Marking my ten years at Common Weal

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Everything in politics seems impossible until the moment it becomes inevitable” – Craig Dalȝell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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(I think this is the first photo of me at a Common Weal event – IdeaSpace, October 2016)

Time certainly does fly. Last week marked ten years since I published my first policy paper through Common Weal. By 2016, I had gone through a bit of a journey from my political radicalisation during the independence referendum, to losing my job and, as it turned out, my career as a laser engineer at the tail end of 2015.

In that intervening time I had kept up my political writing through my personal blog and it was an article there about GERS that caught the eye of Robin (who already knew me via previous campaigning together) and led him to asking me if I could help on a project about Fracking.

At that time, the political winds (including within the Scottish Government) were pushing very much in favour of fracking the hell out of Scotland and while the anti-fracking campaign had (and still has) a very strong case in terms of climate change, local environmental impact and in terms of long term energy security, the pro-fracking side were talking mostly about economics and when it comes to a campaign based on environmental principles vs a campaign based on making the GDP line go up, politicians are often much more easily swayed by the latter than by the former.

Hence the need for something different. I was asked to investigate the Economics of Shale Gas Extraction with a critical eye to see just how they actually held up. The result: They didn’t. Fracking does well to boost the profits of the owner of the well but the industry would create few jobs (especially in comparison to renewables or even the legacy oil industry), would produce even fewer local jobs and would do absolutely nothing in terms of energy security or the price of energy bills.

Even the profits made would only be made if gas prices are pushed anomalously high (thus, as we’ve most recently seen, the industry is sensitive to geopolitics) and if the companies involved are allowed to not pay the costs created by the pollution of the extraction and the burning of the gas.

I’m proud to say that that paper had a significant impact. It was widely read and adopted throughout the anti-fracking campaign in Scotland and that campaign would go on to win a moratorium against extraction that persists to this day (although there are still those seeking power who would reverse that ban).

Not bad for a first attempt at a policy paper!

Ten years later, I’ve published probably more than twenty more, plus co-authored half a dozen books, produced hundreds of hours of audio and video interviews and more. And don’t worry, this isn’t a retirement message quite yet – I still have at least a few more in me (you’ll very much want to keep an eye on the one I’m just finishing up at the moment!).

I’m always a bit embarrassed to self-promote but this seems like a moment that I shouldn’t pass up. I’d like to present the five policy papers written by myself that I look back on most fondly, either because of their sheer impact in the political scene or because they meant a lot to me in terms of subject matter.

Beyond GERS – 2016

If my fracking paper was the one that kicked off my time at Common Weal, Beyond GERS was the one that made my mark on the Scottish political scene. Beyond GERS sought to recontextualise the way we, as a nation, talked about the annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report as it was increasingly being used as a stick to beat the independence movement when it was, in fact, showing something rather different – that Scotland’s accounts were being grossly distorted by the fact that we were not independent in ways that made it very difficult to even talk about the finances of what lay beyond that horizon.

For example, just the fact of independence would cause a lot of civil servant jobs in London who are doing work ‘for’ Scotland to move to Scotland – along with the economic impact they would have when they live their lives in and around Edinburgh instead of in London.

The negotiations around debt and asset splits would cause significant changes which could very well lead to Scotland paying much less in debt interest each year (and almost certainly not more in interest even in a ‘worst case’ scenario). And then actual policy changes like choices to be made over how and where military budgets are spent or where and how large Scotland’s embassies would be could have significant impacts on our annual budgets.

The actual numbers in that paper are now out of date as is much of the methodology that went into calculating them. This was because, in additional to changes to devolution in 2017, one of the impacts this paper had was to change (and in my view improve) how GERS itself was presented. Other impacts were an increased focus on GERS in the context of independence which led to similar papers being produced looking at Wales and at Northern Ireland, which both reached similar conclusions to my own paper. It also led to multiple Scottish Government Ministers promising to produce their own version of a set of “post-indy accounts” for Scotland, though none have actually materialised yet.

Social Security for All of Us – 2017

It was Common Weal’s paper in 2013, In Place of Anxiety that was a major early developer of my political viewpoints, particularly its case for a Universal Basic Income. The concept had been around before then, of course, but that was my own introduction to it. In 2017, I had the opportunity to revisit the topic as part of a broader work on how an independent Scotland could redesign its welfare state.

As part of this I produced one of Scotland’s first fully costed Universal Basic Income schemes. It is meagre by today’s standards (equivalent to Universal Credit, but truly Universal) and I would now advocate for a UBI that meets some kind of adequacy standard of being able to actually prevent poverty rather than merely allow someone to live in poverty.

This paper had multiple impacts on the Scottish political world – not least, it played a role in pushing the major parties to make pledges around the idea of a UBI in the 2021 Scottish elections. The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems all came out in favour of a UBI and Scottish Labour presented a counter-plan around a Minimum Income Guarantee.

Sadly, none came to pass. The UBI pilot scheme proposed by the Scottish Government was blocked by the UK Government and their report into Minimum Income was all-but buried by the Government who had by then changed First Minister twice and were evidently no longer interested.

Ambitions for the next Parliament have also been scaled back with Labour and the Lib Dems dropping their pledges entirely, the SNP promising only pilot study of a Minimum Income study for artists and the Greens proposing a similar pilot for a UBI for care leavers. Both pilots are welcome, of course, but it’s still a step back from the loftier promises of 2021.

However, that journey from 2017 to now has been a remarkable one. Back then UBI was still a radically utopian idea in Scotland, fit only for academics and weird policy wonks. By 2021, Scotland had a Parliamentary majority in favour of UBI even if it lacked the power to implement one and that majority went across the constitutional divide – a rare thing these days.

It also led me to being picked up this year by Basic Income Network Scotland and joining them as a Trustee, so you can believe that I’ll be keeping the issue live as we go into the next Parliament to make sure those pilot schemes happen and then we eventually get a Basic Income rolled out to All of Us.

