In case you were considering your options, take a look at these pictures. If you ask really nicely I will tell you where it is…

We in the UK have benefited from a largely stable political and economic system for generations. Neighbouring European countries have seen change through periodic ruptions and revolutions, whereas we British have favoured a more sensible evolutionary approach, in which we allow our innate good manners and common sense to result in changes for the better in the fullness of time. The idea is that we in the UK did not need to overthrow our ruling classes, as although they have been a bit of a bad lot at times, on the whole things are getting better…

At least this is the narrative perspective that we tell ourselves. Will Self, speaking on radio 4 called this ‘The myth of gradualism”. And he is right- it is a myth.

Firstly, it is a myth that totally ignores the fact of Empire; the Centuries of brutal expansionism and enforced serfdom inflicted on half the known world. We imported all those spices and rich things whilst exporting injustice and greed to the far places where black people lived. The vast wealth that our elites to accumulated then allowed them to buy the compliance of the masses in this country with a million small concessions; some benefits here, universal health care there and the odd pension scheme to feed us in our dotage. The cost of all this was borne by parts of the world who had none of these things.

Even now, in our post-colonial, post-Empire, post-industrial, post-modern nation, the power of this myth remains so strong that it persists even in the places that benefited from it least. The formerly colonised places might carry some degree of resentment for the way Britain treated them, but mostly they aspire to be like us- to attain our energy and resource guzzling consumer driven wealth. Lord forgive us.

So far it is not going well for them- we continue to do very well for ourselves, whilst those places where raw materials come from and where the things we measure ourselves by possessing are actually made- these places (despite the growth of a super wealthy elite) are largely still uniformly poor by every measure.

Change, where we see it, seems to relate mostly to the rise of new Empires, rather than the gradual lifting of the people of the world out of poverty; inequality is not decreasing, at best it is shifting.

How about within the UK- is there evidence for gradualism here? We have seen an unprecedented change in welfare provision over the last hundred years, ever since the Liberal government introduced the first government sponsored old age pensions in the shadow of the First World War. For a short period up to the 1970’s it looked as though the gap between the richest and poorest was for the first time ever beginning to narrow.

However, over the last 20 years, many changes have well and truly reversed this trend; regressive taxation, an almost complete abandonment of non means-tested welfare provision, undermining of labour laws, rising cost of higher education, the housing-ownership bubble, and perhaps more than all this, the re-framing of the narrative of economic crisis around ‘austerity’- as if the problem is spending on welfare. This from a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study;

• Since 1970, area rates of poverty and wealth in Britain have changed significantly. Britain is moving back towards levels of inequality in wealth and poverty last seen more than 40 years ago.
• Over the last 15 years, more households have become poor, but fewer are very poor. Even though there was less extreme poverty, the overall number of ‘breadline poor’ households increased – households where people live below the standard poverty line. This number has consistently been above 17 per cent, peaking at 27 per cent in 2001.
• Already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier. There is evidence of increasing polarisation, where rich and poor now live further apart. In areas of some cities over half of all households are now breadline poor.
• There has been slower change in wealth patterns overall. The national percentage of ‘asset wealthy’ households fell slightly in the early 1990s but rose dramatically between 1999 and 2003 – 23 per cent of households are now wealthy in terms of housing assets.
• The general pattern is of increases in social equality during the 1970s, followed by rising inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. Changes since 2000 are less clear.
• Urban clustering of poverty has increased, while wealthy households have concentrated in the outskirts and surrounds of major cities, especially those classified as ‘exclusive wealthy’, which have been steadily concentrating around London.
• Both poor and wealthy households have become more and more geographically segregated from the rest of society.
• ‘Average’ households (neither poor nor wealthy) have been diminishing in number and gradually disappearing from London and the south east.

So even from a UK-only perspective the idea that we are progressing towards a better and more equal society can not be supported. Rather, what we have is a country in which wealth is being accumulated massively by the already wealthy, and the poorest are being abandoned as valid recipients of state benefits, recast and demonised as feckless scroungers. Progress is now measured not in the sense of a society getting better, but rather the degree to which ‘my’ individual property is increasing. 

