Mar 092012
 

The black calendar of Aberdeen’s civic history has a new entry: 2nd March 2012, the day that its citizens, evident sufferers of apathy and myopia, handed both its natural heritage and its economic future to a cabal of businessmen.  Arthur Taylor writes.

The fight to retain and improve Union Terrace Gardens hit the buffers on that day when the public – or rather 27.5% of them – voted to support the plans to destroy this unique piece of the city’s heritage and replace it with a concrete monstrosity – presumably confused by the smoke and mirrors of the PR campaign which branded it “The Granite Web”.

Whether the battle turns into a war, protracting the debate, and driving further wedges between parties already badly divided, remains to be seen, but it is hard to see a rapid healing of the wounds that this process has created.

It is also difficult to stop the passion that fuelled the Retain campaign from dissipating, before all avenues of challenge are exhausted against a process labelled as democratic – but which in reality has been anything but that.

What is clear is that events from 2008 to now should be reviewed and recorded for posterity, so that future generations when looking back can seek to understand a number of things:

  • why we allowed our heritage to be given away to a clique of egoists and nepotists, who deluded the public and maybe even themselves into believing that they were altruists and philanthropists
  • why the local authority whose primary function is to act in the citizenry’s best interest handed control to an unelected quango, immune from public scrutiny
  • and why we allowed the city’s future to be mortgaged on the most questionable of business cases, flagged up as high risk by Audit Scotland in the final days of the campaign – when most votes were already cast.

Not that this was a revelation: Friends of Union Terrace Gardens had identified the risk months before, but their claims were played down in the media.

The last two months have seen a referendum conducted by a returning officer who sought to have the campaigns run to a fair set of rules.

The dominance of the local print media in forming and steering public opinion, and its incestuous relationship with local business, is deeply concerning.

While it appears that the retain groups stayed within their £8000 budgets, the pro groups – aided and abetted by the collaborators in the local media – spent an estimated £1,000,000 to buy the votes of the people of Aberdeen. Their cynical campaign saw radio adverts dressed as public information broadcasts, and a drip-fed daily editorial in the local press, with each day’s evening paper offering more extravagant promises than the last, as part of a fawning hysterical clamour.

That the retain groups, variously composed primarily of grey-haired men, beardies, tree-huggers and an enthusiastic schoolboy, ran the referendum right to the wire, losing by such a slender margin, is testament to their energy, enthusiasm and resourcefulness. That they did this against a campaign co-ordinated by the BIG Partnership, Scotland’s largest PR agency, is little short of a miracle.

The dominance of the local print media in forming and steering public opinion, and its incestuous relationship with local business, is deeply concerning.

The public need a source of true facts rather than propaganda dressed as objective reporting.

That said, there have been two positives to emerge from the press coverage of the campaign: the amusement derived from watching the Evening Express contorting itself like an India-rubber prostitute in a bid to champion the development, while not entirely abandoning its habitual council-baiting; and the emergence of the STV Local site as a place where all parties can present their voice without editorial bias.

It is hard not to see the future of local journalism as lying in hyper-local online spaces, as counterpoint to the shrinking of print to the point of complete insignificance.

the dead-eyed, gape-mouthed novelty-seekers who lurch zombie-like through the malls

Returning to the proposed development itself, it should be remembered that Union Terrace Gardens is the only part of the city where one can see the original topography of the land on which the city is built.

Sadly the local authority in the last century has allowed almost all traces of the city’s history to be erased like some embarrassing legacy instead of retaining and celebrating its character. Compare this with Edinburgh’s old town or York’s centre.

We are now confronted by the effacement of the final part of our history in order to satisfy the dead-eyed, gape-mouthed novelty-seekers who lurch zombie-like through the malls that have brought about the systematic homogenisation of the city centre and obliterated all individuality and character.

If we do not continue to challenge this proposed act of civic vandalism, by:

  • opposing the planning application,
  • challenging the use of Common Good land,
  • exposing the business case as one which will leave the city bankrupt (as it was last in1817)  when the TIF scheme plays out as feared,

then we should at least ensure that we record for posterity the names of the businessmen who proposed this vanity project; note the politicians and faceless unelected quango-ists who eased its path to realisation; and ponder the many, many idiotic consumers who swallowed the hype, without challenge or analysis.

If we do nothing else, we should record those names on the black calendar’s page for 2nd March 2012.

Sep 302011
 

By Mike Shepherd. 

A document has appeared purporting to reveal and counter ‘myths’ about the proposed Union Terrace Gardens development.  It has been posted on the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce (AGCC) website.
Some of the claims are disingenuous and others stretch the idea of a ‘myth’ somewhat.

AGCC: “Fiction: This is Sir Ian Wood’s project. Fact: The City Garden is not and never has been Sir Ian Wood’s project.”

The City Square has always been seen as Sir Ian Wood’s project. Sir Ian announced his proposal at  HM Theatre in November 2008.  The Evening Express reported the launch with the headline;

Options revealed in Sir Ian Wood’s vision for Union Terrace Gardens EE13/11/08

The same article also states:

The businessman wants to raise Aberdeen’s Union Terrace Gardens to street level and create a civic square.”

A media quote picked at random clearly shows that it has invariably been perceived as Sir Ian’s project.

Back my vision for the city or lose £50m, Sir Ian warns P&J 14/04/2010

So exactly whose vision is it then, Sir Ian?

What is referred to as ‘my vision’ is in fact the vision, aspiration and hopes of many, many Aberdonians for the future economic and civic wellbeing of our city and region as North Sea oil winds down.” BBC20/4/10

Excuse me, I don’t think so.

