On a reality-based security strategy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

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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There is an observation amongst peace-campaigners that politicians claim that there is never enough money to spend on social welfare but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war.

That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way. Now we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so the social welfare has to go to pay for it. The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.

This will have multiple impacts on public spending. The first is the impact of the direct cuts, as mentioned. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending – investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish budget but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn out of the transport budget and putting it into the military means an effective cut of £80mn to the Scottish budget. The third is that as a “job creation tool”, the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but spending £1bn on just about anything else – particularly things like energy infrastructure – would create even more jobs. It is likely that this defence plan will be net-negative for job growth. And that’s before we consider the final point – money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on. War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.

And this is all assuming that this is what the UK actually needs or should be doing right now. The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson rather ironically saying in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it.”

But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like to have, we need a reality-based security strategy.

The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem and it is now too late to prevent but not too late to limit or to adapt to. But doing so will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time. It’s not just the climate itself, but Trump’s illegal war with Iran and Putin’s with Ukraine has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we now have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted in the way those wars did to our fuel supplies. Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.

Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the ones recently spotted outside Holyrood last week. These are all policing matters rather than military though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.

The same goes for non-climate environmental threats. If we wanted a reality-based security strategy to consider the number of British people killed each year then we’d be waging war against pollution. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3,000 lives per year (I haven’t been able to find comparable data for Glasgow or Edinburgh’s LEZ impacts yet). If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3,000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. If a politician tried to win an election on the promise of murdering 3,000 people, I doubt they’d win a vote. And yet, there are politicians and political parties still claiming to want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.

Next on the threat scale is probably something like Hybrid War – unconventional attacks on our infrastructure via things like hacking attempts and drone warfare. The UK has, in fact, experienced attacks like this from state actors – we now know that Russia was likely behind the shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover last year. We also know that Trump’s USA has been actively spying on European Governments, digitally sanctioning human rights lawyers, and is quite capable of ordering Microsoft to lock down Scotland’s ability to pass legislation should he choose to. The threat from this kind of hybrid war isn’t therefore coming only from our “enemies” and cannot be defended against by building more bombs to aim at them. A reality-based security strategy would be following the EU’s lead and developing a digital sovereignty strategy to remove the threat of such hacks from the table. Common Weal are actively working on what a Scottish digital strategy could look like.

“If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.”

On the far side of the threat spectrum in terms of probability is actual territorial invasion which is vanishingly low for somewhere like Britain. The country being held up as a threat in this regard, Russia, has already shown the limits of its capabilities in Ukraine. It may well still be a threat on the borders of NATO, but that’s a very different prospect to the idea of seeing T-90 tank in Tottenham. Once again, when considering territorial invasion, we cannot ignore our supposed “ally” the USA, which is still threatening to annex Greenland. However, the thought does bring up the thing that has been absolutely missing from discourse on defence spending till now – time.

The new Starmer plan has a long time horizon. It will be years before the actual money starts to ramp up weapons production and development and decades before the results of that spending results in deployable equipment (this is particularly the case with things like nuclear weapons and new submarines to launch them). If we take as given that Putin’s Russia is the massive overbearing threat that the establishment would have us fear, then we have to remember that Putin himself is mortal and already past UK state retirement age. He will quite likely be dead or otherwise no longer in power before any of Starmer’s new weapons can be aimed at him. Who will replace him? What can the UK and Europe do now to normalise relations with his successor so that post-Putin Russia is not a threat? Would doing that be cheaper than us threatening to nuke Moscow, murdering 5 million civilians in the process? Might it work better?

Pacifists like myself are never listened to in times of peace. In times of war, we are openly scorned as not having the solutions to the conflict that could have been avoided had we been listened to in times of peace. Warmongers need war and the threat of war to justify their own existence and to bloat their already unjustifiable budgets and they must be called out on this fact. If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead. If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers would prefer we were afraid of instead.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

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Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.

The Climate Emergency is Uninsurable

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“What happened to fun?”
“Our insurance doesn’t cover it!”
– Charles M. Schulz

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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In an uncertain and unpredictable world, insurance is mostly a good thing (I’ll write an article sometime about when it’s not – it’ll mostly be about the US healthcare system). Climate change is proving to be a challenge for it, though – one that might actually be the thing that forces global adaptation and policy change when other things like activist campaigning or actual scientific data have not.

Consider your house. You live on a flood plain, which means that your house is in a zone covered by a “100 year flood”, meaning that you could expect a flood severe enough to damage your house once every century. Such a flood would cause £100,000 worth of damage. You could fairly expect the insurance value of your house to be about £1,000 per year. An insurance company that charged less than that would eventually find itself paying out more than it brought in.

There’s a problem with the assumption that your house will only get flooded once per century. The climate is shifting rapidly. I’m writing this piece on the day that the UK once again breaks high temperature records. I also read a piece this week about the danger of romanticising the 1976 UK summer heatwave, while reflecting that the UK hasn’t seen average annual temperatures as low as that of the average temperature in that heatwave year since 2012 – the dangerously extraordinary has become dangerously normalised. (1976 was before my time. The first heatwave I have strong memories of is the 1998 one. It’s unlikely I’ll live to see a world as relatively cold as that year was either.

But this (overly) simple calculation doesn’t tell the whole story. If you made an insurance claim after your house was damaged, you’d rarely expect to get the full £100,000 paid out to you. Insurance policies often have an ‘excess’, an amount you have to pay yourself before damage in excess of that amount is paid by the company (in the US, they call it a ‘deductable’, an amount the company deducts from their payment to you).

This linguistic choice tells us a lot about whether the sector is focused on the company first or on the person making the claim. Further, there are often reasons that a company would not pay out. For instance, many people whose flights were cancelled or disrupted due to Trump’s attack on Iran found that their insurance didn’t cover losses due to acts of war. We’re also assuming that your policy would actually cover £100,000 worth of damage – many people are ‘underinsured’ for the true cost of their losses, particularly if they haven’t updated their policies recently to account for inflation and increases in building costs.

Looking to the future and accelerating climate damage, if a ‘100-year flood’ starts happening every 50 years, your insurance costs would have to double. If you start getting flooded out every decade, you’d probably be cheaper moving elsewhere – but good luck finding someone who’ll buy your house from you. You can run the same kind of calculation about your risk due to sea level rise, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, storm damage, and every other impact being made worse by the climate emergency.

And that’s if the insurance companies get their estimates right in the first place. If they cost your insurance based on a 100 year flood in a world of 10 year floods, they will very quickly go bankrupt. This is the problem facing global insurance companies, as per a new report from Moody’s.

Between excesses, exclusions, people not buying insurance, and the trouble with estimating insurance values, they estimate that the changing climate could result in $41.4 trillion per year worth of uninsured climate damage globally by 2040. They’ve even created a global map of where and how those losses may manifest. For instance, the rising frequency and intensity of Californian wildfires mean that it’s increasingly difficult now to cover fire damage – 30 per cent of losses are likely to be uninsured.

