poverty was, she decided to organise a pop-up mimicking the public diner concept in Manchester in February this year. Although Wylie said there was a lot of enthusiasm to get the concept off the ground from those who attended, she added it could take a long time for people not to associate such spaces with charity. “There needs to be some consideration about how to attract people to come,” she said. 

Jill Muirie, public health programme manager at the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, has attended events on public diners and can see the public health benefits of the state providing good, nutritious, and affordable food. At the same time, she’s not sure they’d be as universally appealing as you’d want them to be. “I think there's probably quite a lot of work to be done to develop understanding of that public diner concept, but also to find suitable funding for it at the moment,” said Muirie. 

Financing a complete overhaul of how food is distributed is already a gargantuan task, but the idea of building public eating establishments across the country that have mass appeal at a time where everything is so polarised feels Sisyphean; public diners are, unfortunately, fighting both a rhetorical and financial uphill battle. There is, however, another approach that has already found some success.

The CanTeams project hosts community dining experiences at schools across England. So far, the project has served over 3000 people at over 50 events. “We're trying to turn schools into community hubs, and using activities and nutritious food to do that,” said Jonathan Harper, CEO of Future Foundations, the organisation behind CanTeams. “If you have a young person performing, singing, or doing something… [that] can help catalyse communities coming in.”

Although the project primarily focuses on school children and their immediate families, there have been events involving pensioners or those in care homes. Harper told the story of one old lady who said she was scared of young people and therefore didn’t take the bus in the afternoons, who, after sitting side by side with teenagers and breaking bread with them, felt safe. In the future, he wants to create events where the wider community can come in to eat after the children leave. 

With the state having left a potato-shaped vacuum in society, Harper believes it’s up to citizens and communities to act. Although he’s very supportive of public diners and would welcome them with open arms, he also thinks that something like CanTeams would be more palatable in the current political climate. Not only does the project use existing infrastructure by taking place in school cafeterias, and therefore doesn’t have the same start-up costs as public diners, it doesn’t rely on state funding at all—though, he added, it would be very welcome. 

The project has made its mark by relying on philanthropic funding. In the future, Harper hopes to get more private sponsorships and test pay-what-you-can models to make the concept self-sustaining. The Long Table in Gloucestershire, UK, has a pay-what-you-can model and has made enough money to employ 22 part-time and full-time members of staff on a real living wage, showing that it's entirely possible. Based on the success of CanTeams so far, Harper was invited to join the advisory board of DISHED, the overarching project responsible for the public diner pilots in Dundee and Nottingham.

Relying on the private sector comes with its own problems. History, defined as yesterday or earlier, shows us that private interests can't be trusted with assets—unless you enjoy rivers filled with human faeces, overpriced trains with horrible service, and school meals being snatched from children. Building the future of food on the whims of private individuals, companies, or organisations isn’t solid ground for important infrastructure, even though, admittedly, I do understand Harper’s point that CanTeams feels like a more politically-palatable option.

In response to the idea that the government is unlikely to support public diners, Chworow said she believes they will have little choice as poor diets now rival smoking as a leading cause of death. She added that Scotland and England have different political contexts, too, and that public diners would most likely first be adopted by progressive governments in Scotland and Wales, as well as cities like London and Manchester. She added that a similar rollout of public diners happened in Mexico and with infrastructure like the National Health Service and libraries in the UK. 

Yet even if the rollout of public diners did feel truly impossible, that shouldn't stop us from demanding them anyway. During times of feudalism, the idea of democracy would have been unthinkable; before workers secured the right to a five day week, leisure time would have been an activity for the wealthy; and Frodo and the rest of the fellowship would have never made it to Mount Doom and destroyed the ring if they were too afraid to take the journey.

The ideal scenario would be public diners and CanTeams being publicly funded concepts spread across the world: one a place of democracy where people take more control of the foods that they eat, and another that builds intergenerational bridges and treats young people like active participants in society. Both can only contribute to strengthening our bonds with those in our communities, building in more resilience against fascism. 

One old lady said she was scared of young people and therefore didn’t take the bus in the afternoons. After sitting side by side with teenagers and breaking bread with them at CanTeams, she felt safe.

In the meantime, CanTeams' approach is a great way to foster more consciousness around community eating, especially because children will grow into the next generation of voters; the more people care about community meals on a broader scale, the more likely they are to get sustained funding from the government. 

The majority of people I'm still in contact with from university are those I attended the Free Café with. While it's possible they were already the people I would have remained close to following graduation, there's something there to be said about the power of food bringing people together. Many of the relationships I've built today wouldn't exist without food and the way I interact with it.

Public diners and other forms of community eating like CanTeams can help give people access to climate-friendly, nutritious food, but they also serve as a reminder that the human experience is one of community. To adapt a popular refrain, the quickest way to a person's heart—in this case, their empathy for themselves, the planet, and those around them—is through their stomach.

Want to make public diners a reality?

• If you're in the UK, you can reach out directly to Nourish Scotland and ask them how you can get involved. If you're a parent or teacher, you could also try get your school involved with CanTeams.

• Reach out to your MP asking them to look into the idea of public diners and support it in parliament.

• If you're outside of the UK, look to see if there are any similar initiatives going on in your country of residence.

• Start attending or organising a community meal—there's no better way to bring about community eating than doing it!

• Share this article with people who might be inspired to act, and subscribe to spread ideas like this to a wider audience!

Cross-posted from the excellent new eco-journal Sower, Subscribe to and support them here. See our archive on public and community restaurants.

Edinburgh’s Radical Bookfair, at the Assembly Roxy (21st to 24th November), and run by radical bookshop Lighthouse, has a fascinating agenda of speakers and workshops (scroll to the bottom here and PDF). Main blurb below:

The theme for this year's fair will be From Where We Stand. With a nod to the thirty years of a radical bookshop existing on West Nicolson Street, we'll be celebrating the way histories of resistance, protest and change-making live on in every step we take toward a more just future.

Through the four days of the fair, we'll be diving into conversations about community organising, through time and across generations, international solidarity, radical histories and how we draw on them. We'll be exploring possible futures rooted in past struggles.

Sometimes it's not only about making new worlds - it's also about building from the worlds that have wilfully been buried through history, but which we all depend on.

Gallery of events below:

Happy to profile Highland Peoples Power, a community interest company whose purpose is to “create a better energy industry in the Highlands and Scotland, one that works for everyone – communities, workers, businesses and the environment.” Below is from their opening page:

Our Vision

In 25 years’ time, we want the majority of energy generation in the Highlands to be owned and managed by local communities, with 100% of the benefits distributed equitably across our region.

Our Aims

We want to:

• Support communities to pursue shared ownership of energy generation – including solar, wind, hydro and battery storage

• Distribute returns from energy projects into regional priorities – fuel poverty, housing, and public services

• Build community wealth, by using local businesses and suppliers, and keeping profits within the region through community ownership and control.

Our ethos

We believe our communities should be benefiting from the transition to renewable energy, not being left behind.

Rural Scotland suffers from higher rates of fuel poverty than those living in urban areas, with 36% of households in fuel poverty in the Highlands. At the same time, we have the highest amount of renewable energy development any region in the UK.

The majority of wind farms across Scotland  are owned by private developers, with profits extracted from our communities to shareholders. Others are public companies owned by foreign governments, with profits going towards public services in other countries, not to our own communities.

Highland People’s Power supports renewable energy that delivers real benefits for Highland communities. We are therefore pushing for more of the benefits of the energy transition to go towards communities.

HPP don’t take a position on individual energy projects or planning applications, that is down to communities, Highland Council and the Scottish Government but we are open to exploring community and shared ownership opportunities with communities, developers and local government.

Why now?

With climate change high on the  political agenda, there is  global consensus that an energy transition grounded in renewable technologies is the only way to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C. 

The new UK government’s support for Great British Energy and the Local Power Plan is providing political momentum and policy support towards the deployment of large-scale renewable projects to address energy security, lower energy price volatility and reduce carbon emissions. 

Community-owned renewable energy must play an essential part in this coming transition.

We note some excellent articles on their blog - in particular this one on Private Wires:

Private wires are dedicated power lines linking generators directly to users, bypassing the public grid. They can cut costs by avoiding some transmission fees, improve reliability by reducing outage risks, and make it easier to source renewable energy directly.

The Taiwan Film Festival in Scotland (TFFS) is thrilled to announce its return to Glasgow from November 4th to 19th, bringing a vibrant celebration of Taiwanese cinema to Scottish audiences.

With 13 screenings featuring 18 films, this year’s programme will unfold across two iconic venues: Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) and Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA).

The festival aims to bridge Taiwan and Scotland, fostering a lasting cultural exchange that sheds light on cinema’s power to connect inward truths with outward visions, creating a vibrant shared space for reflection and inspiration.

This year, TFFS will feature a diverse selection of 13 screenings (18 titles), which were organised into three thematic units: Intimate Familial Bonds, Historical and Trans-cultural Legacies, and Voices Transcend the Boundaries. Besides, the 2025 programme will also present a special section of short films, showcasing dynamic, bold energies from the young filmmakers.

Highlights include the festival's Opening Gala film of the highly acclaimed film Family Matters (Dir.Pan Ke-yin), a Scottish Premiere nominated for eight categories at the 62nd Golden Horse Awards. The film that deeply depicts love in a family with a humorous yet melancholic tone, will bring you laughter and tears, followed by a public opening reception at Third Eye Bar.

The festival consists of 6 European Premieres, 9 UK Premieres, and 2 Scottish Premieres, spanning documentaries, animations, experimental films, and feature narratives. Closed by a special mention at the 2024 Caméra d'Or, Mongrel (Dir. Chiang Wei-liang), offers a powerful call to reimagine Taiwan and its place in the world.

From poignant dramas to bold experimental works, the festival proudly presents a feast of audio-visual experiences, showcasing internationally acclaimed films that promise to captivate, challenge, and inspire”

“We invite you to join us in these marvellous encounters—where Taiwan meets the world, and where Scotland, in turn, encounters Taiwan,” said Junwei Lu, Director of TFFS 2025.

From Future Economy Scotland:

The ScotWind offshore leasing round marked a landmark moment for Scotland’s net zero journey. In 2022, Crown Estate Scotland awarded seabed rights to 20 offshore wind projects with a potential capacity of 30GW – then the world’s largest commercial round for floating offshore wind.

Rapidly scaling up renewable energy generation is of course essential. But how we do so – and who benefits – also matters. Central to this question is ownership.

Securing a ScotWind lease is not just about the right to build and operate a wind farm – it also grants the right to capture the long-term financial returns these projects will generate. This in turn will determine who ultimately benefits from one of Scotland’s most crucial resources, and whether the transition to net zero is fair and just.

In collaboration with Common Wealth, here at Future Economy Scotland we’re publishing our interactive map: ‘Who Owns ScotWind?’ The map below shows the location of all 20 ScotWind projects. Hovering over each project reveals key information, including the project owners and capacity, and the proportion of supply chain expenditure that has been committed to Scotland.

However, simply examining the immediate owners of ScotWind projects does not give the full picture of ownership. Many of these companies are subsidiaries of large multinational groups, which in turn are owned by large institutional investors, asset managers and other financial institutions.

Clicking each project in the map below reveals the top 10 ultimate shareholders of each ScotWind project, weighted by the proportion of capacity owned. Understanding who these ultimate shareholders are is crucial, because it reveals where the benefits of Scotland’s offshore wind will ultimately flow.

Full report is here: Rethinking ScotWind: Maximising Scotland’s offshore wind potential.

Our data further reveals that:

Nine ScotWind projects are owned either in whole or in part by foreign state-owned enterprises

These state-owned firms collectively own 12% of total ScotWind capacity, with the ultimate beneficiaries being their respective government owners. As shown in the table below, this includes national governments of Ireland, Sweden and Denmark, as well as regional and municipal governments in Germany and Belgium.

Note: A company is classified as ‘state-owned’ if a public sector entity holds a majority of the shares and voting rights.

Only four out of the 29 parent companies that own ScotWind developers are headquartered in the UK

These UK headquartered companies are BP, SSE, Shell and RIDG. Between them, the projects owned by these companies are expected to generate around 6.5GW of the total 30GW of capacity expected to be generated by ScotWind projects, equivalent to less than a quarter (22%). This means that more than three quarters of ScotWind capacity is owned by parent companies headquartered outside the UK.

Eight ScotWind projects are owned either in whole or in part by six fossil fuel companies

Six of the parent companies of ScotWind developers can be regarded as fossil fuel companies, due their extensive involvement with the exploration and production of oil and gas. These include Shell, BP and TotalEnergies, alongside the Japanese firms Marubeni and Mitsui & Co and the Norwegian company Aker ASA. Collectively, developers owned by these fossil fuel companies own a quarter (25%) of total ScotWind capacity.

The ultimate shareholders of ScotWind projects include the world’s biggest asset managers

The world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, is a top ten shareholder in 14 out of 20 ScotWind projects, while its rival Vanguard is a top ten shareholder in 15 out of 20 ScotWind projects.

In total, five large investment firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, JP Morgan Asset Management, Macquarie, and Quantum Capital Group – collectively own approximately 18% of ScotWind capacity, representing nearly a fifth of the total portfolio.

Blog series from Marilyn Hamilton, integral cities expert and chair at Findhorn Ecovillage, Scotland:

Findhorn stands as both a laboratory and a beacon: a small-scale, spiritually rooted, regenerative ecology that mirrors the dynamics of whole cities and contributes to the healing of meta-crises at planetary scale.

This series of blogs will explore key themes that emerged from Marilyn Hamilton’s interview with Ruby Livingston in early September 2025.

Here are the themes that emerged from the interview.

– Calling & Obedience to the Inner Voice – Marilyn frames her journey to Findhorn as a response to deep calling, illustrating the role of spiritual impulse in community evolution.

– Integral Frameworks Applied Locally & Globally – The use of Integral City, Spiral Dynamics, and multiple maps connects individual, organizational, and planetary perspectives.

– Findhorn as ‘Hospitable to the Soul’ – Beauty, Truth, and Goodness emerge as guiding lenses for regenerative culture.

– Gaia’s Reflective Organs – Cities, organizations, and individuals are nested holarchies within Gaia’s consciousness.

– Governance in Transition – The SCIO and petition processes are viewed as opportunities for learning, tough love, and new models of collective responsibility.

– From Eco-Village to Regenerative Learning Community – Findhorn’s potential is to be a microcosm and fractal of larger human settlements, serving not only people and place but also planet.

These themes are explored in this series of Blogs:

1. Listening to the Inner Voice: Findhorn’s Call to Community

2. Scaling Up Consciousness: Applying Integral Frameworks from Local to Global

3. Hospitable to the Soul: Living with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

4. Gaia’s Reflective Organs: Cities, Communities, and Consciousness

5. Governance in Transition: Tough Love and Collective Responsibility at Findhorn

6. From Eco-Village to Regenerative Learning Community: A Microcosm for the World

More here.

The Bell is an excellent example of the new city-based independent journalism, using platforms like Substack to cover stories at a level of granularity and depth rarely served by traditional media.

The Bell’s beat is Glasgow - and this week’s newsletter shows a story on how the “flag wars” of the moment have taken a creative (and globally political) turn [To subscribe to The Bell, click here]

We can reveal the group behind the Palestine-Saltires popping up on lampposts across the city as the activists ‘United in Resistance’ [hotlink to their retail site]. We spoke to a member of the group, who wish to remain anonymous. “The idea that the Saltire can be used as a symbol of division and fear is not a true representation of Scotland's legacy of fairness and equality,” they told us.

They describe those raising the saltire as “far right” figures using the flag “as a weapon to dehumanise migrants in Scotland”. They explained that the Palestine-Saltires, which they are calling ‘flags for freedom’ are “a visible message that Scotland stands with refugees and the people of Palestine. Resistance, they told us, means “resistance against genocide, anti-immigration, racism, and colonialism”. 

It’s notable that the flags have been appearing all along Victoria Road, as well as Argyle Street near the university and Kelvingrove Museum, as opposed to areas like Milton, Maryhill and Possil. Last night, the groups were also out in Battlefield and Pollokshaws Road. They told us they are “not out to antagonise”, and so made the decision to avoid the areas where Saltires have already been raised, predominantly in the north of the city.

Over a week on from the Palestine-Saltires being put up, we’ve noticed one has been ripped down on Victoria Road, while two directly in front of Kelvingrove have been removed. Given the council has made the decision not to remove the Saltires in north Glasgow, United in Resistance told us they “strongly hope” it was not a decision by the council to remove their flags.

The group are working with the support of the Glasgow Genocide Emergency Committee and the Scottish Palestine Solidarity campaign. They’ve launched a crowdfunder with a target of £5,000 to “fill the streets of Glasgow” with solidarity flags. “At a time of genocide and displacement, we want to show that compassion, dignity, and solidarity are stronger than borders,” they write. 

Much positive critical attention has been paid to the performance of Oscar-nominated actress Saoirse Ronan in the 2024 film The Outrun.

The film, adapted from Amy Liptrot’s memoir of the same title, follows Ronan as Rona, a young woman who returns to her childhood home on the mainland of Orkney in an effort to recover from her alcoholism.

Ronan slips across time and place: her performance weaves together Rona’s return to her home, her time in London as a student, and her eventual relocation to Orkney’s Papa Westray Island, crafting a fragmentary portrait of addiction.

While most critics seem to agree that the quality of Ronan’s performance ought to surprise ‘no one,’ the narrative of the film itself seems to have divided opinions.

RogerEbert.com critic Tomris Laffly writes that The Outrun is an ‘exhilarating memory piece’ because it is not a ‘blandly told, straightforward narrative.’ Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, however, found fault in the film’s narrative style and ‘lack of forward momentum.’

Resisting Gleiberman’s critique, and building from Laffly’s position, we assert that this lack of momentum allows the film to generate a wave-like motion that mirrors Rona’s lack of upward continuity in her sobriety, the fraught borders of islandness, and character-viewer subjectivity.

In adapting a film from a memoir, Director Nora Fingscheidt works not to generate a narration of a life but, rather, to strike up composite images and sounds of person and place.

Our review is particularly concerned with The Outrun’s soundscape and how it works to resist the false binaries that divide humans from their environment.

The first sound in the film is that of the sea. The crashing of waves is audible, unaccompanied by an image. The seascape emerges following this cue: a bank of seaweed, a grey horizon, and a child in rain boots moving across the pebbled shore. The score strikes up, followed by the squawking of gulls and the crunching of the child’s boots against the rocks and weeds.

From the beginning of The Outrun, Fingscheidt has a vested interest in foregrounding Rona’s sonic environment. The ocean, Rona’s movements, and the score are entangled. Her boots cause depressions in the seaweed; her hands return debris to the sea; the sound of her body moving across the shore is inextricable from the waves and the gulls.

Thus, the soundscape postulates an alternative to false human-non-human binaries: Rona is not apart from her environment but an intimate part of it.

The film transitions from the sounds of the beach to the insular sounds of the sea’s depths as Jan Miserre and John Gürtler’s ‘Dance of the Selkies’ plays, tracking the movements of a seal during Rona’s opening narration on the island’s folklore.

Here, the image turns: an adult Rona dances under green light, ‘trapped in [her] human body,’ seemingly unable to return to the sea. However, as she dances, she and her boyfriend are submerged. The green light of the club is the same green light that filters through the water.

In The Outrun, these two environments are inextricable. The club and the ocean are linked through Rona’s experiences.

In the last quarter of the film, Rona can be seen once again at the water’s edge, mirroring the opening shots of the film. She wears headphones that cover her ears, walking to the sound of ‘The Conduit’ by Belief Defect.

This track is rhythmic and crackling, with deep resounding beats. Rona breathes in time with the music. Though we can hear her breath, we cannot hear the environment beyond her headphones. However, the thudding of the music paired with the shots of the waves crashing against the cliff evokes the sound of the sea.

Then, shot in profile, with the sea behind her in the frame and her hair blowing around her face, Rona reaches up and tentatively removes her headphones. The electronic music transitions cleanly into the ocean’s rhythmic pulse, which all along has been thudding.

While it might seem that the world inside her headphones—harkening back to her prior life in the London club scene—isolates her from her natural environment, these sounds are deeply entangled.

This scene distills the intermingling of Rona’s worlds: an essential part of her healing is to maintain continuity of identity, integrating music, dance, and pleasure into her sobriety.

The entanglement of Rona’s environment(s) and selfhood is reprised at the end of the film. Rona’s monologue, which is plucked from Liptrot’s memoir, narrates: ‘In grandiose moments … I study my personal geology.’

Throughout a montage, Rona musically conducts the sea in Orkney, the Thames, and a crowded club. The soundscape coalesces here. All of her senses come together as ‘waves roll into the shore in time with [her] beating heart.’

Her conducting mirrors her embodied experiences with the world around her, making it impossible to distinguish whether she is making the waves move or is being moved by them. Juxtaposing images of the club and the sea offers the possibility to understand these environments as being at odds; however, Rona’s conducting throughout demonstrates otherwise.

The relationship between these places is nuanced, and this is mirrored in Rona’s pursuit of sobriety. The blurring of these conceptual categories works to generate a vision of recovery and environments that complicate what a straightforward healing narrative might offer, contra Gleiberman.

While the blended soundscape establishes a crucial blurring of conceptual categories, in our view, one of the most potent sounds of the film is one that the viewer and Rona are forced to wait for—the call of the corncrake.

Corncrakes used to be numerous in the Orkney islands, but changes in farming practices and the introduction of modern farm machinery have had a significant impact on their presence. The work that Rona undertakes for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds requires her to listen for rare and subtle sounds in the middle of the night.

Though during the montage, Rona conducts the world around her with huge crescendos of orchestral music, she cannot conduct or even summon the sound of the corncrake—she, and, thus, we, must wait for it.

When Rona departs from her croft on Papa Westray Island, she walks quietly down the lane and happens upon the corncrake as it calls. She laughs as the credits begin to roll.

The ‘crex-crex’ of the corncrake and Rona’s sharp laugh are ruptures, spontaneous happenings. Following the surging sonic moment of conducting, this intimate and quiet moment pushes us into reality.

The Outrun’s interest in complicating linear narratives through sound, montage, and flashback pays homage to the legacy of Scottish screen. This is particularly pertinent to Orkney due in part to the work of twentieth-century filmmaker Margaret Tait, who called herself a film poet.

Demanding that a film propel us via linear narrative does not attend well to the island as subject and participant in a particular history of filmic arts that is tied to poetic and image-based practice. Here, this is made even more capacious via The Outrun’s attention to the resonance of the sonic world of the island and Rona’s subjectivity.

Resisting linear narration, vested in locality and identity, this film is a thoughtful and compelling adaptation of Liptrot’s memoir.

More from the International Review of Scottish Studies - subscribe here

We think it’s clear that the interconnected crises facing us at this time require transformational change in our economic, political and social systems. And we believe that transformational change happens as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what is possible.

The knowledge and experience held by our members is our key resource and we seek to provide a structure that can nurture networks of relationships between our members across Scotland. 

Apart from doing our best to enable mutual support and inspiration between our members, we develop and deliver training and other services to meet our members’ needs. We work to illuminate and make community-led action more visible and better valued. We link with wider partners and other networks and act as a channel to communicate with policymakers.

More from SCCAN here.

Delighted to be able to cross-post an essay from the Scottish eco-thinker Mairi McFadyen. Here’s her reflection “on the role and value of local archive material in the context of the global climate and ecological crisis”:

Here in the Highlands, that crisis is close to home: a region vulnerable to climate change and ranked among the most nature-depleted in the world – sitting in the lowest 12% globally for biodiversity, a reality far removed from the untouched wilderness of the imagination.

Local forms of culture and creativity offer ways to connect with place and with the natural world. This was a theme so beautifully articulated by Eilidh MacKenzie in last month’s column, with a focus on Skye’s gruagach traditions – how songs, stories and cultural practices can encode deep relationships with land, animals and the natural world.

I’ve been thinking recently about so-called Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) – music, song, story, cultural practices, traditional knowledge – and its relevance to nature recovery.

In 2024, the UK government finally ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH (2003). While this distinction between tangible and intangible heritage may sound abstract, or the jargon a bit academic, this is nevertheless a pivotal step forward in terms of a national framework that commits to the recognition, support and renewal of living traditions.

When it comes to nature recovery, the UNESCO Convention recognises that cultural heritage is vital for sustainability and biodiversity; however, in Scotland, the emerging ICH Partnership – led by the museums, heritage and cultural sectors – has so far not engaged with environmental and nature policy frameworks.

At the same time, Scotland’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2045, led by NatureScot, while it highlights the importance of involving communities, makes no mention of cultural heritage, local traditions or cultural practices.

Perhaps this is because nature restoration is often understood in practical terms: planting trees, restoring peatlands, improving water retention, reintroducing species. While these interventions are vital, their long-term success depends as much on human relationships with the land as on ecological processes themselves.