AGCC:  “Fiction: The City Garden Project will destroy the only green space in the city. Fact: It will create new, bigger, greener and more attractive gardens. It is about gardens and open, distinct spaces on different levels, using the natural slopes, for all sorts of activities.”

The development will destroy the existing Gardens and according to the technical feasibility study, all 78 mature trees including the old elms will be chopped down. It is hard to accept that the new “City Garden” could ever support mature trees on the existing scale.

AGCC: “Fiction: It will destroy our history and heritage. Fact: Wherever possible, the project will preserve and enhance our history and heritage.”

This is the most disingenuous of all the ‘myths’ in the document.  The first draft of the design brief for the City Squarecalls for a …

“21st century contemporary garden”

…to be built in place of the Victorian park. Union Terrace Gardens was planned by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie, who also designed many of the surrounding buildings including the Art Gallery. If Union Terrace Gardens feel as if they belong, this is the reason why. The city square WILL destroy a key part of our history and heritage.

AGCC:  “Fiction: Aberdeen City Council is selling off public land for this project. Fact: The land involved will remain in public ownership.”

This is misleading as it doesn’t explain the whole picture. The land will most likely remain with the Council for the time being. However, the ground will probably be leased for a long period, 125 years has been suggested. A lease-hold on this time-scale while technically not ownership, is nevertheless a significant property deal.  Any structure on the land, including the so-called City Garden, will not be publically owned. This will belong to the private company or trust if they get planning permission.

AGCC: “Fiction: Aberdeen City Council is spending money it cannot afford on this project, money that could be better spent elsewhere. Fact: Aberdeen City Council has not allocated any revenue expenditure to the City Garden Project, over the past year.”

We know that considerable Council officer time has been allocated to work spent on the project. We do not know if the City Garden Project intends to reimburse the Council for this or not. ACC minutes show that the Council lawyers have not yet signed  off the relevant project agreement that would allow this to happen.

AGCC: “Fiction: The City will be taking on-board future liabilities relating to the construction and operation of the City Garden.  Fact: The City has agreed to consider a TIF scheme to provide public sector funding for the project. This will involve the City borrowing funds to invest in the project. The project will stimulate new business investment and generate additional extra economic activity in the area, resulting in an increase in the amount of business rates collected in future years. This will be used to repay the loan plus the interest charges.”

Doh! – “Fiction: The City will be taking on-board future liabilities” but then we are told “This will involve the City borrowing funds to invest in the project”.

The Council are £562M in debt and cannot afford any more borrowing for anything. As has been explained on these pages before by Mick Miller, the version of TIF suggested for the City Square Project involves major financial risk. If the amount of business rates does not increase sufficiently to pay back the loan, then the Council get left holding the baby.

AGCC: “Fiction: The majority of Aberdeen public has voted against redeveloping Union Terrace Gardens. Fact: 11,000 people (less than 10% of the population) participated in the public consultation which revealed that just over half were against the proposal. Many of those were basing their decision on misinformation. The majority indicated a need for change and for the location to be more attractive and accessible.”

This is probably the most outrageous of the so-called myths. A public consultation was held, the public voted No by a significant majority and it was ignored. The public were told that their votes would count. Even Sir Ian Wood acknowledged this in an interview as can be seen on an STV located on Youtube.

“”The citizens of Aberdeen…  will have the right to choose. There will be full consultation, it’s coming to the end of it now and they will decide. And that’s democracy in operation. That’s great.”
http://video.stv.tv/bc/news-l2-gardens-190210/?redirect=no

The scale of participation in the consultation was significant. ACSEF, who helped set up the consultation, noted:

“11,943 people went on to submit formal responses that have been recorded in the statistics.  This is a huge response rate when compared to similar style consultations. For example, the Edinburgh Tram consultation had just under 3,500 direct responses.”

When, later ACSEF discussed the results of the consultation at a board meeting onthe 22d March 2010, they discussed how to frame the result of the consultation as a favourable outcome for the city square in spite of the No vote:

“If views are roughly split there is an opportunity to say that although the public has spoken this is only in relatively small numbers.  Those wishing to see the status quo are in the minority compared to those who wish to see change such as updating and modernising the gardens.”
http://www.acsef.co.uk/uploads/reports/21/22%20March%2010.doc

The statement that the majority indicated a need for change is misleading, the majority said no to the City Square Project and did not endorse it.

If the public were misled during the consultation, who was responsible for the misinformation?  Where did these myths come from?

It is now acknowledged by all involved that the absence of a reference design was a fundamental flaw in the consultation. The consultation asked if people supported the project or not but the common perception was that the conceptual illustrations, based on the technical study, represented a final design. Many based their decision on not liking what they believed was a final design.”
http://thecitygardenproject.com/background.asp

The proponents of the City Square do not accept that they lost the consultation fairly. They cannot believe that the public cogently preferred either the Peacock scheme or the preservation of the existing gardens to a modern city square. But this is what happened.

AGCC: “Fiction: It will be a flat, concrete square. Fact: This is not the case. The design teams have been given a very clear brief that new gardens and space which will have street level access from all four sides will use the existing topography of the site to provide a unique, dramatic and creatively landscaped setting to better reveal and blend with the surrounding historic architecture.”

OK guys, explain to me how you can ”raise the level of the Gardens to that of the surrounding streets” (the Council’s words not mine) and use the existing topography to any significant extent?  So where did the idea of a unique and dramatic setting come from?