A Silver Chain – 2018

The Sustainable Growth Commission was the first major push by the SNP to produce a body of work on Scottish independence since the publication of its Scotland’s Future White Paper in 2014. It was widely anticipated but at Common Weal we had heard whispers and rumours that we weren’t going to like what was in it. Sure enough, when it was published we were, quite frankly, appalled. I received an ‘advance’ copy of the report just two hours before its midnight embargo and stayed up till 3am reading it – I was then on the radio at 8am the following morning being interviewed about it which made the late night rather worth it.

Over the course of that publication day, I hammered out this policy paper which was published a few days later. The biggest difficulty we had with the report was the ‘six tests’ it laid out that were put in place to block the launch of an independent Scottish currency in the event of independence. Tests that we still maintain would have been impossible to meet and that the act of adhering to the tests would have made it harder, not easier, to launch a new currency.

This wasn’t the only objection we had but it was the one that gained the most traction. The party had to put substantial effort into railroading an adoption motion through their conference that year – the rebellion amongst members was almost as great as the one they saw during the debate to become a pro-NATO party. It also led to the formation of what would become the Scottish Currency Group who have taken our work on an independent Scottish currency and have pushed on far beyond it. Keep an eye out for their next sets of work in the coming months.

Good Houses For All – 2020

There is no logical reason that I can fathom for building houses that leak unnecessary amounts of heat when the technology to build them better doesn’t just exist but now costs virtually the same as building them badly. At the same time, incentives to improve existing houses don’t exist because why should landlords bother to properly retrofit when it’s the tenant who pays less on their bills and instead you could just jack up their rent because they have nowhere better to go.

This paper sought to solve both problems. It laid out the finances of building passive energy efficiency grade houses (though not necessarily the PassivHaus standard as there are other ways to achieve similar levels of efficiency) for social rented stock. I found that doing this could deliver houses cheaper than the private sector would while still being profitable for Local Authorities. This would mean Councils could build essentially unlimited social houses and outcompete the private sector in both price and in quality.

In 2022, I was asked at a fairly high profile public event if I could win just one policy in my political career, which would it be? I chose this one. It has the potential to not just reduce but to eliminate fuel poverty in Scotland and would leave a legacy lasting potentially centuries.

So imagine my shock and surprise that just a few weeks later, MSP Alex Rowley got in touch and took us up on that challenge, introducing a Members Bill to make passive energy efficiency the minimum standard for new homes in Scotland. The Government, facing a massive defeat if they opposed the Bill, did the smart thing instead by simply adopting it as Government policy. There’s still a long road to go in making it all happen but there’s an excellent chance that it will. I hope that I don’t only win one Government policy in my entire career, but if I do I’ll be happy if I only win this one.

ScotWind: Privatising Scotland’s Future Again – 2022

In January 2022, the Scottish Government announced that the Crown Estate Scotland (an arms-length org, but one owned by and accountable to Scottish Ministers since 2017) had completed its auction of options to develop what was then the world’s largest offshore wind project – ScotWind.

Basically, companies bid to buy the right to come up with a plan to develop a particular patch of seas and then they can choose to either return the right to the Estate or “exercise their option” and start the process of developing it. The Government PR machine went into overdrive to talk up the benefits of selling these options. Headlines touted the hundreds of millions of pounds that would flow into the Scottish Treasury and what could be done with it as well as promises around the ‘supply chain’ that would bring hundreds of jobs to Scotland.

But I was looking at the actual reports and things didn’t seem right. As it turned out, the auction was badly flawed. Rather than a traditional option where the highest bid wins or one where a lowest reserve price was set, this one had a maximum bid ceiling set on it. Every winning bid won their option at exactly the bid ceiling (suggesting they might have paid more). Other problems became evident, such as absolutely minimal protections that in many cases would make it cheaper to break those supply chain promises and to pay the fines than to actually fulfil them.

I very quickly put together a report of these findings and we published just a few days after the initial announcement. Instantly, the news coverage flipped from repeating the party line of the success of the auction to taking a more critical eye. The newspaper article covering my report ended up being the most read article in the Herald’s history of publishing online. My follow up report a year later revealed that Scotland has potentially lost out on billions or maybe even tens of billions of pounds by botching the auction the way it did and an investigation into what happened is now underway.

The Next Ten(?) Years

Obviously, my actual job at Common Weal has changed substantially over the decade. I spend more time now managing our Working Groups and the various other people working on policies than I do writing myself. I also keep up with contributions to our Daily Briefing and weekly Magazine (you are subscribed to both, aren’t you?) and I do a lot of outreach, networking and public engagements (want me to speak at your local campaign group about any of my work? Get in touch!). But, I’m still heavily involved in developing my own policies too and, as I say, I think you’re going to like the one I’ve got coming up next.

And so, where for the next ten years? Honestly, the unemployed laser engineer I was ten years ago couldn’t have predicted where I’d be today so who knows? I do know that I couldn’t have done it without you. It’s folk who support Common Weal with their £10/month that have let me do everything I’ve done and can support me and the rest of the team to keep doing it. So, as proud as I am to have done it all, I’m so grateful to have been allowed to do so. Thank you.

And here’s to the next decade, where ever it takes us.

Threats of genocide must be prosecuted

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 4 Comments

“Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.” – Ann Clwyd

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Donald Trump appears to have finally found his exit ramp to his illegal war with Iran. If early reports are to be believed and if those reports lead to a peace that holds, it leaves the US militarily depleted, the world economy reeling, Iran substantially devastated, thousands of civilians dead and the Strait of Hormuz has become a toll road with the introduction of a transit fee of $2 million per ship, split between Iran and Oman. If (and this may be a large if) shipping traffic numbers recover to pre-war levels, that means Iran receiving approximately $150 million per day – almost $55 billion a year – in fees from a shipping route that used to be open and free to transit. This is comparable to and may even exceed the revenue they received from their own oil exports pre-war.

