Month: September 2024

Ageing For Indy?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” – Robert Frost

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I’m writing this on the 18th of September 2024. Ten years on from the independence referendum is a day of sober reflection. I certainly have a lot of memories of that day in particular as I spent it under a warm blue sky (much like today, though not quite as warm) going door-to-door to get out the vote amongst folk our campaign group, Yes Clydesdale, had identified as likely to vote Yes. The shattering of my hope was still several hours away, the grief of the following days and the determination to get back on my feet again was a little further away again. I remember many of my conversations that day but two stick out in particular right now.

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Why We Tax Houses

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.” – Adam Smith

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The past couple of weeks have been incredibly busy with some unprecedented levels of media attention pointing at Common Weal now. As much as I loathe to blow my own trumpet, I ended up appearing in The National five days in a row on various topics like local democracy, ScotWind and our local Property and Land Tax proposals (You can read all of those articles here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

By far the most feedback came from the latter articles on reforming Council Tax (Have you seen our new short video explainers popping up on social media about this and other topics? If so, what do you think of them?) and extending it into land to create a comprehensive Property Tax that would cut taxes for the vast majority of households and bring in over £1 billion a year in new revenue for Scottish Local Authorities.

Of course, not all of the feedback has been entirely positive but much of the rest has been around asking genuine questions about the policy so I thought I’d take the time in my column this week to answer some of them.

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PfG 2024 – Serving Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive.” – George Orwell

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Serving Scotland, what exactly?

The Scottish Government’s latest Programme for Government, titled “Serving Scotland”, is little more than a list of platitudes covering some of the most brutal public service cuts in years coupled with a paring back of all sense of ambition in what should be a critical year of laying groundwork for the next election (if you take a short-termist political party view of things) or the rapid ramping up of actions to halt and mitigate climate change (if you’d prefer there to be a liveable biosphere in the next couple of generations).

The PfG is divided into four of the Government’s overarching strategies so it’s worth picking them apart one by one.

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It’s Time To Tax Scottish Land

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.” – Henry George

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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Last week, I had the pleasure to address SNP members at the Revive Coalition’s fringe meeting on land reform where I presented Common Weal’s proposal to bring a land tax to Scotland. As the meeting wasn’t filmed, I want to discuss the issue here for the benefit of members (and non-members) who couldn’t be there. I am also delighted that after our fringe, members gave overwhelming support to two motions that would enable such a tax. Taxing land in Scotland is now solidly SNP policy and the Scottish Government should bring forward a Bill to enable it at the earliest opportunity. With the Scottish Government pledging to bring in fresh cuts of in excess of £500 million, to ignore a tool that would almost entirely avoid the need for them is simply unacceptable.

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How Not To Dispose Of Disposable Cups

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

If it can’t be reduced –
If it can’t be reduced
Reused, repaired – REUSED REPAIRED
Rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold
Recycled or composted – OR COMPOSTED
Then it should be – THEN IT SHOULD BE
Restricted, redesigned – RESTRICTED
REDESIGNED or removed – REMOVED!
From production – FROM PRODUCTION
– Pete Seeger

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The Scottish Government still doesn’t understand what a Circular Economy is or how to bring the public with them as they implement it. This has been made clear by their latest ad hoc and misjudged approach to dealing with disposable cups. Their consultation on the levy has been launched here and Common Weal will get our response in in due course, please make sure your voice is heard too.

The proposal shouldn’t be as contentious as this and I should shouldn’t be on the side of fighting it – especially as I both agree with and support the goal behind the policy; to reduce resource use and waste produced by our single-use consumerism.

The policy as it stands, a 25p levy on disposable cups purchased as part of a takeaway drinks order, though risks seeing people as consumers to be punished into doing the “right thing” even as producers are allowed to make it impossible to make the right choice.

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