It's about how Scotland is governed. And it's about how Scotland looks the way it does and we live the way we do because of how we're governed. She makes the point (and I agree) that we are over-governed: from Westminster, from Holyrood, from our local council HQs. But sadly, government doesn't reach down to the truly local level. We, the voters, don't have any say in how our communities work day to day. Other people do that. We don't make decisions on budgets and priorities for our community. Other people do. These other people probably act in our best interests but it leaves grown-ups like me wondering if we're that pathetic we can't be trusted to have a say in how our communities live.
And yes, we have community councils but they have no political power - that is, no money, because when you're talking about power, it's the budgets that matter. She compares how this works in Scotland with various other models that operate in Scandinavia and Finland. I've seen for myself how that works in Norway and Sweden. For example, the town of Ulricehamn in Sweden has a power station of its own. It burns wood pulp. The town grows trees, sells some on the open market, and uses the cash to plant more trees. The rest of the trees fuel the power plant. Cheap as chips. This was all the idea of a local farmer, who went on to become the mayor of the town. He wasn't making any money out of this personally and he was the humblest politician I've ever met but he was proud the town was doing well and proud it was doing it for itself.
I don't expect Scandinavian models of government and local involvement would work here but it's interesting to know how many other different ways there are of doing things in education, housing, care of the elderly, childcare, land use, even language.
In fact, I'd go further than Lesley Riddoch and say we're not governed so much as managed. And since capitalism is now the only game in town, in the UK we are managed capitalist-style: top-down (do what I tell you is the message I too often get from politicians), big gap in communication between them (the politicians) and us (the tax-payers who make the money for them to spend and to pay their wages), and a sneaking suspicion that the politicians don't really need to be too bothered what's happening at our level because they may not even spend much time in our community but live a lot of their working life inside wee government bubbles in places like London and Edinburgh remote from the people they represent or, in local government terms, commute in to manage the place and push off somewhere else at the end of the day.
I said I wasn't going to write about the referendum. I lied. I have to write a bit about the Yes campaign because I think it offers an example of how politics can be done differently, more locally and certainly more democratically. (I can't write about Better Together because I don't know how it's organised.) Even if the 18th of September doesn't bring the result I want, I will still be grateful to the Yes people for the way they've taken politics back to the 'grass roots.' The Yes campaign works with volunteers from local communities. There are no selection boards or forms to fill in giving your qualifications, no party membership to sign up to. Obviously the ability to discuss ideas with members of the public is what's needed and the Yes campaign seems to have attracted people who can and want to do that. Volunteers are trained in the sense that they come together with usually well-known speakers who give them ideas on how to present the case for independence. They 'work' in their own communities but they meet volunteers from other areas in training, so they have a reasonable picture of what's going on across the country. They use social media to get information from campaign HQ and to publicise what they're doing in their local community: 'town hall' meetings, door-to-door canvassing, stalls in town centres and at farmers' markets, etc. They are enthusiastic to begin with and their involvement with Yes and with each other keeps their enthusiasm going.
It will be interesting to see what becomes of these people after the referendum vote, whatever the outcome is. Some will be absorbed into party politics. Not necessarily for the SNP. There are a lot of Labour and Green voters working for the Yes campaign. They will I hope remember the big lessons from the independence campaign. There are other ways to run a country. We can have different priorities if we want to. We occupy a very interesting part of northern Europe and can take lessons from Eire, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Or not. It's up to us.
I'm grateful to Lesley Riddoch for setting out in her book some direction arrows for us to investigate the possibilities.
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