I am British, and so I do not welcome the idea of something so unpolite as Revolution. What is left to me however is the hope that we might rediscover something that we can collectively believe in- something that lifts us up beyond the slavery to selfish accumulation and personal security, back towards the idea that we are collectively responsible, and that a good society has to find ways to mediate the power of the strong in order to lift the weak. If it happens gradually, then so be it…

Grey lies the lock that curls

my lips to softening cheek.

The lines on your lovely face

are the paths we’ve walked together.

For love is never young-

It is older than we are.

So let the unkind light fall harshly;

let gravity do its worst.

For I will be your mirror,

and your pillow

should you fall.

Thats all.

Out along the peninsula where I live (Cowal) lies a ramshackle old Victorian stately home surrounded by an estate all gone to seed, called Castle Toward. I have a particular love of this place, in all its overgrown and leaking grandeur, as it is the where I play cricket from time to time with Innellan Cricket Club.

Castle Toward was built in 1820 for Kirkman Finlay, who had been Lord Provost of Glasgow- political power seemed to serve him well as he also made a fortune from trading in cotton from the far east and India. His Scotland was thrusting and expansionist, fat with Empire plunder and Findlay feasted with the best of them.

Through the years, Findlay’s big house was pressed into service as HMS Brontosaurus, then in 1954, after being bequeathed to the local corporation, was run as a centre for arts and music. In fact even in very recent years orchestras have used it to rehearse- I remember playing cricket listening to Mozart wafting on the breeze from square leg.  Ownership passed to Strathclyde council, and eventually to the newly constituted Argyll and Bute Council, who ran it as an outdoor centre, then let it to an organisation who did the same.

For a while it was a television star, as a childrens TV programme called Raven was filmed there;

However, cash strapped Argyll and Bute council decided to sell. After a complex bidding process a deal looked to be on the cards- the Castle was to become a posh spa resort. It all got messy very quickly however as other bidders (most notably the organisation who where the current tenants, Actual Reality) raised considerable objections to the way the matter was handled, as well as making allegations about various other dodgy dealings on behalf of the council. Whatever the truth of all this, the deal fell apart and the council was left with a huge white elephant which seems to be costing them many hundreds of thousands of pounds each year just in maintenance and security costs and with no tenant, it provides no income.  The estate itself is slowly being reclaimed by weeds and saplings.

Frustrated members of the local community decided that they were sick of the mess the local council were making of this prize asset and decided to try to take it into community ownership, something made possible when Scotland’s Land Reform Act was passed in 2003. This Act allowed communities with a population of less than 10,000 in Scotland to apply to register an interest in land and the opportunity to buy that land when it comes up for sale.

The Act was intended to address an age old issue of the power of the Highland Lairds, whose ownership of the land that whole communities lived and depended has given them almost total power over the lives of Highlanders for generations. Think of the Clearances, or scandals over more recent absentee landlords. Celebrated Community Buy-outs have taken place on the Islands of Eigg and Gigha for example, although these projects are often marginal and troubled.

The Toward Buy-Out has so far been a political story full of twists and turns, claims and counter claims, interventions from Government, allegations of lies and double dealing. At present Argyll and Bute Council and its leader Dick Walsh (almost unbelievably, in whose ward the Castle lies) are looking like a bunch of incompetent nay-sayers with some kind of agenda that makes little sense to anyone who is unfamiliar with the odd political landscape in this part of the world. Here are a few pointers;

Argyll and Bute Council was created in 1996 from the existing Argyll and Bute district and one ward of the Dumbarton district. It is a massive mostly rural area, made up of lochs, mountains and glens, as well as islands in and around its extensive and twisting coastline. It has a population of around 80,000 but has only four towns in which more than 10,000 people live.

The council has long been dominated by ‘independent’ councilors; with no stated political affiliation. There are a few Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party have done well of late, but Dick Walsh, the veteran (‘independent’) leader of the Council depends mostly on a coalition of independents. Power in Argyll tends to continue to be held by those who have seized it, with no real challenge, no obvious political ideology and no overt value base.