“It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.”

By this measure, the UK comes off actually quite lightly. The near ubiquity of home and property insurance (usually a basic requirement if one has a mortgage) means that basic cover is quite broad. But still, there is a rising threat of things like flood and storm damage, which means that Moody’s estimates that 25% of the cost of damage and loss from either would be uninsured by 2040.

Part of the problem is that climate damage has been creeping up on us quite slowly, and insurance companies have tended to be reactive rather than proactive – they increase rates after they see their claims start to rise, rather than modelling ahead of time what they could become.

The costs of climate losses are becoming significant, though. They almost certainly outpace the annual profits of the oil companies that have produced the climate damage – yes, this means that the price of oil (high as it is) would be selling at a loss if the oil companies had to pay to clean up their own mess. Instead, we all have to pay even more because they don’t.

Climate activists have been campaigning to try to prevent the climate emergency for decades. Scientists have known it would happen for well over a century. Oil lobbyists have spent lavishly on our politicians to ensure even greater profits can be reaped without having to pay for the consequences. And wars have and are still being fought to keep the pipes flowing.

It didn’t have to be that way, but where scientists and activists could be ignored, it might well be that the insurance agents are the ones that can’t be. It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.

The problem is that this is a reactive force. Only once people see the damage happening will they respond. But the climate effects are so gradual that even if we collectively stopped emitting CO2 globally today, the climate will continue to get worse for perhaps decades still before things begin to repair.

This isn’t a reason not to do that. Every tonne of pollution makes the problem worse. Every day of delay makes the problem worse. Every politician calling for more oil extraction despite all of the evidence to the contrary makes their own contribution to global ecocide worse. But also, every tonne of pollution avoided by switching to renewables or reducing unnecessary demand makes the problem less worse by the same degree.

The solution is in front of us. We know how to fix the climate emergency. It won’t require magic technology, mass poverty, or a collapse in wellbeing – quite the opposite. The solution is a world that, once we live in it, we’ll wonder why we didn’t demand it sooner.

Who Watches the Watchdogs?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we’ll never know.” – Terry Pratchett

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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Almost buried under other political scandals afflicting the Scottish Government and the SNP right now was the news that the Government was found in contempt of court in a case involving the Scottish Information Commission.

The details of the case aren’t particularly relevant to this article though they are part of one of those other scandals. It involved an FOI request to release the legal advice given to the Scottish Government relating to an ethics inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon after an accusation that she breached rules during the investigation into Alex Salmond. While Sturgeon was cleared of wrongdoing following that investigation, a Freedom of Information request to reveal the advice was upheld as valid and the Government was ordered in November 2025 to release the files by January 15th 2026.

The Government failed to do so and the Information Commissioner began legal proceedings over the matter while extending a further deadline of January 22nd. The Government did release the files more than a month after the extended deadline but this month the court found that the delay was deliberate (rather than merely a symptom of the size and complexity of the files as the Government claimed) and disregarding both the Commissioner and the courts amounted to contempt.

And so the Scottish Government now has a criminal record for contempt of court. Not that it particular matters in any real sense as the punishment levied was merely an admonishment (the lightest sentence in Scots Law and really just a formal and legal version of a stern talking to) and an order to pay the Information Commission’s legal costs (given that the Commission is entirely funded by the Scottish Government this just means the same public money going to lawyers, just via a different accounting line).

This is the first time that any Scottish Government has been found in contempt like this and it’s certainly the most serious breach of information regulations that I can find but it’s hardly the first. Both the current Information Commissioner David Hamilton and his immediate predecessor Daren Fitzhenry have been scathing about the Government’s approach to Freedom of Information.

It’s not even the first time John Swinney has transgressed the lines – in 2018, Fitzhenry published an “intervention report” warning about Ministers, including Swinney, deliberately obstructing the FOI process by treating requests from journalists in a different manner from those submitted by the general public, resulting in more rejections and delays to responses if a journalist was identified as making the request. By 2023 as Fitzhenry was passing over to his successor, the final progress report into the Government’s reforms to this behaviour were noted as inadequate with the report saying:

“The Commissioner anticipated that this report would announce the successful conclusion of this intervention, but, unfortunately, the Scottish Government’s improvement activity has not reached a point where this work can be appropriately concluded.”

I have nothing but admiration for Hamilton and Fitzhenry. It’s a difficult job holding Government to account. It’s harder still within the context of the “Commissioner Landscape” that Scotland is in. Previous Governments have been farming out a lot of roles to Commissioners over the years and the varying statuses of each of them has made things extremely messy.

Some positions, like the Information Commissioner, have extremely well defined roles and significant powers – as evidenced by the contempt verdict – but others appear to be little more than purely advisory and have little recourse when the Government decides to ignore the advice.

=Others still chafe under the pressure of making sure that the advice they give to Government is the advice that they already want to hear (in 2023, the then Children’s Commissioner Bruce Adamson only gave a furious rebuke towards the failings of Nicola Sturgeon’s Government to properly embed human rights legislation a week before he left the office, though it’s noteworthy that his successor Nicola Killean is publicly warning this week of the Swinney Government’s failure to ensure that homeless children are placed in safe temporary accommodation).

There was also an identified risk of Commissioners being set up in response to political events such as the downgrading or removal of Ministerial responsibilities – hence the calls for roles such as a Commissioner for Older People, which we supported on the merits of the case for the role even though it added to the broader landscape problem.

In 2024, Common Weal responded to a Scottish Government consultation on reforming this landscape essentially by calling for a standardisation of the role of Commissioners and to make it far more clear who they report to within the Scottish governance structure. Commissioners shouldn’t be seen as merely advisors to Ministers or as a second-best alternative to them but should be seen as the right arm of Parliament (not Government) in holding Government to account.

This principle is, of course, complicated by the realities of politics. For a start, while it is indeed Parliament (not Government) who approves of appointments to the top jobs in a Commission (technically they are appointed by the King, on the nomination by Parliament but with the understanding that the King could appoint anyone they like but promise not to, because monarchies remain a ridiculous way to run a country), it is Government who decides the budget for the Commission. And herein lies the risk in a time where Governments keep being told what to do by people they control the purse strings of.

A few years ago, Audit Scotland started producing more and more critical reports of Government spending only to find that their budget was slashed in 2022. It’s not hard to see how a Government that is constantly being reminded that its projects are late and over budget might prefer for those reports to go away and if the problem can’t be solved, they could simply defund the messenger.

There’s no evidence of this happening at the Information Commission at the moment – their latest accounts show an increase in their operations over the previous year – though it’s worth noting that the Commissioner has already warned that the time spent forcing the Government to comply with the law is eating too much of their resources. I worry that between this new contempt judgement and a stated objective of the current Government to cut the public sector it might be that this office is one that is ordered to accept its (not so) “fair share” of those cuts.

