The Isle of Eigg, famous for its community buy-out.
The origins of Scotland’s Community Empowerment Act 2015 predated Scotland’s independence referendum, but like all things touched by that referendum, it grew in scale and imagination. What started as a few lines in the SNP’s 2011 manifesto about giving communities more power over eyesore land has become just one in a whole range of measures, united by one common thread – decentralising to communities at the most local level possible greater say and even direct control over what matters to them.
For far too long conventional social democratic thought focused on inequalities of income or wealth to the exclusion of concern about inequalities of power. Deprivation is also marginalisation. In those places where incomes are lowest so too often are hope and confidence. Without addressing one progress on the other is always going to limited. A line of thinkers from radicals like Jimmy Reid to Harry Burns, the previous Scottish Chief Medical Officer, point to the danger of this pernicious sense of alienation. The lesson we must all learn is that if regeneration used to be something done to people, instead today it must – it can - only be done with or by communities.