There have been a few scandals, but Dick has shown himself to be remarkably politically resilient. Check out this article from 15 years ago.

The council itself seems to ride out a fair number of external criticisms. For example, Audit Scotland have made several damning assessments of the way the Council operates over the years, most recently in 2013. It was this report that ushered Dick Walsh back into power in the wake of the collapse of an earlier SNP led coalition. However he had survived earlier critical reports himself, with barely a shamed face, managing to bring about changes that satisfied the critics.

Dick Walsh and the leader of the Castle Toward Buy out company, South Cowal Community Development Company have clashed before. He is Alan Stewart, a nice bloke who runs a local garage – the one we always take our car to – and had previously successfully run a campaign to oppose closures of local village schools, much the to then embarrassment of the Council, and Dick in particular.

(I hesitated about making this point, but decided in the end that it had to be said.) Argyll has a long tradition of Freemasonry. Key members of the elected membership and senior officers of the council are thought to be members of local lodges. The significance of this might of course be entirely benign- I have friends who are also active masons and I believe them to be persons of great integrity and community mindedness. In a context in which power is mediated through such complex webs of alliances and political wheeler-dealing this does seem to me to be something worth mentioning, but surprisingly, few people ever do, which always confuses me. I am no conspiracist, but I am interested in how people reach consensus on a particular subject; the supporting social context. Politicians of course need to be particularly careful with this and the still secretive nature of Freemasonry always obscures rather than reveals.

But back to the story of the Castle…

The valuation placed on the castle by the Council was £1.7M, and through fundraising and a grant from the Scottish Land Fund, the community had gathered around £700,000. They needed either a hefty discount from the Council, or some kind of loan that would allow the project to proceed. Don’t forget that there are no other known buyers on the horizon and that the vacant property is costing the Council a fortune.

What happened was anything but a straightforward yes/no duality- those things are rare in Argyll politics. Rather something was offered in a way that seemed to pretend helpfulness whilst simultaneously torpedoing the Buy-out. You can read more about the terms of the loan deal offered here.

Locals were furious and demanded to know what Dick Walsh was up to. He replied with the political equivalent of ‘not me gov’, continuing to express his support for the project, and the need to get the best deal for the Council to maintain services such as education. Even the most trusting local smelled a rotten rat. Some have been openly demonstrating in the streets and outside Dick’s Councillor surgery.

There is also an on line petition with over 10,000 signatures- you can sign it yourself here.

Then, more twists. Firstly, an independent valuation suggested that the house and estate was worth a lot less than the Council valuation at just £850,000.

A vote of no confidence was tabled against Dick Walsh by another local Councillor. He survived this by somehow managing to vote in the motion himself, and relying on the casting vote of his friend in the chair. More on this bizarre local take on democracy here.

Then, following the increasingly angry exchanges between the Council and the local MP, the Scottish Government intervened; first the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, then the First Minister herself, Nicola Sturgeon. This from here;

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has urged Argyll and Bute council to negotiate with the local community group in South Cowal over the purchase of the Castle Toward estate. At a busy session of first ministers questions Nicola Sturgeon was asked by MSP Mike Russell to engage with Argyll and Bute council over the local authorities unwillingness to reduce the price of Castle Toward. The local authority had instead offered the community a £1 million pound commercial loan.

Here is what Mr. Russell had to say;

Council Leader completely isolated but still thinks everyone out of step but him.

The First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has added her voice to the chorus of organisations and individuals urging Argyll & Bute Council to accept the bid from the South Cowal Community Development Company for the Castle Toward Estate and  has urged those involved to “negotiate constructively” to secure the future of what she described as “an important community asset”.

Dick Walsh has responded again by saying that others are misrepresenting him and distracting people from the proper work of the council.

A full hearing of the matter in front of the council is now planned, with Walsh looking increasingly isolated- but this is Argyll so who knows what the outcome will be. Things are different here.