Here is the description of the existing Gardens as noted in the City Centre Development Framework:

They have a “topography which provides a unique and dramatic setting for the surrounding historic townscape and bridges and an essential component of the identity of the City Centre. “

I suspect that this is just the start of a large PR campaign to sell the concept of the “City Garden Project” to the Aberdeen Public. It will have only a limited impact. Aberdonians are highly educated and can think for themselves. They can make their own mind up about what they want the city centre to look like, whether it is the existing Gardens or a city square at street level. They are smart enough to see what is plausible and what isn’t.

Aug 182011
 

 An update on the Council – and non-council designs on Union Terrace Gardens by Mike Shepherd

Six architects are busy designing a modern square and a subsurface concourse for the proposed development of Union Terrace Gardens. The public can expect to see these designs in early October. The architects have been given a design brief by the project implementation team for the City Garden Project, telling them what it is they are expected to design.

Only part of the brief has been made public; most of our councillors still have not been fully informed as to what the architects are being asked to do with our public, open, green space.

Yet, the intention had been for the councillors to sign off the design brief, but this never happened. Councillors are informed about the City Garden Project in a series of meetings for a group called the Project Monitoring Board. The minutes of the meetings are posted on the council website. The April minutes state:

“MRC (Malcolm Reading Company – the company managing the competition) will produce a comprehensive design brief and this will be submitted to Council on 29 June 2011, for ratification, before being issued to the short listed companies.”

Two months later, the June minutes stated:

“Mr Brough informed the group that the project management group had met on Monday the 6th June and had discussed and also amended a draft of the brief that Malcolm Reading has written up. The final brief will go to council on the 29th of June for noting. Mr Brough informed the group that the brief for the design didn’t go into much detail and may seem vague as the brief needed to allow some leeway and not be too prescriptive to the architects.”

This document was provided to councillors and gave some vague details as to what was expected of the architects including a specification for “ a contemporary 21st century garden”. I was present at the Council meeting on 29 June and the design brief was never discussed. There was a lengthy debate on allowing smoking in homeless accommodation and that was more or less it. I asked the council executive why the design brief had not come up. I received this reply on 3 July, just after the council meeting:

“I reported to the Project Monitoring Group what was intended at the time of the meeting. However, it was subsequently decided, by members involved in determining the Agenda for Council meetings, that there was no need to obtain Council approval for this and that it should go to Council as an attachment to the normal quarterly City Garden Project Bulletin report.

“Also, the brief still has to be finalised, by the addition of various technical annexes, before being issued to short-listed companies on 21 July.”

This makes it clear that the brief had not been completed by the time of the council meeting on 29 June, and that ‘members’ had pulled the item from the agenda. The document provided to councillors was not a finalised version. I wrote an open letter to councillors criticising the decision not to allow councillors to ratify the design brief. https://aberdeenvoice.com/2011/07/an-open-letter-to-our-councillors-city-garden-project/

“You have now lost control over the City Garden Project. A non-elected body has now made decisions as to what our city centre should look like. They have decreed that the Denburn should have a “contemporary 21st century garden”, not you. It is this body that is also deciding what the large underground concourse should be used for. If conference and exhibition facilities are to be provided, then this will clearly have implications for the future of the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre at the Bridge of Don. However, this is not a decision that you will have any control over unless you turn down the city square plans.”

The public should be extremely worried about the loss of democratic control over the City’s assets. The public was ignored when they voted against the City Square in a public consultation last year, now the powers given to our councillors are being bypassed too.”

This was repeated in a letter in the Scotsman and later partly republished by Private Eye. The result was a major row in the council chambers, which still has not died down yet. Some councillors and council officials were very upset at the statement that councillors had lost control over the City Garden Project. Others were annoyed that they had not been allowed to debate the design brief. Labour Councillor Willie Young asked a series of questions at this week’s Council meeting.
http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?MId=1972

One of the questions was:

“To ask the Chief Executive if it is normal for third parties who currently do not own, lease or have any pecuniary property rights over a public asset such as Union Terrace Gardens to actively promote, encourage architectural design briefs on an asset they currently do not own, lease or have any pecuniary right over?”

The Chief Executive replied to this as follows:

“No. Any party does so at their own financial risk. However, the Council by virtue of their decision of May 2010 and those of subsequent meetings have noted and encouraged the course of action undertaken by the City Gardens Trust.”

The following request was also made:

“Council agrees that in order to provide proper scrutiny over an area of land currently under the City Council’s direct control, and to ensure that no citizen or citizens of Aberdeen can accuse the Council of “losing control” over the City Garden Project, as well as to ensure beyond reasonable doubt that there will be a local democratic audit of plans for an area of the city centre that many Aberdonians care passionately about, Council undertakes without delay to determine a design brief to be provided to architects which meets the requirements of the citizens of Aberdeen as approved by elected members, the democratically elected guardians of this fine city.”

This was not debated at the Council meeting on Wednesday. However, I’m told it will come up for discussion at a later Enterprise, Planning and Infrastructure sub-committee meeting.

I would ask councillors to stand up and assert themselves on this issue. You are our elected representatives. There should be local democratic control over our public open green space, its function and its utility.  It’s not up to a bunch of businessmen and their friends to decide what our city centre should look like. Nobody voted for them.

Jun 032011
 

Voice’s Old Susannah shares with readers an recent email exchange with a prominent Aberdeen City councillor which has raised many more questions than answers.

A long, long time ago people learned about reasoned debate, how to structure logical arguments, and what the difference was between the rational and irrational.

Then again, some of us must have skipped school that day.

Let me share a recent chain of emails between me and Councillor Neil Fletcher with you. It started as a correspondence on the subject of the Tullos Hill Roe deer, and turned into something else.

First let’s just review how our elder statesmen – our experienced, mature elected officials – have handled the whole deer cull and tree issue. At first, we were happy: a tree for every citizen was an election pledge of the Liberal Democrats.