Sustainable environmental stewardship relies on emotional, ethical and cultural connections between people and place – relationships that foster a sense of belonging, responsibility, and care. That is to say, nature restoration is as much a cultural task as it is an ecological one.

Across the world, research has shown a causal link between the loss of biodiversity and the loss of cultural diversity. When languages and traditions disappear, so too does the knowledge of how to live with and care for the ecosystems that sustain life.

The destruction of culture often comes first – disrupting memory, dislocating communities and severing the bonds between people and place. It is no coincidence that the world’s 370 million Indigenous peoples, who make up less than 5% of the global population, steward around 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity.

Global examples show how integrating cultural heritage into nature recovery can lead to more sustainable, community-supported outcomes, particularly in Indigenous contexts. In Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia, for example, established protocols ensure that traditional knowledge and practices actively guide restoration and stewardship.

In Scotland, no such legal protocols exist. NatureScot has a Gaelic plan, but this focuses mainly on language use and cultural visibility rather than embedding cultural heritage within nature recovery frameworks.

This is partly because Gaelic culture is not officially recognised as Indigenous. Claims to Indigeneity are hotly contested: some argue that Gaelic culture absolutely should assert this status, in solidarity with Indigenous peoples across the world.

Others caution that doing so conflates the historical experiences of the Gaels with those peoples colonised by external modern imperial powers today, undermining Indigenous struggle.

Others worry the term risks being essentialist or exclusive, sidelining people outside Gaelic-speaking communities or excluding those already under-represented.

Whether Gaelic culture is considered legally Indigenous or not, it carries a rich tradition of place-based knowledge that resonates with indigenous perspectives worldwide, rooted in a worldview that reflects a deep, reciprocal relationship between people and nature.

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) provides a constructive framework to recognise and safeguard Gaelic cultural practices on their own terms, without conflating them with Indigenous rights.

In Scotland, emerging ICH policy has adopted an inclusive approach, celebrating the value of such deep-rooted traditions while also embracing contemporary cultural expressions from migrant and marginalised communities, supporting evolving, plural understandings of community, place and belonging.

ICH is also defined as living heritage, meaning that it is actively practiced and transmitted from generation to generation. Framed this way, ICH isn’t viewed as a romanticised or static relic of the past, but part of a living flow of culture: traditions can be revived by the communities that sustain them, adapted to contemporary contexts while remaining rooted in their original meaning.

One of the main ways ICH is safeguarded is through documenting and inventorying practices guided by communities themselves. This preserves knowledge that might otherwise vanish, providing a resource for education and creative practice.

In the context of the climate and ecological crisis, safeguarding ‘knowledge about nature and the universe’ – including understanding of land, sea, and ecosystems – is a vital and urgent task.

Of course, many local projects have long understood the link between culture and the environment, drawing on songs, stories and traditions in community initiatives. What’s missing is a way to translate this practice into national frameworks.

The land reform and parts of the rewilding movement increasingly emphasise the importance of connecting people and communities to the land through cultural engagement. But this remains piecemeal.

This matters now more than ever. Land across Scotland is changing hands rapidly, often through large-scale rewilding or carbon offset schemes, freezing ownership patterns and locking out local voices. This diminishes not only community agency but also the ecological resilience that comes from local knowledge and place-based stewardship.

One approach that begins to address the missing cultural dimension is bioregioning, which looks to organise human life in alignment with the living systems that sustain us.

It defines regions by natural characteristics – rivers, mountains, watersheds – rather than political boundaries. Bioregioning understands that humans are a fundamental part of the ecology of a place, and therefore recognises the importance of including both cultural and scientific knowledge in nature restoration projects.

I have been fortunate recently to work as a researcher-in-residence on a bioregioning and ecosystem restoration project, the Findhorn Watershed Initiative (FWI), led by Elle Adams at the Findhorn, Nairn and Lossie Rivers Trust (FNLRT).

Together with Raghnaid Sandilands, we have been exploring in part how cultural heritage can begin to help nurture and restore connection to the river, guide restoration efforts and foster relationships of care for lasting stewardship.

Our work recognises that cultural and ecological loss are deeply intertwined, and therefore both are necessary for restoration. This connection is vividly illustrated in Gaelic placenames, which hold valuable knowledge about the land and its former richness.

Names encode details about flora and fauna, landforms, traditional land uses, settlement patterns, local stories and beliefs. In Gaelic, even the smallest features of the landscape were named in detail, reflecting a depth of local knowledge and care.

In music, song and story there exists a cultural memory of a human story – cultural expressions of a relationship with the landscape, unique to this part of the planet.

Unearthing the songs and stories of a place is not simply about preservation. Our work is future-oriented, an act of repair and creative renewal. Local tunes, songs and stories can be given new life, performed in convivial spaces, returned to the community to be carried forward with care into the future.

What if every nature restoration initiative included a policy for engaging with Intangible Cultural Heritage? What if every woodland, wetland, river, coast, or landscape-scale project recognised that cultural practice and traditional ecological knowledge are a vital part of restoration?

Implementing this vision at scale would require collaboration, capacity building and dedicated resourcing – but doing so could turn ICH into a powerful source for nature recovery, fostering lasting stewardship grounded in local knowledge, culture and connection.

Archives are a vital part of this picture. The thousands of recordings on Tobar an Dualchais - Kist O Riches capture songs, stories, folklore and the wisdom of those who lived in intimate relationship with the land, sea and rhythms of the seasons.

There are so many recordings I could choose to illustrate this, but I really like this one – a conversation with John Brown from Tiree about the various uses of plants. The fieldworker is Margaret Mackay, alongside Eric. R. Cregeen (Track ID 88452).

Tobar an Dualchais is a wellspring for rekindling cultural memory and inspiring creative practice. It is not a resource to be mined, commodified, or extracted; its potential comes alive when people engage with care, respect, and reciprocity – sparked into action through creative connections, bringing the recordings back into living use, renewing and remaking traditions for our time.

…In an age of profound ecological loss, this work is not nostalgia; it is quietly radical, and necessary.

Original piece here. Mairi has co-written a policy paper on this topic for the British Academy, which will be available on https://www.ichfornature.co.uk/  when it is published this autumn.

The Glasgow poets’ network St. Mungo’s Mirrorball celebrates its twentieth anniversary this coming Thursday, at the Centre For Contemporary Arts. Below is an essay by one of its founders, Jim Carruth, explaining its history and purpose.

From Scottish Poetry Library:

What exactly is St Mungo’s Mirrorball?

St Mungo’s Mirrorball is 20 years old – but what exactly is St Mungo’s Mirrorball: Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?  Whatever it is, it has poetry as its beating heart. In truth, it was a poem that became a network of poets. Or, to be more precise it was originally a title of a poem of mine. 

The Mirrorball with it many different faces lit up is exactly how we want the Glasgow network members to feel – an opportunity to shine. In fact, it is probably more akin to an AA network for poets  “My name is Jim and I have problem with Poetry”.

I have always been keen to hear poetry being delivered in the poet’s own voice. Unfortunately, in Glasgow at the turn of this century, very few events were taking place. Leading poets of the day were much more likely to travel to Edinburgh or perform at the annual Stanza festival.

Making a Start

The original idea for the Mirrorball germinated in a self-managed tutorial group of Donny O’Rourke’s famous poetry writing classes and always set out to be something more than simply organising regular poetry events in Glasgow..

On the evening of March 15th 2005, St Mungo’s Mirrorball was launched with its first ever event at The Glasgow School of Art. The Mirrorball throughout its history has relied on strong supportive partnerships and our longest standing one has been with StAnza who let us borrow our first ever performer – the great American poet Mark Doty. Since that launch, we have run roughly seven or eight poetry events a year ever since.

We were keen to make poetry accessible so all the events were free to the public for the first nine years, thanks to some financial support from the city council..      

Over the years we have overcome a number of challenges relating to diminishing funding and relocations but we are still here

To this day our typical events still try and provide a mix of local talent with a more experienced poet from farther afield.  We have also supported poetry in translation sessions, poetry imprint showcases, and delivered a variety of talks.  

Examples of headliners include the likes of Michael Longley, Lorna Goodison, Ian Duhig, Jason Allen-Paisant, Sinead Morrisey, Sean O’ Brien, Jane Hirshfield and Michael Symmons Roberts along with the great and good of The Scottish poetry scene.  

But the Mirrorball has always been about a lot more than events. It started with two simple aims

• To support the development of poetry and poets in Glasgow

• To raise the profile of poetry in Glasgow and Glasgow poetry

Over the years we have delivered on these for our members by providing a weekly newsletter, workshops, conferences, special projects and competitions.  

Upward and Onward

We also did not want to become to inward looking so in the early years we coordinated two  city-wide engagement exercises – the Glasgow Report Card which looked with a critical eye at the state of the poetry scene in Glasgow – and the envisioning exercise ‘Glasgow City of Poets’ which created a vision of what Glasgow could become with the creation of the ‘Seven Priorities for Poetry’.

Central to these priorities was helping individual poets to develop their own voice and have it heard – removing barriers in their way.  This in turn led to creation of initiatives such as the Glasgow Poetry festival which ran until 2019, The Scottish Slam which is still going strong and the Clydebuilt Mentoring programme for developing poets now in its 18th year.

2014 was a milestone year for the Mirrorball.  We became a bit more grown up – by writing and agreeing a constitution and recruiting an official committee of volunteers. These unpaid volunteers have been crucial in weaning ourselves off of any kind of public funding and moving wholly to an annual membership fee approach.

For the last ten years we have delivered our network’s core offer to members with no public money – a rarity I would guess these days. We are currently very grateful to the ongoing support from the Edwin Morgan Trust for their support of the Clydebuilt programme.

In terms of supporting our members, one example of the culture we try to create stands out. In the early weeks of Covid we set up the daily Mirrorball Showcase email to encourage each member to share their experiences during lockdown and a poem, to help them stay connected and to stay safe. Starting on April 6th, 2020, it would run for 140 consecutive days.

So where is the Mirrorball currently?

Mirrorball membership is now open to anyone across Scotland and beyond and we have well over 100 members. All events can be watched live online. Annual membership fees remain at only £25 for the year and free for those who aren’t able to pay.   The Clydebuilt mentoring programme is also open to applicants from across Scotland and is receiving record entries.

And how healthy is the poetry landscape in Glasgow?

A healthy poetry landscape requires not one single organisation but a range of supportive partners. There is definitely an increased number of regular events across the city where you can experience poets and their poetry. We also have at least four membership organisations that poets can be a part of who run their own regular events and workshops– St Mungo’s Mirrorball, The Federation of Writers, The Scottish Writers Centre, and the City of Poets. These networks work collaboratively and share many of the same members. 

A healthy landscape requires a number of different elements and champions. Today we have members of the Mirrorball who run poetry publishing imprints (Red Squirrel, Mariscat, HappenStance, Seahorse Publications). Others who are involved running poetry magazines (The Dark Horse, Glasgow Review of Books). We have a member who runs a poetry pop up book shop (Tell It Slant) another who runs a poetry book club, and another who runs visual poetry exhibitions (Off-Page).

So Many Memories

Recently, and to help celebrate our anniversary, Mirrorball members have been sending in their favourite memories from the last 20 years. I thought to finish off with just a few of my own, in no particular order, to give a flavour of an answer to What exactly is St Mungo’s Mirrorball?

• Taking part in The Morganathon –  a 24 hour non-stop reading of Edwin Morgan Poems in Royal Exchange Square

• Listening for the first time to the Mirrorball toast by Mirrorball’s unofficial bard Sandy Hutchison

• Presenting  a lifetime achievement award to the great Gaelic poet Derick Thomson.  He was 85 at the time and we presented him with a line of his poetry inscribed on the rib of a boat. He was genuinely pleased but as he struggled to hold the weight of the wood he mentioned he had come to the event on the bus and he wasn’t sure how to get it back

• Spotting Tom Leonard have a sweary outburst and storming out of an event before his actual Mirrorball reading and not coming back

• Being blown away by the audience that turned up to hear the Somali poet Gaariye’s performance – wonderfully colourful and raucous

• Watching Liz Lochhead doing a reading in the observation deck of the Science Centre tower

• Spending a day with a big issue seller in Glasgow on National poetry day as part of initiative to pair a poet with each seller across the city to highlight the plight of the homeless

• Drinking free Tequilla with Mexican poets supplied as part of an event in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution

• Editing a number of chapbook anthologies in conjunction with the likes of the Commonwealth Games, the Glasgow Jazz festival, the European Championships, and the Kelvin Art gallery

I will finish with my favourite email of the last 20 years, sent by one of our longest standing members, Christie Williamson. I think that it sums up the human aspects of what we continue to try and create at the Mirrorball:

Oliver Campbell was delivered this morning at 10.54 by C section. Weighing in at 8lb 8oz, he expressed his gratitude to St Mungo’s Mirrorball for bringing his parents together in the sacred union which brought about his creation and subsequent birth.

More from Scottish Poetry Library, and St. Mungo’s Mirrorball

An interesting (and free-to-access) research paper from Scottish Affairs, challenging some of the dominant assumptions of young people migrating out of Scotland’s islands. Is it more complex than just a net loss of youth? Or is it more about mobility than sheer loss?

Abstract

Youth outmigration has long been construed as a significant problem for Scotland’s islands. In common with other islands across the world, the “brain drain” of young people is often understood to put considerable strain on the population and economic sustainability of island communities.

Declining population levels and demographic imbalances create risks for longer-term sustainability. More specifically, shrinking working-age populations are seen as a threat to supporting an ageing population.

Low levels of human capital—especially the loss of young people with higher-level skills—are also thought to limit economic sustainability and growth.

In this paper, I critically analyse the existing evidence from the Scottish islands and further afield, ultimately questioning the assumption that youth outmigration is necessarily problematic for Scotland’s islands.

By exploring a range of alternative propositions, the paper highlights novel ways of thinking about youth outmigration that could inform policy and practice. This shift in perspective may help to more effectively support island populations and stimulate sustainable economic growth.

Free download of paper here

Cross-posted from Scotland’s tech news service, Digit News, here’s Nick Sherrard from brand consultants Label Sessions on what the recent Edinburgh festivals can tell us about the ecosystem of innovation in Scotland more broadly:

Scotland’s place at the centre of the world of performing arts is over for another year, with the Edinburgh festivals brought to a close. Looking back on it gives us an opportunity for reflection on where the nation stands in a global context on a range of fronts.

To that end, over the summer our consultancy Label Sessions ran a research programme looking at what artists involved in the biggest arts festival(s) in the world were making, how they did it, and how audiences responded. Often what happens in Edinburgh during August is a signal of what may be about to follow in the mainstream – including in the business world.

In innovation, everyone talks about ecosystems. It’s a favourite word of policy and corporate strategy. The analogy of a natural ecosystem suggests that if you can make it rain, it’s good for everyone. But, that does not seem to be the case for the Edinburgh festivals.

Scotland’s role in what you might term very broadly the ‘performing arts’ seems integral in the world. People are willing to travel from as far away as Australia and Korea to be a part of it. So too people head away from the entertainment capitals of Los Angeles and New York to see if they can cut it in Scotland for these few weeks in a wet summer.

In innovation lingo, these are excellent signs for an innovation ecosystem. In fact, it almost defines what Scotland, and the wider UK, is trying to create in other industries. Scotland would love to be as central to spacetech, fintech, or traveltech as it is to the performing arts.

But there is one nagging question that has come up during the festival. Yes, it is happening here, but who is it happening to and for?

A good illustration of that point is that the company behind Mary Queen of Scots had to go to London to get programmed in its home city. That is a natural consequence of the fact that the Fringe festival is programmed by venue operators based elsewhere.

On top of that, around 90% of submission viewers for the film festivals do not live in Scotland. The ticketing app for the Fringe used to be made in Glasgow; now it’s licensed from Australia with barely a thought. There is no Scotland House like there is a House of Oz, showcasing and elevating what the country has to offer.

Scotland imagines that simply by hosting the biggest arts festivals in the world it will reap the economic rewards of what Dan Breznitz in his book Innovation in Real Places calls a stage one economy, where new-to-the-world inventions are created. Almost as if Adam Smith’s guiding hand will look after the rest.

All over the world, though, we find that unless the local ingredients are right, stage one innovation rarely leads to innovation-led prosperity. The classic example of it working is Silicon Valley, which has highly unusual ingredients in its soil that are not easily simulated.

The reality is that the Edinburgh festivals in effect make Scotland what Dan calls a stage four creative ecosystem. Work is assembled here – international shows, international promoters, international bookers. It isn’t invented here, though.

So too big movies are filmed here, rather than being from here. That’s not a problem in itself. It simply states where we are. It does mean that policy is based on a bad case of mistaken identity.

Scotland’s creative scene can be seen as a case study of what happens when we mistake innovation activity for wealth generation, or ecosystem development. From a policy perspective, we need to be very clear about what kind of innovation ecosystem we are actually looking to produce – and take active steps to produce it.

By the way, it is hardly as if Scotland does not have the levers to shift the way its festival economy works. But we need to start asking the right questions to make that happen.

For instance, while we talk about an array of venue managers, how many of them are managing venues on behalf of the university? How is the public value of that assessed? And how does that connect with the university’s role in developing the innovation economy of the country?

For Scottish companies that want to innovate, we need to think about what role we aim to play in the different ecosystems we are a part of, and gain clarity on what we mean by that. And, while everyone wants to be an innovation ecosystem, only now do some of us realise we should have been more specific in the first place.

More on Label Sessions here, and their All Tomorrow’s Festivals research project. (Full disclosure: the editor of Daily Alternative, Pat Kane, is an associate of Label Sessions).

This is a cross-posted excerpt from George Gunn’s column for Bella Caledonia, focussing on the mess that is renewable energy development in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Support Bella Caledonia here, and see George’s work here.

Things are done to us, not by us.

For the Highlands of Scotland the concept of “economic growth” has aways been a fraught one: just what exactly is “growth” and whose “economy” are we talking about? 

Due to the unique and medieval nature of landownership in the Highlands the “economy” has always been a basket case. With the concentration of vast swathes of land owned by a tiny number of mainly foreign individuals it could be argued that the Highlands does not actually have an economy in the accepted sense of the word.

What we have are private interests. Sporting estates and entire straths, glens and islands which can be bought and sold like used cars keeps the Highlands depopulated and poor. The way these estates are run – over-grazed by both deer and sheep – denudes the landscape of its native trees and renders the place little more than a wet desert.

What those who thunder around the NC500, and who mistakenly marvel at the “natural wilderness”, are in fact looking at a human-made construction.

When it comes to “developing the Highlands” both Westminster and Holyrood share the same tone-deaf, cloth-eared, shorn antennae approach. […] Not since the end of World War Two and the retirement of Tom Johnston as Secretary of State for Scotland has there been anyone in power who had the welfare of the Highland people as their major concern.

With the formation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board Johnston and others managed to bring electric light to the Highlands and Islands. The “Board” went the way of all privatised flesh in 1990.

The mess that ensued in energy provision and distribution is an on-going de-regulated jamboree. With energy still a retained power under devolution, it will remain so - until some sanity and reason is brought to bear and a National Energy Company of Scotland is set up.

But alas, there is no such thing. If you Google for it this is what you get: “The page ‘National Energy Company of Scotland’ does not exist.”

Things are done to us, not by us.

The population of Caithness – as of 2021 – is approximately 25,347. Ten years before it was 26,486. In 1880 the population of Caithness was over 40,000. Since then it has been a steady emigration, reaching its peak after World War One.

The coming of Dounreay and the nuclear industry in the 1950’s changed little demographically. In reality, the people of Caithness were conned over nuclear power as the primary purpose was military: to produce plutonium for the bomb.

We now have been conned over renewable energy as the primary purpose is corporate profit, while the natives pay the highest utility tariffs in Europe.

The cruel, nonsensical irony here is that Caithness generates significant renewable energy, primarily from large offshore and onshore wind farms like the Beatrice Offshore Array and the many onshore wind farms in Caithness and north Sutherland, which combined have a capacity of over 432 MW, with more planned.

Giant power companies such as SSEN EDF and RDW talk a lot to the press about “partnerships” with local communities, but in practice, partnership is just a word and power, in all its forms, is the reality.

The companies transmit the electricity South for massive profit and Caithness carries the environmental cost whilst receiving none of the benefits. The roots of this injustice is in landownership

The ugly dog-dance goes like this: the power company rents the ground for the wind farm off a landowner. The landowner gets mega-bucks in rent. The power company builds ever-bigger turbines and proposes to build even bigger pylons to carry the “free” electricity South on the Grid.

To achieve this SSEN Transmission plans to upgrade an overhead line near Spittal (on the edge of the Flow Country) to near Beauly, about 12 miles west of Inverness, and then South to Denny. The length of the line from Spittal to Beauly is planned to cover about 106 miles – carried by steel pylons about 187ft tall. There are various battery and hydrogen initiatives planned.

Meanwhile, the Grid is not fit for purpose and at present cannot take the generated load, therefore turbines have to be switched off and the Ukanian government compensates the power companies handsomely for this.

What the locals think about this industrialisation of their environment is not a real issue for the likes of SSEN, who treat the idea of “planning permission” as a green light, even when there is none. “Retrospective planning permission” is a favourite trick of Highland Council.

The Scottish Government has also not covered itself in glory either in relation to wind-generated renewable energy. The ScotWind sell-off was both a missed opportunity and a disaster.

ScotWind was the name given to the leasing of Scotland’s seabed to companies who want to build offshore wind farms. These sections of the seabed aren’t sold off, but leased to developers for up to ten years at a time with the aim of them eventually building wind farms.

There were 20 projects approved in 2022, after applying in the auction in 2021. Almost all of Scotland’s seabed up to 12 nautical miles out is owned by the King, and managed by the Crown estate. While ownership technically lies with the monarch, they cannot sell the assets, nor do the revenues from the land come to the monarchy.

Profits generated by the Crown Estate land in Scotland goes to the Scottish Government. It has been claimed Scottish ministers spent profits from the special auction of Scotland’s offshore wind licences – known as ScotWind – on propping up the overall Scottish budget. Hence the lost opportunity.

Whatever way you look at it, if you were to plan and build a renewable electricity generating capacity in Caithness and the Far North of Scotland you could not come up with a worse scenario than the one we suffer from now. It is not so much a dog-dance as a dogs dinner.

Things are done to us, not by us.

Caithness is where devolution does not work. What we see here in operation, in relation to renewable energy, is the least expensive option and the short cuts taken in order to achieve it. It is short-sightedness almost to the point of blindness.

What this means, environmentally, in Caithness is replacing valuable hectares of peatbog with tonnes of concrete. In Caithness “net zero” will mean net profit for SSEN and net carnage to our lived environment. We already live with the never-ending decommissioning and pollution of Dounreay. Now this.

What we are seeing emerging up out of the peatbog is the implementation of Westminster’s strategic interests, facilitated by the Scottish Government, which are elevated above the rights of the people.

The rhetoric of both Westminster and Holyrood masks the reality of land ownership, which makes this all possible as it is a system in which the individual has no rights. The habits of Empire have not vanished.

How much longer can the people of Scotland tolerate things being done to us and not by us?

The problem we face in Caithness is that those who make the most noise about wind farms are a mixture of pro-nuclear, property-owning individuals, many of whom have retired here for the “good life”, who are anti-independence and anti-renewables in general. 

The realpolitik of the unjust corporate energy developments gets lost in the babble. This babble comprises reactive, semi-articulated negativity, on-line chat room conspiracies and rage chambers which lash out at everything and focus on nothing.

These voices, in which prejudice survives all evidence, care little about cultural provision or a falling population and all that means for social services. What Caithness needs in the future is the opposite of what is happening at present.

Our culture is being shut down and our environment is being ripped up. Our MP has a constituency the size of a European country; our Lib Dem MP is an apologist for the establishment; and our councillors are told nothing. If and when they are told, they do nothing about it. Inverness will have her Castle and Caithness will have her pylons.

On the Ulbster Stone, in the soon-to-be-closing North Coast Visitors Centre, there is a brilliant carving of a mysterious beast. This creature is common to many Pictish stones throughout the North of Scotland and obviously represented something vital and shared by all the people of the time.

It represents something vital to us now and it is the perennial, ever-restless sense of justice without which all human society is sterile. The Pictish beast faces down the on-going injustice where the powerful and the rich are protected but not bound by law, the same law that binds the powerless and poor but does not protect them.

That injustice is what will be pulsing down the pylon-hung cables from Spittal, through Beauly to Denny. We need to make better connections.

Original piece here

Cross-posting here from the Scottish Beacon, written by Mike Small:

The response to the rising unrest about the experience of the onshore renewables industry in Scotland has led to renewed calls for community ownership of the energy technology that communities are host to.

The Scottish Community Coalition on Energy, comprising Community Energy Scotland, Community Land Scotland and the Development Trusts Association Scotland, have issued a manifesto of six recommendations ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections. They write:

There is growing opposition to new clean energy infrastructure, threatening Scotland’s climate targets and the UK’s clean power targets. The UK Government plans to build the majority of new onshore wind capacity before 2030 in Scotland, but 53 community councils in the Highlands recently supported a joint statement calling for a pause on energy infrastructure developments, and 10% of Scots are against the development of onshore wind.

