January | 2026 | The Common Green

“Preserving the difference between “rule of law” and “law for rule” is essential for democracy.” – Pawan Pandit

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woman holding sword statue during daytime

On Saturday 3rd of January 2026, just a few days shy of the fifth anniversary of his last attempted coup against a government he didn’t like, Donald Trump ordered the invasion and bombing of Venezuela culminating in the kidnapping and extraction of its President. Maduro is an illegitimate ruler, having also ignored the democratic will of his own people, but this does not excuse the US’s breach of international law nor its own domestic laws around the mandate for armed conflict.

Multiple governments now have condemned those actions. Blocs like the EU and UK have restated their commitment to the rules-based international order. None have suggested that the US should face tangible consequences for their actions. Instead, they appear to be nervously looking in any other direction, hoping that the next zebra the lion takes from the herd isn’t them.

In Scotland, the Scottish Government did issue a stronger statement than most – with the First Minister condemning the actions and saying that he did not see how they could be considered legal, but he stopped short of even suggesting any kind of consequences that should be enacted in response.

In a world not too different from ours, all of these things happened too, except the Scottish Government did decide to take action – both to punish the rogue regime that the US has become and to protect the people of Scotland from that regime.

It’s true that the failure of the 2014 Independence Referendum severely curtails the Scottish Government’s ability to acts in geopolitics. Despite promises at the time that Scotland should “lead not leave” the UK, its voice is largely ignored even where it would be quite possible for the UK Government to take advice from devolved nations. Often, not only does this consultation not happen but the first the devolved governments hear about UK Government actions in Scotland is in the newspapers – not even from the halls of Parliament in front of MPs from those nations.

And yet, there are powers that the Scottish Government holds that could be used to respond to Trump’s warmongering.

The first would be direct sanctions. The Scottish Government probably can’t do the traditional sanctions of freezing bank accounts and directly seizing assets (though it should investigate the extent to which it can), but they can be a bit more creative about such things. The Scottish Government could draw up and publish a list of all assets owned in Scotland by members of the Trump regime.

Trump’s own golf course is an obvious one here but there will be other hospitality assets and it’s very likely – given Scotland’s track record in such things – that key personnel will own property, possibly even land and estates, in Scotland.

Scotland has the power to enact compulsory purchase of land where doing so is in the public interest and it certainly might be considered to be in said public interest if Trump and his allies no longer own said land. It might even be that given that Trump has recently removed public service provision of golf courses in his own country, then transferring his Scottish golf courses to community ownership in Scotland is merely a part-compensation to the common weal.

There should certainly be no question of Scottish public property being used to aid, abet or support the US’s warmongering efforts. If the Scottish Government can’t close Prestwick, Wick or other Scottish airports they own to hostile or illegally operating US military traffic the way it did for Israeli military traffic in 2024 then officials there should do everything in their power to make it as difficult as possible for the US to use those facilities.

“We no longer live in the world where we can depend on ‘the good guys’ for our security because we can see both how fast they can turn on us and how good they never were in the first place”

The Scottish public sector must pull away from dependence on US tech now. Just as with Chinese involvement in critical Scottish infrastructure such as energy assets and telecom gear, the US’s ability to severely harm the Scottish public sector must now be highlighted.

At the tail end of last year, we saw several large scale failures of IT cloud services that, as far as all evidence points to, were genuine tech failures but one of them – an outage in Microsoft’s cloud servers – went so far as to disrupt the Scottish Parliament’s ability to conduct business. There is no serious question that if Trump so ordered it, Microsoft could deliberately shut down all services to the Scottish Government and our public sector and the Government must now react as if this is just as much a risk to our democracy as if it was discovered that Putin could send the same order to the same effect.

In the short term, back-up procedures must be updated and war-gamed ,but longer term, we must harden our tech sector against malicious attacks like this. The EU is already well ahead of us in this regard with several countries like Germany actively moving their public sector IT over to open source software (switching out things like Microsoft Office to alternatives like the LibreOffice software I wrote this article on).

They are also moving cloud-based software to either self-hosted solutions or secure open-source alternatives with the EU going so far as to start developing it’s own fully sovereign yet completely open source alternatives to storing our critical files on servers located in America and owned by Microsoft and Amazon. (Of course, this does mean that if Scotland doesn’t start doing something like this then we’ll be stuck with choosing between US cloud services or EU cloud services without being politically attached to either which could lead to vulnerabilities no matter the choice).

This will have its economic consequences here too. The public sector and Scottish companies will have to get used to having IT departments again and employing trained staff to secure their systems rather than simply delegating that task elsewhere without taking the responsibility or accountability. But skilled jobs are a good thing for an economy, aren’t they?

Which brings us finally to our economic dependence on unstable regimes like the US. The principle part of this is energy. One of the consequences of Russia’s expansion of its invasion of Ukraine was a drastic realignment of the EU’s energy supply chains (incomplete as it was, painful as it was for the lack of foresight) but much of this has resulted in an increase in imports of US fossil fuels – including to Scotland.

