A political Spring has sprung - embrace it

Article in The National, 24th March 2025. Original online piece here, PDF of print version here

By Indra Adnan and Pat Kane

WE live in a time of extremes. Even as we go about our daily lives, the big picture presses in on us.

On one hand, we’ve never been closer to self-destruction. Count the ways – nuclear exchange; climate meltdown; the next pandemic; runaway AI; even old-fashioned war.

Some say we can no longer steer away from the precipice.

On the other hand, we have the resources for extraordinary human flourishing. Renewable energies that redeem the sins of the fossil-fuel era. Radical technologies – with artificial intelligence properly stewarded – that could take humans, as citizens and makers, to new heights.

We urgently need to imagine the shift from the first to the second, in order that we can actually make it happen.

We’d like to suggest a metaphor. It’s like living through a harsh winter, while sensing, or hoping, that spring is on its way.

Now there is a new project called Spring. It is part political, part social and part cultural and it aims to make a good future here not just possible, but probable.

We identify communities – availing themselves of all the structures and technologies sitting before us in the 21st century – as the key agents of change.

Scotland brims with examples of these super-powered communities.

Take the hundreds of development trusts and community enterprises that show confidence and competence in managing themselves – producing energy, food, housing, and much more. Or the cultural and academic networks that support our dazzling clusters of creativity and talent.

This is a worldwide phenomenon. Our parent organisation, the Alternative Global, set out in 2017 to chart the rise of self-determining communities across the planet. We were triggered by the murder of Jo Cox, a few days before the Brexit vote. Our slogan was, “if politics is broken” – as it evidently was – “then what’s the alternative?”

Over thousands of blogs and hundreds of meetings on and offline, we began to identify new forms of social and political organisation arising, answering what some have called the “polycrisis” (which is certainly a crisis in politics).

We call the spirit of this answer “cosmolocal”. This means loving your place, but ready and willing to connect and engage with the world, not defend yourself against it.

And we describe the form of this answer as a “community agency network” or CAN.

Think of a CAN as a container for the power and future ambition of a community. One that takes the shape it needs to be: democratic forum, throbbing festival, communal meal – or a hybrid of these. Or something brand new.

Again, Scotland is such fertile ground for what we’re calling the Spring mindset. We also want to be concrete. This celebrating and amplifying of community power happens in a country where there are passionate and living traditions around the people’s control of land and resources.

We support small-i independence, as the best preparation for any large-I project – and we’re fully aware that under a proportional system, something like Spring could have a party-political expression.

But first things first. Let’s turn to each other, and see if we can make our gardens bloom, dispelling the gloom. A new socio-political system: why not? Because Spring has come.

To find out more go to www.spring.site where you can become a member.