This would obviously be deleterious for both Parliament, the public and our very democracy. Voters cannot hold Government to account if we can’t see what they are doing and so Freedom of Information is, in a very real sense, the foundation stone of our democracy.

All parties in Parliament have a vested interest in ensuring that all Governments are maximally transparent (they can’t hold the Government to account if they can’t see what’s happening either) but I’m going to single out just one. Fresh from their victory (tinged by party tribalism as it was) in securing an independent inquiry of political party finances, I’m going to lay the job of protecting the Information Commission at the door of the Scottish Greens in particular. It’s well within their remit of party policy but more than that, as a party with a history of supporting Government budgets I would say that failing to protect the functions of vital watchdogs from potential cuts would mean complicity in those cuts.

Even this is only a temporary patch on the problem though. Scotland would only be one hostile majority government away from being able push through cuts even despite a united opposition. This is why Common Weal advocates for a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee our elected chamber and we suggest that Commissions and Commissioners should be tasked with submitting their desired budgets to the Assembly to be approved before they are passed to Government to include in the national budget. This would apply a level of safeguarding and scrutiny to the whole process to make sure both that demands are not excessive and that any changes in funding from the Government are driven by need and not by political advantage.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the need for transparent government. It won’t be the last. The moment we stop being able to see what Government is doing is the moment they stop caring about being seen when doing things. This goes for when the regulations aren’t good enough. This goes for when the regulations aren’t followed and no-one holds them to account. We’re lucky that this time both worked. We need to be lucky every time though. A Government that decides it wants to pull down the curtain of secrecy only needs to be lucky once.

How to solve renewable constraint payments

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 13 Comments

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

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 would like you to try an experiment with me. Talk about renewables with someone you know who isn’t in the political bubble. It doesn’t really matter if they are for or against renewable energy, but I want you to keep track of how long it takes before they mention a particularly pointed claim against especially wind turbines.

“When it’s too windy, they pay the owners to turn them off!”

What they’re talking about is called “constraint payments”. And the people saying this have a good point. These payments are a major issue at this stage in the now inevitable transition away from fossil fuels and it’s a consequence of how renewable generators produce energy in a ‘non-dispatchable’ manner.

With many fossil fuel generators, the generators can be turned on or off to suit demand (it’s actually not as simple as that – many generators can’t really be ramped up and down or doing so is neither cheap nor efficient and things like nuclear plants are even more limited in how they can respond to demand) but wind turbines only produce energy when the wind blows. This is a problem if there’s no wind but there’s high demand, but it’s also a problem if there’s high wind but low demand – an overnight storm when everyone is sleeping could well overload the grid.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that the UK has an extremely privatised energy generation sector. If everything was owned by the State under, for example, GB Energy (not my preferred solution, but we’ll get back to that), then turbines could be strategically turned off so that supply matched demand. Under a state monopoly, the revenue from the generation would go down, but as revenue isn’t as important as service (I would hope that a single state energy company would run as a not-for-profit anyway) then it all balances out in the end anyway.

The problem comes when various different private companies own some but not all of the turbines. If the energy regulator issues an instruction to a private company to stop generating, then they lose revenue but their competitor who has been chosen today to keep their turbines turning might not.

The solution, to stop the private companies complaining, is constraint payments. Simply paying the generators to shut up and turn their turbines off for the greater good. It’s hardly an optimal solution and it rightly earns the ire of people who live near the turbines but are still paying through their teeth for energy because of all of the other problems we have in the system.

A possible solution came to me this week while reviewing some of the work coming out of our Energy Working Group. The UK is pumping out an overwhelming number of public consultations on energy transformation just now. Common Weal doesn’t usually respond to UK consultations but energy is such an important issue that we feel that we must. However, some of them are ‘public’ in name only as they are long, technical and extremely pedantic in a way that means that only those with specific expertise in the energy sector have a hope of responding to them meaningfully. They certainly don’t adhere to the UK’s own principles of good public consultation.

But our unsung heroes in the Energy Group are doing an amazing job – especially Gordon Morgan who has been taking the lead on many of the responses. I hope to share the latest of them with you all soon.

It was in one of his most recent responses that he mentions something that caught my eye. Common Weal is still arguing for the UK energy sector to be rearranged along the lines of Zonal Pricing. Rather than the current system that prices electricity essentially based on the distance between the generator and London and then from London to you house (there were good reasons for this in the age of coal, not so much now), Great Britain would be split into multiple zones and if your zone happened to be a net exporter of energy, then you could get a discount on your bills – as Scotland is a massive resource for renewables, this would almost certainly mean Scotland would get deeper discounts than, say, London.

There are complications with this plan that Sweden – which has implemented a form of zonal pricing – has to contend with. What happens if the energy exporting zone hits the limits of what it can export? If an Island is generating more energy than it can physically export to the mainland, or if the interconnectors between Scotland and England are maxxed out? If the bottleneck in the system isn’t the generators or the users, but the infrastructure in between?

In Sweden’s case, they have their own form of constraint payment – a congestion revenue – that kicks in and starts arising when generators need to move energy out of their zone. The system isn’t quite the same as the constraint payments issue but here is the key difference between here and there.

In Britain, the constraint payments can be stuffed into the pockets of the owner of the generator. In Sweden, the congestion revenue payments must either be returned to consumers as a discount or must be invested into means of reducing the need for future constraint payments. The payments pay to try to remove the need for themselves.

“If Sweden can do it, why can’t the UK?”

What this means in practice is that there are more investments into interconnectors between the Zones. It could also mean more investment into things like energy storage so that instead of shutting down capacity when limits are reached, then the batteries can be charged instead and then used when demand within the Zone exceeds supply.

Like Sweden does, I could even see a case for discounts or negative pricing for consumers to try to encourage more energy use within the Zone during these times (though in line with Circular Economy principles, we don’t want to encourage too much outright wasteful usage).

So my proposal is this: If Sweden can do it, why can’t the UK (or Scotland, if we ever become independent or energy gets more substantially devolved)?

We don’t have the inter-Zone issue because we don’t (yet) have Zonal Pricing, but the same principle could apply to constraint payments more generally. Companies could continue to collect payments in exchange for turning their turbines off during high winds, but they must not book the money as a profit for themselves. Instead, the payments must be invested into reducing the need for future constraints. They could invest the money into interconnectors (or into driving up more demand within high resource Zones to minimise the need for more interconnector cables), or into energy storage, or pass it down as a discount to customers. But they can’t just keep the cash.

As I say, none of this is my preferred solution. The private sector led, market model of energy doesn’t work (a view recently presented by a coalition of African trade unions, showing that commentators in the UK really need to start looking beyond our borders for better ideas) and we really should be bringing our energy sector back into public ownership. But until that happens, we could be regulating and running the private sector a lot more tightly than we currently do. This one idea – using constraint payments to drive the transition rather than pad the pockets of shareholders – could be a useful step in that direction.