This represents nothing less than a comprehensive strategic defeat for Trump and the US even if the two week ceasefire turns into something more permanent. Trump started this illegal war, failed to change the regime and is now walking away leaving Iran in a stronger position than it was prior to the war.

But it does mean that the world wakes up this week to some kind of peace rather than a mushroom cloud over Tehran and with millions dead (though we still do not know what the long term effects will be of this conflict – especially around the impact of food production in years to come due to the disruption of fertiliser supplies).

Trump achieved this using his trademark “Art of the Deal” in which he applies brinksmanship pressure until the other side backs down and he “wins” (Trump appears to reject or be unaware of the concept of a ‘positive sum game’ where both parties can gain out of a deal – either he wins and you lose, or you’re somehow screwing him over even if he can’t see how yet).

This might work in the world of New York real estate where he learned his trade (though there’s evidence that it didn’t particularly work there either) but it doesn’t work in politics and especially not in diplomacy. On the eve of this peace deal, Trump had to escalate beyond the moral and legal maximum leaving himself with almost no way for him to back down. His words on Tuesday that “a whole civilisation will die” horrified the civilised world and even horrified some of his more loyal allies.

There’s good reason for that. That threat promised nothing less than genocide – defined by the Genocide Convention as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical (sic), racial or religious group”. It is codified as one of the most, possibly the most, severe crimes that a human can inflict upon the world.

It is so severe that it is one of the few international laws that explicitly apply to “constitutionally responsible rules” – who are often considered to be immune to prosecution while they serve their terms – as well as to other public officials and to private individuals.

It is also so severe that the Convention doesn’t just apply to people who commit actual genocide but also those who ‘merely’ threaten to commit genocide. It’s not even considered a ‘lesser’ crime. The Convention treats actual and attempted genocide as well as conspiracy to commit genocide and the threat to commit genocide as equally punishable.

Trump must therefore be impeached, arrested and charged for his threat on Tuesday with the same vigour as he should have been had he carried out that threat on Wednesday.

John Swinney made the right call on Tuesday when he responded to Trump’s threat of genocide by calling it out for what it was. In doing so though, he has given himself an obligation on which he must now follow through. He must now take concrete steps to do what he can to bring about Trump’s prosecution under the Convention. It certainly means stating that Trump and other responsible members of his Government will be arrested if they set foot on Scottish soil.

Make no mistake. This isn’t merely some lefty trying to be petty. Failing to prevent genocide is another crime just as punishable as actively attempting it and so Scotland has an obligation – not an option – to deal with crimes of this magnitude when perpetrators come to Scotland and arrive within our jurisdiction.

This is a good thing for for the world. The Trump Doctrine of “Peace through Strength” has been shown up as a complete and total failure. All it does is encourage ‘Might as Right’ while simultaneously showing how weak and fragile the ‘Mighty’ actually are. The only thing that will create peace in the world is not a deranged hegemonic imperial power bombing people into submission with the most horrific weapons our species has yet invented but instead the only thing that has created peace of any kind in the world so far. Rule of Law and the submission of even the ‘Mighty’ under it for the good of all.

The breakdown of that system will take years to rebuild. We need all countries to step up and we need the collective United Nations to start functioning again and to actually hold those countries to account.

That task is much larger than I can express in this remaining article but it starts here. We cannot allow countries to threaten genocide without consequence. We cannot allow leaders to act as though they are beyond the law. We cannot allow unstable leaders to destabilise the world because of their personal failings. Scotland can yet be a beacon for peace and resilience in the world. All we need to do is follow our own rules.

If energy powers get devolved – what then?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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John Swinney has kicked of the election campaign with promise that should he be returned as First Minister then “on the first day” he’ll submit a Section 30 order to the UK Government to request the devolution of energy powers to Scotland.

I want to make something clear from the outset – Scotland should have more powers over energy and, given that Scotland holds a massively substantial share of the UK’s total renewable energy resources – the powers that do remain reserved should be jointly managed to a much greater degree than they are now.

The current bickering and grandstanding between governments combined with the, frankly, whining from either government that the other government is blocking progress as they see it serves none of us at a time when first the climate emergency and now escalating geopolitical turmoil is demanding that we get ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. To that extent, a campaign for more devolved powers is not just welcome, but vital.

This is not to say that I believe that a simple call for those powers via a Section 30 order will be successful. I don’t think it will be, for the same reason that the Section 30 order for independence referendum powers almost a decade ago was not successful. Governments and politicians will only do something that they do not want to do when the consequences of not doing so – as they see and feel them – are worse than the consequences of acquiescing. If they are told to do something and there is no credible answer to the inevitable response “or what?”, then they won’t.

But let’s assume that they do. Let’s imagine a scenario after May where the Scottish Government clearly won’t win a campaign for a second independence referendum (which would inevitably absorb all other campaign energy and would, if successful, win the powers over energy anyway) but there is scope to win a “more devolution” campaign, including or centred around energy. It might well come about due to the SNP failing to win a majority of seats in Holyrood (and thus failing in their self-imposed prerequisite for an indyref campaign) but there nonetheless being a strong pro-independence majority in Parliament coupled with voices on the other side who don’t favour independence but would welcome more powers over energy (so…not much different from the recent outgoing Parliament then?).

What then?

The powers over energy get devolved to Holyrood, but what then? What is the plan for using those powers? here

I know what Common Weal would do with them. We’ve written extensively on energy matters for over a decade now and have pulled in expertise from some of the top people in the field. We have papers on how to reform the Grid written by people who have helped to run national grids. We have papers on how to heat homes, written by people who have helping to define the standards by which home energy needs are measured. We understand that trying to decarbonise the economy we have today without fundamentally changing that economy is doomed to failure.

So we have our own answers to the question of what we’d do with devolved energy powers and you can hear about a few more of them in my recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast here and below.