There were no worries, no costs, no deer cull – just trees. The tree planting phase 2 consultation passed with barely a word; after all, the consultation only said we might have to move some rabbits – deer didn’t get a look in.

Then March arrived and Cllr. Aileen Malone’s Housing & Environment Committee comes up with a new promise: give us £225,000 by 10 May or we promise to start shooting deer. No one knew about a cull before then; animal charities and sensible people were outraged, and most of us pledged not to give in to this blackmail. Protests and petitions were launched, but nothing would sway the Lib Dems. Democratic debate was stifled – at least until 26 May when the Cults, Bieldside and Milltimber Community Council let the issue be discussed.
See: https://aberdeenvoice.com/2011/05/you’re-shooting-yourself-in-the-foot-cults-cc-tells-malone/

Coming out of these discussions we learnt directly from the horse’s mouth (as it were) that unless the trees all reach a certain height in 2 years, the City has to pay back the grant money!

So there it is at the end of May – the most important factor in whether or not to plant trees on an arson target.

I wonder whether someone should have mentioned this just a wee bit earlier? Then we could have all laughed away any thought of Tullos Hill being suitable for the trees. The Council and its ‘experts’ don’t seem concerned about arson – the deer might nibble the trees, making them shorter – and you and I would have to stump up for the tree stumps. Tree planting – best to leaf it out, I think. But the Lib Dems are now out on a limb, as they are now saying in effect ‘well, we did ask for quarter of a million, but we have to shoot the deer anyway’.

What kind of people can come up with such disorganised, illogical, constantly shifting set of priorities? Old Susannah is on hand to answer that question.

I think Ms. Malone has shown us the kind of person she is: trustworthy, open, sensible and not at all stubborn. But what of our other guiding lights on the Council? How are they handling the pressure to stick to their moral high ground faced with ‘people like me?’

Let’s look at some correspondence between me and Mr Cool, aka Cllr. Neil Fletcher. I’d been copying him on email and occasionally writing directly to him. I’m not so sure he kens the difference.

Here are three emails:-

1. Neil Fletcher’s response to an email from myself (he is only on my email as a ‘CC’ not as addressee:

Dear Ms Kelly
I’m afraid we will simply not agree on this issue.
I see the culling of deer as a necessary, if unpleasant, measure to control a
species of animal in a non-natural environment, which has no natural predators. (I)
I believe that a cull is preferable to allowing the deer numbers in any area to

control themselves by starvation.
Culls happen all the time in Scotland, including Aberdeen, and I’m disappointed
that on this occasion, what is a widely accepted measure of animal control, is
being used to oppose the largest re-forrestation project the City has ever seen.

Additionally, this project is at practically no cost to the tax-payer. (II)
As you are not a constituent of mine, I do not intend to continue any further
correspondence with you on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Neil Fletcher

2. My reply to the above, sent on the morning of Sunday 29 May:

Good morning Mr Fletcher

Firstly the email was merely copied to you; you were not an addressee. I was doing so merely as a courtesy – and in the slim hope that as a Liberal Democrat you will realise that, in the words of the Cults Community Council leader ‘you do not have the people with you’ over this Tullos Hill affair.

Still thank you for your reply. It is regrettable that you are either unwilling or unable to separate the general, wide-ranging of culling from the specific Tullos Hill situation – a stable population of deer are to be decimated to turn their ecosystem into a forest – in an arson hotspot. Whether or not culling is required on a larger picture, a whole host of animal charities, no less the Scottish SPCA are condemning the plan to kill the Tullos Hill deer to transform Tullos Hill into a forest from an open, windswept meadow.

You still seem able to grasp that in terms of transparency, democratic process and duplicity, the handling of this situation is unacceptable.

I do have one unrelated question for you Councillor – is your Register of Interests up-to-date and correct? I only ask as a. you had absolutely no hospitality entries for the whole of 2010, and b. someone had told me – obviously they must be wrong – that you might have been involved in some way in a business which was doing some work for the City Council.

You list no directorships under ‘Section 3 Contracts’ (which for some reason has sub points numbered from 4.15). I am happy to accept that you had no hospitality in 2010 and have absolutely no connection whatsoever to a business or consultancy which is/was doing any business with the Council if you confirm this is true. Again, if the Register is completely correct on these two points, then I thank you in advance for clarifying that for me.

Yours sincerely

Suzanne Kelly

3.  And then – Cllr. Fletcher to me this past Sunday evening:-

Dear Ms Kelly

My register of interests is correct.

I admire your logic. He doesn’t agree with me, so he must be corrupt and I’ll
get him. (III)

I now avoid anything that I can that would require registering an interest.
Precisely because of emails like yours. (IV)

I used to go to various events to represent the Council, and when these were
registered, people like you pointed fingers. (V)

The Lord Provost now has trouble getting Councillors to go to such things, but
as I’d rather be in the pub or community centre with my mates than attend a
stuffy evening with a bunch of strangers, its a great excuse not to go. (VI)
As regards your allegations about me not registering a previous business

interest, I haven’t spoke to that gentleman for over 2 years, so it’s unlikely
I’d have anything to declare now. (VII)

Interestingly, Cllr Willie Young, who publicised my perfectly legitimate
interest in the hope that folk like you would jump to certain conclusions,
recently sold Oakbank School to that property developer at a price significantly
lower than it is worth with the housing that will be build there. He is also a
property developer himself. (VIII)

However, the Labour Group, whilst initially supporting the need for a cull, have
done a few somersaults to appear to be backing you now. So I doubt you’d be
interested raising doubts about his honesty. (IX)

Neil Fletcher

For the record, I have omitted nothing. I was being polite, but it looks as if I have hit a nerve or opened an old wound which I truly didn’t know existed – until just recently that is.