I used that term ‘post-modern’ to describe this story as although the struggle has many historical precedents in all those small communities fighting unequal battles against landowners and those in power, still this one feels very different. The land in dispute is not some Western Isles Crofting village, or an island community withering because of the neglect of an absentee landlord. No-one was evicted from the estate (although perhaps Actual Reality, who ran an outdoor activities business there might argue against that.)

The land in question has no deep roots in local culture- in fact the history it represents belongs to the Lamont tribe who appear to have been rather silent on the issue. People involved in the campaign are not necessarily poor, or disenfranchised, or necessarily otherwise politically active- rather they are ordinary people from all social classes who see the opportunity to break out of the old negativity that often clings to these hills and do something that invests in the life of this place, bringing jobs, art, creativity and energy where there is only a leaking roof and lots of weeds.

Oh- and a cricket field.

And quite wonderful for all of it.

Finally got round to watching Fern Britton Meets Richard Coles on the i player, telling his story. You can catch it for a little while longer here.

Coles, along with the majestic Jimmy Sommerville were the founding members of The Communards, who provided part of the sound track to my student days. Although I could never dance, as I was even then far too awkward and self conscious.

In many ways, for people of faith, his story charts one of the totemic issues of our age. He survived hedonism of stardom in the 80’s, alongside the homophobic hysteria and traumatic loss of the AIDS epidemic and in the mess of it all, encountered Jesus.

Despite all the complex rejection and hostility towards homosexual people that was around then in the Church (even in the manifest presence of gay people within the walls of the establishment) God seemed to have no problem reaching for Richard.

Coles is now a CofE vicar, and lives in a celebate relationship with his partner David (also a vicar). So he remains a faithful witness to both the faith that found him and the person he was born to be.

Watch the programme if you can, it is beautiful and life affirming.

Stay with me a little on this one…

What do we know about the so called ‘War on Terror’? Here are some of the facts as I think we can generally accept them;

• The back story to terror is long and winding; having roots in old Colonial power struggles
• Poverty and broken societies in which people lose hope and connection also tend to breed terrorism
• Behind the scenes are many vested interests who tend to prosper in spite of the miseries experienced by those directly affected
• Terrorist/freedom fighter? It depends on your perspective and whose narrative frames the context
• Fighting insurgency and terror using invasive conventional forces tends to create the very conditions for the violence to increase
• Simplistic ideas of good and evil entrench the situation into a bloody stalemate and tend to make things worse

The evidence for these statements (which I accept are value laden and open to debate) is fairly widespread, but as a case study, consider the rise of ISIS, which according to its own leadership only exists because of the invasion of Iraq, and the imprisonment of key activists in brutal military prisons, which effectively became academies for the religious and political movement which led to the very formation of ISIS.

But that has been said before- the point of this piece is a rather interesting comparison with the ‘War on Drugs’- by which I mean the on going effort to address addiction to substances within the western world- and my own situation in the UK in particular. In case it is not obvious why I am blogging about this, I am concerned on this blog to engage with things that might bring freedom to the captives, and proclaim the hope of jubilee to those who have lost hope. Addicts need this more than most.

By any measure, we are not really winning this war any more than we are winning the one against terror. Those on the front line are suffering dreadfully, many are dying young after blighted half-lives. You can check out the stats in relation to UK drug use here. Whilst the longer term trend of hard drug use have been down (although this figure might be masked by a trend towards new patterns of poly-drug use). In 2013 to 2014, 3.1% of adults aged 16 to 59 were defined as frequent drug users (having taken any illicit drug more than once a month on average in the last year), a slightly higher proportion than in 2012 to 2013 (2.8%) but similar to the 2011 to 2012 proportion (3.2%).Young adults were more likely to be frequent drug users than older people. The proportion of young adults aged 16 to 24 classed as frequent drug users (6.6%) was more than twice as high as the proportion of all adults aged 16 to 59 (3.1%) in 2013 to 2014 and represented a statistically significant increase compared with 2012 to 2013 (5.1%).