Scotland’s houses are crumbling around us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week…
The bottom is out of the Universe.”
– Rudyard Kipling

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 page here.

A photo of a dilapidated house in the Scottish Highlands Image Credit: Trevor Littlewood, CC BY-SA.

This week I had planned to write an article about the recent publication by the Climate Change Committee focusing on its recommendations around adapting buildings for climate change. The way we used to design houses for a colder, dryer climate with fewer hot and cold extremes is simply no longer sufficient but there is also a challenge with applying a one-size-fits-all approach to policy across the UK.

As we’ve seen just this week, the south of England is sooner going to be regularly seeing 40C summers while Scotland is likely to still only see absolute maximums in the low 30s. While the latter is still too hot (I basically cease to function above about 25C), the engineering challenges of keeping houses cool in an occasional 30C heatwave is very different from keeping them cool in a regular summer high of 40C.

Scotland’s houses need to be adapted, and they need to be retrofitted to limit the damage they continue to do to the environment (Common Weal is still engaging with the Scottish Government to shape policies such as the PassivHaus-equivalent energy efficiency regulations and the National Housing Agency).

But on Tuesday, the Scottish Government published some data that changed my focus entirely. It’s not that we don’t need to have that conversation about appropriate adaptations or that adaptations are no longer needed, but that a lot of these adaptations may need to happen at the same time as or after critical repairs are done to the houses just to bring them up to current standards.

The headline figure is stark. More than half of Scotland’s houses, 55 per cent of them, fail the Scottish Government’s basic housing quality standards. Twenty-eight per cent of them fail the legal “Tolerable Minimum” standard and could therefore be deemed not fit for human habitation.

The Scottish Housing Quality Standard was designed in 2004 with a view to applying it to social rented houses. The idea being that this should be the minimum standard of repair and of the provision of amenities delivered to social housing tenants. This standard could be set at a level higher than the minimum legal limit as a means of trying to drive up standards as a whole across the housing sector but also in recognition that because Scotland and the UK sold off and deprioritised social housing as a means of providing houses, those who remain in social houses now are often more vulnerable to poor housing provision than owner-occupiers.

This dataset does not apply the SHQS only to social housing though, but to all houses in the survey. It shows though that if the goal really was to drive up standards across the sector, then it has failed. As said, the average failure rate across all houses in Scotland is 55 per cent. Amongst social houses alone, it’s only(!) 41 per cent, but for houses that are owner-occupied, 60 per cent of them fail this quality standard. For private rented houses, it’s even worse at 62 per cent.

The minimum Tolerable Standard (TS) is even more stringent. Where the SHQS demands provision of services including a decent standard of kitchen and bathroom, the minimum Tolerable Standard can be met with services like a basically functioning indoor toilet and a working sink in the kitchen delivering potable water.

Nevertheless, 28 per cent of Scotland’s houses fail to meet this standard. Just 10 per cent of social houses fail the MTS (reflecting the regulated legal duty of local authorities to provide decent housing), while 24 per cent – almost one-in-four – private rented houses fail the TS (reflecting perhaps that the legal duty placed on private landlords is not being enforced nearly as strongly as it is on social houses). Meanwhile, 36 per cent of owner-occupied houses appear to fall below the legal minimum standard for habitation. Local Authorities technically have the power to mandate owners to undertake repairs, to repair them on behalf of owners or to condemn the house entirely but, in practice, these powers are rarely invoked.

There is a caveat in the private rented figures though. For many local authorities in Scotland, the data on the SHQS and TS failure rates for private rented houses are not available due to lack of responses to the survey. This perhaps makes sense. If you were a private landlord and you owned a house that was in bad need of repairs that you, the owner, weren’t carrying out, would you tell the Government that you were still renting it out despite that?

The local authority with the best(!) housing on the list is West Lothian where only 42 per cent of houses fail to meet the SHQS. The worst is neighbouring East Lothian where 66 per cent – two houses in every three – fail the standard. This is almost a paradoxical result given that East Lothian scores substantially higher than the West on deprivation metrics but again this perhaps makes sense in light of local authorities being better regulated than private landlords or owner-occupiers.

“It’s not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day”

There are still huge data gaps in this study. The total survey only covers around 2,500 houses across Scotland meaning that if the survey contacted a completely different set of houses each year, it would take over a thousand years to survey every house. This isn’t normally a problem for statistical surveys when considering the nation as a whole but it does run into problems when breaking the data down by Local Authority (only 299 houses were surveyed in Glasgow, only 11 in Orkney) and it becomes statistically useless when breaking things down even further within those local authorities (the two social rented houses and the single private rented house survey in Na h-Eileanan Siar are possibly not representative samples of rented housing on those islands).

Scotland needs far better data on subjects like this if we are going to form decent public policy – especially when so much of that policy is likely to be delivered by local authorities. They need to know what houses are like in their patch and so a limited national-scale survey simply isn’t good enough. Perhaps the Scottish Government will finally get around to adopting its own policy of launching a Scottish Statistics Agency to help fill data gaps like this.

But this is a bigger problem than data gaps. There are obviously serious failings in Scottish private rented regulations if so many landlords are renting out badly repaired homes that we can see it in the stats even just from the landlords brave enough to admit it. And there are even deeper problems – perhaps linked to inequality and deprivation, perhaps linked to the poor build quality of British houses built by profiteering developers – that mean that owner-occupiers are struggling to maintain their houses, never mind upgrade them to meet climate and energy efficiency standards.

A lot of this isn’t the fault of owners. They mostly weren’t the ones who built the houses either long before the climate emergency became as urgent as it now is or who built them to such shoddy standards that they are now barely surviving beyond the lifetime of their first mortgage. Therefore, owners cannot simply be dumped with the upfront costs of repairing and then upgrading their homes. If they could, they would have done so already. It’s not always about the money. Working out what you need is a specialist skill. Finding the traders who can do the work is another one. Inspecting and auditing their work so they don’t just leave you with even more problems is another one again.

Common Weal has advocated that the fastest, cheapest and most effective way to get Scotland’s houses climate-ready is not to just to ramp up standards and hope that owners will spend their own money to keep up, but to enact that national-scale public works programme to get everyone’s houses up to where they need to be. The issue that these statistics bring into focus is that it’s simply not enough to fit loft insulation and bolt solar panels onto a house with a leaking roof and call it a day.

Every house in Scotland needs to be surveyed prior to this public works upgrade and where repairs are needed, these need to be included in the package. And yes, this needs to be a public works project even for owners who can ‘afford’ to pay for the repairs and upgrades – we can take the money back in taxes later.