When I asked about a consultancy, I was referring to some new piece of information a source had suggested might be true. It is time to look into some of his wilder statements. In the emails above I have added Roman numerals in places, and would comment as follows:-

(I) Cllr. Fletcher keeps going to the general statement ‘culls are needed / culls happen’.

This has nothing to do with killing the Tullos Hill deer to turn their ecosystem into a forest. I have been to the Hill; I have no idea what Fletcher means when he says the deer live in an ‘unnatural’ environment. The laws of physics apply on Tullos Hill, and plants were growing. It seemed to be an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. No, the deer have no natural predators on the hill (except arsonists). Fact: Roe Deer bucks rarely exceed 5 years, does 6 to 7 years.

(II) Cllr. Fletcher says this tree-planting is at ‘practically no cost to the taxpayer.

If the trees reach a certain height that is true. If you don’t count the cost of a minimum £2,000 annually to kill 8 or 9 of the 30 deer (Council quote – other quotes are higher) for at least 3-5 years. And if the arsonists burn enough trees – we return all the grant money. Money of course does not grow on trees (however you protect them). The grant money is coming from the public purse. Hands up who knows how the money gets into the public purse in the first place.

(III) Cllr Fletcher is annoyed. The Register of Interests is a mandatory document all councillors have to keep accurate, up-to-date, and public (have a look – his is here – http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/mgConvert2PDF.aspx?ID=150&T=6 )

I don’t know where to start as to the accuracy of the document and its contents. Its first page says it was updated in January 2011. On the last few pages there is an unsigned space for signature for Jan MacEachran (democratic services) and Neil – the dates for their non-existent signatures are 2007. Cllr. Fletcherl’s record shows he attended not a single solitary event in 2010 for the council or as hospitality. He did get to dozens of events in 2009 – I was merely wondering if the absence of 2010 was another error in the document.

The numbering is interesting. Item No. 3 – concerning Contracts – is sub-numbered starting with no. 4.15. Not how we do it where I work. Hmm.

(IV) Cllr. Fletcher says he is avoiding going to events.

Well, he did avoid going to any events he’d have to register in 2010. He’s lost this reluctance now – the document was prepared (apparently) in January 2011. The last two hospitality entries are for January 2011 – a cruise on a ship, and an evening at an arts centre. I do note that barely a single event – even those where the ticket price would have been printed on the ticket – is shown.  If the average price of a ticket at AECC is £20, and he is getting at least two tickets or more a time, he is a lucky man.

(V) ‘People like me’ Cllr. Fletcher writes.

I would quite like to have a description of ‘people like me’ from Mr Fletcher. I doubt he would like to be stereotyped.

(VI) Ah, yes: pity the poor councillor who’d rather be in the pub with his mates.

Instead, he was forced in 2009 to represent his constituents at approximately 20 events – mainly concerts at the AECC. Official regulations say that councillors should not accept a large number of invites/tickets from one source (like the AECC), These dull events included Eddie Izzard, Neil Young, Britain’s Got Talent, Gladys Knight, Kasabian, Proclaimers, Simple Minds….. the sound you can hear is my heart going out to him.

(VII) ‘That gentleman’ – What gentleman? I wondered what on earth he was talking about – it wasn’t the story I was trying to follow up on.

So –it was time for a bit of research. It seems that some time ago, shortly after being elected, Cllr. Fletcher set up a company and did a wee bit of consultancy work (for about £7,000) for Carlton Rock. There was talk of this not being declared during a potentially related council vote. Nothing came of it – but it made headlines. But this story came out of left field for me. If I thought that was out of the blue, there was more to come.

(VIII) Well. The last thing I expected in my dealings with Neil Fletcher was for him to bring up Cllr. Willie Young. It was something of a shock I must say. What I did to raise Cllr. Young is beyond me.

(IX) It looks as if Neil Fletcher is implying that Labour councillors are wrong to have changed their minds over the tree situation.

I can’t find a single record of Labour councillors saying ‘we need to kill the Tullos Deer’ – it looked as if they were trying to find an alternative, even when the blackmail money was first mooted. If Labour is going back on the idea of the tree planting – it may be for two reasons. One – the overwhelming evidence now out in the open that the plan is deeply, deeply flawed – and that relevant material was not made public until after the consultation closed.

The other reason is they may be sensitive to the thousands who have signed petitions and sent letters begging for the cull to be averted and humane deer control methods to be used – and expressing the view that Tullos Hill is not the best location for tree planting. If Labour have indeed ‘done somersaults’ and are on the side of the people – I fail to see what’s wrong with that.

Sorry to have been so long-winded – but this is information Aberdeen voters and citizens should be made party to.

When the results of my complaint about Councillor Fletcher’s email are made known – I will write on this subject again.

May 052011
 

As part of Word 2011 Book Festival in Aberdeen which runs from 9th to 15th of May, Celebrated Scottish writer Iain M Banks will be appearing at 7pm on Friday 13th May in the Arts Lecture Theatre, King’s College.

Aberdeen Voice is grateful for permission to reproduce the following article  entitled ‘The Culture’ which appeared recently in Democratic Green Socialist online magazine.

Is there more to some science fiction than meets the eye? Steve Arnott takes a personal look at the ‘Culture’ novels of Iain Banks and argues that leftie sceptics of the genre are missing out on something big.