To build public support for renewables and the energy transition, we must enable and support increased community ownership and shared ownership of new and existing electricity and heat infrastructure, and ensure fair distribution of the wealth that is being generated and consolidated through renewables.

64% of the Scottish public would support a community-owned renewables project in their area, compared to 40% support for a private project. This is partly due to financial benefit: on average, community-owned windfarms provide 34 times more financial benefit per MW (and sometimes more) to the local community than private windfarms. Equally important is that communities feel a sense of control and involvement in the energy transition. Community energy projects drive sustainable behaviour changes and help ensure a just transition for all.

This analysis chimes with what we’ve been hearing from independent media representing rural communities as part of the Scottish Beacon’s Power Shift project [The Power Shift: Investigating Scotland’s Green Energy Boom – The Scottish Beacon].

The Scottish Community Coalition on Energy’s (SCCE) six recommendations are as follows:

1. Increase the CARES funding package for community energy to £15m/year, rising each year. The Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES) supports communities to engage with, participate in and benefit from the energy transition to net zero emissions. CARES offers a range of financial support to local energy projects.

2. Use public land to boost community-owned energy. When public bodies like Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) lease land for renewables development or repowering, they should prioritise applications from community companies.

3. Consult on amending planning legislation to prioritise the use of land for community-owned energy over privately-owned energy, and to ensure that onshore renewables and storage developments up to 50MW provide a fair deal for local residents. 

4. Update the National Framework Agreement for the Supply of Electricity to allow local authorities and other public bodies to buy energy direct from community energy groups. This would mean lower costs for the local authority and a guaranteed income for the community group, retaining wealth in the community.  

6. Establish a Scottish Community Wealth Fund to equitably distribute a portion of the wealth being generated by Scotland’s natural renewable resources. This is a transformative policy that could excite the public about the energy transition, increasing buy-in and promoting a just transition, as well as providing finance for increased community energy ownership. This Fund would not be managed by the Scottish Government, but their role is to give the proposal their support and encourage or incentivise developers to contribute to the fund.  

You can read the full manifesto HERE.

Scotland’s share of community-owned renewable energy is minuscule next to our northern European neighbours, so we are starting from such a small base. In this context some of these proposals seem modest.

For example, the proposal to increase the CARES funding package for community energy to £15m/year is a rise of only £2m. In the scheme of things that’s not very ambitious. However, their first ask is a target of 1GW of community-owned energy by 2030. That’s 10x higher than now.

These proposals are to be welcomed, and give some detail and road-map for the policy-makers to follow. It seems we are at a fork in the road where there will either be a significant investment in and commitment to community ownership of renewables or the entire project will be in severe jeopardy.

More from the Scottish Beacon. Report here [PDF download]

Just a note, while in our Scottish ambit on the Spring initiative, to promote The Skinny to the wider world. With a music-led but culturally eclectic editorial, it’s distributed free in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. Its commitments to diversity and creativity are impeccable - for those of a certain age, it reminds us of the NME in its eighties and nineties heyday.

Here’s a sample from the lead article of this September’s issue, on “Easy Listening: Streaming, AI and our changing relationship with music” [more about The Skinny here]:

Over the past few months, I’ve been striving to become a more mindful musical listener, making an effort to experience music as it was originally intended. A rather logical approach was to listen to albums all the way through, letting the music engulf me from the first track to the last.

While incredibly straightforward, only upon adopting this habit did I realise that I’d practically never taken the time to do so. Now, I’ve noticed myself becoming more patient, more curious about music; I care more now about experiencing a song as its own individual piece of art, as well as attempting to understand how it fits into a broader artistic narrative of an album or the artist’s discography.

On a sunny afternoon this past July, I popped in my earbuds and pressed play on The Doors’ 1967 album Strange Days. An apt name, for you could certainly describe The Doors’ psychedelic, moody sound as a bit strange. Especially when one factors in lead singer and principal songwriter Jim Morrison’s sporadic screeches, bordering on primal; it serves as a stark contrast to his haunting, ethereal vocals.

I’ve loved The Doors’ music for years, and yet somehow this marked my first listen, in its entirety, to their second studio album. It features some of their classics, such as Love Me Two Times and People Are Strange, as well as a few tracks that I hadn’t come across before. Some of these I was quick to groove along to, while others I found less accessible.

After about a minute of Horse Latitudes, I checked to see how much was left, willing a transition into a soft ballad, or a funky, organ-backed beat; most sounds would have been a welcome change from the cacophony. It was starting to sound less like a song and more like it would send me into a panic room. After one minute and 35 seconds, it ceased, and I breathed a small sigh of relief.

The Doors are unusual in the sense that they’ve got tracks that are over in the blink of an eye – a taster of an idea, explosive and then over – as well as others that are long, winding stories. I’ve listened to When the Music’s Over absently, subconsciously, likely skipping it halfway through; its 11-minute runtime is a far cry from a standard radio tune, but certainly no one would ever claim The Doors to be conventional.

And so, there I sat, seeing it through. It’s a fascinating song, instrumentally and lyrically, with an energy that ebbs and flows throughout. Yet, once the five, six, ten minute marks hit, I found myself more than ready for the end; for lack of a better phrase, for the music to be over.

It makes sense that I’d feel this way, doesn’t it? This is how we've become conditioned by the popular music industry – our ears consistently piqued for the novelty of a new tune; an invisible threshold of time beyond which a song is inevitably deserving of a skip to the next track.

In light of this convention, how many of the most popular, prolific artists would dare make music that may not be short, snappy, or radio-worthy?

More here.

Continuing our interest in community energy/power - both human and renewable - as it applies in Scotland, this piece from the Democracy Collaborative in the US, gratefully cross-posted:

The Democracy Collaborative’s Neil McInroy has recently chaired a taskforce on incorporating Community Wealth Building approaches into the development of the renewable energy economy in Shetland, an archipelago of islands off the coast of Scotland.

Joana Ramiro interviewed Neil on the opportunities and risks in the sector, and the danger that the benefits of the ultimate decentralized common asset – the wind literally blowing for free across the North Sea – will overly serve global financial interests rather than be realized for broad community benefit in the public interest.

The renewable energy industry is growing at a remarkable pace. According to the International Energy Agency’s latest forecast, global renewable electricity generation is set to increase by nearly 90 percent between now and 2030.

By then, utility-scale wind and solar power should account for nearly a third of all electricity generation worldwide. The expansion of the sector is vital to a successful green transition. But with the scale and speed of this growth in renewables, questions arise over who owns these resources, and who truly benefits from them.

The energy sector is central to the development of our economic system. Historically, without fossil fuels and hydropower there would be no second industrial revolution, which pushed forth mass industrialization and birthed global corporate powers like Rio Tinto and General Electric.

The cycles of carbon through our economies have formed the basic cadence of  capitalist production. The resulting struggles for ownership of and control over oil fields, mining territories, and all types of power plants have won wars, spurned revolutions, and birthed nations. 

The shift from industrial to financial capitalism in the last forty years has had the same effect on the energy sector as on the economy as a whole. We’ve seen the growing financialization of the industry, following the privatization of gas and electricity.

The commodification of energy assets, coupled with the advent of what should be understood as a “capital gains economy,” has meant a growing transfer - that of financial flows from the production and consumption of energy, to giant energy companies and their owners and backers in global financial markets.

The rise of the renewable energy sector has seen increased attention from investors to this new field of opportunity. The popularity of “ESG” (Environmental, Social and Governance) policies within the corporate world has also contributed to burgeoning investment in energy transition projects.

Sustainability-linked green and blue loans and bonds are among the new products populating the financial world. Last year, Bloomberg forecast that global ESG assets would reach the $40 trillion mark by 2030. According to an ESSU research report, of the 626 global transactions in the secondary market of renewable energy only 4.4 percent were made by the public sector in the years 2019-2020. By contrast, a staggering 34 percent involved private equity funds.  

As new forms of energy grow in importance and replace fossil capital, it is vital that we develop a deeper understanding of financialization in the renewable energy sector and how it impacts communities hoisting and hosting the building blocks of the green transition.

If Community Wealth Building approaches are to continue to grow and become the foundations of a more sustainable and democratic economy, they will inevitably come into conflict with continuing models of financialization and extraction.

This is already evident in the fledgling powerhouse that is the renewable energy sector. Huge private investment in the industry has given conventional financialized models a commanding head start. But space still remains in which to democratically and socially reconfigure the ownership of this bedrock sector of our economic system. 

At the end of the day, a truly transformative decarbonization will not happen without definancialization. We cannot afford to allow the emerging renewable energy economy to replicate the patterns of financialized extraction of our old carbon-based model. We must not deliver the benefits of the green transition to the same wealth extraction by financial elites, who have benefitted from forty years of privatization and upwards redistribution.

International Models

Locally owned renewable energy investments are not without precedent. Since 2019, the European Union has enclosed within its legislation the rights of “energy communities” – citizen-driven organizations investing in renewables, accessing energy markets alongside private enterprises. The EU is also operating its fourth funding programme, the European Energy Communities Facility, which will run until February 2028. Calls are open to energy communities in EU countries, Iceland, and Ukraine. 

Perhaps the best-known example of this is the Danish island of Samsø. The island, which is now run on 100% renewable energy, hosts eleven onshore and ten offshore wind turbines. They have been operating since 2000 and 2002, respectively. The onshore turbines are owned by local farmers or local cooperatives; the offshore ones are owned by the municipality, cooperatives made of various small shareholders, and three private investors.

The project took advantage of a 1997 Danish state initiative to lead a renewable energy community experiment, which offered some seed capital to the winning proposal.

But according to the UN Climate Change secretariat (UNFCCC), Samsø’s success stems greatly from a financing model that had the “participation of citizens and stakeholders and local ownership of the renewable energy investments at its core.” The community ownership strategy is touted as the secret behind the wide-ranging benefits of the island’s energy transition.

Samsø has not only become carbon negative but has also seen its employment rates boosted. Clean energy has injected the municipality with much needed cash for other local projects, and made the average citizens of the island better off. There have also been beneficial population effects, reversing a challenge facing many island communities: according to the UNFCCC, “families have also moved to Samsø from the mainland, inspired by its success and green brand.”

The social ambition shown by the Danish state at the turn of the century to share the benefits of the green transition is in keeping with the actions of other Nordic governments. Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy, Statkraft, is fully owned by the Norwegian state. Vattenfall, which runs various on-and offshore wind farms in Scotland, England and Wales, is entirely owned by the Swedish state.

The ideological predisposition for private over public ownership in Britain has in fact opened the door wide to state ownership of renewable energy resources – just by other states!

Community owned renewable energy enterprises, on the other hand, are common in Germany, where there are over 900 “civic energy communities” as part of the Energiewende. They cannot, however, access and have their electricity distributed by the public grid, facing major obstacles when it comes to growth and further financing. 

GB or not GB – who will own Britain’s renewables?

Creating a publicly owned renewable energy provider was one of the concrete policy pledges made by Labour in their general election campaign in 2024. Named Great British Energy, or GB Energy for short, the policy has widespread popular support (with up to 75% of the public in favor, according to pre-election polling) and one of the government’s signature  actions in its first six months.. 

The Great British Energy Act 2025 has now been legislated. Scotland will be the home of all its main sites, with GB Energy headquartered in Aberdeen and housing offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow, too.

The board will be chaired by Juergen Maier, the former chief executive of German multinational conglomerate Siemens, and counts Frances O’Grady, a former Trades Union Congress general secretary, as one of its members. Maier will apparently not be relocating to Scotland but will continue working from Manchester instead. 

The company’s mission statement proposes to “create jobs, boost energy independence, and ensure UK taxpayers, billpayers, and communities reap the benefits of clean, secure, homegrown energy.” To accomplish this, Labour has created five areas of work for GB Energy, including the £3.3 billion Local Power Plan – a programme set to award low-interest loans to communities and make funds available to local authorities so they can develop 20,000 small and medium-scale renewable energy projects. 

Unfortunately, the institutional model for GB Energy remains vague, and the pathway to genuine impact is unclear. The original electoral presentation – Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower – cites cases of community and municipally owned enterprises. But the language leans heavily towards enticing and derisking private investment.

As a comprehensive examination of the policy by Common Wealth points out, “absent genuine public ownership and investment coordination, GB Energy’s functions would resolve to some mix of debt financing and minority equity stakes of private sector led investments.”

In other words, there is a distinct possibility that GB Energy will not become a leading player in the strategic public development of Britain’s renewable energy sector, with far too little support for community and municipal ownership. And with the UK state’s stewardship, control over and benefit from the green transition severely diminished.

What is more, public money would be used to co-finance and derisk renewable energy ventures—without a guarantee of significant and equitable distribution of profits. Or the securing of public benefits such as lower retail prices for consumers. Furthermore, recent research from the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) indicates that offshore wind companies are resisting Fair Work principles, including Trade Union recognition

There are question marks over the main thrust of Labour’s flagship energy policy, particularly when the government’s wider approach to the green transition is taken into account. It lacks ambition and falls short of any real aim or commitment to restructure a system in which the production, transmission, distribution, and individual supply of energy is fragmented by many different entities and interests.

For all the good intentions that have been articulated for it, GB Energy lacks the historic purpose, political provenance, and strategic ambition of state-backed energy vehicles like Statkraft (the Norwegian owned energy company), while still being given the charge to accelerate the green transition towards a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030.

How exactly GB Energy will be able to deliver at such speed, let alone how it will also obtain community consent for a just transition or incorporate elements of economic democracy or community wealth into its operations, remains unclear.

Renewable energy has to be at the forefront of driving a just transition away from fossil capital. This includes ensuring a reduction in wealth extraction and growing attention to social and economic justice in the green transition. There must be the advance of inclusive and democratic ownership of energy generation, transmission, and distribution – not simply a shift in supply towards renewables.

What is needed is public power, in every sense – proper public and local community benefit from distributed natural resource endowments. We must remember that these essentially come free, in the form of solar energy harnessed from the sun’s rays and converted into heat or electricity, or the wind that blows freely across the seas.

GB Energy and its Local Power Plan are off the pace in the race to a new energy model, in large part because their tone and messaging seem predominantly industry-led, with a weakened voice of consumers, citizens, workers and communities.

GB Energy may be shaping up to be not merely a missed opportunity but potentially something worse. There are already political grumblings about the impact of net zero on energy prices, against a backdrop of chaos and uncertainty around the new Trump Administration in Washington.

Policymakers looking to eke small wins risk missing the bigger picture: small and even large wins can all too easily be lost or reversed, if political support for the green transition is not actively and consciously sought and constructed along the way.

The immediate dismantling of the Bidenomics climate programs and agenda ought to provide a cautionary tale. This is what can happen if technocrats ignore democratic popular consent, and the need to provide tangible material benefits to people and communities as part and parcel of government climate action. Especially when it comes to those expected to directly and actively undertake the transition from the carbon economy.

There are readily available models for how to build justice and equity and local democratic control into the energy transition. Samsø’s fruitful experiment took a decade to accomplish and offered generous timeframes for consultation and implementation. Samsø also allowed for vital public confidence-building and a sense of collective ownership that went beyond shareholding or financing.

For GB Energy to succeed in half the time, it must at the very least commit to ownership and institutional models that offer frontline energy communities and the wider public a means to share in the benefits of the renewables transition. Ideally, the green transition ought to provide a huge opportunity to build community wealth—and thereby repair the tattered social fabric of Britain’s communities, after decades of neoliberal disinvestment, decay and fiscal austerity.

Unless the centrality of ownership, control and the need to institutionalize community and public benefit is at the heart of the renewable energy transition, there is risk of political backlash and perhaps even reversal. And even if it succeeds, it will only have replicated the unsustainable patterns of extraction and financialization that have long plagued the wider economy.

Shetland’s Wind Rush

It was with this context in mind that The Democracy Collaborative was able to engage with the challenges of the expanding renewables industry in the Shetland islands, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea.

In recent years, Shetland has been home to a veritable “wind rush” of foreign private and public investment into the enormous potential afforded by offshore wind. Our Global Lead for Community Wealth Building, Neil McInroy, chaired Shetland’s first Energy Transition Task Force, which in turn was responsible for a report setting out steps to ensure ‘A Fair Share for Shetland’ in the development of the sector. 

It is a fitting irony that so much of the UK’s offshore wind potential should be located cheek-by-jowl with the carbon industries of the North Sea. The oil and gas industries have been important to the Shetland economy for the last fifty years. The presence of an immediate alternative, right to hand, makes the case for a truly just transition unanswerable.

The transition to renewable energy presents an epochal opportunity for Shetland. But it could also provide a model for the energy sector as a whole—shifting the pattern of resource and wealth extraction into one of recirculation and shared benefit, inspiring frontline energy communities around the world.

As the Independent Panel report outlines, the task force suggested a pathway by which to attempt just that, exploring how the isles “could maximize value and community wealth from the renewable energy activity in Shetland”. 

In Neil McInroy’s words:

There is a massive concentration of new developments in Shetland and the seas around Shetland. Traditionally you’ve had the oil and gas industry – which are still there – but now you’re also seeing a new spaceport and plans for hydrogen plants, plus the energy renewable sector and associated activity. There is a lot going on, for a group of islands with a mere 23,000 people. One could see these developments in wind energy as akin to the gold rush in California or Alaska in past centuries.

Importantly, Neil highlighted that while there are some existing community ownership developments, these are “dwarfed by private investment and financialization”. The Shetland Islands Council is already playing a key role in tackling this imbalance by its ownership of some of the sites (including the oil and gas site at Sullom Voe). 

Looking ahead Shetland is ideally placed to spearhead a green transition that would be commensurate with the UK government’s net zero aspirations. It draws upon some of the strongest winds on the planet; there are sheltered deep water harbors, prime sites for developing hydrogen production, and an existing workforce in the energy sector that could be reskilled and repurposed.

The islands are a particularly good place to invest in community wealth building, too, given the council’s prospective influence in shaping renewable energy developments. As well as owning land and assets, the council holds planning control functions and could act as steward over the framework for development.

They could represent not just the immediate interests of Shetlanders, in securing a fair share of the returns from the region’s growing renewables industry. But they could yalso acting as custodian of the broader public interest, ensuring that the benefits of abundant, cheap, clean, green energy are spread far and wind – including to the consumer, in the form of lower prices.. 

The Energy Transition Task Force – instituted by the Shetland Islands Council – was born out of the sense that there was a need for clarity within a fast moving, ever changing, dynamic investment situation and the need for a mechanism to explore how Community Wealth Building could be incorporated.

“The task force was a moment, a space, to discuss how to achieve a fair share. A space to breathe, to take stock, to move from the maelstrom of the everyday, and have a Shetland-owned conversation, to think about the issues and what is and could potentially be done,” Neil explained. 

While the abundance of offshore wind energy represents a windfall for the Islands and community if managed appropriately, the Task Force found that the wind rush towards renewables also poses considerable risks to the environment and natural habitats. It could also jeopardize both Shetland’s ancestral culture, and its existing industries – including the area’s sustainable fishing industry.

The final report argues that a move away from fossil fuels is absolutely necessary, but that must not come at the cost of – and, indeed, must be of benefit to – the local community, their homes, their businesses, and their livelihoods. “What we can’t do is allow the direction of travel, this juggernaut, to be steered by the investment interests and priorities of financiers or the developers,” Neil added.

Before the further development of Shetland’s renewables is fixed and determined, through developers and overly-financialized investment models, there is a pressing need for open and transparent analysis as to how this promising new sector will be effectively managed,

How will Shetland’s interests be safeguarded? And how will the public interest in abundant cheap green energy will be kept at the centre of decision-making? A balance must be struck between the environmental impact and potential benefits of renewable energy development for the local community – and the wider public. 

The Energy Transition Task Force identified five modes through which a democratization of the renewable energy industry in Shetland could be achieved. Those included:

• the establishment of community benefits packages;

• indirect benefits and market gains, through the trickling down of industry opportunities and wealth;

• compensation payments for those disrupted or “dis-benefited” by the development of renewable enterprises;

• regulatory measures such as special local tariffs;

• and the adoption of one or various public or community full or shared  ownership models.

All these have their clear advantages and disadvantages, differing legislative weight, and assorted regulatory frames and processes. They are best perceived as a toolbox from which the leaders of the green transition in Shetland, in Scotland, and in Britain, can and should draw in a combined fashion specific to the development in question. 

Conclusion: Community Wealth Beyond the Wind Rush

As the late, great poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote: “The master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Relying on the financial interests and systems of the selfsame energy sector that has brought us to the brink of climate calamity to come to the rescue of our ailing planet – that is, to lead the green transition – is a grave error. 

The transition is happening in Shetland and in many places across the world, but the manner in which it is occurring, risks simply replicating the patterns of financialization and extraction that have brought about the climate and economic crises we now face in the first place.  

The British government’s environmental ambitions do encompass a series of programs and plans to promote the green transition. But in strategic and in tactical terms they ask far too few questions about the environmental impact. They don’t effectively consider the challenges and interests of local communities on the front lines of this energy transition—including their means of economic subsistence, their identity, and future in the face of the impending juggernaut.

Yes, net zero and a transition away from fossil fuels is urgently required. We must find the right balance between the legacy of the past and the demands of the future. The manner in which we are collectively planning and bringing to life these new developments needs to be different.

They need to be pursued with the object of building a more democratic, locally rooted economy—developing from the basis of the community and the public owning the means of producing, sustaining, powering and retaining its own wealth. 

Without this, the means by which we produce our energy may become greener. But the extraction and distribution of this new wealth, and the social conditions and relations it produces and reproduces, will remain as dirty as ever.

More from Democracy Collaborative

In 2016, acclaimed animator and film director Hayao Miyazaki was presented with an early demonstration of AI-generated animation: a grotesque zombie-like creature shuffling about its virtual environment [see embed video above].

The demo was meant to showcase the early potential for artificially generated animation, with the presenters arguing that the technology might have further applications in horror videogames to imagine motion beyond what human creatives could imagine themselves.

Miyazaki was not enthused. He said he was “utterly disgusted,” and that what he saw was in his eyes “an insult to life itself.” When pressed as to what their ultimate technological goal was, the presenters sheepishly replied that they “would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.”

The clip ends with a bleak response by Miyazaki: “I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”

In the nearly 10 years since Miyazaki was first presented with this demonstration, the capabilities of artificially generated images and animation have exploded well past what many people thought would be possible.

Earlier this year, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now had the ability to generate images, from text prompts or other pictures, with surprisingly impressive detail. This kicked off the “Ghiblification” trend, where people used ChatGPT to generate images in Miyazaki’s iconic artistic style.

Examples range from filtering holiday photos to look like charming scenes from Kiki’s Delivery Service, to the outright dystopian use by the official White House X page of a ghibilified image of a crying woman in shackles being deported by an ICE agent.

Regardless of the content of these generated images, the technology that Miyazaki was first presented nearly a decade ago has surpassed the inhuman shamblings of that early demonstration zombie.

What was once a meticulously crafted example of human artistry that required painstaking hours of attention to detail and years of experience could now be copied within a matter of seconds.

What strikes me most from this is Miyazaki’s lament that “we humans are losing faith in ourselves.” This line has gone largely unnoticed, but stands to be the most salient message from Miyazaki.

Beyond what generative AI is in itself as a technology, what does this technology say about us? How is generative AI an example of us losing our faith in ourselves, and what can we do about it?

In order to properly consider these questions, I find philosopher Albert Borgmann’s concepts of disposable and commanding realities particularly illuminating. In “The Moral Significance of the Material Culture,” he draws a distinction between two sorts of material artefacts: things and devices.

Things are those artefacts which produce commanding realities: they demand skilled engagement and focused attention in order to make them operate effectively or produce their desired output. For example, a trumpet does not produce music on its own - it takes a mix of knowledge and hands-on work.

Devices, on the other hand, procure disposable realities: they require little to no active engagement, skill, or attention in order to get their output. Listening to Louis Armstrong on Spotify does not require such engagement - just tune in and tune out.

Whereas things are active, devices are passive: they commodify experience, reducing it down to the product with little to no care in how one gets to it.

Borgmann’s distinction between things and devices is not meant to be merely descriptive, but normative. He heavily critiques what he calls the “device paradigm:” the way in which modern societies have shifted towards automated, unskilled, and unattentive commodification of experience.

Instead of pouring ourselves into experiences that demand our focus, our care, and the development of our skilled capacities, modern societies have become awash with quick and cheap alternatives.

This preference for the device paradigm leads to the degradation of skilled experiences, and our lives more generally. Without the opportunities to grow and learn through material artefacts that allow for those commanding realities, we lose out on the fundamental, meaningful experiences of life that allow us to flourish.

This shift towards the device paradigm is what I believe Miyazaki was aiming to capture when he said that we have begun to lose faith in ourselves.

