PROPERTY

This is an article about property, based largely on my practical experience of how property, spaces, buildings, call them what you will, is handled in a small largely working class Scottish town. It is born out of deep frustration bordering on exasperation at the lack of creativity in working towards new ways of managing property for the benefit ion communities, even by those communities who desperately need those benefits. I'm coming at this from the multiple perspectives of creative placemaking, an approach which doesn't simply mean adding a bit of colour to the town (though that's always nice to see) but really means adding some measure of creativity proper to how we think about things like property, ie intelligent, nuanced, multi-layered and complex thinking leading to sustainable solutions for deprived communities in particular.

I don't want to talk about theories of property except in one respect and that is to paraphrase a passage from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow,  in which they look at the origins of our legal framework around property rights. It goes something like this (part copied, part paraphrased):-

The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is based on the power of the individual (by implication a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn’t even a right, since rights involve negotiation with others and mutual obligations. It’s power. You can do anything you want, limited only by ‘force of law’. Freedom is therefore essentially a state of primordial exception to the legal order. Property is a set of relations between a person and an object characterised by absolute power. It is argued that Roman Law conceptions of property trace back to slave law. A slave was a thing, not a person and property law was about the complications that might arise within that relationship. The people who laid down the basis for our current legal order had, in private, near total domination and authority over wives and children and had their needs taken care of by dozens if not hundreds of slaves whom they could torture, rape, mutilate or kill as they wished.

Any reasonable person can work out that other options are available and yet we’ve stuck to this framework, albeit a more humane version, for centuries.

Jedburgh is a reasonably pretty town with a beautiful hinterland. Very beautiful. It still catches my breath after twenty three years. It has an excellent school, NHS centre and swimming pool. The Abbey is stunning and Mary Queen of Scot's House has a beautiful garden in which to space out and think, read or write. In the growing season there are beautiful flowers and hanging baskets around the town, largely down to the dedication of one committed individual. Shops are so-so, many lie empty. There’s a wonderful new bookshop and pizza restaurant. The people are friendly. That’s about it. 

The problem with Jedburgh is that most of the people who make the important decisions about the town are either Tories or elderly people, mainly men. Nobody seems capable of applying anarchic thinking to the solution of local problems, meaning the imagination and exploration of better forms of local democracy and governance. Creative thinking proper, that is, risk-taking, long-term thinking, nuanced approaches, doesn't have a chance. Neither does a healthy and ecologically sustainable approach to the use of property, buildings, in the town. We live in 18th century France where the rentier plies his or her trade.

In terms of community, culture and creativity it’s a dull town, a ‘cold spot’, lacking in any accessible community/creative /cultural spaces or sustainable programmes of creative activity. Some of us are working hard to remedy that but at every turn we encounter obstacles and resistance. I can't set foot in some so-called community spaces because they've been rented out or even pledged to private interests before they're renovated. The new school or Community Campus with its state-of-the-art facilities and large social and technical spaces is inaccessible to community activity because of the extortionate price structure set by Live Borders and presumably approved by Scottish Borders Council. Now I’m starting to name names. The wonderful Town Hall - who knows? It’s dragged on for about eight years and still no firm commitment that it’ll be accessible to the community. Ditto the Old Library. Last I heard was that it might be up for sale. The Campus library is not for purpose because it’s in the middle of a school with hundreds of kids and you can’t have members of the public wandering about. Why none of the highly paid executives in the council couldn’t have worked this out is beyond me. Actually I correct that - they were told and didn't listen.

What we need is a comprehensive change in the attitude and behaviour of custodians of (ostensibly) community public spaces towards how such spaces are accessed and used for the benefit of the people of Jedburgh. Led by young people preferably. The rentier economy, with respect to community buildings, sees a situation where the landlords carry little or no risk. The overt politicisation of some of the town bodies with actual agency will see that change is unlikely to happen. 

Thirty percent of children in Jedburgh are considered to be in a state of poverty, which means parents as well. It's not their fault despite views to the contrary surfacing from time to time, usually from the well-to-do. A healthy and civilised community (in the sense of caring for each other), above all the self-appointed leaders, need to ensure that the less privileged people of the town have access to the same range of community/creative /cultural spaces and activities as anywhere else. The same goes for land - a whole school lying disused and dilapidated, pockets of land disused and inaccessible, for example the old limeyard by the Bowling Club and the land behind the old school which could be used for community allotments, in other words food growing. There are no mechanisms for soliciting interest in such initiatives (and there will be interest) which would enhance amenity and quality of life for citizens. But I’ll deal with land in a separate article.

The biggest problem in my view is that few if any of the local bodies who claim to represent Jedburgh at various levels are inclusive and diverse so we get what the same people want year on year. I’m not a zealous missionary for these things but they are highly desirable, important and legally required in many cases. I’m seeing very little or no effort at attempting to include women, younger women in particular, or poorer (let’s say disenfranchised) people in the town, in important decision making with respect to the town’s development. It’s become largely the domain of retirees. Three decision-making organisations I know of are largely made up of septuagenarian and even octogenarians, largely men. The argument seems to be that ‘we need to get started on things so we’ll forget about all this inclusivity and diversity stuff because it takes too much time’. But there’s the point - things should take time if they’re important and everything in one’s power should be done to make the groups with community decision-making agency as diverse and inclusive as possible. Otherwise we end up with the same people on the same committees making the same decisions. If you start something well it has more chance of ending well. The evidence is that, in my twenty-plus years of living in the town, very little gets delivered in the way of new ideas, potentially risky initiatives are resisted or even blocked and things stay the same, more or less.

Returning to property then what we find are ingrained attitudes towards sharing all or parts of buildings as if they’re sacrosanct. Any incursion into the established order of property rights and transactions (seldom a mention of responsibilities) will bring the fall of capitalism and civil order. ​This is entirely a political field of engagement. I feel it’s a community duty to say to the people of Jedburgh here that by voting at local level for Tories, or more importantly by NOT voting at all, you’re chopping yourselves off at the knees. At a recent local by-election a miserable thirty two percent of voters bothered to turn out and the successful candidate, who began as an independent then jumped ship to the Tories, was voted in with just over half of the total vote. All of this is therefore eminently within the political domain. It's not impolite to describe and analyse these matters as correctly as possible. Democracy is based on confrontation or, to put it more softly, finding consensus, and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge this.

For those young people who can’t escape Jedburgh and go to University or the Antipodes (currently a favourite destination with some youngsters) there remain the options of either entering a trade, going into agriculture or the retail sector. Nothing wrong with those at all - there are some excellent careers in the trades - but it’s a limited field and as a result we see a huge and unhealthy gap in the demographic composition of Jedburgh. The local Tory MP has done nothing to bring jobs to the town and never will because he’s at Westminster to represent himself. We therefore have to accept this and get on with making things better for ourselves. And yet the citizens keep voting for these people. For jobs I’d be looking carefully at the cultural sector in Scotland, officially defined and accounted for, which turns over more than tourism and agriculture combined, a fact that gets sceptics tapping away on the old Google. A strong cultural sector would bring jobs to the town, but this would overtax the capacity of those running the town because it requires longer term thinking (as opposed to the ’end-of-your-nose thinking of SBC and others), the empowerment of local communities and new ideas on what exactly local democracy should be. 

My point is that without a fresh approach to local democracy we will never find better ways of managing properties in the town for the benefit of communities over individuals. If enough people could be persuaded to recalibrate their vision we could have wonderful community education initiatives, music, dance, theatre, meeting spaces, children’s events, green initiatives, special interest groups and even a night-time economy. This not utopian dreaming. It happens already in other regions of Scotland no different from ours.