‘Perspective, she thought, woozily, slowly, as she died; what a wonderful thing.’ – ( Last line, Chapter One, Surface Detail ) – Iain M. Banks

‘I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to keep them safe from us and let them devour themselves; I wanted maximum interference; I wanted to hit the place with a program Lev Davidovich would have been proud of. I wanted the junta generals to fill their pants when they realised the future is – in Earth terms – a bright, bright red.’ ( Diziet Sma, The State of the Art ) – Iain M. Banks

‘…it all boils down to ownership and possession, taking and having.’ – ( The drone Flere-Imsaho summing up the feudal-capitalist society of Azad, The Player of Games ) – Iain M. Banks

I read Iain Banks’ newest Culture novel Surface Detail recently.  Feeling I’d just read something exhilarating, deep and satisfyingly unique, and contradictorily wanting more of the same, I took the opportunity of systematically re-reading all of the Banks Culture novels – some for the fourth or fifth time. Having made mutterings since the inception of Democratic Green Socialist online magazine about writing something on the Banks Culture universe, the inexhaustibility of these radical novels finally convinced me it was long past time to put fingertips to keyboard pad, and share my thoughts on the Culture with other readers of the DGS.

Not the least motivation for me doing so is that many on the left in Scotland seem mainly or wholly ignorant of these titanic, richly layered literary and philosophical works, even though they are authored by one of Scotland’s leading popular writers. Thus they are unable to participate in a meaningful discourse about the important – and genuinely revolutionary – ideas and concepts they embody and contain.

If you have never read any of Iain Banks’ Culture novels previously I hope this short essay can act as a bit of a primer and goad, and lead you to those books. If, like me, you’re already a fan, then I hope it might spark the beginnings of a discussion group on the left about the Culture.

What are the Culture novels? And what is the Culture? (I’ll stop using italics at this point).

Most readers of books are aware that Iain Banks publishes his non-genre novels under that name, and uses the middle initial M. when publishing his science fiction output.  The Culture novels and novella represent the greater part of that science fiction output and are, in order of publication, Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art, Excession, Inversions, Look to Windward, Matter and Surface Detail.

All of Banks’ science fiction is of a mind numbingly consistent quality – they are wide screen, intelligent space operas, thrillers that are both comic and tragic in turn, redolent with dizzying philosophical and scientific ideas painted on a universal canvas, splendidly baroque, grotesquely violent, but always with intimate, human, recognisable stories at their core. The Algebraist, for instance, would be a good example of a great Iain Banks science fiction novel that isn’t necessarily a Culture novel. But here I want to talk exclusively about the Culture, Banks’ greatest character, and surely his highest intellectual creation.

The Culture is the communist/anarchist/socialist/libertarian (delete/add according to taste) civilisation that is both background and protagonist in the loose and diverse group of Culture novels. A galaxy spanning, highly technological meta-civilisation that is both pan-human and pan-species, in which artificial intelligences (in many ways superior) are the civic equals of their biological counterparts, and in which men and women routinely meddle with their genes and enhance and change their body shape and sex, the Culture is a ‘Player’ in galactic terms; one of a small group of galactic civilisations who have evolved way beyond middling stellar empires or republics to where they are either approaching the possibility of Sublimation (throwing off all remaining material shackles and effectively becoming ‘something else’), or are busy (when not having plain good old-fashioned hedonistic fun) trying to do good in galactic terms by their own moral lights.

The Culture is in the latter category. Most folk remember ‘Star Trek’ and its off-shoots, and the famous ‘Prime Directive’ which forbade the Captains’ Kirk or Picard of the Federation to interfere in developing cultures. Both the Culture and the Federation are egalitarian societies that have abolished disease, poverty, war and money, but whereas the Star Trek Federation worldview is informed by 60’s, 70’s and 80’s progressive liberalism and cultural relativism, the Culture is an utterly bolshevik creation, informed by historical materialism, social critiques of capitalism and oppression, and a view of all things in the universe as being fundamentally transient and processal in nature.

Although it agonises about it and tries to do it using minimal possible force, the Culture is an interferer par excellence in emerging and developing cultures on planets and habitats throughout the galaxy.

When I first read that book back in the late eighties I was blown away by the spectacle and scale, the dark violence and inexorable sense of doom

Through the sometimes clandestine, sometimes open agency of its ‘contact’ and ‘special circumstances’ sections, it actively seeks to shorten the time civilisations will spend in a state of primitive barbarism, whether feudal, capitalist, or in state or religious tyrannies, (and sometimes mixtures of all of these), and help them progress to more enlightened and egalitarian states of being.

It is in the interstices of this pan-stellar revolutionary/evolutionary narrative, the doubts and moral shadings of the enterprise, its rewards and contaminations, that Banks finds his characters and his stories.

We were first introduced to the Culture through the eyes of one of its enemies; the Changer Horza Bora Gobuchul, a mercenary working for the religiously fanatic Idirans at war with the Culture, in the now classic of the SF canon, Consider Phlebas.

When I first read that book back in the late eighties I was blown away by the spectacle and scale, the dark violence and inexorable sense of doom. In the era of Star Wars, Aliens and Blade Runner I absorbed it as a wide screen space opera that would surely out do all others if ever made into a film.

All of Banks’ science fiction work has that hugely visual, imaginative cinematic quality – not just in the sense of making the page disappear before your eyes and immersing you utterly in his story, but in the literary sense of showing not telling his deeper themes. And deeper themes there are in all of his work.  Though there is no lack of talky philosophical discourse between Banks’ protagonists, it is principally through the plot and development of the characters themselves, the tragic/redemptive weave of their pasts, presents and futures that we find a truly humane richness and a reflection of our own lives. Reading and re-reading Consider Phlebas I became aware that this wasn’t just the ultimate science fiction action movie in print but a more mythic and multi-layered tale. In following Horza’s journey through war, death, the hope of new life and irredeemable loss, we see his prejudices against the Culture and machine intelligence gradually undermined, until he realises he’s been fighting on the wrong side all along.

