‘I really love my church community’

CATHERINE Stihler suggests we meet in the café at Dunfermline’s new museum and gallery, a smart extension of the town’s library.

The library was originally funded by Andrew Carnegie - the ultimate ‘local boy done good’ - and the café overlooks the grounds of Dunfermline Abbey, birth and burial place of generations of Scottish royalty. Both of the ancient capital’s claims to fame are relevant to Catherine’s interests.

“Carnegie saw why libraries and open knowledge are important”, she says. “Above the door at every Carnegie library are the words ‘let there be light’ – not just the light of knowledge, but the light of public places and public spaces. That’s why churches being public is so important, that’s why here in this library we have to make this space not just about knowledge but also making them centres for understanding… so we can all become far more data-literate.”

The former MEP talks ten-to-the-dozen, very passionate about her new job, the causes she works for and the people who inspire her, with a politician’s habit of repeating phrases for emphasis (‘fair, free and open’ appears in my transcript seven times).

The interest in open knowledge and open data reflects her new role as Chief Executive Officer at the Open Knowledge Foundation, an international non-profit that campaigns for open data and information. But it is also consistent with longer-term interests in working internationally, in issues around copyright and creativity, and generally in helping create a better and fairer world.

She even invokes the golden rule – ‘do unto others as you would do unto yourself’ – exposing the faith background which was instilled in her childhood in North Lanarkshire.

Catherine grew up in Cambusnethan North Parish Church, where her parents (“Gordon and Catherine Taylor – extraordinary individuals who are some of the most giving people I know”) are still the Life and Work co-ordinators.

Much of life revolved round the church – Catherine and her sister went to Sunday School and sang in the choir, as well as going to Brownies and Guides, and playing badminton on Saturday morning in the church hall. “I was very fortunate to have the groundings of a strong faith from when I was born, and that has helped me throughout my life”, she says.

It was a politically aware but not party political household, but when she went to university at St Andrews, she found herself getting more and more involved.

“I represented the youth of the Labour Party at Scottish level, and then at UK level on the national executive committee. I was also involved in student politics – I was senate rep and on the Community Council as a student, and then I was fortunate to be elected as president of the Student Association.

“It was through all this activity I just got more and more involved in seeing how politics could be a vehicle for change. As a committed internationalist as well, I could see the bigger picture, and the draw for me at a European level was to make a difference at that big picture level where you could make a positive difference in people’s day-to-day lives.”

She stood unsuccessfully in the 1997 general election, and then worked for Aberdeen MP Anne Begg, the first wheelchair-using MP at Westminster, as ‘researcher and carer’. “Anne was an extraordinary role model and I’m still privileged to have her as a friend”, she says.

“Until you work with someone who is a wheelchair user, I don’t think you see the challenges and the discrimination that they face. I’ll never forget we were showcasing a bus at Westminster for being accessible, and there were three wheelchair users and two couldn’t get on.”

She then faced the choice of standing for the European elections or the first Scottish Parliament elections in 1999. “People were pressuring me to go for the Scottish elections, but as a committed internationalist I always felt that Europe was my home and where I can make the greatest difference.”

Initially selected at number four on Labour’s list for Scotland, she was moved up to number three, which was enough to get her elected – at the age of 25, the youngest MEP from the UK.

It was a significant ‘sliding doors’ moment personally, as by this time she was in a relationship with David Stihler, a Californian she had met at university, and they had a deal that if she wasn’t elected she would join him in the States.

“Much of life revolved round the church… “I was very fortunate to have the groundings of a strong faith from when I was born, and that has helped me throughout my life”, she says.

As it was, David chose to pursue a law career in Scotland (he now works in the law department at the Church of Scotland offices in Edinburgh). They got engaged on the stroke of the millennium, and married four months later in St Salvator’s Chapel, St Andrew’s.

“So if I hadn’t been elected I’d be in California, and yet here we are in Dunfermline!” she laughs.

Chosen because it was in Fife but convenient for Edinburgh (the airport for Catherine, the university for David), Dunfermline has been home for nearly 20 years. Their first son, Alex, was born in 2006, followed by Andrew in 2011.

Having a job that involved being away four nights a week, and with no maternity cover, was challenging when it came to raising a family. “Both kids travelled with me from when they were 11 weeks old until they started nursery at about a year”, she says. “My parents helped a lot – my mum would fly out with me to Brussels when Andrew was born.”

I ask her what she’s most proud of from her time as an MEP. “One of my first big things was graphic labels on cigarette packets – now you see them across the EU, and it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for us making the case for why that was important. A picture paints a thousand words.

“I really love my church community and I think it’s something that’s really important to me, that sense of coming together and being with people who have a strong faith is really important in how I conduct my life.”

“Then we got braille on pharmaceutical packaging. The pharmaceutical industry came round to me to say they knew it was the right thing to do but they needed to be nudged to do it, so I was really proud of that achievement. Most recently my work on copyright reform, arguing for fairer access to knowledge.

“Although I’ve got to say – all politics being local – I was very proud of being part of the campaign to save Achmelvich public toilets! But that’s all part and parcel of your job and role as someone who serves other people and has a public responsibility to others.”