In a world where the fruits of creative labour can be generated at the click of a button, it seems to me that we have lost faith in our ability to create meaningful experiences for ourselves. Seeing AI as an easy tool to make things quickly and efficiently misses the mark as to what art is supposed to be; an active engagement with the experience of creating.

By saying we have begun to lose faith in ourselves, Miyazaki seems to be capturing the fear that we have begun to miss the point of why we engage in art in the first place: to have flourishing lives.

However, all hope is not lost. In response to these generative AI technologies, groups like Artists Against Generative AI have banned together to fight against the infringements on artist’s copyrights in training these models. Discussions on the value of traditional artistic practices have led to discussions of a new Romanticism movement.

Beyond this return to traditional artistic practices, some artists and digital art collectives like SMACK and the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s The New Real are working to actively integrate AI into their art, not as replacements for the creative process, but to stimulate it.

In both the creative exploration of these new technologies and in the championing of traditional methods, there has been a return to the faith in ourselves and in the creative process.

Although Miyazaki’s worry remains resonant, I believe there is still something to have faith in going forward.

More on Andrew Zelny here

Happy to cross-post this piece from our great pal, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia, providing an extremely useful summary on the tumult in community renewable energy, a stramash coursing across the Highlands and Islands (which we’ve also been tracking through our Spring site). Check out his Fifty-Six Degrees North personal blog, and his Power Shift project (through the Scottish Beacon), aiming to create a news-sphere for this issue.

The Scottish renewables revolution feeds into a dysfunctional, even dystopian UK energy system. The crisis in the Highlands and Islands has echoes of age-old issues of power, poverty and democracy.

Scotland is in the midst of a renewable energy revolution. It’s a revolution that could (and should) produce clean energy, thousands of good jobs, a reliable source of income for rural communities, and conquer fuel poverty.

But it does none of these things. It is creating uproar and outrage by communities swamped by wind-farm proposals and the accompanying infrastructure, and shocked by the industrialisation of the Highlands and Islands, with little benefit to see for it.

The story has echoes of John McGrath’s seminal play of the 1970s which recounted the history of economic change in the Scottish Highlands, from the Clearances in the 19th century through to the contemporary oil boom at the time of its first production. The echo is of communities without agency facing enormous changes over which they have little or no control. The story holds the same questions: who is the Highlands for, and what is the purpose of energy production?

The level of dysfunctionality at play here is exposed by the fact that energy companies are paid NOT to produce wind power at times when the grid can’t cope with the amount it’s generating. As Ben Cooke at The Times explains, the grid is struggling — and our green future hangs in the balance:

As the government races headlong towards its goal of powering the country with 95 per cent renewable and nuclear energy by 2030, the strain on Britain’s grid is growing and with it, curtailment costs. In the first six months of this year bill payers have paid £810 million for wind farms in remote areas with little local electricity demand to switch off and gas plants to switch on, and Neso predicts that without massive grid investment, those costs could balloon to about £8 billion by 2030.

…to stop those power lines going bang, Neso, which is funded by consumers’ bills, paid for them to be switched off, handing out £4.8 million in so-called curtailment costs. However, while the grid was not up to carrying all that clean energy, the south still needed power. So Neso also had to pay £9.6 million to switch on gas plants further south.

If you wanted a metaphor for everything that is wrong with Late Britain, here it is. Endemic fuel poverty sits alongside enormous corporate profit, while a moratorium on onshore wind in England, maintained by the Conservatives for fourteen years, is in stark contrast to a Gold Rush for renewables in Scotland.

If we stand back from this crisis, we see that the problem is one of gigantism, an addiction to growth, and an inability to stand up to corporate power. The onshore renewables industry is vast – frequently foreign-owned – and sits geographically far from the demand it is supposed to supply. Which leads to massive distribution costs.

And, despite the climate emergency, there is no point when anyone, as far as I can see, questions the energy ascent that is built into this scenario. At no point does anyone suggest we live within limits and build the infrastructure, both technical and cultural, to engage in an energy descent plan.

But then, why would we? If energy is a commodity and energy companies are in private hands, they have no incentive for us to use less. So we have a crisis of over-abundance of supply alongside people in the coldest parts of the UK unable to adequately heat their homes.

The Grid

Meanwhile something called ‘The Grid’ stands like a figment of an Iain M Banks novel. A gigantic piece of technology that is woven into the fabric of everyone’s lives and is considered an unquestionable good whilst being unable to fulfil even its most basic purpose. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of this entity: landscape, ecosystems, serenity, peatlands, birdlife and wildlife.

The Grid is a testament to centralised Britain, decaying and archaic but completely unquestioned. It is based on an outdated energy system that is no longer fit for purpose.

As Ben Cooke notes:

Britain’s grid was built to move energy from a few big power stations, running on coal, gas or nuclear, mostly near the middle of the country. But increasingly, we’re using it to carry energy from the windy peripheries of northern Scotland and the North Sea, and from solar farms all over the place.

It’s becoming very clear that energy infrastructure, like political power needs to be radically decentralised.

7:84, Back to the Future

If John McGrath’s play was produced by the Theatre Company 7:84 – named after a statistic on distribution of wealth in the United Kingdom, published in The Economist in 1966, that 7% of the population of the UK owned 84% of the country’s wealth. Today that figure would be 1:70. 

But there’s another salient figure that stands out in this debate. Despite the fact that we know that “community energy generates 100x more wealth than corporate counterparts” – the actual amount of community-owned onshore wind is pitifully small. Community-owned wind in Scotland is 0.2% contrasting with 52% in Denmark. That’s a staggering disparity.

Framing and Narrative

Different stories and analyses surround this debacle.

For some—those not directly affected—the complaints of rural communities are simply the latest form of Nimbyism, an inconvenient outrage against an inevitable, and much-needed technology. For others, on the right, the complaints are the manifestation of long-held beliefs: that Net Zero is a scam and that climate change isn’t real.

For this latter tribe, many of them Reform UK and Conservative supporters, this is all a vindication of their long-standing opposition to the dreaded wind-farms, which,goes back decades. This is not a new issue, experienced in real time or expressed in good faith. These terrible turbines despoil the bucolic idyll that is their idea of the Highlands, which for many was a utopian retirement plan. The issue has been weaponised by the far-right.

For others, such as Believe in Scotland, the issue is constitutional. BiS have just launched a new campaign declaring:

Scotland’s soaring energy prices aren’t inevitable – they’re the result of Westminster’s failed energy system. Scottish energy bills are amongst the highest in the world. Scotland generates abundant low cost renewable power, but unfair pricing means you pay more than most of the UK.

Along the same lines, the National have just launched a new newsletter The Energy Experts asking: “Scotland has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. Why is this, when we have an abundance of energy resources at our fingertips?”

These competing narratives put two sides on a collision course at next year’s Holyrood elections.

The Wild (North) West

One of the recurring complaints from communities impacted by all of this is that it feels like the ‘Wild West’, with seemingly little or no strategic overview or plan, and a planning process which is, to be charitable, opaque.

This leads to bizarre anomalies where some communities have lucked out and negotiated lucrative ‘community benefit’ income, while others have nothing at all. Connectivity is either a blight, meaning massive pylons and substations, or an obstacle to connect to innovative projects to the grid.

As long-term champion of both renewable energy and community empowerment, Lesley Riddoch puts it:

Take Applecross. The 250-strong community over the highest mountain road in Britain ­managed to raise £780k in 2016 to win Westminster funding for Apple Juice – a community hydro project. Great.

But they weren’t given the extra grid connection promised by SSE – which means only half the hydro’s tiny 90kw output can be sold to the grid. It means no other hydro on the peninsula can ­export, and there are no three-phase energy supplies, which basically means no new businesses and no public charging point for electric vehicles. Indeed, the new ­Applecross distillery is located off the peninsula near Kishorn.

The community company has tried ­valiantly to fill the gap with everything from a community filling station, housing and ­local broadband. But everything is difficult when local control of energy would make it so easy. So right now, there’s no point ­developing more hydro, wind, tidal or solar.

Applecross is all dressed up with nowhere to go. Awash with energy but losing population and stuck in fuel poverty. It’s a situation replicated across rural Scotland and the islands. But unheard of in other small countries at our latitude.

The central problem for communities fighting against exploitation is that this shambles lands in a context in which none of the issues of land ownership and power laid out in the 1970s by 7:84 have been remotely addressed.

Yes, there have been notable community land buy-outs, but they remain—like the percentage of community-owned renewable projects—marginal. The Highlands and Islands remain an area still mired in seemingly intractable issues: falsely perceived as a ‘natural wilderness’; used as a playground for the rich (whether that be the North Coast 500 or the hunting and shooting fraternity); struggling with a housing crisis; often ignored by remote government, be that Holyrood or Westminster; and now suffering from mass Overtourism.

The challenge for communities is not just to demand that there be a moratorium on further renewable energy developments until these issues begin to be resolved, though that seems like a good idea.

The challenge is to imagine a different kind of energy system altogether based on addressing energy as a human need, not a commodity, and for the energy system to be decentralised and put in the hands of public ownership.

This could take different forms: micro-renewables owned by community trusts and larger-scale projects owned by national bodies. It is not as if there are no good examples.

As Devon McCole points out for the Power Shift project, in ‘Study finds community energy generates 100x more wealth than corporate counterparts’:

A report by Equitable Energy Research CIC [covered on this blog] highlighted that community-owned renewable energy projects are generating over 100 times more wealth for local people than privately-owned wind farms, sparking renewed calls for a shift toward community and public ownership.

The report, ‘Social Value from Renewables in the Highlands and Islands’, compares the returns to local people from different types of renewable energy projects.

The findings indicate community energy can empower communities through social wealth generation and produce vastly more wealth for local people than privately-owned projects focussed solely on generating wealth for private companies as opposed to reinvesting those profits back into communities:

• Tilley, the Tiree Community Wind Turbine, returns over 100x more economic value to the community than the privately-owned Beinn An Tuirc 1-2 Wind Farm, despite being around 1 percent of the size.

• Community-owned Garth Community Wind Farm returns around 90x more value per MW to the community than the privately-owned Viking Wind Farm, despite being 100 times smaller.

• Orkney Community Wind Farms, wholly-owned by Orkney Islands Council, are set to deliver £5.5 million in revenue each year, helping to support public services across the islands.

Other examples include the community-owned Isle of Eigg which is not connected to the mainland electricity grid. Eigg’s 48 homes and 22 businesses run on electricity from solar, wind and water power generated by the island’s own electricity company Eigg Electric.

A crucial innovation here is that domestic houses and businesses are asked to live within a certain energy limit, making them mindful of energy use. This ‘energy cap’ is generous but a useful conceptual shift. As Eigg resident Lucy Conway explains: “As well as the cap, a traffic light system helps manage demand further. On dull, windless days with no rain, an email is circulated and a red light comes on at the community hub asking people to reduce their electricity consumption if they can. This conserves energy and reduces demand by as much as twenty per cent.

On Arran, Arran Community Renewables, a Community Benefit Society, which has been granted planning consent for a 6 MW solar farm, with the aim of generating 5600 MWh of clean renewable energy from 2027. Glenkiln solar farm near Lamlash will provide enough renewable energy to meet one-quarter of the island’s domestic power needs. The £5 million project will be the largest 100% community-owned scheme of its kind in Scotland.

The renewables revolution offers the opportunity to revitalise the Highlands and Islands and provide an income stream for sustainable housing and improved infrastructure. Instead, we are industrializing the highlands for the benefit of private corporations.

In 1973 John McGrath’s play spoke of the idea of land ownership, exploitation, and cultural identity. The play demanded that you: “Remember that you are a people and fight for your rights,” and that, “Everyone in the land will have a place / And the exploiter will be driven out.” These are words worth remembering today.

This article was first published on my Substack Fifty-Six Degrees North.

You can subscribe here: Subscribe to Mike Small

A blog from CrownShy, democratic tool experts, on their new Scotland-based consultation software, Comhairle (Gaelic term, pronounced ko-er-luh). [Disclosure: we at the Alternative Global are hoping to brew up some projects with CrownShy]. Written by Andy Paice:

If you sail out onto Loch Leven, in Western Scotland, tucked beneath the shadow of the Pap of Glencoe, you’ll come across a tiny island with an epic story.

It’s known as Eilean a' Chomhraidh, the Isle of Discussion, or sometimes Eilean na Comhairle, the Isle of Council. According to local legend, members of the MacDonald clan who found themselves in conflict were sent there by their chief, not to be judged, but to work things out themselves.

They were rowed out and left with only cheese, bread, a knife, and a bottle of whisky. And they weren’t brought back until they’d reached agreement.

Only then would they be taken to a second island, Eilean na Bainne, the Isle of Covenant, where the agreement was formally sealed and peace restored.

The tale has a comedic note, but it also carries something very meaningful. The clan members weren’t expected to avoid conflict, they were trusted to work through it, even with sharp tools and strong drink in hand! It’s a reminder that real dialogue is about creating space for differences with enough trust, structure, and (hopefully) humanity to find a way through...

A new Comhairle

At CrownShy, we’ve been building something that shares more than just a name with this island: Comhairle, our open-source digital platform for large-scale, structured public participation.

The word comhairle in Scottish Gaelic means council, consultation, or advice. It’s rooted in the principle of collective reflection.

And just like its island namesake, our platform is designed to hold a range of views, proposals, perspectives, even disagreements - productively. The goal isn’t to eliminate difference, but to make room for dialogue, deliberation, understanding, and where possible, shared direction.

Unlike the island, we don’t leave people with whisky and oatcakes (tempting though it may be). Instead, we’re creating a platform that brings together digital, open-source tools like Pol.is, Talk to the City, Star Voting, and in-person deliberation processes to support inclusive and thoughtful decision-making at scale.

From difference to deliberation

The island tradition reminds us of something that’s still true today, in the age of algorithms and online outrage: difference isn’t the problem, it’s how we navigate it that matters.

And while stranding people on remote Scottish islands to achieve dialogue may no longer be practical, we do need to design democratic processes with powerful social architectures and a similar spirit of generosity and creativity. This is what we’re working on building into Comhairle:

• Contained process
  
  Comhairle guides participants through custom workflows that clarify each step and purpose, reducing confusion and disengagement.

• The human element
  
  Whether or not cheese and whisky are present, the human touch is key. Comhairle supports hybrid models that blend digital tools with in-person facilitation. We design for access, empathy, and, where necessary, privacy and anonymity, whether someone is logging in via phone, taking part in a town hall, or contributing to a rural community workshop.

• Trusted space
  
  Comhairle and its associated offline contexts offer structured, psychologically safe spaces where people can explore their authentic voice and different views without fear.

• Closure and continuity
  
  Like the Isle of Discussion, Comhairle helps turn deliberation into formal decisions and action. Its reports don’t gather dust, they’re living, traceable, and open, ready to inform both policy and public understanding.

A digital island of discussion

We’re developing Comhairle in partnership with the Scottish Government, having recently been selected as winners of CivTech Challenge 10.7. We’re beginning in Scotland, but the platform is built for broad use, designed to support democratic participation wherever it’s needed, from local communities to international dialogues.

So the next time someone tells you that online discussion is bound to be toxic, or that consensus-building is naïve, tell them about a little island on Loch Leven. About cheese, whisky, and the quiet power of letting people work things through.

Then tell them about Comhairle!

More from CrownShy here

From The Guardian:

For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University’s institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history.

As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university’s self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces.

Not just that, Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university’s investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor.

“I’m a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation,” he said. “Why is that important to not be the first? Well, it’s important because everybody has an ‘in’, and if there’s nothing left after your ‘in’, you just become a symbol for somebody else’s story.

“I’ll be the subject of another report, but I won’t have influence, I wouldn’t have ushered in any of the people that look like me that the world said couldn’t be.”

The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said.

“The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That’s why this report matters so much to me.”

In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, education. “So what does reparations mean if it doesn’t mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?”

His singular status in Edinburgh’s philosophy department (which lists 12 tenured professors) also, he added, points to one of the most important findings of its investigation: the “severe underrepresentation” of Black staff, the patchy recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised students, and continuing staff and student experiences of racism.

The decolonisation review, co-chaired by Dr Nicola Frith, an expert in reparations policy, found that less than 1% (150 out of 17,260) of the university’s employees were Black – a figure static for some years. A different picture emerges with other ethnic groups. The number of Asians – a category which includes Japanese, Chinese and south Asian people – reached 9% in 2022-23, up from 7% in 2018-19.

Among the university’s 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian – driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students – with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black.

The report says the increasing diversity in the university’s population “does not benefit Black staff and students” yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a “global institution”.

Article continues here. Excerpt reprinted under the Guardian’s Open License Terms

New edition of the academic journal Scottish Affairs is out. Here’s a selection of article abstracts - subscribe to the journal here.

Edinburgh’s Culture Conflict: the struggle to free the Fringe [£] - Charlie Ellis

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a renowned gathering of creative talent and cultural wealth. It also triggers considerable debate, with many considering its current model unsustainable. The sheer volume of performances has led to increased costs for artists, making it difficult for smaller acts to participate. Many feel that‘Big Four’ venues dominate the Fringe to an unhealthy degree.

The Free Fringe model, pioneered by Peter Buckley Hill and his associates, has emerged as a significant attempt to address these issues. It seeks to provide a more accessible and egalitarian space within the larger Fringe ecosystem, challenging the prevailing commercial pressures and promoting a more diverse range of artistic voices.

This article combines personal experiences of the Free Fringe (as an attendee and reviewer) and discussions with its representatives and performers, examining how they articulate its cultural and political vision. It also scrutinises how they respond to various critiques made of it and how the Free Fringe creatively channels a sense of marginalisation.

Double Devolution? Examining the Case for Scottish ‘Metro Mayors’ [Free access] - David Clelland

Directly elected mayors for the largest English city-regions are now an established feature of the political landscape, prompting proposals for the adoption of similar arrangements in Scotland. These ‘Metro Mayors’ are one element of an evolving approach to devolution within England that aims to address regional inequalities.

Advocates of Scottish mayors argue that they have the potential to promote economic growth, govern city-regions more effectively and enhance democratic accountability.

However, there has so far been little serious consideration of what a system of Scottish regional mayors might look like in practice. This article seeks to establish a starting point for a more informed debate, drawing on emerging evidence and critical perspectives on the English experience from a regional development perspective.

It identifies challenges in translating a model of devolution that is conceptually based on promoting agglomeration and growth in major urban centres to Scotland’s distinct geography, raising questions about how ‘city-regions’ should be defined and what this might mean for other areas.

It also identifies policy areas that could potentially be devolved to the regional level. Although the idea of high-profile city figureheads has attracted attention, there is a broader issue of how different places within Scotland should be governed, with appropriate powers and resources to develop effective policies for regional development.

Re-Evaluating Scottish Social Movement Activism During the Covid-19 Pandemic [£] - James Foley and Ewan Kerr

This article re-evaluates how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped contentious activism in Scotland, revealing contrasting approaches to protest and organising.

While much of the social movement literature highlights resilience, adaptation, and even revitalisation during the pandemic, this study takes a different perspective by focusing on the reflective insights of activists that emerged as initial optimism faded and the limitations of contentious-oriented movements became more apparent.

Rather than viewing the pandemic as a moment of transformation, we consider how activists grappled with the challenges of sustaining mobilisation in a shifting political landscape.

Methodologically, we draw on interviews with activists to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic amplified existing inequalities in movement capacity.

Collective justice activists were better positioned to institutionalise their claims due to their temporary integration into policy processes, even if the longer-term effect of these has more recently been cast into doubt.

By contrast, libertarian-inclined activists, particularly those focused on autonomy and opposition to state control, struggled to gain traction. This disparity raises critical questions about the uneven ability of social movements to contest state measures and influence policy during moments of crisis.

More:

Reconceptualising Scottish Island Youth Migration [Free Access] - Rosie Alexander

More from Scottish Affairs here.

Cross-posted from Positive.News (support Positive.News here):

The Edinburgh International Book Festival returns from 9 to 24 August with a programme themed around ‘Repair’. Festival CEO Jenny Niven explains why mending what’s broken – in society, the environment and ourselves – is the urgent conversation we need

Now in its 46th year, the Edinburgh International Book Festival returns for two weeks this August, bringing together authors and literary fans from across the globe. We spoke to the festival’s CEO Jenny Niven about the issues this year’s theme, ‘Repair’, aims to shed light on.

The theme this year is Repair, ‘which seeks to explore the many things around us which feel broken, and how we might seek to fix them’. What inspired the choice of this theme for the 2025 festival, and how do you see it resonating with today’s audiences?

We believe that dialogue and discussion are a positive and hopeful thing in and of themselves. It can feel at the moment like there is just an onslaught of difficult news and irresolvable conflict.

But amongst all of that there are also brilliant thinkers and great ideas in the world about how we can move forward, and how we might be able to do things differently.

So our programme aims to showcase those, some of the terrific books that help convey those ideas, and also to remind people that getting offline and being face-to-face with other people – even ones you don’t always agree with – can be a fun, uplifting, and even cathartic thing to do.

How does the festival plan to explore the concept of repair across different dimensions: social, environmental, political and personal through its programming?

We’re looking at the idea of repair through a range of lenses. One of those is environmental, looking at how new concepts might help us repair our imbalance with the natural world.

So we have Robert McFarlane talking about his new book about rivers having personhood status, and likewise the amazing Monica Feria Tinta, ‘Barrister for the Earth’ on how to reset our relationship with the environment at a structural level.

We’re also looking at how we’ve become so divided, and how to have difficult conversations, with people like Ash Sarkar, AC Grayling and Deborah Frances White. Philippe Sands is looking at the International Criminal Court and reconciliation and elsewhere the wonderful novelist Hanif Kureishi joins us from his hospital bed sharing how writing has helped him repair in very profound ways after his terrible accident in 2022.

Can you share specific examples of events or authors in this year’s programme that embody the theme of repair in unexpected ways?

It’s clear our audiences are increasingly interested in participating as well as just listening, so we’ve got a full programme of workshops and activities also related to repair.

For instance, we’ve got sessions on the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken ceramics are repaired in such a way as to make them more valuable, or Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton teaching us how you might repair a failing manuscript or novel… we’ve even got fermentation to repair your gut health.

We’re taking the theme in quite playful directions too so we’ve invited the brilliant Scottish novelist Jenni Fagan to curate a cabaret on Frankenstein (the ultimate example of repair) to celebrate a re-edition of that classic, along with two upcoming Frankenstein films, one of which was shot in Edinburgh.

The festival features 641 writers from 35 countries. How does this diversity contribute to a global conversation about repair and healing?

We’ve got some really challenging geopolitical conversations in the programme spanning events in the Middle East, looking at the changing face of the American political landscape, or exploring how indigenous leaders are protesting the destruction of the Amazon.

Hearing first hand from writers and journalists at times of great change is a vital way of understanding the world around us, bringing seemingly distant and abstract things into proper focus.

Getting offline and being face-to-face with other people – even ones you don’t always agree with – can be a fun, uplifting, and even cathartic thing to do

It isn’t all challenge though – some of the huge eternal joy from book festivals is bringing writers who specialise in the imagination to audiences, so hearing a brilliantly told story from a writer from somewhere you’ve never been, whether that’s Korea or New Zealand or France, is one of the best ways to explore the world and build curiosity and empathy for other people.

In what ways do you hope the theme of Repair will inspire attendees to take action in their own lives or communities?

On site at the Festival, we’ve got two little garden sheds programmed with activities for the whole duration of the festival where audiences can drop in and try out first hand very practical repair tasks including sewing, mending, bike repairs and 3D printing.

Through that work, we’re getting more drawn into the ‘Repair’ community as an organisation too which is brilliant, and positively affecting the way we’re working as a festival.

For instance, ‘The Wee Spoke Hub’, who we’ve approached to do bike repair workshops, are now lending any participating author who wants a bicycle for the duration of their stay in Edinburgh, which helps us meet our ambitions around reducing our carbon footprint too.

How does the festival’s Young Adult programme, featuring authors, approach the theme of repair for younger audiences?

We’re really committed to creating great programmes for children and young people. A ‘National Year of Reading’ was announced for 2026 just last week in recognition of the literacy crisis and decline of reading for pleasure for young people, and we have a key role to play in turning that around.

Over 5,000 children will visit the festival from schools across Scotland and nearly as many again will visit with their families as part of the public programme. In some ways publishing for children and young people has never been more vibrant or diverse, so there’s a really terrific opportunity to pull kids back into reading.

As a parent of three kids myself I know they are a discerning bunch. We have terrific writers like Michael Rosen, Julia Donaldson, Rob Biddulph and Pamela Butchart with us.

But lots of our older Young Adult audiences are interested in quite challenging topics as well as all the fun stuff so we’re pleased to have, for instance, the brilliant Laura Bates talking with young people on feminism at our Teen Takeover Day.

The ‘Table Talk’ series combines food and conversation. How does this format contribute to the theme of repairing relationships or fostering community?