Banks followed up this stunner of a novel with another immediate classic. The Player of Games introduces us to Culture society and the machinations of its dirty tricks section Special Circumstances from within. Jernau Gurgeh is one of the great Game players of Culture wide renown, with a life devoted to the study and winning of games picked up from planetary and stellar civilisations throughout the galaxy.

Living a comfortable life of academic luxury on a Culture Orbital (a circular ribbon of diamond hard material 3 million kilometres in circumference, 10 million kilometres in diameter and a few thousand kilometres across its inner surface – few Culture citizens live on anything as primitive as a planet), Gurgeh is inveigled by Special Circumstances to travelling to the Empire of Azad, a cruel feudal capitalist stellar empire, to play the game of Azad, a game on which the whole society is modelled and run and which determines the station of every one of its subjects.

The Culture is physically vast beyond our capacity for imagination

Think Graham Green meets Blade Runner meets Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, together with devastating social critique and an apocalyptic set piece climax, and all compressed into a shortish novel, a breathless, beautifully written narrative best read in a single evening.

Here’s the thing; all of Banks’ Culture novels are different – different characters, different stories, different storytelling techniques. Both the Culture oeuvre and the Culture universe are too vast to encompass in a short essay. Suffice to say the classically written two viewpoint, two plot narrative of Inversions is a much easier read for the relative newcomer than the multi-narrative, high tech Excession, and though both are fantastic novels that deeply reward the attentive reader, the reader will benefit from having already introduced herself to the Culture through the earlier novels. Look to Windward is a deceptively simple, yet tricksy tale, an exquisitely observed tragi-comedy of manners; Matter a return to epic scale and high adventure.

Yet there are also common themes which seem almost instinctively knitted into all of the Culture stories, and which are worth drawing attention to.

Perspective. The Culture is physically vast beyond our capacity for imagination. It is the pinnacle of what we might imagine a future socialist society to be, super technological, superabundant, superhuman, morally enlightened, profoundly egalitarian and long since moved from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. It has existed for thousands of years and will continue to exist for thousands of years, but it is only one of a number of galactic meta civilisations, and it too will fade away, collapse or transform itself into something different. All things come into being and pass away.

Our Earth, our world, is part of the Culture universe, but only incidentally, in the passing, as it were, as one of the multitude of barbarian primitive planets observed but not yet contacted. The events of Consider Phlebas occur ‘far, far away’ at the time of the Crusades. The Culture’s Contact section comes across us in AD 1977, in the novella The State of the Art, but decides not to intervene in our mixed up primitive society, and instead treat us as a kind of control experiment, clandestinely observed, to see whether we make it out of barbarism by ourselves, or destroy the planet by ourselves. The class struggle is universal but we are one speck of dust in a galaxy teeming with life and conflict.

Politics, and the price of doing good. Left politics runs through all the Culture novels like an invariable, but infinitely applicable, mathematical constant, and not in the bad “you’ll have three bowls of cold socialist realist porridge a day, young man”, kind of way.

This is not Doctor Who. The universe is not saved every week by waving a sonic screwdriver and ‘reversing the polarity’

Rather, Banks allows the politics to be a kind of emergent phenomenon, something that is created from the narrative, the moral questions and exigencies of character and plot, the observation of societies and the multifarious nature of the sentient conscious beings that populate the Culture universe.

As in his so-called ‘mainstream’ novels, it is very clear that Banks is an original, non-dogmatic thinker who has imbibed in his education much left wing discourse, and sipped of the notion of revolution and social progress as a moral categorical imperative.  The clear theme that runs throughout the Culture novels is the price to be paid when persons, singularly or collectively, attempt to do good, or to maintain good in the face of reaction. That price may be physical destruction or emotional disintegration, it may be moral compromise or the shattering of cosy cherished beliefs, but there is always a price to be paid. Leading characters die, or become disillusioned, or are used for higher purposes. This is not Doctor Who. The universe is not saved every week by waving a sonic screwdriver and ‘reversing the polarity’.  There is real death, real failure, real suffering. The redemptive aspect comes from doing what is right for wider social progress on an interstellar scale.

Human nature in ‘Utopia’. Banks’ Culture has often been referred to be critics as a utopia – mistakenly in my view. Literary utopias are all blank slate/human putty endgames from Revelations to Thomas More and onwards. They assume that human nature is flawed either because of some form of original sin or because society isflawed. The Utopia cleanses humanity of these flaws and either allows their ‘true’ humanity to shine through or makes them into the New Man. Dystopias are the cynic’s/realist’s response where attempts to make the New Man fail with disastrous, frightening, totalitarian consequences.

The Culture is neither Utopia or Dystopia because human nature in Banks’ vision is not a blank slate or human putty to be perfected or damned. Or more correctly ‘person’ nature – whether that person is human basic, human enhanced, machine or alien – arises from its evolutionary and contingent history and the very nature of sentience and social being itself. The lives of persons can be enormously enriched by a better society, but they do not become wholly New.

The protagonists of the Culture remain recognisable. They have fears and flaws, loves and hatreds, pettinesses and jealousies, egotistic personal drives and altruistic self-sacrifice; this is a mirror that holds up human nature as a complex constant. The new civilisation is about creating a better place for the great Bell curve of sentient beings to live their diverse lives in, not about creating a trillion Stakhanovite Aristotles in some endpoint socialist paradise.