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I’m not convinced that the present Scottish Government has fully thought their answer to that question through though. From what I can see there are promises of energy price cuts without elaboration as to how it’d happen, there’s a manufacturing sector based almost entirely around inwards investment – though the UK’s blocking of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory on “national security” grounds (read: “we didn’t want to upset Daddy Trump”) is appalling – and there remains the continued risk that vital improvements like the proposed PassivHaus energy efficiency standards will get watered down and compromised by people who profit massively from your heating bill.

I am greatly concerned that the current Scottish Government’s plan, such that it is, will not be the overhaul of the energy sector that it needs. It won’t be based around bringing the sector into public ownership. I suspect this because they haven’t used the powers they currently have to bring much of it into public ownership.

They’ve also made efforts to privatise energy infrastructure that was in public ownership for no reason other than it would boost the “inwards investment” line a bit more – Scotland’s ‘public’ electric car charging network is now operated by an Austrian company. The Government also reviewed policies around community benefit fund recommendations and chose to reduce them in real terms compared to when they were first launched. And, of course, we’ve seen what happened with Scotland’s largest auction of offshore energy options where it’s very possible that the Scottish Government left many billions of pounds on the table due to undervaluing those assets.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see the manifestos of most of the political parties (including the SNP) ahead of the elections next month but on this topic I’ll be paying particularly close attention. It’s simply not enough to call for more powers but to not lay out what to do with them and I am concerned that what the parties would do with them would just perpetuate the rip-off that the energy sector is. Powers must be used with purpose and that purpose should be not to serve the already wealthy and powerful, but All of Us.

May this be the last Oil War

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I’m going to say [to George W Bush], ‘And you tell me, what the noble cause is that my son died for.’ And if he even starts to say ‘freedom and democracy,’ I’m going to say, ‘bullshit.’ You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died so you can spread the cancer of Pax America, imperialism, in the Middle East” – Cindy Sheehan, (2005, Voices of a People’s History of the US)

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

sunset

For decades now – almost since the first barrel of oil was pulled out of the ground – the oil companies have been paying people to tell environmentalists that the world couldn’t possibly shut down the fossil fuel sector, especially not overnight! Furthermore, rather than spending those decades slowly ramping down fossil fuel dependency in favour of alternatives, we were told that we should just “Drill, Baby, Drill” and pump more black stuff into our consumer goods and into our atmosphere for the great profit of the oil barons. There will be parties in the upcoming Scottish elections who will be openly campaigning on this stance.

Well, thanks to those efforts and the efforts of some powerful men with apparent grudges against the future, we now live in a world where the fossil fuel sector can be shut off overnight.

Continue reading →

The Scottish Parliamentary Election 2026:- The Manifestos

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

This post and the research underpinning it is undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this work, you can here.

It is that time again. Scotland faces another election for its devolved Parliament at Holyrood. As I have done in the previous several Scottish and UK General Elections, I want to collect here as many of the political party manifestos as I can so that you, the voter, can find them all in one place as they can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to find (they also tend to disappear from the internet after the elections which can make it difficult to hold parties to their promises later – but that’s for a future article.

The Scottish Elections tend to be quite vibrant in terms of the number of parties involved and this year promises to shake the main parties to a degree not seen in generations so I want to give voters the change to see as broad a set of candidates as I can.

Unfortunately, there are limits. It’s difficult in this format to present Independent candidates fairly as they often don’t present a traditional manifesto and even when they do, by definition, they can only stand for one seat in Scotland (constituency or regional).

That said, if you spot a political party manifesto out there in the wild that I haven’t yet listed below, please let me know. The criteria for entry are fairly simple:
1) The party must be registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission.
2) They must be standing at least two candidates across at least two constituencies and/or regions (the same single person standing in both a constituency and in a region doesn’t count).
3) They must have published a manifesto of election promises and commitments to voters. It needn’t be called a “manifesto”. Alternative names like “contract”, “election promise” or suchlike may be similar enough for inclusion.

This means that “manifestos” produced by trade unions, think tanks or third sector organisations who are seeking to influence politics but who aren’t standing candidates under their party banner won’t be included.

This is going to be live article for the next several weeks to follow me on social media or check back here regularly for updates.

Note:- Parties marked in square brackets are placeholders for now and the prospective list may change as manifestos are published, parties emerge or, indeed, parties drop out of the electoral race. If a party produces several focused manifestos (e.g. a Manifesto for the Islands, or a Manifesto for Young People) then I may link to them, but the main banner image shall point only to their primary manifesto.

Click on the party name to be taken to their current manifesto webpage which may include accessible or localised versions of their manifesto. Click on the thumbnail image to download a copy of their primary manifesto directly.

Incumbent Parties

The following parties were represented by at least one MSP at some point during the 2021-2026 Parliament and are standing at least two candidates in the upcoming election. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party

Scottish Greens

Scottish Labour Party

Scottish Liberal Democrats

Scottish National Party

Reform UK

Insurgent Parties

The following parties were not represented in the 2016-2021 Parliament. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Alliance to Liberate Scotland

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

Communist Party of Britain

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

Independence for Scotland Party

Scottish Common Party

Scottish Family Party

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

UK Independence Party

Scottish Libertarian Party

Scottish Socialist Party

Workers Party of Britain

Edits and Updates

07/04/2026 – Added Scottish Conservatives.

09/04/2026 – Added Independence for Scotland Party and Scottish Common Party

13/04/2026 – Added Scottish Labour Party

14/04/2026 – Added Scottish Greens

16/04/2026 – Added Alliance to Liberate Scotland, Communist Party, Scottish National Party, UK Independence Party, Scottish Family Party, Workers Party of Britain

17/04/2026 – Added Scottish Liberal Democrats

19/04/2026 – Added Scottish Libertarian Party and Scottish Socialist Party

 

 

A regulated economy is one that works for all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“They’ll re-regulate within ten years. There’ll be a string of crashes, and they’ll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don’t provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.” – Michael Crichton

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

It was a sombre weekend for me last week. The fire at Union Street in Glasgow hit me hard. I know it was by far not the worst disaster happening even at that moment – as Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war spread burning oil rains over Tehran in a manner that would surely be an example of a prosecutable offence under the proposed Scottish Ecocide Bill on top of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But still, that corner of Union Street was Common Weal’s office for several years and I realised that I’m the only member of the team remaining who worked in it on a daily basis (Robin had always habitually worked from home even before the Covid pandemic pushed the rest of us to do it too) and so the pang of personal connection was particularly strong.