But this kind of strategic thinking on housing does not appear to be something that the Government is doing. The two housing policies announced since the election have been the folding of the role of a dedicated Cabinet Secretary for Housing into a broader remit within Social Justice (which could be played to advantage if housing policy is itself dedicated towards the goals of social justice rather than merely inflating house prices for the purposes of boosting corporate profits and capital accumulation) and to announce an equity loan fund which will almost certainly inflate house prices to boost corporate profits and capital accumulation. As we briefed last year, there is very little evidence that First Homes Fund will help the kind of people who couldn’t afford to buy a home without the loan.

This is not the first time that Swinney has announced a policy without evidence. Last year, we revealed that he had absolutely no evidence to back up his claim that increasing the Scottish Child Payment would incentivise mothers to stop working. That attitude cannot be allowed to carry through to housing policy too.

Housing is foundational to the entire economy and our entire society. With Scotland’s climate rapidly changing, the very buildings we live in need to change with it. But before we can even do that, or at least as we embark on that job, we need to fix the houses we have. Everyone deserves a decent roof over their head. According to these statistics on the state of repair of Scottish homes, far too many people in Scotland don’t have one.

Workers aren’t lazy; they’re being left behind

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. – Bertrand Russell

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 page here.

You will probably know the story right now. That the way to get the UK’s economy growing is to get more people working. And the reason that they’re not working is because a bunch of young people are lazy, feckless and that people are faking mental illness to avoid work and sponge off the benefits system. Claims that the benefit bill now exceeds income tax revenue are flowing around right-wing media outlets to try to delegitimise the entire social security system.

The problem with the story is that much of it is flat out false and most of the rest is misleading to the point of meaninglessness.

To take that last claim head-on, Full Fact did a thorough debunking of it. The total UK social security ‘bill’ has been higher than income tax revenue for quite some time now, but even that point is utterly irrelevant. Income tax is not the only tax paid as a result of wages, National Insurance is too. So even if the benefit bill was only paid for out of direct taxation on worker wages, the claim would be false. But even that idea is itself wrong.

Direct income taxes aren’t hypothecated to pay for social security (not even National Insurance which only sits in a separate pot for historical reasons – all UK public spending comes out of the general Consolidated Fund). Saying that benefits are unsustainable because they cost the country more than it receives in income tax is precisely as illogical as saying that the UK’s military budget is unsustainable because it costs more than revenue from landfill taxes. National budgeting simply does not work like that (I’ll go into the MMT model of how national public budgeting for a currency-sovereign nation actually works another time).

The argument itself begs an important question. If the claim was true – what would its right-wing promoters want to do about it? ‘Cut benefits’, sure, but which ones? The state pension? Anything they personally claim? What kind of world do they think they would create if they ‘won’?

A similar story emerges when looking at young workers. A lot of newspaper lines have been written about unemployed people and feckless ‘NEETs’ who are neither working nor seeking work. To fix the economy, we’re told, those people need to be starved into working via benefits cuts.

Never mind that it won’t work (plenty of data shows that a Universal Basic Income – giving poor unemployed people more money, not less, is the key to improving life chances by allowing people to work under less duress or to improve their prospects through education and training rather than taking the only job that lets them eat tonight).

A large number of people who are ‘NEET’ are people who no reasonable person thinks should be told to drop what they’re doing and go work. The vast majority (in order of size of group) have a long term illness, are students, care for someone, or are retired while younger than state pension age.

What we’re actually seeing among vulnerable workers is a ladder being pulled away from them. There are currently approximately 700,000 job vacancies across the UK. There are approximately 1.8 million people currently unemployed (plus another million who are NEET). This means that there are about 2.5 people actively looking for work for every posted vacancy. This number rises to four people per job if you force the NEETs out to work regardless of their circumstances.

Those two numbers don’t equally divide into each other either. Employment isn’t fungible. A newly redundant senior civil servant isn’t going to take an entry level cafe job if they can help it. A newly graduated student isn’t going to walk into the vacancy left behind by the civil servant. Neither are going to think a job in Kent is going to be worth much to them if they both live in Inverness and can’t or don’t want to move. At some point this kind of ‘structural unemployment’ starts to matter more than the ‘frictional unemployment’ that happens when, for example, the laser engineer I used to be moves from one laser company to another.

“Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life.”

This means that it’s simply not a matter of cutting benefits till people squeak and go get a job if the job doesn’t exist for them to get.

And it’s about to get worse, especially for young workers. The latest figures show that not only are posted job vacancies not there, the number of jobs in the economy may be shrinking – around 100,000 jobs were lost in April this year, mostly in sectors like retail and food services. This paints a picture of households starting to cut back on eating out or even on how much they are buying as an economic system rocked by global instability starts to bite.

It’s not just the poor who need more money, it’s everyone else too – at least insofar as the current economic structure is concerned. If politicians want a growing economy based on consumerism, then they are going to need more consumers (immigration rates are falling again and the number of births and deaths in the UK is already nearly net-zero…) and those consumers are going to need more money to spend on consumption. This model of economics simply is not working and is about to come right off the rails even before the impacts of the Iran war and the rise of AI really start feeding through.

Common Weal will soon be publishing a new report looking in detail at the state of income and inequality in Scotland and the results are shocking but one of the most shocking results is the extent to which households fall below not the official poverty line but the line of a ‘minimum decent standard of living’. Even relatively well off households are struggling to raise kids to a decent standard. Beyond this paper we’re going to have to look at how we can pull even those households up not just through better jobs and more income but by changing the way the economy works.

If you can’t afford to buy books, it shouldn’t matter because we have more libraries. Your house should be a decent home at a decent price, not a leaking mould trap that your landlord is profiting from. And the basic infrastructure of your life, like energy, should be there to support you, not pad the profits of the shareholders of the equity funds that own your energy supplier.

Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life. What we actually bought was hard work without the reward while still being blamed for not working hard enough by those who got the reward without even having to do the work.

This says that the entire game is rigged against us. Perhaps it’s time to play a different game.

The Iran War sounds a warning for all of Scotland’s Critical Minerals

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Sooner or later every war of trade becomes a war of blood.” – Eugene V. Debs

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.

In the gap between me writing this and you reading it, a lot of things will have changed. If you read this online on Friday morning, the Scottish election polls were closed, but we didn’t know the results yet. If you read it in print in The National on Sunday, we’ll knew by then who would and would not be members of the next Scottish Parliament. By the time I’ve posted it here on this blog we might know who the actual Government would be.

And by then, maybe the Iran War would still be going on. Or maybe Trump would have pledged another ceasefire. Or maybe he’d reneged on it again.

Either way, the world price of oil is likely to still be high and volatile, and we’re all going to continue suffering problems because of it. People in rich countries will get poorer because everything will cost more. People in poor countries will likely lose access to critical materials completely. I am extremely concerned about the dual effects of the loss of fertilisers and fuel for agriculture, combined with a projected very strong El Niño climate event this year.