We started our Table Talks series last year and they were immediately a huge hit. This is about having people sit down together and do what we all do over food – bond, gossip, dissect the menu – except this time you get to do it with some of the most exciting food writers out there, from Sami Tamimi and his exploration of Palestinian food, to Benjamina Ebuehi and her delicious sweet treats.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from 9th to 24th August. Find out more here 

Cross-posted from Positive News (support Positive News here).

Cross-post from Bella Caledonia’s Mike Small, responding to the Scottish First Minister John Swinney’s speech on a “fresh start” for the case for Scotland’s independence:

…Framing the SNP as a “fresh start” after 18 years in power is pretty gallus, but there is something amongst all of this which shines out, and which could be the centrepoint of a more dynamic strategy.

Much of the dismay about being trapped within the Union is the overwhelming sense of decay and decline that pervades Late Britain.

If this feeling reached its apogee at the death of the monarch, it can be seen daily in the appointment of ridiculous people to the House of Lords. Or in the overarching power of the government within Westminster (as witnessed by the actions of Starmer’s Whips Office against twelve of his own party this week).

Or in the immersive deference inculcated by being subjects of a Monarch in the 21st century.

The feeling of being trapped in an ancient regime that is unreformable and corrupt at its core is overwhelming and debilitating. Beyond this fusion of cronyism and decay, though, is the reality of collapsing living standards, grotesque social inequality and elite grandeur.

The response is a populist movement of the far-right that eulogises a mythical past.

In among the platitudes and the normcore of Swinney’s ‘plan’, there is an opportunity to really contrast with this backward-looking Ruritania, this Britain of fossils and past-glories and relics of Empire.

Countless commentators have remarked on how difficult it has become for anyone to ‘imagine a better future’ in timelines that seem dark and economic systems that seem all-pervasive.

There is a glaring opportunity for the case to be made for a new Scotland to really address the multiple problems facing not just young people, but future generations. And for this case to be made by framing Scottish independence as a future-facing project in stark contrast to broken Britain.

What would that look like? It would mean really taking-on the multiple problems faced by younger (and future) generations, which have been a dark inheritance passed on to them. A mammoth, impossible task? Yes but one worth trying. Where to start?

I would start with the crisis of affordable housing which is life-altering for millions of people.

I would face the existential crisis of climate breakdown and create deep and radical action plans that would give hope and meaning for a liveable future.

I would create the outline of what an ‘ethical foreign policy’ (to use Robin Cook’s words) would look like for a future Scotland.

I would begin to meaningfully address the crisis of social alienation and the epidemic of loneliness and mental health that has spooled out of lockdown, late capitalist anomie and digital culture, which particularly affects younger people.

If these seem ridiculous, impossible or utopian ideas, that’s okay. In such dark times, we need to imagine a better future beyond the confines of today.

As the political philosopher Murray Bookchin said: “The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”

Framing an independent Scotland as a project for future generations would be a reset for the entire independence movement, and would require a complete overhaul of thinking. But somehow, somewhat improbably, Swinney has stumbled on an idea:

“During the next parliament we reach the point where there will be one million people eligible to vote who, last time around, were too young to do so or not even born. A generation has now clearly passed.”

This has two consequences. First, we begin to sweep aside the fragile excuse that the Unionist community have hidden behind for repressing basic democracy. They hold up the phrase “for a generation” [meaning that the independence referendum should not be re-run “for a generation”], asserting that time has passed.

Second, we must go to, engage with and inspire the generation that are now eligible to vote. And who are, overwhelmingly, pro-independence.

To do this properly, and to begin to explore the generational issues I touched on, would require a break from 2014 and an effort to re-imagine the case for independence in a much more expansive timeframe.

This wouldn’t be another ‘campaign’ with slogans and attack lines, it wouldn’t be a politics of resentment, it would be a politics of imagination and possibility.

That Britain is in a morbid state is plain for anyone to see, but that must be contrasted with a movement that offers not just a constitutional off-ramp but an alternative to the politics of fear and resentment that activates the populist right.

In this sense, we need to rethink the case for independence and recast it entirely. In the words of  Marshall McLuhan: “Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

Remaining in this Union means being engaged in the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ For Scotland to be ‘reborn’ demands that we step out of that paradigm and away from the hyper-nostalgia and denialism that characterises British nationalism.

More from Bella Caledonia here. Support them here.

Cross-posted from The National [subscribe to the paper here]:

WE often hear about how Scotland is responsible for a significant chunk of Europe’s renewable potential and how the country could lead an energy revolution with independence.

But what’s the science behind that? Why is Scotland such a rich location for green energy, particularly in comparison to the rest of the UK?

We spoke to engineering and energy expert Professor Gareth Harrison from the University of Edinburgh to dig into why Scotland is a “sweet spot” for renewables.

When asked how he would describe Scotland’s renewable potential in one word, Professor Gareth Harrison came straight out with “enormous”.

“We have more than we could possibly use if we are prepared to exploit it and there’s been more political will up here [than in the rest of the UK] I think, to get on with it [renewables] and accept facts,” he said.

The deputy head of the school of engineering at the University of Edinburgh explained it all comes down to the country being in a perfect location geographically, with its wet and windy weather and a great variety of terrain creating the ideal conditions for renewable energy to thrive.

Scotland sits in the middle of the storm track across the Atlantic, and Harrison explained why this gives the country great promise in green energy.

“Virtually every single storm that comes out of the Western Atlantic comes screaming over Scotland,” said the professor, who was involved in a report produced by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2019 documenting where Scotland was at with different energy technologies.

“This drives virtually everything. I think it’s reasonable to say Scotland is the windiest country in Europe and has among the biggest waves.

“You get storms that originate in the West Atlantic which come across and get hit by strong winds from the north, south or often the south-west. It’s the balance of those and the speed that determines how windy, wet or sunny it is, and that drives most of the renewable potential.

“It shares a lot of that [weather conditions] with Ireland but Scotland is sufficiently far north that it’s in the sweet spot for getting the right sort of weather for renewables.”

Wind

A large part of Scotland’s potential lies in wind energy and Harrison explained that, as well as being a significantly windier country than England, the country’s population density and range of terrain mean it lends itself hugely well to renewables.

“Some of Scotland is very hilly and these are not great places for building wind farms but quite a lot is rolling hills which is pretty good for wind farms. Some of Scotland is pretty flat, and these places are excellent for them,” said Harrison, who is also the university’s Bert Whittington Chair of Electrical Power Engineering.

“Then if you’ve got sea there, it’s an incredible place to build wind farms as long as you’re not behind a mountain.

“Scotland’s territorial waters are large so you’ve got a sparsely populated country and a lot of resources. That’s the main reason why it’s good because, compared to how many people live here, it has a vast amount of resources.

“The reason people started building wind farms in Scotland and not in London is that its resources are better. For the same wind turbine, you get more energy [in Scotland], so actually it costs less. The wind is stronger here and in many respects there are fewer obstacles. Scotland is a relatively smooth and flowing place.

“As you go further north and west across the UK, it generally gets windier. England does get good wind but it’s much larger. Per head of population, there’s less wind.”

Wave

Strong winds in Scotland mean big waves. Wave energy is one of the more tricky forms of renewable energy to manage, but Harrison said if any country has the resources for it, it’s Scotland. Some of the largest waves in the North Atlantic come crashing on to the Scottish coast and Harrison said he hopes Scotland can find ways to use that potential.

He said: “The fact the continental shelf is relatively close to land means you get quite big waves coming fairly close to land before they get tripped up. We have a very significant proportion of Europe’s wave potential.

“The reason you don’t see many wave devices out is that it’s a good bit behind wind. There were a lot of political shenanigans with developing the wave programme in the 1970s and 80s. It’s difficult to manage because wave is enormously powerful.

"If you imagine a metre’s worth of wave coming to you, it can have 1MW of power, the equivalent of about 400 kettles boiling. So you’ve got to design things that can cope and not get washed away in some of the big waves. But if anywhere is going to do it and has the resources to do wave, it’s here, Scotland just has to persist with it.”

[Ed: see this week’s story on Orkney tidal stream energy project 'setting new world record']

Tidal

Scotland also has large potential for using tidal stream energy – where electrical generators are installed directly into the tidal stream with no requirement for a wall to obstruct the flow, like a barrage.

Harrison explained: “If you think about a map of Scotland, you’ve got the North Atlantic on the west and the North Sea on the east and a relatively narrow bit towards the top. Basically, if you imagine the tide as a very long wave coming round, one of the things that happens with waves is they get tripped up, and you end up with big differences in timing between the west and the east and when you get that timing difference, you get very large flows of water.

"So places where you’ve got obstructions, or channels or headlands, you tend to get fast flows of water. So, for example, the Pentland Firth – my late colleague Iain Brydon called it the Saudi Arabia of marine energy.

[See this week’s story on “Orkney tidal stream energy project 'sets new world record'“]

“You get that constriction there that forces the water through the narrow channel and it means the speeds of the water go up. A big advantage of tidal energy is that it’s predictable.”

Hydro

Scotland has made use of hydro power since the turn of the 20th century, with several schemes operating across the country. It played a vital role in connecting vast swathes of rural Scotland to the grid.

Harrison explained a combination of the storms that come over Scotland and the country’s hills make certain spots perfect for this energy source. “To produce hydro power, you need water dropping from a height,” he said.

“These storms bring rain and the structure of Scotland means you’ve got big hills in the middle and you get a significant rain shadow effect. You get very warm, moist air coming in, it goes up, it cools, forms clouds and then buckets and most of that lands over the hills. Some of it goes to the west and some to the east, and that’s why you have a lot of hydro power built in areas north of Perth.

“It comes back to geography. You have a lot of water being dumped and the right sort of hills in the right place. Scotland is pretty fortunate. And one of the things about hydro is it is controllable. If you’ve got a dam with a valve, you can control it.”

Solar

Scotland is not famous for sun but that doesn’t mean it has no potential for solar energy. Harrison highlighted how Scotland’s cloudy and mild weather is actually beneficial to solar and is an important part of the renewable mix, given it often provides power when other sources are unavailable.

He added: “Although it is cloudy here, we do get some days which are crystal clear and that’s very good for solar, and it’s not too hot generally.

“When a panel gets very warm, its efficiency drops, so if you compared a panel in the same sunlight here [Scotland] to the south of England, you’ll find we’re more efficient, so that’s an advantage. If it’s light cloud, solar performs quite well. It’s a good part of the mix.”

Subscribe to The National here

Below is an extract from a post on the North Sea Poets blog - the Scottish poet Don Paterson musing intelligently on whether AI will “Destroy Literature or Save It?” [Verdict: mibbies aye, mibbies naw]:

* * *

There is an online video in circulation of three guys – ‘influencers’, one assumes – beating up on a humanoid robot they’ve just purchased. The pathetic, passive and pacifist robot keeps righting itself, picking itself up, climbing to its feet, and is finally sent flying by a martial arts kick.

It’s not cat-burning in the market square, but many of us will find it unwatchable. And if we've been stupid enough to say so online, the bros have corrected us: these guys know the difference between real life and a toaster, and we’re pathetic for not knowing it.

Only losers anthropomorphise. To which I’d reply – if you can think of a clearer example of anthropomorphism than beating up a robot, you’ve got me.

But anthropomorphism is neutral. Some will use it to exercise a reflexive empathy (it’s what finally put paid to the cat-burning; we imagined ourselves or a loved one in the cat’s place, and were appalled), others will find a place to indulge their sadistic fantasies.

The lad who enjoys kicking his robot is the more likely to be kicking his dog. We may want to quickly inoculate ourselves to this casual indulgence of our worse natures. dIf you find this incident easy to shrug off with a laugh, Ted Chiang’s unspeakably distressing novella ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’ will concentrate your mind, especially as we head into the murky waters of AGI.

Though – as with us – ‘consciousness’ is more likely to be a disease of degree than a state. Though if robot consciousness turns out to be a state which can be continuously sustained, incidentally, I think we’re officially superseded, and probably f-ed.

I feel it’s smart to cultivate a neutral attitude towards AI, but even better that we regard it as ‘in some way human’; it is, in some way.

Whether it achieves AGI or only converges upon some simulation of self-awareness is neither here nor there. It is our brainchild, and makes a very strange object for our contempt.

AI is a collective manifestation. At the very least, there is much to learn from interrogating its strange mirror, which reflects not just our appearance but much of our inner natures.

How we react to that mirror – currently dark, dusty, distorted, but slowly clarifying – will tell us a lot about ourselves, and likely some stuff we’re none too keen to find out.

If there’s anyone reading this essay with growing anger or irritation, and tempted to channel it into ‘sadness for me’, or abuse, or mansplaining – I’d ask you to try to locate its source, and not just the local offence which seems to have provoked it.

I can’t speak for you, but my own rage is often fear. This is an authentically terrifying moment to look into our new soul-mirrors, even if our response is only – Jesus, are we that predictable? Are we even awake ourselves?…

…My friend Edward Farrelly points out that the publicly released AI models are most certainly not the best available for creative writing, which is something very far down the list of priorities for AI developers.

They are far more concerned about AI hallucinations, and the need to guardrail AI’s capacity to say things people might find disturbing.

I see in these constraints not just the loss of ‘the breath of madness’ Katherine Bromwich misses, but the processes that could imitate the kind of disinhibited thinking that produces great writing, and especially great poetry – in all its fearlessness, outrage, bold breaks with convention, ‘imaginative leap’ and astonishing connection.

But a full-strength AI, one free to dream and free-associate, might prove every bit as dangerous as a real artist.

And when it’s liberated from these constraints – what if AI can match us? What if it can do better? Would we even know? We might define ‘true originality’ as that which escapes the predictive model, whether human or AI.

The trouble with originality is that it is, on first contact, hard to recognise, harder to acknowledge, and often found rebarbative because it is, by definition, ‘alien’.

Writers from Bronte to Blake, Rimbaud, Keats, Melville, Dickinson and Auden hardly met with the immediate acclaim that almost all debut authors currently seek.

Were AI to demonstrate such originality, our current reflexive assumption of its soulless bad faith would likely see the work dismissed as empty, trivial, ‘novel’, nonsensical, freakish or inhuman.

AI is currently damned either way: it's either derivative, or it’s in error. We may never concede its success. Its masterpieces may only ever be acknowledged amongst its own community.

In the meantime, AI will do for the formulaic first – the fan fiction in which it already excels, Mills & Boon, maybe the more algorithmic of the genres. But then it will come for literary mediocrity, then the middling, then the good… And then we will have to live with it, literally.

There will be Luddites, and they will claim they are fighting for our souls. (I remain far more worried about how the 90s tech-bro value system inscribed in its DNA will scale, and if an old centrist like me is worried, the left should be terrified.)

But if AI really can learn how to add a few more Alice Munros, or another ten perfect pages to Bishop’s Complete Poems – I will learn to deal with it. Humans and robots can argue the toss about who has a soul after we’ve both figured out how to preserve a viable host planet.

Full version here. You can subscribe to and support North Sea Poets here.

Thanks for this crosspost (original here) from Mike Small at the local news aggregator The Scottish Beacon, kicking off the PowerShift project (reported here earlier). [To support the Scottish Beacon by becoming a member, click here:]

The Power Shift is a new project connecting independent media outlets to share knowledge and experience of the renewables revolution in Scotland.

Our media partners represent communities that are all grappling with shared issues: how the massive onshore renewables transition might be of greater benefit to the people who are experiencing the impact of the emerging infrastructure.

The issue is becoming more and more prominent and pressing this summer as people try to realise the potential for renewables to be something for communities not something done to communities.

As a report by Equitable Energy Research in May put it: “As the scale and pace of new energy developments increase, the question of what constitutes a fair deal for communities hosting such projects becomes ever more critical.”  

Our partners include local media from across the country, such as Kyle Chronicle, Shetland News, Bylines Scotland, Glenkens Gazette, Forres Local, Am Pàiper (Uist), The Bellman (Stonehaven), Fios (Lewis), Greater Govanhill and Lochside Press.

Shared stories from different communities

In Sutherland, Kyle Chronicle readers are seeing an unprecedented number of planning applications for renewable energy developments and for transmission infrastructure. As editor Silvia Muras says:

“The proposed developments are of such a scale that they would dwarf the small, dispersed crofting communities and transform the area into an industrial landscape. The Kyle of Sutherland is a stronghold of endangered species such as Fresh Water Pearl Mussel and Atlantic Salmon, and home to wildlife such as Red Squirrel, Pine Marten, Hen Harrier, Osprey, Curlew and Golden Eagle.”

“Despite having several operational wind farms and hydro schemes at our doorstep, standing charges in Sutherland are among the highest in the country, and as many as 65% of households were living in fuel poverty in 2023.” 

Jane Cruikshank from The Bellman in Stonehaven explains the issues their community is navigating: “The Bellman is going to focus on, ‘that which cannot be considered’ – ie, wind farm community benefits. Like many communities, Stonehaven relies more and more on the voluntary sector to provide services and amenities. This brings with it a constant need to find funding for projects.” 

“The developers behind the Craigneil windfarm are offering a very generous community benefit fund that would bring millions to the town over 25-years. Unfortunately, the structures will be very large, so impact on the environment will be a significant concern when an application goes in shortly to vary an existing permission.

Jane continues: “Councillors understand there is a local appetite for the benefit fund, which would mitigate the impact, but they are not allowed to consider this in their determination of a planning application.”

Siân Swinton, editor of Am Pàipear (‘the paper’ in Gàidhlig) based in Uist but covering the Outer Hebrides, explains her publication has been reporting on the issues that matter to the people of Uist for almost 50 years:

“When we first launched, climate change was not a common topic to read about in our local press, but having been on the receiving end of many a negative consequence of the warming of our planet it is now a topic on everyone’s lips.”

“As one of the windiest places in Scotland we, unsurprisingly, have turned to wind energy. But does the community benefit from these projects? Where is the money actually going? And how do those who deny the warming of our planet feel about these projects?

Am Pàipear will investigate where the money from our local turbines is actually going and we’d like to speak to those who do not believe in climate change to see if potential community benefit will influence how they feel about green energy projects.”

Shetland News has a long history of reporting on every chapter of this evolving story, which began in 2003 with the idea of building two large wind farms, and took more than 20 years until the Viking Energy wind farm was up and running. Read the background to the Viking Energy Wind Farm here. 

Hans Marter, editor of Shetland News explains their publication’s role in the Power Shift project: “We’ll be reporting on Shetland’s renewable future and the feeling of large sections of the community of having virtually no say on what is happening to their home islands.” 

Like many places, this is a complex issue and a mixed blessing. Marter explains: “I am hoping to be able to be present when the keys are handed over to the first tenants of a house bought by the proceeds of the community-owned wind farm on the island of Yell.” 

This is a perfect example of what community-owned projects can achieve.

Marter will also be discussing these issues with Chris Bunyan, the driving force behind the Shetland Community Benefit Fund which is in receipt of £2.4m annually of Viking Energy community benefit. This is now the largest fund of its kind in Europe.

The Lochside Press (which covers Loch Lomond, Roseneath, Helensburgh and the surrounding area) will be covering the ongoing applications for ever-larger wind turbines on the edge of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, with one site on the Cowal Peninsula seeing renewed applications despite earlier refusals after strong objections by Nature Scot and air traffic control body NATS. See Giant’s Burn Wind Farm Plans Revised.

Lochside Press will also be exploring the ongoing uncertainty following the decision by Petroineos to close the Finnart oil terminal: the site on Loch Long is owned by the Ministry of Defence, while the 58-mile pipeline connecting it with Grangemouth saw a multi-agency response after a leak of crude oil last year. See Will the MoD expand its presence on Loch Long?

From the Glenkens Gazette in New Galloway, editor Sarah Ade will be looking at the impact of commercial forestry with regard to its actual green credentials, land use changes, and cumulative impact.

The Glenkens Gazette will also be looking at Carsphairn Parish as a case study. With all the existing and consented wind farms, there will be an equivalent of one turbine for every resident. They’ll be looking at what this means for the lived experience of people with regard to road use for construction of sites, attitude of contractors, pylon lines and substations and their impact.  

Environmental justice

The renewables energy sector is huge and growing. According to Equitable Energy Research the combined capacity of operational onshore and offshore wind projects in the Highlands and Islands is around 5 GW. If all projects currently in the pipeline were to be built, the total capacity could exceed 25 GW. 

But despite the fact that we know that “community energy generates 100x more wealth than corporate counterparts” – the actual amount of community-owned onshore wind is pitifully small. Community-owned wind in Scotland is 0.2% contrasting with 52% in Denmark. This has led to calls at the Public Petitions Committee at Holyrood in June to make offering community shared ownership mandatory for all new wind farm developments. 

According to the Scottish Coalition on Energy: “Community shared ownership of private renewable energy has been a recognised Scottish Government ambition since 2014 and forms a key objective in the Scottish Government’s Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan.

“The Scottish Government reiterated its commitment to shared ownership in their 2017 Onshore Wind Policy Statement stating: ‘Our ambition remains to ensure that, by 2020, at least half of newly consented renewable energy projects will have an element of shared ownership. Shared ownership will form a key part in helping to meet our targets of 1 GW of community and locally owned energy by 2020, and 2 GW by 2030.’”

As the Scottish Coalition on Energy states: “To date, 20 community bodies have entered into a community shared ownership arrangement with a commercial developer. In the context of Scotland’s 9600MW of total installed onshore wind this equates to only 23 MW – only 0.2% of Scotland’s current wind power is owned by communities through a shared ownership arrangement.”

This is a significant policy failure and one that risks missing the opportunity to bring considerable long-term resource to regions of Scotland suffering the triple effect of fuel poverty, a crisis in affordable housing and depopulation.

The Scottish Government’s own analysis shows that of the 32 local authorities in Scotland, seven have significantly higher levels of fuel poverty than the national average. Six of these are in the Highlands and Islands.

It’s important to note that it’s not all bad. There are many examples of highly successful and impactful community-owned projects that can me replicated, as the equitable energy report covers:

• Tilley, the Tiree Community Wind Turbine, returns over 100x more economic value to the community than the privately-owned Beinn An Tuirc 1-2 Wind Farm, despite being around 1 percent of the size. 

• Community-owned Garth Community Wind Farm in Yell returns around 90x more value per MW to the community than the privately-owned Viking Wind Farm, despite being 100 times smaller.

• Orkney Community Wind Farms, wholly-owned by Orkney Islands Council, are set to deliver £5.5 million in revenue each year, helping to support public services across the islands. 

But if the business-as-usual model prevails, then the vast potential of the renewables revolution will be wasted. Large sectors of the renewable energy industry is foreign-owned (none of the proposed wind farms include ownership participation from Scottish entities).

The Community Benefit Payments – direct payments paid annually to communities—have not been updated since 2010, when £5,000 per MW per annum was established as an industry benchmark by Forestry and Land Scotland.

The system of conversion to renewable energy – the power shift – seems at best un-strategic and at worst incoherent.

Most of those we’ve spoken to in communities across Scotland are not against renewables. But they see a just transition and the rapid shift from fossil fuel dependency as an essential part of the fight to combat climate breakdown.

However the issue that our partners are reporting on relates to the need for the democratisation of energy. And for communities to gain control over the technologies and infrastructures that threaten to overwhelm them for corporate gain.

Currently, many feel their voices are not being heard. This is ultimately a question of environmental justice, and as Erin Devlin of Equitable Energy Research put it, a question of: “Who should benefit from the resources of a place?”

Whilst the UK is facing an ongoing public health crisis and life expectancy is declining in a number of high-income countries, some tech billionaires have become obsessed with life longevity - but which factors really impact how long we live and when we die?

Public health expert Devi Sridhar speaks to Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Ways to Change the World about the launch of her new book How Not To Die (Too Soon). She explains how changing public health policy could improve life expectancy, what the UK can learn from other countries when it comes to health, and what her own cancer diagnosis taught her about the state of the NHS’ waiting list times.

The Guardian runs a piece from Devi on how her cancer diagnosis made her realise “the healing power of exercise should never be underestimated, but be cautious about what recent headlines seem to suggest”.

From Scotonomics, a new paper (see PDF):

MMT and the Climate Movement

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) discusses fiscal space—the ability for governments to create currency and spend on the public purpose—not in monetary terms but in functional terms.

The question is not where to find the money—but does the government have available real resources that can be brought back into productive use?

This is the core insight of MMT and it highlights that fiscal space is much larger than mainstream economists, policymakers, commentators and the public believe.

The conventional wisdom instructed by neoclassical or neoliberal economics suggests that governments should

• run a balanced budget in the medium term,

• borrow from the ‘markets’ if spending commitments are above tax revenue,

• and curtail high debt repayments, which can lead to insolvency.

In essence, the mainstream treats a currency-issuing government much like a household.

MMT rejects this position. With MMT providing a framework for increased fiscal space, it begs the question: Why is the climate movement not demanding a larger central government spending response to the ecological crisis?

Part of the answer is surely that many people within the climate movement are unaware of MMT or have only been exposed to the mainstream strawman, whereupon a fuller and more detailed explanation has been unavailable.

