Month: April 2024

A Bute House Divided

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s only hubris if I fail”, Julius Caesar, HBO/BBC TV series Rome (2005)

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

The Bute House Agreement has ended. Earlier this month, the Greens notified members that there would be a vote on whether or not to continue the cooperation deal with the Scottish Government within the next few weeks. This morning, stealing the march and despite saying just 24 hours earlier that SNP members didn’t need a vote because they’d certainly back the agreement, Humza Yousaf unilaterally terminated the deal. The Greens have been booted out of government and Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater are no longer ministers.

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Workers With Purpose

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?” – Lucy Parsons

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

Workers

I was pleased to visit the STUC Annual Congress in Dundee this year, representing Common Weal as an observer and speaking at the SNP Trade Union Group’s fringe meeting on Scotland’s Future. The panel of speakers (Seamus Logan from SNP PPC, Stephen Smellie from Unison, Gordon Martin from RMT, and myself) were each asked to present a progressive policy idea as well as to shape that idea around a broader vision of Scotland as we each saw it.

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Shedding Light on Rural Heat

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.” – Victor Borge

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

If the Scottish Government knew they were going to abandon its climate targets (see Robin’s column for more on that) then they could have probably saved themselves a lot of strife last week over their botched policies and communications around rural heating. If they had listened to us almost five years ago when we submitted a comprehensive policy paper and two extensive policy briefings to them on decarbonising heat in off-grid and rural areas, they might have avoided both weeks of bad headlines now.

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Time For Some Tech Optimism

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

 “I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and I know what people can accomplish.” – Bill Gates

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

Despite my scientific training and engineering background (or perhaps because of them) when talking about the climate emergency, I’ve generally been wary about going down the route of tech-optimism, of believing that there’s a technological solution to the problem just around the corner. There are three broad reasons for this. The first is that risk that the tech fails and leaves us in a worse place than we currently are. Continuing to emit carbon until the day that a tech-priest grants us the blessing of effective carbon capture only works if the blessing actually arrives. If it doesn’t, then we’re left with a larger problem and even less time to fix it. And a strategy like “Net Zero” that fixes part of the problem (like EV cars fixing carbon emissions) but doesn’t address the rest of the problem (overall air quality) isn’t even a solution.

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Glue Traps And Globalisation

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Defining who is to be protected is in effect defining who is not to be protected” – Stephen D. King

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

The UK Government has announced that they are invoking the Internal Market Act to prevent the Scottish Government from banning the sale of glue traps in Scotland. These horrific devices are have been banned as part of broader concerns around protecting animals from cruel deaths and on the responsible management of land. It’s entirely right that the Scottish Government has acted to ban – rather than merely restrict or licence – these traps.

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Freeports Don’t Come For Free

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red and blue crane under blue sky during daytime

The National dedicated last week to the issue of Freeports and I’m glad they did. These deregulated tax havens have not been interrogated nearly well enough by our politicians or our media and the information coming from the ports themselves – even when asked directly – has been too little and too vague. This hasn’t allowed for a proper democratic debate around their merits or demerits, has allowed their failures to go unreported and, perhaps worse, has allowed outright conspiracy theories to rise up to replace the information vacuum which has, in turn, made it harder to campaign against them on the basis of the facts on the ground (something which suits their proponents whose agenda thrives equally in an empty well of information as it does in a polluted one).

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