Politics in the UK appears to be scrabbling around how to deal with fuel disruptions, and more than a few political parties appear to be willing to set the world just a little more on fire by trying to boost production from the North Sea as a replacement for oil being diverted and disrupted due to the war.

Here’s the thing, though. If we replace one barrel of oil we’ve lost in imports with one barrel of domestic oil, we won’t reduce the price of oil (it being a globally priced commodity), and tomorrow, we need to find another barrel of oil. If, instead, we replace the demand for that barrel of oil with heat insulation and a wind turbine or a set of solar panels and batteries, we never need to buy that barrel of oil again.

Even if post-war trade returns to ‘normal’, the countries that have responded by weaning themselves further off of oil will never be threatened by that kind of oil war again, either in Iran or anywhere else that Trump or his successors or allies wish to invade next. The bonus is that right now, the solar panels and batteries are even cheaper than the oil they’d replace.

But there is a complication there, too. Building solar panels and batteries also requires critical minerals, and right now, that means often not just importing those minerals from vulnerable countries, but probably importing the finished products from countries like China with all of the problems that entails, too. Switching one insecurity for another doesn’t make us more secure.

This week, a paper I contributed to was launched by Friends of the Earth Scotland and various other coalition partners, calling for the UK and devolved governments to develop a better strategy around critical minerals of all kinds. The report Aligning UK critical mineral policies with the human rights and environmental priorities of devolved nations considers where critical minerals are, well, most critical to various aspects of our economy, from energy to industry to the military and advocates for a more strategic approach to their use via the implementation of Circular Economy principles.

“While I’ve come to believe that Scotland has largely lost control over the current renewable energy transition, we could and should be building up our manufacturing industries around repairing, recycling and rebuilding the next generation of renewables”

This is the insurmountable advantage that renewables have over oil. Oil is disposable because you have to burn it to make it useful. Renewable energy generators are reusable. They just keep generating energy after they are built. They are also recyclable. If designed properly, the materials in a solar panel or a battery can be used to make another solar panel or battery once the first one eventually breaks (the lithium in a battery can be recovered with something like 90% efficiency, meaning that lithium mined today could still be being used in a battery centuries from now).

I mentioned in a recent article in The National (26th Feb 2026) that while I’ve come to believe that Scotland has largely lost control over the current renewable energy transition, we could and should be building up our manufacturing industries around repairing, recycling and rebuilding the next generation of renewables so that when the current set of imported generators starts to wear out we can replace them with Scottish made (and owned!) versions. At the same time, we should be actively exploring alternatives to critical minerals so that we’re not so vulnerable to supplies being disrupted. Scotland doesn’t have a lot of lithium to mine, but we do have plenty of seawater and sodium batteries are becoming a very interesting alternative to lithium for many purposes.

Ultimately, the lesson of this new paper is that the whims of the “free market” do not hold up in environments where trade is not free and where autocrats can cause chaos for any real or imagined reason. This means that we need deliberate, strategic government policy in place to keep us safe, our economies resilient and our politicians listening only to profiteering megacorporations or lurching from crisis to crisis but actually building a country and ultimately a planet that puts All of Us First.

2026 Scottish Parliamentary Elections: The Day After

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn’t matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did.” – Cassandra Clare

This is an original post, not previously published elsewhere. If you would like to support me or this blog, please see my donate page here.

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

The results are in and we now know the shape of the Scottish Parliament. 58 SNP, 17 Labour, 17 Reform, 15 Green, 12 Conservative and 10 Liberal Democrats.

We don’t yet know the shape of the Scottish Government but the result is pretty certain so long as there are no major U-turns from the political party promises beforehand. The SNP will form a minority government and try to get their budgets and bills passed on an ad hoc basis.

I do not believe we’ll see a formal coalition agreement or even a looser cooperation agreement of confidence and supply (where a smaller party promises to support the annual budget and other votes where failure would result in the automatic fall of the government). The SNP still feel rather burned by the failure of their cooperation agreement with the Greens and while I think the Greens would consider a second shot, they are rather wary of being used and discarded again like they were last time.

The other probable source of a kingmaker is the Liberal Democrats who have outright refused to join a formal coalition with the nationalists but have signalled willingness to support budgets etc. Indeed, I believe courting Lib Dem votes for the last budget before the election was the SNP’s way of testing whether such an agreement would be acceptable to their own members (who skew rather more left and green than the leadership does).

It is notable that the same is true for the other parties as well. Any combination of SNP plus one other party would allow a Bill to pass and that technically should mean a fair bit of power-brokering or at least the SNP playing parties against each other. In practice, the Conservatives and Reform are so ideologically opposed to the SNP to support anything and La

For me as a political lobbyist, this was a good result all-in. A majority government tends to be one that closes ranks and pushes outside voices completely outside (or brings them in so close that everyone else can’t see them…but that’s a transparency talk for another time)

For the third time in a row since 2011, we have a pro-independence Parliament with 73 MSPs being representatives of pro-independence parties (if any MSPs on the other side would like to raise their personal convictions despite their party position, do let me know) though this was gained on just 41% of the proportional vote (the discrepancy is because while the Scottish Parliament is more proportional than the UK Parliament, it’s still got a built in advantage for the largest party). This is a drop from 48.4% of the proportional vote for the SNP + Greens in 2021. There have been increasing signs that while sentiment towards independence has been rising, there is a growing dissatisfaction with political parties in their delivery. This could prove important in the coming months especially now that there are openly pro-nationalist governments in place in all three of the devolved nations of the UK. This is probably the most important point to note out of the elections generally. While this doesn’t mean that independence is now inevitable in any or all of those nations, had this happened, say, to a Soviet or colonial bloc in the 20th century, pundits would indeed be predicting the bloc’s imminent demise and they would probably have been right.

Back to the parties though, there is going to be a lot more relief and disappointment than glee in the first week of the Parliament.

SNP

The SNP lost seats and lost vote share. Even though they remain the largest party, remain in government, held most of their “big hitter” politicians (with the notable departure of Angus Robertson who came third in his constituency seat, now taken by Green Lorna Slater) they did not make advances and fell back significantly from latter-day polling that suggested they might be in the running for an outright majority. They remain in a commanding position in Parliament – not least because of the fragmentation of their opponents – but being seven seats short of winning a vote means that they will be extremely reliant on other parties to get anything done. They may try to just do things boldly and challenge others to stop them but John Swinney isn’t Alex Salmond. I’ve never known him to start a fight that he didn’t know he’d already won and I’ve rarely known him to be sure that he’s won until he has.