When Iain Banks appeared on The Book Show recently he appeared to argue that artificial divisions between literary, mainstream novels and the genre novel can be misleading. He made the point that the literary novel itself is a genre novel with its own sets of rules and suppositions. Perhaps Banks himself has been hamstrung by the artificial division he himself (or his publisher) has created between the science fiction writer Iain M. Banks and the mainstream novel writer Iain Banks.

Or, just perhaps, Banks has been enjoying a near three decade long private joke at the assumptions and labellings of the critics. His ‘mainstream’ work is very fine, of that there is no doubt – The Wasp Factory, Espedair Street, The Crow Road and Whit are all excellent reads. But I would argue that Bank’s greatest contribution to literature are his Culture novels, and that perhaps that will only be finally seen and understood in the fullness of time.

Further, I would argue that the left has ignored the Culture as a potential source and reference point for discourse and that Banks, in his Culture novels, whether instinctively, or consciously, or a bit of both, has made a major theoretical contribution to socialist and progressive thought. The idea of fiction as a source of theory may be new and alien to many readers, but in this particular case I believe it to be true.

But an essay on a whole body of work can give only a flavour – and a flavour through the perceptions of one person at that. The proof of the pudding is in the reading. Go spacewards, young barbarians, and find new worlds.

Oh, and one final, teasing thought. What if something like the Culture actually existed?

Read more about Iain Banks at http://www.iain-banks.net/
For more info on Word 11 Festival, See: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/word/

Feb 112011
 

By Cllr Martin Ford, Aberdeenshire Council.

I said last week I did not expect Aberdeenshire Council’s budget setting meeting, which took place yesterday (10 February), to be either lengthy or out of the ordinary (see: Aberdeenshire Budget Day Looms, Aberdeen Voice 4 February 2011).

I was only half right. The meeting lasted less than two hours.

Normally, budget meetings are extremely predictable. The Council’s ruling administration proposes its budget. The opposition parties each propose an alternative package of measures.

There is a debate in which speakers from each party say why they believe what their party has put forward should be supported. There is a vote in which each party votes for its own set of proposals. The administration’s budget receives the most votes and thus becomes the Council’s budget.

Yesterday’s budget meeting was different in one key respect. The Democratic Independent group of councillors, of which I am a member, was not allowed to put forward its alternative to the administration’s budget.

As reported in previous articles, Aberdeenshire Council’s Liberal Democrat/Conservative administration, with SNP support, voted through nearly £27 million of cuts and savings at the full council meeting on 25 November.

At yesterday’s budget meeting, further savings of £1.461 million had to be approved to balance the Council’s revenue budget for 2011/12. As expected, the Liberal Democrat/Conservative administration accepted the recommendation from Council officers to close the budget gap by bringing forward planned cuts and savings from 2012/13 into 2011/12.

So, for example, the administration proposed changing the cut in spending on Community School Networks it had decided in November, increasing it from £107,000 to £137,000 in 2011/12 by bringing forward some of the cut planned for 2012/13.

Council officers advised that it was not competent to propose no cut to these staff, even though we had put forward an alternative

Amongst the accelerated cuts in education spending proposed by the administration was an increase in the cut for 2011/12 to spending on primary school classroom assistants, from £88,000 to £100,000.

In their budget proposals, the SNP councillors left unchanged the planned £88,000 cut in the 2011/12 budget for primary school classroom assistants.

This year it fell to me to formally move the Democratic Independent group’s budget proposals. We saw it as a priority to maintain spending on primary school classroom assistants and visiting specialist teachers – so we proposed making no cut to either in 2011/12. We proposed making a saving instead by cutting the budget allocated to repairing unadopted roads, as these roads are not, by definition, a Council responsibility and the budget for repairing them has mostly not been spent.

Once it became clear I was proposing no cut to primary school classroom assistants or visiting specialists, I was stopped from speaking by the provost. Council officers advised that it was not competent to propose no cut to these staff, even though we had put forward an alternative way of balancing the budget.

The Council operates a general policy that it cannot reconsider its decisions within six months, unless there is a two-thirds majority in favour of doing so. But when the administration, and then the SNP councillors, proposed increased spending cuts in 2011/12, by bringing forward cuts from 2012/13, it was ruled this did not constitute a change to a previous decision, so the two-thirds rule did not apply.

But when I proposed the opposite, not to proceed with cuts, this was deemed a change that could only be debated if a two-thirds majority agreed.

A show of hands was called by the provost. Just six councillors voted to allow us to put forward our budget proposals.

The provost ruled the Democratic Independent group budget proposals out of order.

Faced with a debate between the administration’s and the SNP’s very similar budget proposals, both of which opted for staff cuts in primary schools, there was no point in staying. None of the Democratic Independent group councillors was going to vote for either of the proposals we had to choose from. We all walked out in protest.

I have never walked out of a Council meeting before. It is not something I would normally consider and not something to do without very good reason.

I did it yesterday because the budget debate had become pointless, and because of the manifestly unfair way the meeting was being conducted. It was not that our proposals were voted down – it was that we were not even allowed to put them forward for consideration and debate. That is undemocratic and wrong.

I am appalled at the Council’s refusal to allow open debate. Apparently it is perfectly acceptable to propose further cuts in classroom assistants – but seeking to stop the cuts is not allowed.

That is completely one-sided.

The two budget proposals that were voted on by Aberdeenshire councillors yesterday both accepted the primary school staff cuts the Democratic Independent group had sought to avert.

It was, of course, the administration’s budget proposals that were approved. The cuts to classroom assistants and visiting specialist teachers – and many others – will go ahead.