Whatever the reason, the climate movement is not yet capitalising on the work of MMT academics to demand the allocation of rapid and substantial funding for climate and nature adaptation and mitigation.

The connection between MMT and government-funded climate finance is clear. If access to finance isn’t the main constraint for Global North nations, and the Global South is much less financially constrained, this would empower the climate movement to demand faster and more substantial government action worldwide.

An extension of fiscal space would enable the implementation of large public works, a Green New Deal, a Job Guarantee, and support for a care economy. It would also enable a very different approach to climate finance, which is generally governed by a neoliberal framework which prioritises the private sector.

The climate movement finds a natural economic ally in MMT.

More from Scotonomics here.

Katherine Trebeck worked for a decade in the Scottish political scene, developing a wellbeing economics agenda, and this is a lecture on her latest thinking, on her return to her native Australia (still regularly referring to Scotland).

We’re delighted to run this piece from the Scottish, specifically Glasgow-located builder Gordon Bain, who thinks deeply about the philosophy and history of his profession. Here, the act of buying a kitchen triggers off Gordon’s musings about the enduring power of the hearth.

Gordon bain: The Price of Wonder

Let me tell you a modern parable.

When was the last time you bought a kitchen? It’s an experience that is exemplary of modern life. It comes with a creeping suspicion that hints at hidden surfaces and mediocre constitution.

You park up in some industrial estate or business park, stepping over broken beer bottles. Avoiding that ankle-deep brown watering hole in the tarmac, you slouch towards a metal coffin, devoid of any wonder.

The fluorescent lighting inside beckons you in, as you are blasted by the hot breath of a solitary heater mounted above the door. Just enough to make you feel warm for the instant you cross the threshold. An attempt at the first and last memory you have of this place being a good one.

Inside you are greeted by someone who seems posted at the threshold of the underworld. Greeting strangers with the most affected smile. Genuinely happy. Genuinely happy. Wringing their hands and welcoming you in.

You look around, at the inspiring displays. You’ve seen all of the colours, the styles before. But you know how this goes, and you’ve got to play the game right. You have a pitiful number in your head and you’re clinging to it, “if I’m going to spend money in this place, it won’t be any more than £ xxx.”

You meander around the shop.

“…the country style is popular… shaker design, matte finish,”
“the modern look…teal…gloss,”
“Islands are popular yes... including the waterfall island…”

The discussion feels like a regurgitation of a regurgitation. But you smile gratefully, the budget never far from your mind.
“We have our laminate worktops but also here are the natural stone options… these are from Italy…”

You make your grim choices. Your new best friend shows you the design. Maybe even a little excitement – you think about breakfast around the island. Maybe, homework time or making jokes and dancing. Then with a smile your host explains that the price is 17 times your meagre budget… “That’s the price of quality,” they say. And you sit back in wonder.

This is the price I am asked to pay for wonder these days.

The kitchen store is an allegory for modern life. We are promised, sold, and shipped wonder in cardboard boxes. We create the meaning in our minds. But often the meaning is sold to us by people who can’t possibly understand our needs.

But—this isn't just about kitchens.

In the construction industry (my profession), we’ve created a whole system designed to sell wonder that often falls short of expectations. Projects are born from the dreams of a few individuals—idealists, executives, sometimes a well-meaning committee. But as more people get involved, those dreams are diluted. What could be a collaborative effort soon turns into a battle of wills. Whose opinion matters most?

An architect is brought in, but the palette of available materials has narrowed to the point of banality. We create frameworks to steer the process, in the hope that the outcome might be more sustainable. But in the end, a series of compromises - between quality, sustainability, finances, and end-user needs (imagined or otherwise) - results in something that feels like an echo of a good idea that once lived.

Ultimately, years hence, we wander amid the Frankensteinian infrastructure—now decaying—and we think: What was the point of all this? Or, increasingly in urban areas, we let the buildings become a canvas for the vivid social lives we paint amid the concrete, brick and glass—our buzzing activity defying our mortality. The lucky ones notice something amiss and escape to the mountains. But most of us, resigned to their fates in the city, trudge on.

In response, we create garden walls that slake our biophilia. It’s a gesture of healing that feels like sticking a plaster on the hull of a sinking ship.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Across ancient cultures, our built environments were not just canvases for living, but instruments of meaning. Design didn’t express meaning—it breathed meaning. A mirror reflection of nature, myth, community, and transformation.

The Celtic roundhouse curved like the seasons, placing fire at the centre of communal life. The Japanese minka opened to the garden, welcoming impermanence and silence as honoured guests. The Roman domus’s marble walls echoed with ancestors. The Assyrian palace became a cosmological mirror. From the Navajo hogan’s east-facing door to the sacred geometry of Vedic vastu—these were not buildings, but orientations in space and time.

What these traditions teach us is that homes are not just physical artefacts, but ritual devices. They orient us. They anchor us to cosmos and culture. They help us navigate thresholds: between waking and sleeping, self and other, life and death.

The hearth was not just a cooking appliance—it was a spiritual nucleus. Courtyards were not just circulation spaces—they were lungs for breath, stillness, and sacred pause. Materials were not arbitrary—they were drawn from the land, imbued with memory and myth.

And yet—at the very basic level—buildings were functional in the extreme. For most of human existence, homes lacked the comfort we’re accustomed to today. They were huts offering meagre protection from the elements. Fossil fuels and human exploitation have formed the foundation of democratising comfort at scale.

So what now?

A new design practice inspired by this lineage would be less concerned with novelty and more attuned to necessity—not functional necessity alone, but existential. It would ask: What does this space remember? What does it honour? What does it allow us to become?

Such practice would favour negative space over clutter, earth-honouring materials over industrial gloss, and human ritual over technological spectacle. It would be regional in spirit, yet universal in its invitation to dwell meaningfully.

In practical terms, this approach might reimagine the threshold as a sacred zone of transition; the bathroom as a ritual chamber of cleansing and renewal; the dining room as a space of gratitude, communion, and generational continuity. The kitchen island—reclaimed from the fantasies of Instagram—as the hearth and heart of the home.

It would embrace circular gathering spaces, altars of attention, and nooks for solitude. It would prioritise daylight, ventilation, texture, and symbolic form. But above all, it would serve the unseen: the moods, memories, and mythologies that make a house a home.

But here’s the rub—our culture is hyper-individualised.

For some, creating a bespoke environment is well within their means. An architect is hired, images are gathered—mostly from Pinterest or Instagram. Meaning is borrowed. Shadowplay of someone else’s dream.

How can we create spaces that imbue meaning? Psychology offers clues.

Ulrich’s 1984 study found that a simple view through a hospital window—onto trees—helped patients recover faster. His work has shaped hospitals ever since. His team focused on the what—but the why still pulses beneath.

Maybe when we’re most vulnerable, a glimpse of the uncurated world—the rustling green of a tree instead of the buzzing glow of a light strip—reminds us that we belong somewhere deeper than a showroom.

What is clear is this: humans have the capacity to make meaning. Experience imprints thought and feeling. These, in turn, shape our way of seeing.

So perhaps my dread of kitchen showrooms isn’t just about laminate vs. stone. Maybe it’s about being sold someone else’s dream, wrapped in gloss, staged for the lens of a smartphone.

But what if we designed spaces that reminded us to act with love? That nudged us—subtly, spiritually—towards connection?

The hearth is a good place to start.

The Greeks had a goddess of the hearth: Hestia. The idea was that the hearth was sacred. Sacred as a place to sustain life—through food, warmth, story. A place that asked us to be human.

After Christianity, and especially after the Reformation, these ideas became more internalised. The sacred migrated from the collective to the individual.

But maybe it’s time to bring it back.

Not to make a religion of the home—but to let the home remind us how to be. Not as a cult of living, but as a sanctuary of becoming.

Our thanks to Friends of the Earth Scotland for this cross-post by Scott Herrett, showing how an act of community theatre in Torry, Aberdeen is helping with raising climate consciousness;

In late 2023, I went for a walk with Emer Morris around the headland of Girdleness and Greyhope Bay. This is the part of Torry, in Aberdeen that sticks out into the North Sea. It sits beyond the glow of the city, so at nighttime it can be the best place in Aberdeen to witness the Northern Lights when they shine.  

Emer and I met through our work in the UK climate movement, having coordinated a demo on Aberdeen beach together to protest drilling in the North Sea. Emer, who was based in London at the time, learnt about the community’s campaign to save St Fittick’s Park while she was up.

During our walk I described why it’s so important to keep telling the story of what’s happening in Torry far and wide, because it’s a story that transcends the people and place it directly affects. It’s a story of injustice, one that gets repeated. More people must hear and heed its lessons if ever we have chance to stop it being played out on the backs of other people, elsewhere or in the future. 

I told Emer I thought it would make a great play, something like The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, if they had heard of it? It turned out to be one of their favourites and had been thinking the exact same thing.

It wasn’t until after I’d shared this idea that I learned Emer is in fact a playwright by trade and had even made community-led plays that use verbatim text from interviews with people to form the scripts. 
 
So we set off to make a play about Torry. But before getting too far along, we agreed on some core aims and principles for the project. We felt it had to be a celebratory play about resistance of the land and people of Torry – past, present and future.

We felt it had to be a community-based theatre project that centres community members as culture bearers, storytellers, artists. Using verbatim interviews, music and poetry, we’d develop it directly with the people of Torry. 

We also set out some principles that underpin everything we do in the project, and ideally feature in the finished play, these being: 

• Centring injustice (done to people and land) 

• The responses are collective rather than individual (as seen through the ensemble) 

• The individual is the tip of an iceberg (systemic under the surface) 

• Authentically represent the richness of and in Torry 

• Health is impacted by society and wider social structures 

• Joy is resistance (there will be singing about the dark times!) 

• A community informed process of making this work.  

Over the last year, Emer and I have conducted hours of interviews with people living in or connected to Torry, gathering personal and historic stories about life in Torry, from “the fish, to the oil, RAAC and the wind”, a phrase from the play that highlights themes of industrial change and issues that have affected the community.

We’ve held writing workshops, cooked breakfasts and lunches for people, to help capture a diversity of perspectives from the loons and quines of Torry, both longstanding and new. We’ve scoured library shelves and internet pages, building an archive of key events in the community’s history, and uncovered numerous personal anecdotes. 
 
In January we recruited a Torry resident, Nattie, in the role of community producer to help coordinate the various community workshops we were holding. We also have the privilege to work with two of Aberdeen’s leading lights in writing, Mae Diansangu and Shane Strachan.

We now have a draft script, which was shared with the community for the first time, via a public reading in a local pub, with community members reading their own and other parts. 
 
Thankfully the event went even better than I’d hoped. Everyone performed their parts beautifully, the script seemed to land well with most, if not all, of the audience, and we received some useful feedback to make it better. At times I felt moved by what I was hearing and seeing, which I thought must bode well for the full production. 
 
Now you’ve read all about how the play has come to be, you may still be wondering why Friends of the Earth Scotland is supporting the making of a community-based theatre production about Torry. It might seem some way off our usual campaigning against new fossil fuel projects and organising protests – but really, it’s all connected. 

Our support for this project is part of our continued solidarity with people in Torry, who have been burdened with the fossil fuel industry impacting their lives for decades. They carry the environmental burden for the wealthier parts of society who are consuming and polluting more.

For example, all the unrecyclable waste produced in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Moray, ends up in Torry, to be burnt in a giant waste incinerator, just yards from a primary school full of the community’s kids. The Tullos Death Star, as it’s aptly referred to in the play. It’s crucial for us, as a climate justice organisation, to support working class communities that are being exploited like this. 
 
But still, why support a play? 

I believe theatre projects that are directly informed or made by the people that they are representing can contribute to broadening the movement.  Building more spaces where we can create the understanding and connection we need is crucial work to truly bring about climate and environmental justice.

These projects have the potential to provide people with organising skills and confidence, that orthodox political organising spaces are unable to.  

Sometimes meeting spaces within the current social and climate justice movement can be alienating for people not accustomed to the language and practices used in those spaces.

This is not always a fault of those leading those meetings, but sometimes we forget that many people have never seen themselves as agents of political change – other than say casting a vote every so often – and so might feel intimidated to walk into a traditional organising space. 

Providing alternatives for people to meet and organise, like a community theatre project, can provide people ways to work, learn and make decisions together. One that is not ‘work’ or part of some other hierarchical structure, such as a sports team.  

I also believe well-made theatre can provide more weight to stories of injustice and resistance, than say a written report, film or even a book. I don’t go to the theatre that often, but when I have, I feel involved in the story and moved emotionally, more so than other forms of public story telling.

Live theatre has the power to move and shape people in profound ways that can have consequences long after the event.  

Sometimes I’ve even left with a sense that I want to change the world. I remember that feeling walking out the doors of Dundee Rep in 2015, after watching the play I previously mentioned – The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil.

That feeling made me want to study the consequences of the highland clearances for my degree, which got me a job in academic research, which eventually brought me to Aberdeen, and then onto this organising job through which I’m now writing these words to you. I hope a ‘Play for Torry’ is similarly impactful for those who come to see when we eventually perform it. 

The next stage of the project is to seek funding for full production, performing it first in Torry later this year before a Scottish tour. More from FOE Scotland here

It’s a story we’ve told here many times before. In the early 1990s, still smarting from their undignified withdrawal from Vietnam, the USA was anxious about its standing in the world. How could such a large and powerful country be seen to be running away from the battle in such a tiny country? Of course, it was broadly understood that Vietnam was a proxy war with the Soviet Union – but even so, failure was the spectacle.

In response, Joseph Nye, working for the Kennedy School of Government, wrote a book offering a new term – soft power – to make the claim that America would always be the greatest superpower. Not because of its hard power – guns and money – but because of its ability to attract people the world over to the American Dream. At the time this was understood as the claim that America was the land of the free: everyone thrives and anyone – whatever your status at birth - could become President.

This story – largely a myth perpetuated by the instruments of soft power, such as Hollywood and advertising – caused a never-ending flow of capital (financial, cultural and otherwise) towards America. Everyone wanted to be associated with the home of abundance – millions dreamed of living there. Although the reality was that the majority of black and other POC always found it extremely difficult to succeed; inequality in the US has always been higher than any of its peer countries with major economies. 

What happened to America over the past 70 years is that the story changed. Firstly internally, within the communities most affected by inequality. And then that truer story massively accelerating from the turn of the 21st century to become common knowledge. Anyone with access to the internet began to see that US poverty was an everyday reality, that the conditions for improvement amongst the less privileged were poor and that black people above all were being targeted for incarceration. 

These realisations drove the ‘woke’ movement that began to challenge the American Dream. Successive American governments responded with measures to create a more level playing field – Diversity, Equality, Inclusion (DEI) –  but the impact has been slow. And then, when President Trump came into office, he put a stop to them, calling these protections anti-white.

When taking this into account, Make America Great Again is the ambition to bring back the Dream, the illusion of freedom, the appearance of flourishing. Rather than acknowledge extreme inequality – the greed that has led to social and planetary breakdown. The story that the second Trump administration wants to tell is this: America is struggling because of immigration, unnecessary climate regulations, and woke-ism. It’s a ‘story’ that is still capturing about half the population – which matters because the goal is to stay in office beyond this term (possibly with the current VP, J.D. Vance, succeeding as President).

However, what this administration has not yet understood – or appears to ignore – is that soft power is not an inward projection towards your own people: it’s your message to the world. Simon Anholt is the inventor of the Nation Brand Index which has been running annually since 2005, polling a sample representing nearly 70% of the world’s population on its perceptions of 50 countries. He’s noticed this:

“Why does a positive national image matter so much? Because it is directly correlated to performance on almost all measures that involve international engagement: stimulating exports, cultural and diplomatic relations; attracting tourists, talent, major events and foreign investment. 

And where does a good image come from? An analysis of more than 200 billion data points accumulated by the Nation Brands Index delivers the surprising result that most people prefer good countries: not rich or powerful or beautiful or successful countries, but countries that are perceived to contribute to the greater good of humanity. The conclusion is a simple one: if a country wants to do well, it had better do good”.

Trump’s America First ethos is the opposite of what Joe Nye identified as the country’s strongest resource – its openness and eagerness to do business with the world; its welcome to all visitors; its championing of justice, liberty, freedom for all (not just its own elites). Instead Trump threatened invasion of three sovereign territories; imposed sudden, un-negotiated tariffs upon most of the world (painting America as a victim of its own past influence); showed himself to be indifferent to the health of (our shared) planet and closed the borders to immigration.

His attempt to present himself as a man of peace has backfired—and not only because he sets goals he can’t deliver. But because he refrains from holding aggressors to account, preferring to make deals. He’s now backing new military action in Gaza and Iran. On his birthday he chose to honour himself with a (somewhat desultory) military parade. While sending the National Guard, illegally, to Los Angeles, as a way to control his own protesting citizens. Not a good look to a world that is always yearning for peace.

If America’s economy thrived on its ‘power of attraction’ – soft power – in the past, it’s in danger of blowing it now. Today tourism is down by 7% indicating a 22% loss of revenue - largely because people are afraid of how they might be treated on entry. Exports to the US are down by 33% (a figure Trump might welcome but signifies a loss of relationship and trust with other countries). 

Are we watching the decline of American power? Or is that question itself no longer relevant, in a world that is already re-arranging itself in terms of non-state activity? After all, woke-ism did not arise directly from national liberalism – but in the face of its slower, overly-contained pursuit of human rights. The strength of hashtag movements like #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and #fridaysforfuture comes from global networks of resonant feeling, shared through social for virality. No one country owns this emergent power which, nevertheless, disrupts them all. It’s as if there is a collective intelligence which transcends national boundaries.

Within America, around half the voters don’t agree with Trump’s agenda or his way of acting in the world. Will the rebellious Los Angelinos come to define American soft power in the future? Or will Californian plurality find more cause with other smaller entities than nations – that is, cities or towns? Or maybe there’ll be different patterns of organisation than governments – movements, scenes, cultural expressions? Even the aforementioned hashtags, pulling people together across geographical boundaries on the internet, have been effective in influencing all levels of power.

Many people are conservative by nature, inclined to hold onto the present and the past to ensure stability across society, or preserve privilege. Others are progressive by nature, believing that the limitations of the current moment can only be improved by change and development, constant evolution. And of course, most of us have elements of both dispositions – conservative where we feel vulnerable, progressive where we feel more capable. 

When countries are facing instability – both inside and outside its borders – it’s common for conservatism to take hold. Even so, history demonstrates that societal evolution continues unabated. This process is barely led by governments who lack the agility while in charge of the economy and are dependent on votes to stay in office.

It's not easy to judge whether there are more progressive or regressive movements globally – we feel the influence of both. The first focusses on social justice, equality, and environmental sustainability, the second prioritizes nationalism, protectionism, and traditional social structures – each gaining traction in different parts of the world. However, it is the former – by definition - that constitutes attraction, inviting relationship and cooperation with others. It is the latter that maintains hard power hierarchies of financial and military force that dominate others and invite sanction.

When we relied upon our mainstream news to shape our views, what to fear, what to follow, we were subject to an establishment idea of national identity. Inside that, we had opposing ideologies from what’s understood as the left and right. Today, more and more people are aware that the swing from one to another has proven ineffective for the transformation of our society – party politics has let us down. The mainstream news outlets report our collective dread of possible outcomes – climate, economy, war – but offer little hope of better futures. So people go looking for them. 

As the Daily Alternative testifies, outside of this mainstream there are multiple possibilities of innovation becoming more visible through social media. Not only solutions to material problems, but new ways of thinking wholistically about the moment we are in. Although the plethora of responses we face editorially can be overwhelming, it’s not so difficult to make distinctions. For example, between those that are interested in the fate of the whole planet – understanding there is no postcode that protects you from general climate breakdown – and those that are focused on economic advantage over others (MAGA). 

And let’s not forget what we are looking at when we choose the latter: nations led by ‘strong men’ like Putin, Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un, Trump, who parade their wealth and military might to dominate those countries who are expected to serve their world order. Aided and abetted by the tech bros who have learnt to manipulate outcomes in elections, markets and increasingly, outer space. Who don’t rate Nature but love weapons and would like diversity to stay in its box. Is this really so difficult to reject?

Back to Simon Anholt: how can a country be explicitly ‘good’, in the light of what is increasingly understood and experienced as our shared global space? We might suggest at least five “good country” goals to be able to explore and share with others – each of which is already well under way in different parts of the world. But none of them have yet been brought together under a national umbrella: one that describes a post-imperial, post extractive, post-violence, cosmolocal entity within a global community. These goals might be:

·      new forms of governance, including participative deliberation and decision-making, that help bring people together rather than polarise

·      new methods of conflict transformation – locally and globally - that are explicitly non-violent and leading to peace cultures and structures

·      new economies that allow the generation of wealth arising from community ownership of energy and food

·      new food and energy systems that regenerate rather than deplete our natural resources

·      a new idea of global community that grasps cosmolocalism as a source of collective intelligence

We’re witnessing elements of this in Scotland: let us know if you can see the signs in your country/state/bioregion. And we’ll join up the dots.

Thanks to The National for cross post. Subscribe to them here.

NEXT month is a milestone for North Yell. On July 14 the first house purchased by the local development trust will be let, and its new tenant will move in.

It’s an important moment because, like so many areas in rural Scotland, this is a place where there’s nowhere for workers to live — and there’s nowhere for young people to go when they leave home.

So we’re investing in housing, and the thing that has allowed us to do that is wind. In 2017 we built five wind turbines at Garth wind farm, which together generate around 4.5 megawatts of electricity that goes right back into the grid.

Every year, we negotiate with suppliers to get the best price for the electricity we produce, and after we have covered costs we invest the rest right back into the community.

The amount of power we generate is the equivalent to just one of the turbines at the Viking Wind Farm on mainland Shetland, which has 103 turbines and is run by Viking and SSE Renewables.

But the amount of difference we’ve made in terms of community benefit and investment here is incomparable.

If we hadn’t had an active and determined volunteer community on Yell this would never have happened. They borrowed £8.3 million to build it  — that was a huge risk for the community to take, but it’s paid off big time.

We need to take in around £1m to cover our costs and anything on top of that we invest back in the community.

At the moment we are investing in housing, and before now we have extended our industrial estate, built a big marina, purchased the local shop and bought two business units which we are turning into a community hub.

In addition, we operate a number of social projects, including a free community lunch club, which is attended by 60-70 people weekly, a local youth club and shopping and prescription deliveries.

We have also just purchased a vehicle for community use, and operate a community grant scheme, distributing funds to other organisations and individuals. We now have what we’ve been told is the largest community-owned industrial estate in Europe, and it’s occupied by local businesses over 14 sites.

We have a 28-berth marina – with 23 permanently let berths and five for visiting vessels. This services business and recreation users, as well as the tourist industry that’s built up in Cullivoe – and we are going to build a caravan park.

Unlike some other wind farm developments, there was never any objection to Garth, and that’s because all profits are going back to the community.

Now, there are a number of potential projects trying to replicate what we have done but they can’t get a look-in, because there’s no space for them to connect to the local grid.

We can’t expand, either, for the same reason. Our story was told in a report released by Platform last week on the Social Value of Renewables in the Highlands and Islands.

There are other projects, like Tilley, Tiree’s community wind turbine, which returns over 100 times more economic value to the community than the privately-owned Beinn An Tuirc 1-2 Wind Farm, despite being around 1% of the size.

Projects like ours should be at the top of the list. We have shown what can be done with a fraction of the power that Viking produces — if big developers left a small amount of grid connection aside for others to do what we have done, the benefits would be massive.

Where big wind farms are being developed, the community should receive a percentage of their gross income in the same way as they pay the landowners.

Community benefit should not be calculated based on a £/installed megawatt basis. This is not fair, and current Scottish Government guidance relating to this should be both revised and enshrined in legislation.

Communities should also have a right to buy a share in the renewables project should they wish to do so. And — crucially — there should be access to the grid for people like us who want to make the most of the clean power that Scotland has to offer.

We know how much money can be made. And if communities really want to benefit from renewables, they need a real and lasting stake.

More here. To subscribe to the National, click here

The video above (click on image) is the Inaugural Lecture from Professor Oliver Escobar, Chair of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at Edinburgh University. Here is the blurb:

We are undergoing an unprecedented global democratic recession, but also a period of democratic innovation. What is at the heart of this apparent contradiction? Can democracy evolve to improve the prospect of desirable futures for people and planet?

The world faces social, political, economic and ecological crises, and there is doubt that traditional forms of democratic governance can cope or even survive. In this context, what can the field of democratic innovation offer to the task of sociopolitical reimagining and change? The field is advancing globally, based on the premise that the challenges of our time require mobilising the collective intelligence and capabilities of citizens and communities.

In this inaugural lecture, Oliver Escobar will offer a critical but optimistic take on democratic innovation. He will argue that the next decade will be crucial for the future of democracy and for the democracy of the future. And that we all have a role to play.

