Month: October 2022

How To Heat Scotland’s Homes

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“Leaky pipes lead to puddles of despair.” – Anthony T. Hincks

(This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.)

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In December 2019, our oil boiler exploded. This was rather inconvenient as it was the week before Christmas, we had only moved into the house a couple of months prior and my parents-in-law were over visiting to see the new place for the first time. It was also bitterly cold and our only sources of heat were a hot water bottle, two hyperactive kittens and an old electric heater the previous owner had left forgotten in the shed – plugging it in was effective but sent the meter spinning so quickly that I’m pretty sure I could have rigged up a dynamo and used it to keep the water bottle warm. It was doubly annoying in that one of the first things we did when we moved in was to get the boiler serviced and that turned up no obvious problems.

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The UK’s Rotten Borders

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Regulatory compliance is critical to managing risk.” – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

(This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.)

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The “spectre” of a controlled border between Scotland and England is looming again as Scotland discusses independence and the future shape of our country but we should be paying more attention to how the UK manages borders on behalf of Scotland – especially when it fails to do so.

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Burning Money

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.” – William Gibson

(This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.)

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Britain is heading into one of the worst winters of a generation. The rising cost of living combined with multiple crises from energy, food supplies and general government incompetence mean that we’re facing price rises, empty shelves and potentially the highest rents and mortgage burdens ever seen in this country (headline interest rates /might/ not quite reach the peaks of the early 90s but house prices are so much higher now than then and wages haven’t increased by nearly as much so a greater proportion of our wage will end up being devoured by our bank and/or landlord). Folk trying to buy a house over the winter, who are trying to renew a mortgage reaching the end of its fixed rate or who are renting from a landlord trying to do one of the above are particularly vulnerable to price shocks that could equal or exceed the energy crisis.

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Whose Land?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

The land so much needed by men was tilled by these people, who were on the verge of starvation, so that the corn might be sold abroad and the owners of the land might buy themselves hats and canes, and carriages and bronzes, etc.” – Leo Tolstoy

(This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.)

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If you read the Scottish press last week, you might have seen some headlines promoting the spectacular success of transfers of land to community ownership over the devolution era. The amount of land now in community ownership in Scotland has “skyrocketed” in the past twenty-odd years. If you heard the Scottish Government’s own statements on the news, you’d be forgiven in thinking that the last round of land reform in 2016 was a huge success.

If you read the actual report, your enthusiasm might be more muted. The actual rate at which hectares of land have transferred to community ownership in Scotland has completely flatlined since the last round of land reform legislation in 2016 with over 99% of all community owned land being transferred before that act came into effect.

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