The farce continues

The farce that is the (un)Fairer Scotland Fund. we are now told that "community engagement" i.e. putting resources into helping groups get set up so people can help themselves is no longer allowed. Instead, those groups themselves are supposed to do community engagement. Yet without those resources, those groups will not exist and so won't be able to do that engagement!

This is what this means for my area. Three years ago, when I was able to get around £1m over 3 years for Restalrig and Lochend the community quite rightly decided not to spend any money on creating a local bureaucracy as has happened in other places. Instead what we did do was fund a post, managed by the Council, which actively supported for groups to get set up and running in a very hands on way.

The postholder has done a brilliant job. I can identify over 10 groups she has helped start or support or develop their work. These include the hugely successful Lochend boxing and fitness club and Lochend football Academy, which between them have around 250 young people on their book. They have no paid staff but with this workers support they have proper governance, they are trained in child protection, first aid, health and safety etc. She has also been able to get them grants and other support. She has done similar things for the other groups and the Community council.

Without her these projects would have struggled as would the others she has been involved in. But aapparently that's not good enough for the SNP Government nor the Council's SNP/Libdem mal-administration. They know best of course and so it looks like this post will go and along with it all the hard work !

Well I can promise you I am going to fight this one all the way. It is a scandal that they claim to want communities to set their own agenda but then take from them the very tools to do that.