More from Oliver Escobar here. And for more on democratic innovation, explore this category

From the Edinburgh Futures Institute:

Futures Conversations will bring listeners thought-provoking dialogue showcasing the intersections of disciplines, ideas, and possibilities taking place at the Futures Institute. 

Episodes will feature inspiring stories from people working across different fields — arts, science, AI, policy, and more — who are coming together in unexpected ways to tackle the most complex challenges of our time.  

First episode: The ethics of AI 

Hosted by Professor Enda Delaney, Futures Institute Director of Research, the podcast kicks off with the first episode featuring Centre for Technomoral Futures Director, Professor Shannon Vallor. 

In this fascinating episode, Professor Vallor explores how her background shaped her approach to research on the ethics of AI.  

Professor Vallor argues that AI is a mirror to society, and that we need to look to humans — not machines — for ideas and solutions on how to adapt to this emergent technology. 

Upcoming episodeS

• Episode 2: Liz McFall on the Data Civics Observatory (June 2025) 

In a frank and revealing discussion, sociologist and Professor Liz McFall charts her journey from growing up in West Lothian, Scotland, to exploring vital questions about democracy and data in the Data Civics Observatory which she leads at the Futures Institute. She also discusses her film, Closes and Opens: a history of Edinburgh’s Futures and Milton Keynes of the Mind. 

• Episode 3: Laura Cram on the Neuropolitics Lab (September 2025) 

How does our brain explain the ways in which we make sense of the complex political worlds we inhabit? This question is explored in the Neuropolitics Lab, designed and developed by political scientist and Professor Laura Cram, where politics and neuroscience come together to answer some of the most pressing questions we face today about our politically-divided societies. 

• Episode 4: Sean Smith on Future Infrastructure (September 2025) 

How do we future proof our infrastructure? This question is the key concern for Professor Sean Smith, an engineer who has worked in industry and academia. He outlines the unique expertise that pioneering research can bring to the design and construction of buildings that enable us to reduce our environment footprint. 

• Episode 5:  John Vines on Design Informatics (October 2025) 

Designing technology that humans can easily use — this is Professor John Vines’ mission. He takes us through a varied career in design and explains how the field of human-computer interaction explores the ways in which people experience technology in their everyday lives. Along the way we learn about the value John places on the participation of users in design. 

• Episode 6: Kate Wright on Mass Media (October 2025) 

Working as a BBC journalist, Kate Wright spent time in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. Moving into academia allowed her to investigate how journalism is responding to the twin challenges of the new digital landscape and the changing political and cultural contexts in which news is now produced. Kate speaks openly about the uncertain future facing the media.  

How Scotland's great potential for renewable energy is thwarted. Scotland has abundant sources of renewable energy but local communities and Scotland's devolved government lack the power to fully exploit that potential. This film is the story of Applecross - a small community in the scenic Scottish Highlands which should be awash with wind and hydro energy since it nestles under the UK’s highest mountain road.

Instead, residents have some of the country’s highest energy bills and 7 in 10 live in fuel poverty. The 250-strong community has tried its hardest to tackle this. Locals raised nearly a million pounds ten years ago to unlock more Westminster funding for Apple Juice – their community hydro project. But they’re still waiting for the extra grid connection promised by SSE - the private company overseen by Ofgem on behalf of the British Government that decides on grid upgrades.

And there’s nothing anyone in Scotland can do about it because energy and grid connection are powers reserved to Westminster – not Holyrood. So, Applecross has no public electric-car chargers, no electric showers in the hotel, no new businesses, fuel poverty and a dwindling population.

Energy rich but without the power to make that work for local people. It’s a situation replicated across rural Scotland and Scotland's islands but unheard of in other small countries at our latitude. The film explores the challanges community energy in Scotland faces and the problems created by a power grid which isn't set up to meet their needs.

More here. And more news on the Scottish Beacon’s Power Shift series on community energy - an opening post from Mike Small:

The Power Shift is a major new collaborative journalism project from the Scottish Beacon which will be investigating how Scotland’s green energy transition is reshaping land, communities, and power dynamics across the country.

The subject of the green transition has been politicised, and even weaponised. Too often this means that coverage of this topic has been portrayed as black and white. We want to stay in the realms of the grey, embracing complexity and covering nuance.

We will explore what’s working as well as what’s not, and what communities can learn from one another. We will also cover how the renewable energy revolution can be driven by local communities themselves.

This is a process that is happening now – and at scale. It’s a process that has huge potential but has also sparked debates around ownership and local democracy. 

The renewables revolution is an essential part of the fight against climate catastrophe and has the potential to bring jobs, and clean affordable energy to communities across Scotland. But the revolution also throws up big questions: 

Who benefits from huge infrastructure projects? What’s in it for local people? Who gets to decide how a community benefits? How does the renewables boom interplay with issues of land-ownership, crofting and often fragile ecosystems?

How can we protect common land and precious environmental assets? When will our energy bills come down? What would constitute real benefits for affected communities? Could community shared ownership be the answer? And how will this affect community owned energy projects? 

Ultimately, the question is: what is energy for?

Communities face huge, private, foreign-owned companies that are often remote and unresponsive. Shetland already hosts the SSE Renewables owned Viking Energy wind farm, at 443MW one of the UK’s largest onshore wind farms.

Yet the islands have one of the highest fuel poverty rates in the country, meaning that to heat their homes people generally spend twice as much as the UK average. The same pattern can be found in communities across the country.

This topic has also the subject of ongoing consultation by the Scottish Government – who have been seeking “ways to improve how communities will receive additional benefits from renewable energy developments”. The UK Government has recently set out a white paper “seeking views on potential mandatory community benefits for low carbon energy infrastructure, and shared ownership schemes”.

The Power Shift is an innovative collaboration between independently owned, community-based newspapers and magazines to tell the story from the ground up. Our partners on this project span the length of Scotland from the Outer Hebrides to Galloway. They cover urban, rural and island populations. They include: Kyle Chronicle; Shetland News; Bylines Scotland; Glenkens Gazette; Forres Local; Am Paipear; The Bellman, Greater Govanhill, Fios; and Lochside Press.

The picture across Scotland is mixed, with some communities already in receipt of huge resource from community renewables, while others are suffering at the behest of a planning system which seems opaque at best.  By working together, we are able to notice patterns across different locations to create national stories about how the bigger picture is playing out across Scotland.

One of the challenges facing communities is how to organise to reap the benefit of a renewables revolution that we are not in control of. How do you create a democratic forum within small rural communities that can come to decisions about appropriate use and also redistribute income and community benefits with transparency and impact?

More here.

From the report’s launch blog:

Community-owned projects are punching well above their weight and returning vastly more wealth to local people than their privately-owned counterparts. So why make do with crumbs from the corporate table?

We’ve just published Social Value from Renewables in the Highlands and Islands, which compares the returns to local people from different types of renewable energy projects.

Community-owned energy is already creating resilient, flourishing local economies. Whether funding an out-of-hours ferry in Shapinsay, a lunch club in North Yell, or a major forest restoration project in Lewis, community energy can empower communities through social wealth generation.

But there’s a staggering imbalance in the distribution of profits generated by renewables.

This new data – gathered by Equitable Energy Research – shows that:

• Tilley, the Tiree Community Wind Turbine, returns over 100 times more economic value to the community than the privately-owned Beinn An Tuirc 1-2 Wind Farm, despite being around 1% of the size. 

• Community-owned Garth Community Wind Farm returns around 90 times more value per MW to the community than the privately-owned Viking Wind Farm, despite being 100 times smaller.

• Orkney Community Wind Farms, wholly-owned by Orkney Islands Council, are set to deliver £5.5 million in revenue each year, helping to support public services across the islands. 

• Despite huge potential gains from community ownership, just 0.5% – around 85MW – of this power is community-owned. 

Wind power now produces enough electricity to power 10 million homes, yet many communities near these developments remain in fuel poverty, paying the highest energy prices in the UK. Thousands of people living in the Highlands and Islands are ‘hungry, homeless and without access to healthcare’, according to the Scottish Human Rights Commission. 40% of households in the Western Isles are in fuel poverty.

It’s imperative that we join the dots and realise community and public ownership at scale. Highland Council are pursuing shared investment in renewable energy projects through their Social Value Charter in order to generate a long-term revenue stream at a time of mounting austerity. By pursuing municipal energy ownership, councils can play an important role in accelerating the development of a just transition in Scotland.

More from Platform here - full report on PDF here.

Making sure we take the chance to alert you to the summer opening (May to September) of Jupiter Artland, just outside Edinburgh, in Bonnington House and its gardens/forests.

The woodlands have an extraordinary collection from leading contemporary artists like Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley, Rachel Maclean and many others (see above). And new commissions are on display inside the house (see the current exhibition from Jonathan Baldock, “Wyrd”. and “Warm Inside”, below):

And in the forest, a joint exhibition between Andy Goldsworthy and Ian Hamilton Finlay:

More from Jupiter Artland.

Welcome cross post from Mike Small’s Substack page:

I’ve long been a fan of Robert Macfarlane’s efforts to coin questions like Is a River Alive? Which, for me, conjures up past essays and stories like "Histoire d'un ruisseau"by Élisée Reclus and other seminal bioregional texts.

During the time Macfarlane was writing the book Is a River Alive?, it became apparent that every river in England was polluted beyond legal limits. The situation, like almost everything, has caused much outrage but little action.

The disaster, Macfarlane said, “is born of a failure of imagination… We have come to envision water in this country as a privatised deterritorialised resource, and not as the life-force, lifeline, history-maker, life-giver that it is.”

He’s not wrong. The idea of commodifying the water that falls from the sky is both dystopian and completely normalised.

This idea of a failure of imagination is everywhere. It crops up in Rachel Donald’s Planet Critical where she writes of: “Acidifying oceans, burning soils, choked atmosphere, extinct species, and those that survive migrating with nowhere to go. Genocides, wars, famines, droughts…”

But she notes: “Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, in this ultimate nexus of crises, is the pollution to our minds. In a time when we need to find the very best of ourselves, we are collectively suffering through a crisis of imagination.”

This idea mirrors Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."

But two ‘new’ elements combine to accelerate this decline.

First the destruction of the natural world has an impact on our inner world. Minds that should meander like wild rivers, are instead stuck like industrial canals or culverts. People that experience no wild places cannot have wild imaginations. People that live in Marc Augé's No Place "spaces of circulation, consumption and communication" cannot envisage a better place.

Secondly, this process of becoming utterly disconnected from place, time, season or the natural world is amplified by our relationship with digital technologies. This process of alienation and disconnection feeds on itself. As Douglas Rushkoff has it: “we’ve disabled the cognitive and collaborative skills needed to address climate change.”

This, Rushkoff argues, leads to: “Our current inability to engage with the subtleties, the paradoxes, and the contradictions - the COMPLEXITY - is a symptom of our quantized state of mind.”

This inability to think feeds into an inability to think forward or to recognise the past. Desensitized, we are trapped in Orwell’s ‘Endless Present’.

This level of crisis and disconnect throws up some, er, anomalies. Hilariously, as Constance Grady points out in Vox, some of our tech billionaire’s are great fans of Iain Banks’s Culture novels, which envisage a socialist utopia.

How is this possible?

As Grady writes: “Nearly every aspect of the Culture seems to be diametrically opposed to the worldview of the tech right.”

“Banks takes as his starting principle for the Culture the idea that a space-faring civilization will have to be socialist to be effective. In the hostile environment of the vacuum of space, he argues, you will need to be able to count on the collective. Banks further reasons that each spaceship or planet in the Culture will have to be reasonably self-sufficient to survive.”

“At the same time, the Culture is stringently non-hierarchical and non-individualistic. There is no money and no want; therefore, there can’t be any billionaires or any economic inequality. There are no laws and almost no crime. This is not a world in which supremely wealthy people who use their power to influence the social fabric make sense.”

So how can Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg all share Iain M. Banks as their favourite author?

Grady writes:

If politics offer the Culture books their intellectual framing, the tech is what gives them their zing, their spectacle. Throughout the series, Banks lovingly describes spaceships and AIs (and lots of spaceships that are also AIs), and artificial planets and gizmos and gadgets. Generally, at the end of the book, the Culture uses one of those gizmos in an inventive way to win a big, explosive space war.

Read through this light, the Culture’s technological prowess offers the brute force that backs up its warm and fuzzy ideology. The Culture can afford to be idealistic and worry about its moral culpability because it has better technology than all the other civilizations it faces off with, which means it will nearly always win in a fight.

If you think of yourself as a titan of industry who is making that technology for your own culture — who is providing the brute force that allows for wishy-washy moralizing — there is a certain easy comfort that comes with this alignment. You know you are on the correct side of history because you’re on the side that is building the strongest and most advanced technology.

If we are reduced by the world we live in, partly by the technologies these men have created, they are more intensely reduced.

But there’s another element to this, that is the extent to which the far-right have come from, and still ally themselves with our own counter-culture.

This is the phenomenon of ‘diagonalism’ or ‘confusionism’ in which, as Ben Gidley writes:

The right soaks up energy from the left, but presents itself as something other than the right, as post-partisan, beyond left and right, and therefore actively seeks self-proclaimed left-wingers like Naomi Wolf (or, we could add, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the US, or in the UK the former Leninists of Spiked) into its tent.

Gidley (and Klein) argue that the rise of this populist right stems from the collapse and confusion of the Left, which they date as from 9/11 on. We have a landscape of ‘always online’ and the acceleration of multiple arenas of crisis, to which mainstream politics has no answers (the answer to McFarlane’s question Is a River Alive? is, no it’s dead).

This provides fertile ground for the simple reductionist and conspiratorial worldview of the far-right, soothingly dressed as counter-cultural and against the ‘Deep State’. There is also a form of ‘camaraderie’ in these pockets and forums for the highly isolated hyper-individual.

As Gidley writes:

The strength and vividness of its narratives, in contrast to the dull narratives the left seems to serve up, combines with the sense of togetherness and friendship provided by embattled, encamped rabbit hole-dwelling communities to generate a strong sense of belonging for its adherents, despite its apparent incoherence. It is this emotional offer that makes it so dangerous, and why it is so vital that the left renews its own narratives.

How to do that?

We could start by cleaning the place up and rejecting the capture of alternative culture by the far-right [Musk named Space X drone ships after the starships in the Culture books] and declared himself “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks” - Banks and the Culture series need reclaimed from the madness of the broligarchy.

Culture and “The Culture” need reclaimed and cleaned-up as much as the polluted rivers do. That process of cultural and ecological renewal and a nurturing of place - real-world place - needs to be taken seriously. ‘Utopian Anarchism’ has its proponents (such as Élisée Reclus) and its own origin story that will have to be re-told as it is grappled from the grim hand of the libertarian right.

And we will have to (re) envision water as a common territorialised resource, and a “life force, lifeline, history-maker, and life-giver”.

More from Mike Small here

On the Spring theme of cosmolocal empowerment in Scotland we bring this story, taken from the news blog on Community Land Scotland:

On 25th April 2025 the Dundee Sheriff’s Court rejected an appeal by Forthtay Ltd. It was against a Scottish Government decision in January 2024 to grant consent for the exercise of the Community Right to Buy to Further Sustainable Development (Part 5 introduced by the Land Reform Act 2016).

This decision means that unless there is a further appeal, the parcel of derelict land in St Andrews will be sold to the community group, Poets Neuk, against the wishes of the absentee landowner. This will enable them to create a public poetry garden.

Legal significance

This is a profoundly significant case. It is the first legal decision under the most legally challenging of the Community Rights to Buy which forces the sale of land under certain circumstances. The Sheriff refused the appeal of the landowner, which means the transfer to the community must go ahead unless the landowner appeals.

The Sheriff has recognised that when considering whether the transfer of the land is likely to further the achievement of sustainable development, the Scottish Ministers have given less weight to ‘achieving a sustainable economy’ and more weight to “living within environmental limits’ and ‘ensuring a strong healthy and just society”.

However, the judge finds that this approach is in accordance with law. This is important and underlines that property rights and landownership should not just contribute to economic goals, but also environmental and social goals.

In relation to the public interest, the judge was content with Scottish Ministers’ description that the community was “leading by example”. There was “a community presented with an area of land that has been left to fall into disarray becoming an eyesore and a problem for the residents and businesses alike coming up with a plan and making the appropriate application.”

This type of statement normalises Community Rights to Buy. It becomes a method to deal with landowners who are not productively using the land or considering impacts on the local community.

When considering if the transfer of the land is likely to result in significant benefit to the community, the judge was content with the Scottish Ministers’ approach. It recognised that, although this application did not have economic activity as its primary motive, there may be positive economic effects on the local economy by using the land in a more productive and community-centred manner.

Fear of falling foul of A1P1 [your right to peaceably enjoy your property] is often used as a rationale for not pursuing more transformational land reform policies. It has been used as a reason for limiting the scope and impact of the current Land Reform Bill.

This ruling shows that robust land reform interventions, including forced sales of land under certain circumstances, are legally sound.

Community Land Scotland’s response

Community Land Scotland welcome this landmark decision in favour of the community and the Scottish Government. This is the first time a community has used this compulsory right to force the sale of land.

The judgement sets an important precedent that land should be owned and managed in the public interest. If land is not, then communities with plans for sustainable development can force the sale of unproductive land and bring it back into community use for public benefit.

The community in St Andrews have had a long road to this point and we wholeheartedly congratulate them on this success.

This decision reinforces the fact that our compulsory Community Rights to Buy – which naturally interfere with private property rights – are not only morally robust but legally sound. 

Implications for the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill 2025

This legal decision demonstrates that private property rights are contingent on the public interest. They can justifiably be interfered with, when existing landownership is not meeting public interest considerations.

This important judgement should provide the Scottish Government with much-needed encouragement to take positive and ambitious action on the current Land Reform Bill.

The Bill needs to ensure that all significant landholdings in Scotland are owned and managed in the public interest. And if they are not, ultimately the existing landownership can be challenged.

This case demonstrates the importance of ensuring that the public interest is at the heart of land reform legislation. We need both legal competence and clarity for all concerned.

More here.

Here’s information about the Glasgow Seed Library, housed at the city’s leading art centre, the CCA:

Glasgow Seed Library is a collection of seeds and a community of growers.

The library stocks organic and open-pollinated vegetable, herb and flower seeds for everyone to borrow, grow and save. By learning to save and share seed locally, we can nurture unique varieties and adapt our plants to a changing Scottish climate.

Throughout the year, we run free workshops, talks and events around seed saving, community growing, food justice and earth care.

Glasgow Seed Library aims to:

• Offer people in Glasgow free access to organic, open-pollinated seeds
• Grow a library of diverse seeds adapted and resilient to the Glasgow climate
• Develop seed saving and related skills, knowledge and resources across the city
• Cultivate seed stewardship to build climate, food and community resilience
• Participate in international, local and Scotland-wide seed networks and exchanges
• Connect seed saving in Glasgow to marginalised practices, cultures and histories of earth care and land resistance, here and around the world

What is a Seed Library?

A seed library is a depository of seeds, grown and shared by a community. You can borrow seeds, grow them, and let the plants ‘go to seed’ at the end of the growing season. From those plants, you collect the seeds and return the same variety that you borrowed at the beginning of the growing season. Importantly, the library only hosts seeds that have been grown organically, without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilisers.

Our seed collection changes weekly, and you will find a wide variety of vegetables, edible and wild flowers, green manures, and herbs with medicinal, culinary and spiritual uses. We aim to stock the seeds of crops that thrive in our west coast climate, heritage varieties bred especially for Scotland, and culturally significant plants that have landed in Glasgow over centuries of migration and mingling.

Anyone is welcome to come to the library, browse and borrow seeds to grow. It is not a requirement to deposit seeds, but the more seeds we can save, the more sustainable the library will be. As seed is a living thing, it must be renewed each year or unique varieties can become extinct. Even growing one variety and returning one seed to the library is a valuable contribution.

We’re excited to hear about local, unusual or important seeds that we should stock in the library. Please email meg@cca-glsasgow.com if you have a suggestion!

More here.

Here’s the Edinburgh Open Workshop, and an explanatory interview on Social Enterprise Scotland with Natasha Lee-Walsh, Director of EOW:

What does your social enterprise do?

We provide access to affordable fabrication space, equipment and support to anyone wanting to make anything; underpinned by a program of woodwork, metalwork & welding and DIY classes for all levels. We reinvest our profit to improve our equipment, facilities and our learning and outreach activities.

How do you do it? 

Workspace is offered on a membership model. Membership is tiered to suit all pockets. Our learning program does not require a membership and is open to all. We offer staggered payment options and a bursary scheme to make our classes as accessible as possible.

Why should someone buy/use your product/services? What are the benefits and what makes your organisation unique? 

We are the only creative facility in Edinburgh that caters to you if noise or mess is your jam! Our classes are taught by Residents. EOW staff and residents often collaborate on projects. By sharing resources and knowledge we keep costs down and pass this on to our clients.

What is your personal motivation? 

The founders and staff team all experienced the decline of making space in the city centre. We believe anyone can participate in, and benefit from creativity. We believe art is viable. We are driven to make creativity and creative learning accessible; responding to the needs of our community.

What is the current focus for your social enterprise? 

Service building. We took on the building adjacent and created a 9m x 12m event space with tiered hiring options favourable to community organisations and creative companies. Downstairs is a dedicated metalwork and welding workshop (keeping timber and flames at a respectable distance)! and PAYG project storage for members.

What exciting things do you have coming up? 

Funding from the National Lottery Community Fund means we can employ a Community Outreach Officer. In the pipeline is a series of innovative education programmes, and events. The aim is to encourage social connection and improve social cohesion while equipping community members with the skills to mend, make and create.

Who do you want to work with more? 

We want to work with like-minded organisations doing great work in Leith; Move on Wood, Edinburgh Tool Library, The Croft… and connect with more of the community we serve. We want people of all ages and abilities to connect and to grow in confidence in and out of the workshop.

What’s your biggest challenge? 

The same as the one facing the sector. The creative industry is facing significant challenges. We believe in supporting creative business and the creative economy. We believe that resource and knowledge sharing is key to supporting viable creative businesses and that these enrich the communities they thrive in.

Where do you see your organisation in 5 years? 

Providing more and varied workspace, coordinated resource sharing, more courses in new creative areas. We will work with other social enterprises to do this well and equitably. Long-term we’d like to share a purpose-built facility so we can serve more people, share resources and deepen our impact collectively.

What top tips would you give to other social enterprises? 

Relationships are key. Understand who you serve. Partner with others doing the things that complement what you do. Develop good relationships with your supporters. Get some coaching. Take a business mindset; Forecast. Pivot. Allow space for failure. See mistakes as a learning opportunity. Don’t be afraid to be proven wrong.

More here. And more news from the Edinburgh Open Workshop

From Bella Caledonia, the intro to a paper by Mairéad Nic Craith, “The Multispecies Paradigm in Traditional (Gaelic) Folklore”, available from this free book [PDF]:

In her masterful novel, The Island of the Missing Trees, Elif Shafak tells the story of two young lovers in a divided postcolonial 1974 Cyprus. One is Christian and Greek and the other is Turkish and Muslim.

What is remarkable about Shafak’s novel is the role played by a fig tree that grows in the middle of a cafe. The tree is the third character and plays a central role in the narrative.

As well as witnessing the huge range of emotions involved in a forbidden human love story, the tree narrates the story from the perspective of other animals, plants and insects.

Early in the novel, the tree laments the lack of interest from humans in other-than-human species. After observing them for a long them, the tree arrives at the conclusion that humans “do not really want to know about plants”. They do not wish to know whether plants are capable of kinship and emotions.

“They find it easier, I guess, to assume that trees having no brain in the conventional sense, can only experience the most rudimentary experience”. The rest of the novel is a powerful exploration of love and fear from the perspective of different species.

I focus on the multi-species relationships that is evident in traditional Gaelic folk narratives. Building on a previous blog in Bella Caledonia, my contribution explores the extent to which such folktales engage with an other-than-human world. I also examine the role of multispecies temporalities in these narratives.

Drawing on the Gaelic ontological concept of dùthchas/dúchas [heritage], and on examples of folklore from the Gaelic culture, my key argument is that traditional folk narratives can teach us lessons about interactions between humans and other species.

The paper investigates the extent to which folk-narratives preserve memories of historical ecologies. It also asks whether these can be revived, re-envisaged or re-purposed to develop new possibilities for cohabitation in the multi-species world.

My focus on Gaelic folktales derives from the fact that I grew up in Ireland and now live in Scotland – but I recognise that many of the points I make concerning Gaelic folk narratives also apply to other Indigenous cosmologies…

More here.

We had a vibrant conversation with the drama-maker Simon Sharkey this week, across Zoom (separated between Glasgow and Edinburgh). His story is below, as reported in a panel presentation Simon made to the European Theatre Convention in 2019 (thanks for the cross-post):

I was part of the original team that created the National Theatre of Scotland, launching in 2006. After fourteen years with the company, I left and created The Necessary Space as a way of continuing the participatory work I had developed with the National Theatre.