Possibly unexpectedly, faith played a part in life as an MEP as well. “My grandmother passed away in the early 2000s and John Purves, a Conservative colleague, invited me to the European Parliament prayer breakfast. So I went along, and after that I went every single time I was in Strasbourg and ended up being chair of it for five years.

“We’d all come together on a Wednesday morning and sit in the public space, we’d have a reading and discuss it and then I’d lead prayer, and then we’d all say the Lord’s Prayer in our own languages. It was such a special moment of, I felt, positivity but also just connection, and seeing the bigger picture of why we were placed to serve politically, but also to think about the bigger picture of how faith plays into that.” She is now a trustee of the National Prayer Breakfast for Scotland.

With Brexit hanging in the air, she says she had already decided not to stand for re-election this year, even before the Open Knowledge opportunity cropped up.

“I was devastated by the Labour Party’s approach to Brexit. As somebody who’s pro-European I found it very difficult. But after 20 years of public service and talking to David about where we wanted to be as a family, I was always going to step down in 2019.

“We’d made huge sacrifices as a family to allow me to serve the people of Scotland, so it just felt right that this role not only allowed me to work remotely, so I could have a better work-life family balance, but it also allowed me to use my internationalism to try and advocate for a fair, free and open future, to try and make knowledge accessible in all its forms for people globally.

“It’s a challenge, but it’s also an extraordinary opportunity to try and make the world a better place.”

Now, instead of being in Strasbourg or Brussels four days a week, Catherine’s day-to-day work is in her own study, from where she manages a team across four continents.

“I’m working with an incredible board”, she enthuses. “People like Professor Tim Hubbard – if it wasn’t for him the genome wouldn’t be accessible to us all – Dr Rufus Pollock, who founded Open Knowledge, starting in the basement when he was a student at Cambridge. Really quite incredible people all doing extraordinary things, and who I’m privileged to be working with.

“I’m coming in to drive this new strategic agenda for the fair, free and open world we want to see, using this open definition which we created, which is about non-personal data, its reuse, redistribution and recyclability – but also about how in future we fairly remunerate creators and innovators.

“At the moment we’re in this place where if we’re not careful we’ll go down a route where only those who have money will be able to access knowledge. At the moment we as taxpayers fund research across the UK, and those pieces of research are meant to be open access, yet sometimes the researchers, in order to have their work published, have to sign away their rights to a publisher, which means a university has to pay to access the work that they funded. There’s something not quite right about that.

“There’s also something we’re working on called frictionless data, which is about making sure one data set can talk to another data set. That’s important so global researchers can take that work together to cure cancer, or come up with some of the solutions to the problems around climate change.”

Fundamentally, she says, it is about equality and challenging the power of the technological giants that control so much of our data. “It is not right that so few people hold the power over everyone else. We need to hold those people to account, and we do that by making sure that an algorithm is open, by making sure we’ve got rules to hold them to account, but also making sure that we have open access to taxpayer-funded research. Open data is a public good, available for all to use, and that’s important when you think about citizen science to solve some of our problems at local and global levels.”

She gets her phone out and shows me a note of a Bible verse she came across the previous Sunday. “It’s Hebrews 11 verse one – ‘now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’ – I think sometimes the data world can be something people do not see, it’s virtual and yet it’s so important to decisions that can be made in people’s lives.

“My son when he saw me typing sent me a text saying ‘mum you shouldn’t be typing in church!’ I said ‘this is really relevant to what I do!’”

Outside of work, she has also recently become a trustee of the Brink Literacy Project, a prison literacy programme which is being imported to Scotland from the US, which she describes as ‘really exciting’.

She says her ‘Brexit relief’ has been a developing interest in 17th century Scottish history, which brings us back to her adopted home town. “I love the history of Dunfermline, it’s this secret place in Scotland that is absolutely pivotal to not just Scotland but Great Britain’s history. When you think about not far from where we’re sitting, Anne of Denmark was given Dunfermline Palace, and had her children Elizabeth, Charles and Henry.

“And later Charles would be the only monarch who’s ever been beheaded by parliament, and you think we’re still having these discussions about Parliament and sovereignty.

“But what I think is really special about Dunfermline is Elizabeth Stewart was born here – some people say it was at Falkland – and she became Queen of Bohemia, lived in exile in the Hague, had Sofia who became Electress of Hanover, and she was the mother of George I and that’s the link to our current monarch. And it all goes back to Elizabeth, born in Dunfermline, that very few people ever recognise.”

Catherine and her family are members of St Leonard’s Church in Dunfermline, where Alex and Andrew were involved in the holiday club the week before our meeting.

“Alex is now one of the junior leaders, and they’d be picked up by my church elder – Fiona, who is an amazing woman – and off they would go, and I’d pick Andrew up later but Alex was there from 9am to 8.30 at night. The holiday club is a great example of community engagement and inclusion and bringing people into the church who wouldn’t otherwise be there.

“I really love my church community and I think it’s something that’s really important to me, that sense of coming together and being with people who have a strong faith is really important in how I conduct my life.”