Natural state

When the referendum campaign was still in its relative infancy, a challenge was set out to both the Yes and No camps.
Scottish Environment LINK, an assortment of voluntary organisations representing every facet of the natural world from land to sky, asked both Yes Scotland and Better Together how their constitutional choice would deliver on 10 key aspirations, from valuing the heritage of landscapes and culture to tackling climate change.
Rather than take sides in the campaign, it set out to ensure the issues its members wanted to know about were being addressed in the debate.
It was a marked difference to the controversy this year when CBI Scotland was forced to withdraw its application as a campaign group for No after its own members said they wished to remain neutral.
“I watched the CBI fiasco of their registering and deregistering and dinners and it was exactly how not do to it,” says Andy Myles, LINK’s parliamentary officer for the last six years. “I was just thinking, ‘thanks goodness we got it right.’
“We decided we are not going get entangled but not run away from the debates and do this in a way which means we’re not distracted from our core purpose which is to improve the environment and campaign for sustainable development. I think we’ve managed to succeed in doing that, whereas the CBI have been all over the place.”
Although it took 15 months for the responses to come through, they were published so all members – and even those who are not – could make up their own minds. It is an example of the work Myles says the organisation has done, since it was set up more than 20 years ago, to ensure it remains relevant to debate in Scotland.
“We have made sure that we’ve climbed out of the ‘green ghetto’,” he says. “Years ago, before my time, when our members joined Stop Climate Chaos, we started talking to trade unions and international aid NGOs and people outside the environment movement; but we’ve continued that trend and we now try and talk to all of the parts of the policy community and in particular in recent years we’ve been trying to talk to business.”
He adds: “There’s no way we are going to achieve sustainability in Scotland unless we can convert business and the economy to sustainability. To do that, you have to talk to them. We’ve been working very hard on sharpening our communication and getting to grips with the language of economics and expressing ideas in economic and social as well as environmental terms.”
Myles worked at RSPB for eight years and when he joined as parliamentary officer – 10 days before the referendum to decide if there would even be a Scottish Parliament – he said it was much easier “to dismiss people as bird lovers or tree huggers”.
But he says NGOs, like LINK’s members, are taken seriously “because they’ve applied themselves to being a player and growing up.”
“There was never much point going round saying ‘the end of the world is nigh’ – that’s not a tune that’s going to last forever,” he says. “The environment movement had to get down, get its hands dirty and engage in debate and discussion.”
A prominent example of this is LINK’s involvement in the last two years over the current Scottish Government’s attitude to sustainability – and in particular, its Regulatory Reform Act which was passed earlier this year.
The Bill introduced a duty on Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) to promote sustainable economic growth. LINK, its members – and other allies including the Law Society of Scotland – questioned the terms being used in the Bill and said it could end up being challenged in the courts.
While he acknowledges that they didn’t win on the Bill, the duty is still enshrined in the Act, he said LINK’s work “exposed real deficiencies in the legislation”. He believes there is a now a strengthened definition of what sustainable development is in policies, including the new National Planning Framework and the Scottish Planning Policy guidance, actually means.
Although Myles hadn’t worked in the environment movement until 1997, having been a manager in mental health services for NHS Dundee then chief executive of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, it has always been a longstanding interest.
He traces the roots back to his mother and father, both elders in the Kirk, who believed that waste was sinful – and he still recalls his mother “tut-tutting” when the council cut the first paper collection.
On joining the Scottish Liberal Party, after the referendum on a Scottish assembly in 1979, the environment was still considered a fringe issue but Myles said he had a belief that human beings should show respect for the other species they share a space with: “We have to exercise a stewardship and we have to make sure we aren’t making a mess of our own nest.”
But now he agrees the issues of sustainability and the environment are more mainstream and says politicians are being persuaded that the success of a country should be measured by more than just GDP.
By the time he was working as a special adviser to the Labour/Lib Dem coalition in the Scottish Parliament, which included Ross Finnie, now LINK’s president, Myles said the change had set in, organisations were then able to make their arguments directly to politicians to a parliament that wasn’t 400 miles away and he said NGOs in the environment sector were at the forefront of ensuring people’s opinions were taken into account, not just via the political parties they voted for.
“One of the first soundbites I came up with when I worked for the RSPB was to remind people that more people joined the RSPB in Scotland than all the political parties put together,” he says.
“The RSPB and all of our 37 members organisations of LINK represent people’s views, there are 500,000 members of LINK organisations and while I’m not claiming for a second that one tenth of Scots join so they can make radical arguments about the environment, they want these organisations to campaign to improve things and that’s what we’re getting on to do.”
While LINK has remained neutral in the independence debate, Myles has not. He left the Lib Dems in frustration over the Coalition Government’s policies and earlier this year declared he would be voting Yes.
He says he declared his intention because he was “going to be asked” and didn’t want to hide from the question, although he ensured first it was not going to impact on his job.
Myles, who previously sat on the Scottish Constitutional Convention which set up the framework for devolution, said his decision was “a product of a lifetime of debate.”
“I was deeply involved in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament,” he says. “I’ve been in two coalition negotiations since then, stood twice for election to the Scottish Parliament, I’ve been on the edge of the project, or quite close to the centre of the project, sometimes for a long time, and I thought the creation of the Scottish Parliament was going to be like removing the log from the logjam and the river of reform would run free.
“It didn’t happen, I was wrong, I got it wrong. Westminster seems more impervious to reforming the things that brought me into politics.”