As one of our Daily Briefings said this week, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the cause of the fire and many that may never be answered. If early reports are accurate though, it may well be that the vape shop where it started was not properly following business regulations and, simultaneously, the regulations around shops that sell highly addictive and highly flammable substances like vapes is nowhere near strong enough given the risks that the devices pose.

(By the way, if you are subscribed to Common Weal’s weekly Magazine but not yet subscribed to our Daily Briefing newsletter then you’re missing out. Every weekday we’ll send you our take on a news story that caught our eye that morning – one that you may not have noticed or may not have clocked the particular significance of from a Common Weal focus. Subscribe to the Daily Briefings for free here. And if you like it, please consider sending us a wee donation to help us keep it going.)

There are going to be questions in the coming weeks, months and possibly as part of the upcoming Scottish Parliamentary elections about how to better regulate these shops specifically. Even the Reform Party is calling for a review of regulations and they have usually been a party ideologically wedded to the idea that “cutting red tape” is the way to boost the economy.

And this is perhaps the core of the issue. The call for more or fewer regulations in anything from businesses, through banking, to regulations over cross-border food imports and exports, or even the regulation of government itself, appears to run like a swinging pendulum. When things are going fine, people think that the regulations are holding them back and call for the red tape to be cut. We become complacent and perhaps forget that the problems the regulations prevent ever even existed – almost like living in a world where people call for cuts to the fire service because it’s been years since they saw a building burn down.

When things crash (as they so, so often do) people wonder why the regulations didn’t save them and want more to prevent the causes of the previous crash happening again. This works until a different crash blindsides everyone who wasn’t listening to the folk who were warning about it, or folk start to feel safe and start talking about cutting red tape again.

There’s another aspect of regulation that sits underneath that broad cycle of tying up and cutting the red tape and that’s our willingness to enforce the regulations that do exist. This, too, could run from vape shops not being checked to make sure they are registered out to ensuring that the food being imported into the country are actually being checked to make sure they are meeting agreed standards rather than just being ‘waved through’ because there just aren’t the resources there to properly secure the border.

A regulation that isn’t enforced is even worse than one that doesn’t exist because it’s often not never enforced but instead merely enforced selectively. Which means enforced for us, but not those with the money or the power or the “too big to fail” scale to avoid having to play by trivialities like “the rules”.

“We can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business.”

Common Weal has been working on a broad group of policies around the topic of governance – mostly focus at Government itself but this all applies everywhere too. One of the foundational principles is that “no-one should govern themselves”. This means that government isn’t allowed to vote against transparency measures under the excuse that the mandatory rules merely replicate voluntary rules that they’re not following.

It means that the boards that are supposed to govern our regulatory bodies can’t be solely conscripted from the ranks of the bodies they are supposed to be regulating. It means that conflicts of interest must be rooted out and it means that lobbyists who advocate for changes to or immunity from regulations must do so in plain site of our democracy – we now argue that the Lobbying Register is insufficient and that ALL lobbying meetings with the Government (even ours) should be recorded and posted for public scrutiny.

And when it comes to regulation of the private sector, we can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business. There needs to be adequate deterrent and punishment for those responsible for failure that doesn’t just take the form of a fine that is smaller than the cleanup costs. That way lies the principle of CATNAP – Cheapest Available Technology, Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution – where companies don’t even just barely meet what regulations there are but happily sell us illegal products from unsafe vapes to unsafe houses knowing that no-one is about to stop them from doing so.

It’s said that “every rule is written in blood” and this is very much true when it comes to regulatory practices and especially with health and safety. Those who break out the scissors must be able to articulate why those rules came about and what they were designed to protect us from before being allowed to start cutting or even to just stop enforcing what we have – especially in the name of profit.

Otherwise, when the pendulum swings again, the blood that the next set of rules will be written in might well be our own.

 

Process over policy was never a route to Indy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” – Georges Jacques Danton

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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The Scottish Parliament’s Constitution Committee has recently concluded a short investigation into legal mechanisms for triggering a second independence referendum. The final report and the reports of the evidence sessions are worth reading, but the conclusions are fairly simple albeit in a direction that probably won’t please anyone who has an especially vested interest in the process for Scottish independence.

Essentially, the principle of becoming independent is itself legal (as opposed to many states which have constitutions that explicitly prohibit the secession of components of the state) but there is currently no legal mechanism in place that would allow for Scotland either to unilaterally declare independence nor to unilaterally hold a public referendum (even an “advisory” one) on the question of Scottish independence. This stands in contrast with various other states which explicitly legislate to allow components to secede either unilaterally or provide a mechanism to translate the democratic will of their residents into the legislative process of independence.

Instead, the processes which would allow for independence cannot be enacted unilaterally and may only be enacted via the UK Government or UK Parliament. This includes a mechanism similar to the one in place for Northern Ireland which would allow for a poll on leaving the UK and reunifying with Ireland if public sentiment makes it seem likely to the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that such a poll would return a result for reunification. That’s a slightly technical wording but the crucial point is that public polls in favour of reunification are only a mandate for a referendum if the UK Government chooses to not be wilfully blind to them – the veto is still in their hands.

As is the legislative process of becoming independent – that can’t be done by the Scottish Parliament passing a ‘Divorce Act’, but instead by Westminster passing legislation to enact independence. The obvious route to my mind is that they would amend the Scotland Act to delete Schedule 5 and so remove the list of reserved powers – essentially devolving everything not already devolved.