The name The Necessary Space - A Theatre of Opportunity is a play on Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’. I think if you start with oppression, then you’re defining oppression and you’re exercising oppression. So instead, I look for the opportunity in participation.

But I also call it “A Theatre of Opportunity” because of the quote from Martin Luther King, where in the midst of civil unrest and revolution in America he says:

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We’re confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare naked and dejected with a lost opportunity [...]

Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilisations are written the pathetic words “too late” [...] Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to a long and bitter but beautiful struggle for a new world.

The reason I call it The Necessary Space is because I think that we are in the same position where we are developing. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our world and we have the opportunity to change it.

Politics isn’t working. We’re eleven years from ecological disaster. There are seven and a half billion people in the world. Five and a half billion of them have telephones. Religion doesn’t work because we have more faith in our algorithms. The media doesn’t work because we have fake news and we don’t know where to find the truth.

So where do we go? Do we go to the churches, the parliaments, to the online or to media? Theatre is the most important place to be as it’s an opportunity for us to be able to do something about that. That’s why I call it a theatre of opportunity

The National Theatre Scotland was an organisation that seized an opportunity in the history of Scotland to remodel and reshape everything. We called it Theatre Without Walls.

One of our first participants was a sheep. You may laugh but it came with its farmer to feature in a photo shoot for a poster. As a result the farmer had the opportunity to help launch a national company in his remote rural community.

We also made theatre in high rise flats, in abandoned hotels, in the bowels of ships, in old factories, shop fronts, fields, cathedrals, football stadiums, in tube stations, in telephone boxes and of course we made theatre in theatres. We mustn’t forget that.

The principle was that professional theatre and participatory theatre would be exactly the same thing. There was no distinction between them. They would get the same production values and attention.

We took over whole islands and drove audiences around in cars to see theatre. We took over cities and put people’s portraits into windows, into cities, into galleries and made epic productions.

We painted portraits in sand, we painted rainbows—that was really hard. But we managed it and people came to see it.

What I really want to talk about is our home away Theatre Beyond Borders, where we worked with what we call ‘the theatre makers of now’.

We reached out to the Bangladesh community in Glasgow, to represent Glasgow. We went to Jamaica and worked with young men in the ghettos whose narratives of going into drugs and violence had already been written for them. But we introduced participatory theatre and they wrote a new narrative for their community.

We worked with the indigenous population in Australia who were talking about being one generation away from losing the dreamtime stories. We produced the works at home and then brought it to Scotland, brought it “away”, so that there was a dialogue between all of these countries. Between artists from the favelas in Brazil and street kids from India and settled refugees in Chicago. 

Moderator: How did these communities react to your European ideas of theatre?

Simon: I think it’s important that we don’t go to other countries with an assumption that European theatre is the form. We should be exploring and learning what forms, contexts and forums there are. That’s what makes it exciting—that we are not the experts of these narratives or these forms.

So when I went to Jamaica it was my job to listen and to learn about reggae, dubstep and colonialism and to be able to use that as the foundation for the theatre that we were making.

Moderator: Is what you do political activism?

Simon: It depends what you mean by political activism. When you send a team of artists into a community to listen, respond, shape and find form for a voice that has not been heard before, is that politically active? I would say yes.

It’s another form of politics because the old forms don’t work. They are broken. There is a lack of trust there. If you are creating something with young people or cross-generational and you’re finding new narratives that are not concerning themselves with the binary politics that we are all frustrated with, then you are being political with that community in a new form of dialogue and politics.

That’s why I think that’s activism. Creating a school is political activism. Finding these forums, forms and context is an act of being political.

Moderator: But do you see a danger in losing your artistic goals and artistic value through that?

Simon: No, I see that as a massive opportunity for artists to engage in a dialogue that is not necessarily about party politics or binary politics. It’s such an exciting paradigm to work in.

More here, and at Simon’s project site, The Necessary Space. Worth also reading are his Covid blogs, here and here.

Reports The Herald:

A survey conducted by the Electoral Reform Society Scotland suggests Scots want powers decentralised. When asked about levels of trust in local institutions, Scots reported a stronger connection to community councils than to either of the national parliaments.

The survey also demonstrated a strong appetite for a more consensual political culture. Some 72% of people in Scotland said they prefer a leader who seeks consensus before making decisions, compared to a “strong leader” who acts without compromise.

Similarly, 73% agreed that parliaments should consider all opinions before passing new laws, even if that slows the process.

However, Scots also “feel anxious, exhausted, angry and disconnected from their political institutions”.

The survey reveals a clear decline in trust in political parties and politicians.

On a scale from 0 to 10 — where 0 is “do not trust at all” and 10 is “completely trust” — respondents gave political parties an average score of just 3.1, and politicians 2.8.

Trust in local councils scored 4.1, the UK Parliament 3.4, and the Scottish Parliament 3.9.

According to the survey, around three in ten adults, 31%, in Scotland say they always or often feel “angry” about how things are in the country. A similar number, 30%, report frequently feeling anxious, exhausted and disconnected.

Just 28% of respondents expressed feelings of hope or confidence.

The polling also revealed splits on the issue of equality and diversity. While 58% said it must be considered in decision-making, 42% believed it gets in the way.

Willie Sullivan, Senior Director of ERS Scotland responded:

What this polling shows is people in Scotland firmly reject the uncompromising ‘strong man’ politics we’ve seen on the rise globally and want leaders to make decisions in a considered way that builds consensus.

There are also some serious warnings about how people feel about the future, with feelings of anxiety, exhaustion, anger and disconnection a prevalent feature. Addressing this is key to rebuilding faith in political institutions.

The post-2014 landscape in Scotland opened up new debates — and new divisions. There is now clearly a mood for a new chapter where we look to fashion a democracy that is robust, responsive and builds on our common interests.

This also means we need to bring power closer to our communities. The polling shows a trend towards people being more trusting of political institutions that are more local to them, so a big part of what comes next must be ensuring decisions are made closer to the people they affect.

More from Electoral Reform Society Scotland here.

From The Conversation UK:

The early morning light spills over the raised beds of a thriving community garden in Harlem, New York. It’s a Saturday, and people of all ages move among the plants – harvesting collard greens, making compost and packing bags of fresh vegetables.

A community initiative called Harlem Grown began in 2011 as a single urban farm on an abandoned neighbourhood lot. It has since become a lifeline for the people who live there.

The project combats food insecurity, provides fresh produce to local families – 150,000 servings of food in 2023 alone – and teaches the next generation how to nourish themselves and their communities. As one long-term female volunteer told me: “Healthy habits start young.” That’s why their programmes involve schoolchildren as young as five.

Across the boroughs of New York City, a lively ecosystem of urban farmers, non-profit leaders, dietitians and chefs work together to localise food systems. This helps communities to become more self-sufficient and less reliant on ultra-processed foods, all while ensuring support reaches the most vulnerable.

While healthy food options are readily available in affluent areas such as in upper east side Manhattan, lower-income neighbourhoods – dominated by fast-food establishments – face a far greater need. In the Bronx, residents are establishing community gardens to encourage access to fresh, organic produce that people would otherwise require to travel outside the borough to find.

Some young, female urban farmers from minority communities in New York believe that “like fashion, farming is political too”. Some have built their capacity through courses at the Farm School NYC, which provides them with the tools needed to become effective leaders in the food justice movement.

Localising food systems involves growing and foraging for food in urban settings to reduce food miles and reclaim diverse, locally rooted food traditions long-displaced by industrial systems. This is one of the key lines of work explored by women in my book, What if Women Designed the City?

I’ve been investigating how women as experts of their neighbourhoods engage with local food movements – organising community gardens, coordinating cooperatives and managing farmers markets – viewed through a transatlantic lens that connects efforts in North America with those alive in the UK.

My research adopts a regenerative perspective on urban development, viewed through the eyes of women from diverse backgrounds who uncover untapped potential rooted in the uniqueness of their neighbourhoods. For instance, I conducted walking interviews with 274 women from both affluent and hard-to-reach areas in three Scottish cities: Glasgow, Edinburgh and Perth.

A participant from the modernist housing estate of Wester Hailes in Edinburgh observed that locals often favour convenience foods: “People in this area like hamburgers, pizzas, mashed potatoes and stuff like that.” In her view, encouraging more community gardens could provide healthier alternatives while also reconnecting residents with fresh, seasonal produce.

Another resident recognised the social benefits such spaces could bring, helping to counter isolation. Regular meals at the Murrayburn and Hailes Neighbourhood Garden, for instance, attract people who live alone, providing a welcoming space – even for those who don’t feel like talking. As one participant put it, these meals are especially “good for people who are slightly depressed”.

Research suggests that getting our hands into the soil stimulates the release of serotonin, a natural antidepressant, triggered by the soil bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae, which can help people to feel more relaxed and happier. This aligns with compelling evidence on the benefits of “green care” – including social and therapeutic horticulture, care farming and environmental conservation – which has been shown to reduce anxiety, stress, and depression.

Growing native

At the heart of this community-led food justice movement is the belief that both herbalists and everyday gardeners should prioritise cultivating native plants that naturally thrive in their surroundings, rather than relying on plants from distant regions, that require harvesting, processing and transportation over long distances using fossil fuel energy.

This ethos underpins the work of a growing network of women from the Grass Roots Remedies workers cooperative, who meet regularly at the community-led Calders Garden in Edinburgh to exchange experiences while growing, foraging and making their own herbal medicines.

The vital role of communities as growers and foragers in urban resilience has largely been overlooked by city officials, urban planners and developers. Yet, these community-led efforts are bringing more life and vitality to urban spaces, fostering biodiversity, regenerating soil health and reducing the carbon footprint embedded in industrial food systems.

Several of the women I interviewed believe that being thoughtful consumers involves also taking part in producing what they eat, while reducing food waste at all stages of production. Women are also leading the way by repurposing vacant lots and development sites for community gardening and herbal medicine kitchens while integrating local food production into urban planning and building codes.

Regulatory measures that tie planning approval of new developments to the provision of open space for garden cultivation – either on-site or within the neighbouring area – can ensure that urban agriculture becomes an integral part of city planning. In cities, growing and foraging together deepens social links, encourages more diversified diets, reduces food miles and fosters a regenerative approach to community healthcare.

More here. Republished from original under Creative Commons

Two upcoming events showing cosmolocalism, on a cultural level, in Scotland.

First, an interview with Chinese-Scottish author Alice May, about her new book Red Pockets: An Offering

From the event blurb:

Every spring during the Qingming Festival, people return to their home villages in China to sweep the tombs of their ancestors, making offerings of food and incense to prevent them from becoming hungry ghosts that could cause misfortune. Yet for the past century, a time ruptured by war and revolution, many tombs have been left unattended.

Following a record year of wildfires, Alice Mah returns to her family’s rice village in South China, and discovers that her ancestors are almost forgotten, and there are no tombs left to sweep. Instead, there are incalculable clan debts to be paid.

Here Mah chronicles her journey from the rice villages of South China to her home in post-industrial England, through the Chinatowns of Western Canada where she grew up, to the isles and industry of Scotland where she now lives.

As years pass and fires rage on, she becomes increasingly troubled by her ancestors’ neglected graves. Her research on pollution gives way to growing eco-anxiety, culminating in a crisis of spiritual belief.

A haunting blend of memoir, cultural history and environmental exploration, Red Pockets confronts the hungry ghosts of our neglected ancestors, while searching for an acceptable offering. What do we owe to past and future generations? What do we owe to the places that we inhabit?

Starts on Tue, 6 May 2025 19:00 BST, in Waterstones, 174-176 Argyle Street Glasgow G2 8BT [Eventbrite]

Next the Falastin Film Fest, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, showcasing the Palestinian moving image.

From the Skinny’s report:

Falastin Film Festival began life last year as a grassroots event aiming to celebrate and amplify the voices of Palestinian filmmakers and artists in reaction to the war on Gaza.

A year later, and with that brutal war still ongoing, the festival makes a return with a second edition that expands the programme, bringing films to Glasgow as well as Edinburgh

It widens its scope to include not just Palestinian films, but cinema from other nations and countries facing Zionist aggression and colonisation. Through their thoughtful curation, the festival team aim “to highlight not only stories of steadfast resistance and cultural preservation but also tales of love and hope”.

The Glasgow leg kicks off with a screening and workshop reflecting on the work of the martyr novelist Ghassan Kanafani. Titled An Ode to Ghassan Kanafani, the event begins with Return to Haifa, the adaptation of Kanafani’s seminal novel of the same name, which the festival describes as “a pinnacle of Palestinian resistance literature”; a workshop on Kanafani takes place after the screening.

Another Glasgow highlight is a showing of Elia Suleiman’s decade-spanning absurdist meditation on the plight of Palestine and its people, The Time That Remains.  

In Edinburgh, key screenings include From Ground Zero, an anthology film by 22 Palestinian filmmakers documenting life in Gaza over the past year, revealing stories beyond the headlines, and Three Promises, Yousef Srouji’s powerful film about a mother who picks up a camera to document Israeli forces' retaliations after the second intifada in the early 2000s.

There are also talks, musical performances and a supper club to take in. The organisers are attempting to use the film festival form as a tool of resistance, and throughout the festival they say they "will be striving to decolonise the narrative around Palestine and equip audiences with the country’s historical context".

The Falastin Film Festival takes place at the CCA, Glasgow, 9-10 May; and at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, 15-19 May.

[Note: This is an AI-amalgam of news sources, checked for accuracy]

A pioneering renewable energy project on the Isle of Arran has secured planning consent, paving the way for Scotland’s largest wholly community-owned solar farm. The £5 million Glenkiln Solar Farm, a 6 megawatt (MW) development led by Arran Community Renewables (ACR), is set to begin generating clean electricity by 2027.

Located approximately 1km west of Lamlash, the Glenkiln site will host around 10,000 solar panels across 8.6 hectares (20 acres) of farmland. Once operational, the solar farm is expected to generate 5,600 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity annually—enough to meet around 25% of the island’s domestic energy needs, or power roughly 1,250 households.

ACR, a Community Benefit Society established in 2020 by trustees of Arran Eco Savvy, is entirely owned by its local membership. The initiative offers islanders an opportunity to invest directly in local clean energy while also contributing to a new community benefit fund.

“With this decision, we move one step closer to realising the full potential of true community-led renewables and the benefits that a project like this can bring to the island,” said Chris Grainger, Director at Arran Community Renewables. “The hard work is not over, but we look forward to the next stage — securing construction finance, growing our local membership and getting boots on the ground.”

The Glenkiln Solar Farm is being developed with support from North Ayrshire Council and Local Energy Scotland, with development funding provided by the Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES). The next phase of the project will focus on securing construction financing and launching one of the largest community share offers for a UK energy project, with guidance from Democratic Finance Scotland.

“We are delighted to be supporting Arran Community Renewables as they prepare to launch their community share offer for what will be Scotland’s largest community solar farm,” said Morven Lyon, Head of Democratic Finance at DTA Scotland. “This project is a stellar example of a community taking the lead in the renewable energy transition, ensuring that the long-term benefits are shared equitably and sustainably.”

The land for the solar farm is being leased from Glenkiln Farm, where a complementary hydro scheme is already in place.

“We are very pleased to be working with ACR to establish another renewable energy project on Glenkiln which provides further diversification of our business and financial benefit to the wider community,” said Kenneth Bone of Glenkiln Farm.

“The solar farm will complement our existing hydro scheme perfectly with hydro generating power during wet periods and solar in drier spells. Another benefit is that the layout of the solar panels allows us to continue to graze sheep between the solar panel arrays. Together, both schemes on the farm will contribute significantly to Arran becoming net-zero.”

Biodiversity and land use have been carefully considered in the design, with sheep grazing and local wildlife habitats integrated into the landscape plan.

Glenkiln marks ACR’s first major energy project and is intended to be a keystone in the wider Green Islands Net-Zero Project, a collaboration between Arran Eco Savvy and North Ayrshire Council. The initiative aims to help Arran and the neighbouring island of Cumbrae achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

While solar energy has faced public scrutiny in parts of Scotland over land use and weather-related reliability, supporters of the Glenkiln initiative see it as a bold step toward resilient, locally owned energy infrastructure.

From the Herald, EcoWatch, Energy Global

From David Leask, The Times:

Scotland was once a great recruiting ground for the UK’s armed forces. Not any more.

In 2014, the year of the independence referendum, the British Army reported an official intake of 630 untrained soldiers from Scotland.

By 2023 that number had dropped to 330, less than one a day. In the past financial year, it was 370. That is a decline of 41 per cent in a decade.

It is the same story for the Royal Navy and the RAF, where Scottish recruitment has plunged 37 per cent and 53 per recent respectively since Scotland voted on its constitutional future.

The British Army has been shrinking since the Cold War, winding up entire historic Scottish regiments, severing multigenerational links with communities as it does so.

Recruitment has fallen in England too, but by nothing like the scale seen in Scotland. For the army, it is down 13 per cent across the UK.

Back in 2014 Scottish recruits accounted for 8 per cent of the total new intake of soldiers, roughly in line with the country’s share of the UK population. Now it is 5.4 per cent.

“Well, this does not seem to bode well, does it?” said Peter Jackson, a professor of global security at Glasgow University who has been closely monitoring Scottish attitudes to the union, self-determination and defence since before the 2014 vote.

“The figures are shocking but if you look at the demographics on support for independence it is not good news for the union side. I would ask if the young people that the army recruiters are trying to reach feel British? Do they have a sense of duty, but more importantly, do they have any enthusiasm for being involved in a UK enterprise? This is all about identity.”

More here.

We are delighted to profile the Scottish Beacon, which is an aggregation of local and independent news sources in Scotland, of a kind that we argued for in our alternative media system plans a few years ago.

From their about page:

Scottish Beacon is a collaborative network of independent local and hyperlocal newsrooms serving urban and rural communities. Together we’re working to strengthen the voice of the community-based media sector and bring to light real stories from Scotland’s communities.

We are the first project of its kind bringing together independent publications from all around Scotland. Through the Scottish Beacon we will reveal under-reported stories that connect and strengthen local communities while bringing visibility to the vital work of community-based, independent local journalism.

More here. Even more exciting to hear is that the Beacon is looking for contributors to a news project covering how community energy is shaping Scotland, and looking for contributors - see below:

The Scottish Beacon is excited to announce The Power Shift – a major new collaborative journalism project that will investigate how Scotland’s green energy transition is reshaping land, communities, and power dynamics across the country.

Backed by the Tenacious Journalism Awards, this project will bring together community-based publications from across Scotland to uncover who really benefits from the shift to renewables – and who’s being left behind.

From land ownership and community benefits to the voices that often go unheard, we’ll be digging deep into the positive and negative impacts of Scotland’s energy boom – aiming to inspire cross-community learning as well as holding power to account.

The project will feature in depth stories from 10 of our publishing partners – independent, community-based publications from right across Scotland.

The Scottish Beacon is looking to hire two freelancers (an investigative journalist and a podcast producer) to work on a new collaborative reporting project investigating the impact of the green energy boom on Scotland's communities.

Find out how to apply here.

Beautiful piece from Dani Garavelli in the London Review of Books, about the new archive of the works (and workplaces) of the Scottish writer, and imaginative tour-de-force, Alasdair Gray. Excerpts below:

…On the day I visited, [curator of Gray’s work Sorcha] Dallas showed me a box containing the original illustrations from Every Short Story (2012). They tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of grotesquerie.

…There is nothing so sacred you are not allowed to touch it. You can hold in your hand a seashell Gray picked up on a trip to Fairlie beach with some friends on 7 February 1994. You can pull out a book at random, open it at a marked page and read, scrawled in the margin, Gray’s reaction: ‘middle-class nonsense!’

…Gray’s masterpiece is the celestial ceiling mural at Òran Mór – a church in the West End converted into a restaurant/ music venue – which he began painting in 2003. The original church beams divide the ceiling into twelve areas and Gray painted a constellation of the zodiac in each. As well as the ceiling fresco, there are marble balustrades, painted columns, mirror panels and portraits of staff members who worked at Òran Mór over the years. It is the largest free-to-view artwork in Scotland.

Yet, despite the revival of interest in Gray’s visual work, Dallas struggles to keep the archive afloat. The Scottish government paid the first two years’ rent at the Whisky Bond, and there have been successful collaborations with other organisations – most recently the Glasgow International Comedy Festival, which commissioned three writers to create pieces inspired by Gray’s work.

But the archive has no core funding and Dallas doesn’t receive a salary. She is determined to keep her weekly tours free, but relies on visitors who can afford it to make a donation.

More here from the LRB - subscribe here. Donate to the Alasdair Gray Archive here.

Thanks to Bella Caledonia for the following cross-post, where democracy activist Justin Kenrick writes of a community shares initiative in Edinburgh’s Portobello area. The following piece brilliantly shows the activities of what we would call a CAN - a community agency network.

Attempted theft of a church, a Town Hall and a police station.

Public spaces all over Scotland are being lost to private developers. The Church of Scotland is selling off hundreds of buildings, Police Scotland is doing the same. Portobello in Edinburgh is an example of this happening but also may be setting an example for how to respond.

First the Church of Scotland decided to close two of its three churches in Portobello. 

This meant these places of gathering – including church halls sustaining innumerable community groups, activities and celebrations – would vanish. The community managed to save one – the Old Parish Church at Bellfield – but the other has vanished into high end one-million-pound homes.

The Church refused to sell Bellfield to us so we had to invoke the Community Right to Buy, and mobilise huge support in the community and financial support from the Scottish Land Fund, to save the church building and halls at Bellfield.  

Then Edinburgh Council closed the Town Hall – a much bigger venue. The community managed to organise itself to take over running the building on a lease from the council, and like Bellfield, the Town Hall relies on a combination of voluntary and paid workers.

Soon Police Scotland – having decided to sell Portobello Police Station – will decide whether or not to accept the community’s request for a Community Asset Transfer of the Police Station into community hands. This is an iconic building in the heart of Portobello. It was our Town Hall, our library, our fire and police station. It was paid for by the citizens of Portobello in the 19th century.

None of these buildings should be lost from the public realm. It is strange that the community should have to pay for buildings we already paid to build. Losing any of them diminishes our ability to sustain and be a community, to thrive as a community.

“When you build more roads, you get more traffic.

When you create more community spaces, 

you get more community”

When churches were the living and breathing heart of our communities, they were not one-day-a-week quiet places. They were loud and busy with events every day of the week. Like the churches of old, current community spaces need to consider their neighbours not by tiptoeing away but by engaging and trying to help their neighbourhoods thrive. 

We think of churches as quiet backwaters only because that is what they became as congregations fell away, but they were paid for by the funds raised by local people. As recently as the 1960s the inhabitants of Portobello raised the money to build church halls in the grounds of the Old Parish Church at Bellfield.

If paying for buildings the community already paid to build feels wrong, paying to vastly improve them feels absolutely right and can bring us together to continue to shape a positive future.

The good news: Bellfield is in safe hands and can thrive with your help

Since acquiring Bellfield in 2017, Action Porty has turned the former Old Parish Church into a bustling community hub. Today, Bellfield is a place where nearly 30,000 people come together each year, building connections, learning new skills, and creating memories. It hosts 26 community groups and organisations, offering 38 activities and classes weekly, alongside other events, performances, and celebrations. 

“What happens here? Everything! Life events – weddings, memorials, kids’ parties, a whole host of different workshops and classes and activities. People coming together to do something they’re passionate about – it’s the beating heart of the community”.

Action Porty is a community benefit society owned by its members, and we have now secured planning permission to progress Bellfield’s Big Build to transform Bellfield.  

We aim to transform the Celebration Hall (the old church building) into a spacious, versatile and accessible two-level building. There will be a new upper floor for events, weddings, workshops and performances, with a lift to make it accessible, and the ground floor will have new flexible and accessible meeting spaces, with new toilets, and a new kitchen.

Although this will cost £780k, if we can raise £200k (or more!) through our community share issue, then we can unlock a capital grant of £450k towards this from the Community Ownership Fund, as well as a further £130k from other funders. 

Community shares are a powerful way for local supporters and well-wishers from further afield to invest directly in the future of Bellfield. When you buy a community share, you’re making a withdrawable, non-transferable investment in community well-being, with the potential for a small annual dividend after a few years. This share issue will provide the essential capital for the development of Bellfield and help unlock further funding. 

“I had my mother’s funeral here; I’ve spent pivotal moments of my life in this building – happy or sad, joyous or full of anguish, this building has housed all those emotions”

A community share issue isn’t just about money – it’s about showing that we believe in the power of people coming together for the greater good. When Action Porty acquired Bellfield for the community, we were blown away by the incredible support we received from the community here and from well-wishers further afield.

Now, we’re asking you to rise to the challenge once again. Together, we can achieve more – because this isn’t just about a building, it’s about showing that we can build a stronger, more connected future for all of us. 

Buy your shares here: https://www.bellfield.scot/buy-shares

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