For those who are addicted, the story is complex; The majority of those in treatment in the UK are heroin and crack cocaine users; many have been using for a long time and as they get older are experiencing chronic health problems. Recovery for these people can be incredibly hard, however many have made remarkable recovery journeys and now lead full and accomplished lives. Services have gradually come to realise that recovery is rarely the consequence of moral choices enforced by criminality, nor by seeing people as ‘sick’ and needing treatment (these being the two main framing narratives for institutional response to addicts.

One of the best articles I have read about addiction recently was concerned with an interview with disgraced former Independent columnist Johann Hari (collaborator with Russel Brand) who has written a book about drugs, full of his and other’s experiences. I will throw in a few quotes from the article as I return to the comparison with the War on Terror. Mirroring the points above;

• Fighting a War on Drugs has a long history, full of Colonial vested interests too. In this war, the victims may be further victimised in order to achieve socio-political security for the moral majority.

I had no idea that the war on drugs was single-handedly invented by a racist ex-prohibition agent, who needed to find a new problem big enough to protect his departmental budget. One of the first victims of his ambition was Billie Holiday, whose heroin addiction enraged him to the point where he hounded her to death. After he’d had the singer jailed for drugs, she was stripped of her performing licence, and as she unravelled into destitution and despair, his agents continued to harass her, even summoning a grand jury to indict her as she lay dying under police guard in a hospital bed.

• People living in poor deprived areas are twice as likely to be addicted. Addiction is then related to social justice

The book is populated by a compelling cast of meth users, junkies and crack addicts. Other than addiction, what they have in common is heartbreaking early trauma and abuse. Childhood violence and prostitution, abandonment and homelessness, all led their victims to the same remedy: a narcotic anaesthetic for pain and loneliness. “Human beings have an innate need to bond. Healthy, happy people bond with other humans. But if you can’t do that because you’re so traumatised by your childhood that you can’t trust people, you may well bond with a drug instead.” The scientific evidence of the correlation is so overwhelming, Hari writes, that “child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease”.

• The drug treatment industry is vast. Prisons are full of persistent offenders because severe addiction almost always drives people into criminality of some kind. Then then there is the medical side, ranging from the desire to find some kind of addictive gene, or to produce drugs to stop people taking drugs, etc etc.
• Some drugs are more evil than others. We modern humans are driven to alter our consciousness in all sorts of maladaptive and dependent ways, in many ways that could be regarded as damaging. Most of these addictive patterns of behaviour are not only legal, but they are actively encouraged; eating, drinking, gambling, shopping, computer gaming, etc. The drugs field has been further complicated by the emergence of a complex and changeable set of what are known as ‘legal highs’. Fighting a war against drugs is a socio-political decision dependent on a historical context.
• The traditional armies engaged in the War against Drugs very much remind me of the beleaguered armies of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Contrast these two approaches;

Hari goes to Portugal, where all drug possession was decriminalised 13 years ago, and where even the police chief of the Lisbon drug squad now admits, “The things we were afraid of didn’t happen.” He also visits Tent City, a prison in the Arizona desert where the inmates live in tents in temperatures of 44C, wear T-shirts proclaiming I AM BREAKING THE NEED FOR WEED or I WAS A DRUG ADDICT, and are shackled into a chain gang every day and marched in public while reciting chants of repentance. “What I learned is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety,” Hari says….“The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It’s actually going to deepen it.”

• Drug addicts are even spoken about by alcoholics as ‘Junkie scum’. As if they should be discarded as sub-humans. Our general societal approach is to simplify addiction to them/us, despite the fact that they are us.

…we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what addiction is. It isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. It’s not you; it’s the cage you live in.”

There has been a shift in thinking in service land, as I mentioned earlier, towards ‘Psychosocial’ approaches, in which serious weight is given to context, adequate housing, wellbeing etc. However, as long as the war is being fought, at huge cost in resources and lives, then the focus can not really change.

Time to call for peace.

And sorry, this has to mean changing the law to decriminalise.