Labour

This was a disaster of a campaign for Labour. Overshadowed by the scandals hitting their parent party and Keir Starmer down south, they decided not to campaign on policy but on a popularity contest. They pumped massive amounts of money into an advertising campaign for Anas Sarwar specifically and it didn’t work. He lost his constituency seat (though he remains an MSP due to his position on the Regional List) and oversaw a substantial loss of seats. It was, however, not as bad as some polls suggested and even though they are (joint) 2nd place in terms of seats, they were hard done by by the electoral system. In a truly proportionate system, they should have won 20-21 seats, rather than the 17 they have now.

Still, this leaves Labour largely frozen out of the Scottish politics as a party. Their best hope of influence is to do what they accidentally did last Parliament. Back then Sarwar lacked control over his MSPs and basically let them put forward Members’ Bills in areas of interest. This led to the PassivHaus Bill, substantial movements in Freedom of Information, a Land Reform policy that the Government voted down but which has since been adopted by the Greens and others. The party’s fortunes are going to remain closely tied to that of Starmer and Sarwar…but their MSPs may have fight in them yet.

Reform

This is objectively another disappointing result for Reform. Their polls have peaked in recent months and global setbacks to the Far-Right Movement may have ripples here too. The party that was almost certain to go from near-zero to the 2nd party in Parliament only managed joint-second and with far fewer than the up-to 30 seats they were aiming for. I believe their leader’s performance in the debates played a role here. Malcolm Offord’s blithe comment about his multitude of houses and yachts did not endear him to a public for whom the cost-of-living crisis is growing and is plainly being exacerbated by Reform’s allies rather than the immigrants that the party rose to power by demonising.

Greens

One of the winners of the elections, the Greens pulled off some noteworthy victories including their first set of constituency wins (it wasn’t that long ago that they were told by opponents that they weren’t even a “real” party if they couldn’t win in the constituencies. While that slur hasn’t been deployed in a while, it’s certainly no longer applicable anyway). The planet is in greater need of climate action than ever and between the SNP’s continued attempts to backslide on climate policy and Reform’s outright climate denial policies, there is a risk to Scotland here that the Greens will have to work hard resist.

Conservatives

Another of the election’s losers. Devoured by Reform even as they tried to radicalise to save themselves, only to find that the radicals devouring them could do it better. Nevertheless, the Conservatives held up rather better than I expected. Their strongholds in the South remain. My experience of farmers is that where they skew Conservative and Localist, it’s mostly because they want to be left alone rather than out of ideological rightward skew. For reasons mentioned above, the Tories will be largely frozen out of the Parliament this session. When the Right speak, Reform will be louder and first in the pecking order so the Conservatives will have to find a way of distinguishing themselves. There is merit to the idea of them pulling back to a centre-right “Ruth Davidson” position as that is now a clear gap in Scottish politics, but we’ll have to see if there’s anyone left in the party to pull that off.

Liberal Democrats

Probably the biggest winners of the election given the power they might soon have, the Lib Dems should be celebrating this weekend. I’ll admit that there’s plenty in their manifesto that should appeal broadly even to the Left should they want to push it so they may well get a lot done this session. Their vulnerability is that they can’t push too hard or the SNP will just pick another partner to get a vote passed but this is true for everyone else too. We’ll have to see which tail wags which dog going forward.

And everyone else

No other party got elected to Parliament nor did any independents. This is despite the Extremely Online set of supporters who were absolutely convinced that with the power of a tweet, they could get 125% of SNP voters to vote for them on the List and thus win an absolute super-majority. The high profile failures of Alba and Your Party are also a lesson to be learned. Building political parties is not easy. It takes years and maybe even decades of work to build success (seriously…both the SNP and Nigel Farage’s various parties are a lesson here in how long it takes) and even then it’s not a given and everything can blow away like smoke with a single bad headline.

No, it’s not fair that Scotland has such a high effective electoral threshold before votes become seats but we’re not looking at a German system here where a party was locked out because it got 4.9% of the vote but missed the 5.0% threshold. None of the parties who didn’t get a seat managed to clear 1% of the vote. The “best performing” one, with 0.88% of the vote, wasn’t even a real party but is a front group designed to try to confuse and steal votes from Green voters. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for smaller parties – I genuinely wish we had a more diverse Parliament – but it won’t happen without hard graft in the communities to build votes and to win people with your policies. There are five years until the next election. That isn’t as long as one might think.

How Common is your manifesto?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Every election is determined by the people who show up.” – Larry J. Sabato

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.

The elections are now just hours away and pretty soon we’ll all be scrambling into action to hold the parties in Parliament (particularly those who end up in Government) to get them to fulfil the promises they’ve made to you.

In this, my last post before the vote, I want to have a very brief look through some of the main manifestos to pull out the most and least ‘Common Weal’ policy in each them. Parties – even those constantly at loggerheads over the slightest ideological deviation and even those who appear to have almost no ideological overlap at all often agree with each other on a surprising number of policies (even if they get to them from wildly different positions and motivations – for example, a party might want a Universal Basic Income because it would allow them to eradicate poverty while another might want it because it would allow them to privatise public services and hand out vouchers for you to spend to buy those services instead).

None of this should be in any way construed as an endorsement of any of the parties mentioned though. Common Weal is party neutral and we lobby all parties to adopt our ideals (obviously this is an easier task with some than with others though).

I also can’t cover every party standing in this election. I’m sticking to the largest ones which, according to current polling, have a reasonable chance of winning seats after the election. I have a library of many of the manifestos for this election which includes some of the smaller parties, though even this is non-exhaustive. Apologies if the party you personally support isn’t covered here due to those caveats (though if your party’s manifesto isn’t yet in my library, please let me know and I’ll get it added!).

As a final caveat, do please go and read Nick Kempe’s article looking at mentions of care and care reform in the manifestos as this is also an area that Common Weal are heavily involved in. To avoid doubling our work, I’m steering a little away from care here and looking at Common Weal policies in other areas instead.

SNP

The SNP are almost certainly going to be the largest party in Parliament after next week and will have a good chance of being returned as the principle party of Government. The question in this election really seems to be more whether they’ll have an outright majority, will form another minority government and try to pass budgets etc with ad hoc alliances (likely with the Lib Dems and/or Greens) or whether they’ll form a more formal coalition or cooperation agreement with one or more other parties.

The difference from a lobbying standpoint for us is that minority governments may need to negotiate with other partners to get votes passed and therefore are more open to compromise or outside ideas whereas majority governments can just whip things through on party loyalty.

Most Common Policy

It’s only a single half-sentence in the manifesto but the announcement of a National Housing Agency isn’t just in alignment with Common Weal ideals but is an idea that comes directly from us. We’ve been campaigning for a decade now for such an agency to coordinate housebuilding in Scotland, strategically plan it, ensure adequate building standards and to help to train builders in the latest techniques (something that will be essential if we want to build houses to PassivHaus equivalent standards). None of that is in the half-sentence of course but we have been in contact with the Government and one of our projects for this year is to design the Agency that we think Scotland deserves.

