This is the first in a series of conversations between Stir to Action and representatives from philanthropic foundations about their role in democratising wealth in the UK. Stir to Action’s Daniel Stanley speaks to Emma Shaw, who works with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures team.

In September 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, found itself unable to balance its budget. It issued a Section 114 notice, used when a council cannot meet its spending commitments from its income, thus effectively declaring itself bankrupt. These notices mean that a council cannot commit to any new spending, other than for essential services required by law.

Birmingham City Council is not alone: other councils that issued Section 114 notices in 2023 included Nottingham City and Woking Borough, with a further one in five council leaders expecting to declare bankruptcy within the next 15 months. It is expected that demand for local government services, particularly adults’ and children’s social care, will continue to increase throughout the 2020s. This means increased financial pressures on local authorities are set to continue, with many others on the verge of effective bankruptcy. Meanwhile, financial support from central government has been steadily reducing over the last ten to 15 years, particularly during the coalition years of 2010 to 2015. The National Audit Office estimated in 2018 that English local authorities’ spending power fell by 29% in real terms between 2010/11 and 2017/18. Using similar methodology, the House of Commons Library estimates that it remains 10% below its 2010/11 level in 2024/25.

Beyond the national picture, however, Birmingham City Council have claimed that their poor financial position came as a result of significant costs to put right an IT system that was not fit for purpose, alongside potential liabilities for equal pay claims. But the £760m equal pay figure has been challenged by some in recent months, including the Audit Reform Lab, who argue that the original figure used is speculative. The report claims that the primary driver of the council’s financial problems is the cost of the disastrous implementation of a new ‘Oracle Cloud Fusion’ IT system, and therefore that the current capitalisation direction should be redrawn and extended to April 2028, capitalising against the costs of the Oracle IT system. One year on from the Section 114 notice, the council's drastic programme of cuts is being thrown into question, with the Save Birmingham campaign asking for an immediate pause to the process.

How golf courses can be repurposed to meet the needs of people and planet

Back in April 2020, shortly after the UK had gone into lockdown for the first time, Guy Shrubsole, the campaigner and author of Who Owns England (2019), set out to map and investigate London’s golf courses. While a natural continuation of his wider work on land ownership, it was also given particular urgency in the moment – not least for those living in densely populated cities – as the nation began to ask questions about use of, and access to, green space.

The results of this research produced some surprising findings. For example, although a considerable number of golf courses in Greater London are held in private ownership, the figure is less than half, at 45%. This turns out to be only slightly larger than the number owned by councils (42%). After several decades in which councils, schools, and other public institutions have been forced to sell off green space – including school playing fields and county farms – it seems pertinent to ask why so many golf courses have remained untouched.

Happily, there are signs of progress. In Cheshire, the Woodland Trust recently purchased a former golf course, and have been busy planting trees. The vision is for the site to “develop as native broadleaf woodland” and to link with other woodland sites as part of the larger Northern Forest, providing green space and fighting climate change.

And further east, on the Lincolnshire coast, the National Trust is busy converting a disused golf course – Sandilands – to “create new habitats for a variety of wildlife, especially migrating birds like black-tailed godwit, spotted redshank and spoonbills, along with breeding birds such as snipe, lapwings and oystercatchers.” This environmental mission is coupled with the social objective of providing “a space where everyone can enjoy the benefits of being in nature.”

More controversially, perhaps, the London-based architecture firm RCKa has developed a proposal to build housing on an existing golf course in Enfield, at the northern end of the city. Understandably, not everyone agrees with this vision, arguing that green space, once built upon, is lost forever. However, faced with an acute and growing housing crisis, it may be useful to ask whether some compromise solutions might begin to develop at the edges.

What the above examples demonstrate is a growing interest in the potential for repurposing golf courses, for reasons ranging from climate change mitigation and biodiversity benefits, to providing space for housing and food growing.

Which brings us to Glasgow, where the Glasgow Community Food Network (GCFN) are leading on a proposal to transform a disused golf course into a food growing space, with much of the land restored as a richly biodiverse space where wildlife can thrive.

Your book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism (2010), challenges the "neo-Tocqueville consensus" that the development of a vibrant civil society is always associated with liberal democracies. While an “associational boom” may well have a tendency towards creating more democracy, the book explores the consequences of political disorganisation at the state level and how "thick civic societies" – in some instances – can actually lead to authoritarian politics in the cases of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania.

Can you outline your core argument and explain why it suggests we should restructure our theoretical understanding of the relationship between civil society and regime outcomes? I.e., weak civil societies lead to totalitarianism, and strong civil societies lead to liberal democracy.

First of all, I want to paint the picture of the intellectual context in which I was writing at that time, as it was very different from where we are today. Peter Mair's Ruling the Void was based on articles published in the 2000s, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone was based on articles published in the mid-1990s. The discussion of civil society and the emergence of the Tocquevillian discourse, at this point, were really emerging out of the collapse of state socialism. This was associated with the ‘Fukuyama moment’, and with that came the idea that one of the fundamental problems was an over-focus on the economy and the state, on these realms of political action, and that actually what we needed to do was to think about civil society as the basis for establishing a good society. That played out in different ways across the political spectrum. By the 1990s, I would say that the consensus – seen particularly in the work of John Keane, for example – was that we were in this moment of ‘civil society against the state’.

The other point to make about The Civic Foundations of Fascism is that I'd initially started my research on the rise of Italian fascism but was struck by one point that was just inescapable – the empirical observation that fascism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the north and centre of the Italian peninsula. These were, if you think about Putnam's initial book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1994), exactly the regions and towns that he had said were the basis of associational life and vibrant civic and Republican forms of politics going back to the Middle Ages. By his account, this tradition of good government and civic activism continued right up until the late 1970s and early 1980s. But that's where fascism was most organised.

I started reading a very rich historical literature about associational life in these areas in Italy, and then I looked at the specifics of how Italian fascism as a party organised itself in relation to the largely agrarian, consumer, and producer co-operatives in those regions. It forced me to rethink the significance of the transition of the socialist co-operative milieu into early fascism, which is a characteristic of Italian fascism, and how, to a certain extent, that works to form the raw material for the party organisation.

I extended the framework of the book to explore this point about associational life in these different areas. I don't think The Civic Foundations of Fascism was an account of authoritarianism as such, because there are many factors that have produced authoritarianism, but it was an account of one of the central preconditions for the organisation of fascism, and particularly the organisation of the fascist party. Authoritarianism, as a broad basket of phenomena, should be distinguished from fascism, which requires a highly mobilised civil society.