About Closemouth

A closemouth is the entrance to a tenement close, the shared doorway where neighbours pass each other on the stair. The name suits a site about ventures owned or run by the people they serve. Closemouth is independent, and it writes about community and social enterprise in Scotland: shops and pubs bought by the villages that use them, food co-ops, development trusts, credit unions, and the public money and policy that decide how far such projects can go. Now and then it strays into books and music, where they touch the same questions.

Old addresses, new writing

Many of the pieces sit at addresses where these subjects were published on this domain years ago. What stood at those addresses before is not reproduced here. Every piece at one of them was written fresh, from sources that could be checked, and is pinned to the date above it, reporting the rules, prices and people in office of that time. Where something important has changed since, a single later sentence says so once it has been confirmed. Pieces added after the site was relaunched are dated when they were written.

Closemouth makes no claim to carry on from any group or publication that used this domain before it. It speaks for no organisation, has no members and runs no programmes.

Sources and figures

Pieces name their main sources, most often a government department, a regulator or the author of an argument being described. Figures that are disputed are given as someone’s claim, with the name of whoever made it.

What is absent

No author’s name appears on any page. There are no advertisements, no scripts run in the browser and no cookies are set. Corrections can be sent through the contact page.