Then it might add Scotland to the Statute of Westminster 1931 which essentially says that new UK laws won’t apply to Dominions and the Commonwealth nations unless they explicitly request or consent to it. Only then could this be followed by a Scottish Act or Constitution Article to make it unlawful to request or consent to such laws plus further laws to remove the role of the UK Supreme Court and other state apparatus that may remain plus something to clarify questions around Crown succession or to remove the Magic Hat entirely and become a Republic.

Another crucial conclusion is that there is no international law that can be applied to legislatively compel Westminster to act on public sentiment or on the calls for a referendum. The UN isn’t going to send in blue-helmeted peacekeepers to enforce some hypothetical ‘Decolonialisation Mandate’ or something like that.

Instead, the Committee concludes, that the question of independence was less a legislative question but more a diplomatic and democratic one. Essentially, that independence could be legislated for should it need to be, but this is only going to happen in practice when the UK Government decides that it needs to be.

Here’s the thing – This was also pretty much exactly the thought process that went in to us writing our books Direction in 2023 and our policy paper Within Our Grasp in 2019. It’s important to note that the latter paper was written before the Supreme Court ruled that a unilateral advisory referendum would be unlawful – a decision that at the time seemed likely but far from assured and therefore until that moment was ambiguous.

“Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them.”

We recognised long before this Committee was even conceived that the question of independence was going to be more about democracy and diplomacy than sheer legislation and we’ve taken quite some flak over the years from trying to push back against elements of the independence campaign who tried to magic independence into being by finding ‘one weird trick the lawyers won’t tell you about’ that would somehow invalidate the Act of Union and prove that Scotland had, in fact, been independent all along. I remember with wry fondness one person who reacted to my explainer of the legislative process above by calling me a “Colonialist Westminster Shill”.

Wishing independence into being isn’t going to make it happen, but the lack of a clear legislative process with goalposts and milestones isn’t a weakness either. Goodhart’s Law very much applies here in that some process that demands that, for example, public polls show 60%+ support for a sustained period of six months before a referendum can be considered could always be knocked into the long grass by a single 59% poll or – perhaps worse – could bounce us into campaign mode without a plan for the day after (like Brexit). Even the SNP’s foolish target of calling for a referendum if there’s an SNP majority in May grants the UK Government the ability to decline that offer even if every single MSP in Holyrood is openly pro-indy, but only 63 of them are SNP.

Instead we should recognise that the precise legislative formulation for independence is ultimately irrelevant. If Westminster has the ultimate veto over whether or not it goes ahead, then we must recognise that they will always enact that veto if doing so causes them fewer problems than not doing so. This is why Sturgeon’s 2017 demand for a referendum was dismissed with a curt “now is not the time” and every other attempt with even less.

This was the purpose of our book and policy paper. Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them. I’ll leave the details of that strategy behind the links to the book and paper (please go read them and buy the book) other than to say that only one component of it is building the public support for independence to undeniable levels.

We also need to consider building an escalating pressure campaign whereby Westminster essentially realises that governing a Scotland that no longer wants to be governed is more hassle than it’s worth (which, if the propaganda is true, is already not worth much because we’re such a money sink).

We weren’t invited to give evidence to the Committee, despite the detailed work we’ve done on the topic, but if we had been we may have questioned the reason for the inquiry being called. Its conclusion was obvious to us long before it was even started and so should have been obvious to the people who called it. I fear that the inquiry was never designed to be part of a coordinated ladder of escalating pressure but was instead another attempt at substituting process for policy.

There’s a simple test of whether I’m right or not. One that will separate a checkbox exercise designed to let the parties tell potential voters they’re doing something from one where they are actually doing something to bring about independence.

The Committee’s final conclusion calls for the Scottish Government and UK Government to negotiate a pathway to exercising Scotland’s right to determine its constitutional future as a matter of urgency.

The test is this: What will you, the politicians, do when (not if) Westminster once again says ‘No’?

Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.” – Kim Stanley Robinson

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

photo of truss towers

Scotland has an extremely poor track record of benefiting from our own energy resources. The decline of the First Age of energy wealth – based on coal – can still be seen in the scars of deprivation it left behind especially in the Central Belt towns and villages around where I live and where mining was most intensive.

In the Second Age, our oil wealth was – as Gavin McCrone warned – downplayed and then squandered under successive UK Governments while leaving Scotland vulnerable to oil shocks and we’re now seeing how we’re being held liable for the costs (economic and social) of drawing down the sector as it absolutely must be drawn down as the world wrestles with the challenges of the climate emergency caused largely by that oil even as the rich owners of the assets reap the profits and continue to lobby to delay or prevent change.

The problem is that unlike almost every other country that found itself with large reserves of energy wealth, we collectively decided that Scotland shouldn’t own any of it.

Rather than building up a robust public-owned oil sector, the UK Government flogged off the rights to exploit the resources to the lowest bidder, even offering generous subsidies rather than taxing their profits. The downstream infrastructure was privatised too not just sucked vast amounts of wealth into the pockets of billionaires like Jim Radcliffe but also granting them vast political power and the ability to make hypocritical statements about immigration while living the high life in their own offshore tax haven.

The Third Age of Scottish energy is our Green Transition – built initially around our vast onshore and offshore wind resources but now increasingly diversifying into other areas like solar and battery storage.

We see here that Scotland is in the process of losing out once again when it comes to energy resources that, if anything, vastly outstrip anything the oil sector could have ever promised because, unlike oil, the sun and the wind will continue to deliver that energy long after the last barrel of oil is extracted from the ground.