Least Common Policy

The least Common Weal idea in the SNP manifesto as far as I can see is the continuation, and in fact doubling down, of adherence to conventional economic orthodoxy around the only measure of economic “success” being GDP growth and the only means by which Scotland could and should achieve that growth is by “foreign direct investment”. Gone from this manifesto compared to 2021 is any mention of Circular Economy, 15 minute neighbourhoods, Repair hubs (other than a fund for repairing bicycles) or other policies that promote sustainability through deconsumerism.

Reform UK

It goes without saying that Reform are almost entirely ideologically unaligned with Common Weal. Our very mantra “All of Us First” runs directly against their core belief that only some people matter and some matter more than others.

Most Common Policy

Reform are fighting this election based on flipping over the table of governance and pulling power away from the nationalists in Edinburgh and one of the results of that is that they are surprisingly supportive of plans for local government that wouldn’t look too far out of place coming from us with a demand to devolve more power to local authorities. They don’t end up in quite the same place though, as they also support merging Scotland’s already too-large Local Authorities and concentrating power into the hands of “city mayors”.

Least Common Policy

Pretty much everything they have to say about immigration, immigrants and people reliant on social security.

Labour

Labour are the pro-union party that Common Weal has the closest relationship with. We find a lot of common ground on many issues even where we quite happily and openly disagree on others. In the previous Parliament, for example, we collaborated constructively on substantial aspects of care reform (again, see Nick’s article) as well as Members’ Bills on Freedom of Information, Land Reform, what became the PassivHaus Bill and others.

Most Common Policy

Labour are the only party in this list to explicitly mention the National Care Service as an endeavour that they want to bring back in the next Parliament and have explicitly adopted our phrasing that the NCS must be an institution “worthy of the name”. There aren’t a lot of details about what they want to do or what they’ll be able to do if they aren’t in Government, but this is an area that is high on our priority list for the next Parliament and so one that we will be pushing on for more information.

Least Common Policy

Labour’s energy policy doesn’t mention public ownership of energy (at community, Local Authority or Scotland level) beyond a bare mention of the existence of UK controlled GB Energy – which still doesn’t appear to have a clearly defined purpose or stated ambition of how much of Scotland’s energy it would bring into public ownership.

Scottish Greens

The Greens are another party that we’ve worked closely with over the course of the previous Parliament (My own political inclination leans environmentalist, and I was a member of the party for several years though I think my skills and services are much better applied in a cross-party sense these days) and they are in an interesting position in the upcoming election. A potential substantial increase in votes and seats beckons, though the shadow of the uncomfortable coalition with the SNP and its acrimonious collapse looms overhead too which may well limit their influence more than their number of seats suggests.

Most Common Policy

The Scottish Greens have campaigned for a replacement to Council Tax for almost as long as they’ve existed as a party so this isn’t exactly a policy they’ve taken from us in general, but the details of how to implement a proportional Property Tax are now pretty well defined as a result of our work and their policy here closely aligns with our own vision including in terms of its allocation of discounts and surcharges (particularly on ensuring that landlords can’t keep profiting from rent hikes).

Least Common Policy

While the Greens have included a carbon emission tax on land in their manifesto, they have dropped mention of an outright property tax on land. This is an error. Taxing the pollution created by the use of land is important but so is taxing the concept of ownership of excessive land ownership in principle – even managed appropriately, the accumulation of wealth via land ownership must have its limits. This said, the Greens have formally adopted the former Labour position (now missing from the latter’s manifesto) to place a cap on the maximum amount of Scotland that any person can own.

Conservatives

Like Reform, there is little cross-over between Conservative policy and Common Weal’s, though it has happened. We’ve worked constructively particularly at a local level on local democracy reform and it was Conservative voices that proved critical to campaigns we’ve supported in areas like rent controls and Covid policies. With that party looking like it’ll be largely devoured by Reform though, their influence in the next Parliament may be limited. On the other hand, that may force a reevaluation of their political positions and possibly lead to hands reaching out to unlikely allies.

Most Common Policy

If anything, there’s even less in the Conservative manifesto for Common Weal fans than in Reform’s. One of the few policies I’ve found where we’d be pointing in the same direction is in our opposition to the Building Safety Levy but we do so on very different grounds. We oppose it because it has effectively dumped the cost of cleaning up the mess of companies installing unsafe cladding onto house buyers where we believe that more should be done to recover the costs from the companies and their former owners if those companies have been wound up to avoid paying compensation, whereas the Conservatives merely want to make houses a fraction cheaper (they also want to scrap the PassivHaus legislation on up front cost grounds despite the fact that passive houses are cheaper to run and would eliminate fuel poverty).

Least Common Policy

Tax cuts. The Conservatives are quite simply mathematically wrong on their assertions that every devolved tax is on the far side of the peak of the Laffer Curve and that everything will get better if we just cut taxes in ways that benefit the already rich more than those too poor to pay tax as it is. If 40 years of trickle-down economics was going to work, we would have seen it by now.

Liberal Democrats

Along with the Greens, the Lib Dems may be the ones to watch in this election as they will also be vying to become Kingmakers if the SNP don’t win a majority. Indeed, wariness of the former from the SNP after the coalition collapsed along with a less environment and more business leaning FM Swinney may mean they’d prefer a partner wearing orange rather than green. For their own part, the Lib Dems have ruled out any formal coalition but would consider voting for SNP budgets – as they have done the last two times – if the price is right.

Most Common Policy

Although the Lib Dems are still ideologically against independence, they have quite a lot to say about other aspects of constitutional reform that Common Weal has advocated for. They are one of the few parties in Scotland still advocating for a fully Federal United Kingdom (though we caution that this must be framed as true democratic reform, not merely an alternative to independence or a barrier against it) and they have adopted our policies that Citizens Assemblies should be embedded at all levels of government from local to national and that Freedom of Information should apply to private companies that provide government services.

Least Common Policy

Energy policy again. While the Lib Dems are anti-fracking, they are solidly pro-nuclear (despite it being the most expensive form of low-carbon energy generation) and they are pro-carbon capture (despite the inconvenient fact that it doesn’t work). This said, while the Lib Dems aren’t generally the first choice party when it comes to supporting public ownership of things like energy, their manifesto this year does discuss the government taking equity stakes, reforming ScotWind (adopting our own recommendations) and given Local Authorities the power to bring energy into public ownership if they choose.

Conclusion

As I say, none of this is an endorsement of any party nor are we going to state which part is the most Common Weal of them all – all of them have taken on policies that we could support but all of them have also made promises that we’re going to have to fight against. This is fine. It gives us plenty of scope to stay busy in the next Parliament. We’re certainly going to be stuck right in there to try and get as much as we can done and we’ll work with alliances where we can make and join them. If you’d like to support us as we try to pull all of the parties in a more Common Weal direction then please do so here. And I’ll be back on the topic in the next couple of weeks to break down what the results mean once we see what they actually are.