It promised to finally bring some ongoing benefit to communities that would be hosting the generators but even that failed. Neither Scotland nor the UK showed interest in developing public ownership of the assets and the “community benefit” funds were set at the lowest possible level of £5,000 per MW of capacity for wind (not uprated for inflation) and zero for other forms of renewables. It is estimated that a community owned wind turbine generates around 34 times as much revenue for the local community as does a privately owned one that pays its £5,000/MW community benefit. There is some evidence emerging that even this paltry sum is not being met in many cases with The Ferret reporting a shortfall of about £50 million across Scotland’s community benefit funds.

Offshore is arguable worse with the debacle of the ScotWind auction selling off the options to develop one of the largest offshore wind projects in the world in an auction that, for reasons still not adequately explained, set a maximum price cap on bids and potentially cost Scotland anywhere between billions and tens of billions of pounds in upfront capital.

Most crucially of all, we don’t even make the renewable generators and batteries that we don’t own. Decades of climate-denying politicians telling people that we shouldn’t bother trying to avert climate change because China wasn’t doing anything conveniently ignored that China was, in fact, rapidly building up its industrial base and was starting to sell the generators to the world.

So Scotland now imports the materials to build wind turbines that are owned by multinational companies and foreign public energy companies that export their profits elsewhere and pay communities sometimes less than the bare minimum. We don’t even get cheaper energy for it because the UK’s grid and pricing structures are still based on assumptions laid down in the Coal Age.

So what of the Fourth Age of Scottish energy? The thing about the current generation of privately owned energy assets is that they will eventually need to be replaced, and fairly soon – perhaps in 25 years time. This gives us an opportunity to start planning now.

Scotland needs to start building up its domestic wind and solar manufacturing base. We need to use our excellent universities to develop the materials to ensure that those generators are built to Circular Economy standards (current generation fibreglass wind turbine blades are disposable and are sent to landfill after use). We also need to start aggressively bringing assets into Scottish public ownership. Every time a renewable energy lease is up for renewal, it should be transferred to a Scottish public energy company (nationally or locally owned). This can also happen when a site is up for “repowering” – when old, smaller turbines are replaced with larger, more powerful ones but which exceed the previous lease’s maximum capacity terms.

New renewable sites should have their leases signed aggressively in favour of public ownership too. Rather than 60 or 99 year leases that cover the lifespan of multiple generations of turbines, they should be set to as low as 10 years. Enough time for the private developer to recoup their investment but also enough time for the Scottish public sector to take over the site and also make a profit without merely being saddled with the liability of decommissioning as we’re doing with the oil sector.

If any of this is not possible within devolution (some of it certainly is) and the UK is not willing to allow it, then while we are doing what we can, the case must be made for independence so that we can finish the job.

All of this will take time to set up which is why we need to start preparing the ground now. I don’t want to be here in 25 years talking being asked to comment on why we’re importing the next generation of technology and exporting the profits again. If we want to sit under a tree in 2050, maybe the best time to plant it is today.

It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.” – William Golding

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a significant intervention into the upcoming Scottish election, saying that the next Parliament must stop cringing away from reforming Council Tax.

The Scottish Government’s current position is that they can’t make that change because there’s no political consensus for what comes next. This is a disingenuous take, given the chances they’ve squandered or deliberately suppressed in order to manufacture that situation.

Everyone, even the Scottish Government, agrees that the Council Tax is fatally broken. No other tax is based on valuations that were set a third of a century ago (imagine suggesting that your income tax should be based on what your salary was in 1991). No other tax so badly misvalues so many houses (imagine there was a 50:50 chance that your income tax code wasn’t even based on the job your doing right now). Almost not other tax gives such a high tax break to so few at the expense of so many. It absolutely must change and should have changed 30 years ago.

There have been several alternatives to the Council Tax that have been mooted over the years. Some have been better than others. But to my mind at this point there really are only two possible positions in the debate.

On one side, there are those who advocate for a fair and proportionate Property Tax that applies the tax based on a percentage of the present value of a home. Our own proposal to this effect models – for the purposes of making the argument – a flat percentage rate across all homes but there’s absolutely no reason why that rate can’t be varied by Local Authorities, surcharges for multiple ownership or even, as our friends at Future Economy Scotland have mooted this week, why there couldn’t be a progressive element for very high value homes.

The key point to this though is that if your neighbour who differs from you only in that they own a house that costs ten times as much as yours does, then it is fair and just that they pay ten times as much Property Tax than you do.

On the other side of the argument there is everyone else – who, regardless of what they are putting forward in terms of a reform plan – fundamentally believe that the top 10% of property owners in Scotland should have their lifestyles subsidised by the rest of us – even those of us who are going increasingly into debt just trying to keep a roof over our heads.

That sounds harsh, but let me explain.

If you believe in a banded Council Tax similar to the current one or perhaps modified by the proposals in the recent Scottish Government consultation (or their plan for a mansion tax that came out of nowhere while that consultation was still live) then houses in the top band will always and by definition win a tax cut. Even under the “mansion tax” proposal, a £20 million house will pay the same Council Tax as a £2 million house. This is not fair.

Under our proportionate Property Tax and even under its nation-wide flat rate of 0.63% (or £630 per year on a £100,000 house) we found that despite bringing in the same amount of total revenue, almost everyone whose house cost less than £400,000 would get a tax cut. The same would also be true if any of the Government’s consultation options were adopted and then we decided to move to out Property Tax later. The banded system simply doesn’t work and ALWAYS leads to a subsidy for the rich.

The same is also true for replacing Council Tax with an income tax (a position the SNP had in 2007 and some other parties still have). Wealth inequality is far higher than income inequality and property speculation is itself a major driver of that wealth inequality. Failing to tax wealth would release the brakes even further on property speculation and allow those who bought houses when they were cheap to profit even more when they sell them (The myth of the aged widow with no income living alone in their mansion with no-where else to go is largely that and would be better solved with individual discounts or exemptions and providing more appropriate housing they could move to).

But if, after that, the political parties still can’t agree to reform Council Tax in the only way they should then they should have stopped being the problem. In the run up to the 2021 election, the SNP made a manifesto promise to hold a Citizens Assembly on local tax reform, including Council Tax reform. They failed to deliver on that promise. That Assembly could have created the consensus that Robison is using as a shield against inaction – which is probably why they failed to deliver.

As I point out when I wrote about this last time, the major weakness of the idea of a Citizens Assembly is that politicians fundamentally don’t want them to work. For them to work, the politician has to step out of the way. They have to accept that the Assembly is happening because they weren’t able to do their job. They have to give the power to make the decision to the citizens who form the assembly and then they have to agree – ahead of time and not just if the final answer suits them – to carry out the instructions given to them by the Assembly.

If Shona Robison or her successor wishes to claim that the reason they can’t reform Council Tax is because of a lack of consensus then it is incumbent on them to create that consensus. If they can’t do it themselves, then they need to accept that they are part of the cause of that lack of consensus and should step out of the way.

The debate on Council Tax reform has gone on far too long. Everyone agrees that things need to change. No-one, it appears, wants to be the one to take the responsibility of making that change happen. This isn’t good enough. I’ll be watching the party manifestos closely in the coming weeks. If any of my local candidates can’t tell me what their party is going to do about this failure of responsibility that leads to 90% of people in Scotland effectively subsidising the top 10%, then I’m going to have to ask them who I should vote for instead of them.

What is the point of a party manifesto these days?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.” – Aristophanes

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

human hand forming heart shape

Election time is almost upon us in Scotland and we’re already starting to see the various parties start to make their pitches to voters. Even though the official “campaign period” hasn’t yet started various parties – including the party of Government – have already started caveating their promises with “if we are elected”.

Some of this is certainly for the good, such as news that if the SNP are re-elected then they’ve promised to adopt Common Weal’s plan for a National Housing Agency. We’re already gearing up to hold their feet to the fire on that one and to try to ensure that they don’t water our plans down to homeopathic levels as they did with the Scottish National Investment Bank nor that they mess the thing up so badly that it ends up like the National Care Service.

Promises are just words though and we’re entering an electoral campaign where it feels like those words are going to mean less and less to fewer and fewer people. The electorate has fragmented into camps with very little crossover. Politicians are focusing more tightly on the little crossover that does occur. Advertising becomes ever more focused and targeted (to the point that I might be explicitly excluded by the online algorithms from seeing the advert that you have been targeted to see). And we have new threats rising in the form of AI that will mindlessly lie to you by design.

Amid all of that, it might be worth asking what is the point of a mainstay of election campaigning for decades now: the party election manifesto?

Every election, parties are expected to produce a document outlining their plans, priorities and policies should they get into office post-election or even should they merely get into Parliament and be in a position to influence government policy.

It’s important to note that these are not legally required documents nor are they binding contracts. The state of UK electoral law is that, barring very, very narrow circumstances, there is no requirement for a prospective politician to even tell you, the voter, the truth about their intentions in office. The only real legal requirement is that they do not misrepresent the character of themselves or another candidate for political gain (in 2015, Alistair Carmichael won a court case over his lying during an election campaign on the grounds that he never represented himself to voters as an honest person – perhaps this is a question to ask candidates in your next hustings).

And so in a similar vein, there’s no actual legal recourse if a party of Government starts throwing out the promises they made in order to win power – just look at the manifesto of Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign compared to what he’s actually done in office…

Party Manifestos can be tricky to track down sometimes. Over the last few elections, I’ve tried to collect them on this blog but as you’ll see if you try to download some of them on the most recent list, the parties often chuck them in the digital bin shortly after the election which means if you want to track down historical copies, it can mean having to trawl through digital archives like the Wayback Machine.

“Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast…This should be ethically unacceptable”

What they are though is a statement of intent, a business plan and a means of accountability. Just because we don’t have some kind of legal redress mechanism if politicians fail to live up to their policies, we do have a social means of redress. The largest is, of course, the election itself as parties can and should be judged not just on the manifesto they put forward to voters but the ones they put forward prior to this. They can and should be judged based on their previous performance on promises fulfilled and promises broken, especially if their excuses for the latter are lacking.

Another aspect of the importance of a manifesto is open transparency. It’s not enough for you, a party loyalist, to see what the party you’re loyal to is promising you. Everyone else has to be able to see it too. We live now in an area where political ideological bubbles can be digitally enforced.

You could well be on a list to be targeted by a political advert from some party or another. It might well be that I am on a list to not be targeted by that same advert. This means that if we meet and start discussing the politics that we’ve seen that week, we could be facing entirely different realities of what we think is important or not.

This problem is made even worse with the rise of AI and other forms of fake news and radicalising politics (see, for example, the trend of people putting out fake news about rising lawlessness in London specifically because they were being rewarded in advertising money for doing so).

By giving people some level of an equal baseline in terms of our political understanding then we can become more and better engaged with the politics and politicians courting our votes (especially when they are the ones lying to us). See Bill Johnston’s recent article on informed citizens here for more about how you can become a more deliberative democrat.

We don’t yet know when the party manifestos for the upcoming Scottish election will be published. There has been a somewhat disturbing trend in recent elections where the larger parties especially seem to be trying to be the last to publish their manifesto – possibly in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and accountability and possibly so that they can make last minute edits to outbid their rivals (or avoid a pitfall that their rivals have fallen into).

Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast which should be a major alarm sign for our democracy as this means that it’s possible that parties may not be solidifying their promises until after people have started casting their votes. This should be ethically unacceptable.

As the Scottish election campaign lands on us over the next 11 weeks, I’ll be once again collecting as many of the manifestos as I can so that they can be read in one place. I also plan to follow this article up specifically with a look at some of the major party manifestos to see what they actually managed to accomplish over this current Parliament compared to what they promised to do.

This isn’t just an exercise in helping you vote better (though it’ll certainly do that) but when politicians know that we can see right through them maybe they’ll stop acting like they have something to hide. And maybe then, we’ll start to see a few more of those promises actually turn into policy.