It’s not just the risk of Trump cutting us off that is the primary factor here but the pressure that can be brought on the US simply by opting out of its fossil fuel empire. Unlike previous US expansionism in the Middle East or elsewhere, the recent attacks on Venezuela don’t even have a glossy lie pasted over them to pretend they’re not about oil. Trump is openly boasting about raiding the country for its resources and that other countries will be next.

This means Scotland rapidly expanding its own decarbonisation efforts not just to limit our need for US fuels but also to limit our need for fuels in general – if the civilised world follows then basic economics means that over supply and under demand will crash the price of oil and make it economically unviable for the US to do things like invade other countries for their resources. Defanging the oil barons means defanging Trump as well as Putin and other oil autarchs around the world.

At the very least, as we pointed out in our Daily Briefing recently, Scotland and the Scottish Government needs a coherent strategy on foreign affairs. While ‘it’s reserved’, it undoubtedly affects Scotland even down to the use of our public assets and the way in which it makes Scotland a target for adversaries. When we gain our independence we will be cast into the world of having to make the right call on our own and that means building the infrastructure now to be able to start having the discussions on what that call would be.

We no longer live in the world where we can depend on ‘the good guys’ for our security because we can see both how fast they can turn on us and how good they never were in the first place. Common Weal has long advocated for an independent Scotland to take a ‘non-aligned’ stance to foreign affairs. Not necessarily demilitarised and pacifistic – though that’s the goal I personally aspire to – but one where strategic alliances against threats are built based on the merits of their case rather than blind allegiance to a ‘special relationship’ that now offers no protection from our own allies.

Scotland can be a force for justice in the world. Not force in the ‘my might alone makes right’ sense of the bullying superpowers, but by joining with other nations to uphold the rule of law wherever it is breached. Indeed, it’s that rule of law that is the only thing that has ever created some semblance of peace in the world. We give it up at our peril.

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” – Confucius

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

(Image Source: Wikimedia)

I like to say that in politics everything seems impossible right up until the moment it becomes inevitable. What this means is that in hindsight, it’s easy to see how something happened even though the campaign had to fight through a mire of “it’ll never happen” almost all the way.

Few campaigns exemplify this maxim for me better than the campaign I’ve been a part of for more than a decade for Scotland to introduce a Universal Basic Income. What began as a campaign so outlandish and so seemingly utopian that we may as well have promised the Moon and the stars has reached the point where, in theory at least, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in favour of the principle of a UBI (The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems all support one in principle and Scottish Labour supports the weaker idea of a Minimum Income Guarantee though I do not believe they’d vote against a UBI if it came to it), even if the barriers to actually implementing one largely prevent it from happening quite yet (barriers largely within the power of the UK Government to remove…we’ll come back to that in a bit).

But still, elsewhere in the world, the impossible truly has become inevitable. This year, a news story happened that has been covered extensively outwith the West and Global North but which you almost certainly haven’t heard about. In November, the Marshall Islands became the world’s first UN Member Nation to announce the implementation of a full Universal Basic Income.

It’s still not “a lot”, even for the local economy, but it will be enough to make a meaningful difference. The UBI is set at 200 US dollars per quarter plus a system of additional rates for people who live in the more outlying islands in the state as well as for retirees, people with disabilities and others who qualify for a top up. It is expected that the system will have a gross cost around 8% of the state’s GDP for the foundational UBI. The payment can be made in the form of paper cheque, direct bank transfer or via cryptocurrency – the latter garnering some attention in crypto circles despite only a dozen or so people opting for this method of payment.

The UBI is largely being funded externally. The Marshall Islands are a sovereign state that is in a “free compact” with the USA – the UK equivalent would be something like an Overseas Territory like the Falkland Islands, albeit with more power over foreign affairs than the UK allows its former colonies – and the bulk of the money will draw from a trust fund set up by the US as part-compensation for the damage wrought by nuclear weapons testing.

We don’t (yet?) have a wealth fund like that but let’s consider what a UBI could look like if Scotland followed the example of the Marshall Islands.

At 8% of GDP, Scotland’s UBI would translate to around £3,200 per person per year or about £60 per week. This is around half of the maximum amount of Universal Credit so it probably strains the definition of “basic” at this level. And yet, we’ve seen in Scotland that even smaller payments, like the £27/week Scottish Child Payment, has already made a massive difference to those who receive it.

The gross cost of an 8% of GDP Scottish UBI would be £40 billion per year or about a third of the total Scottish public sector expenditure budget. But this is misleading on the face of it for the same reason that it would be misleading to judge the Marshall Islands’ UBI on its gross cost.

In Scotland’s case, the implementation of a UBI would require an overhaul of existing social securities. An independent Scotland would be free, of course, to design the system from the ground up but a devolved Scotland would have to renegotiate the Block Grant and devolved Fiscal Framework with the UK Government so that the UBI could part-replace Universal Credit or the state pension without being unfairly clawed back (the failure to agree this scuppered plans for a Scottish UBI pilot scheme a few years ago). Transferring, say, a third of the existing social protection budget into the UBI would reduce the gross cost by around £11 billion.

And then there’s the Scottish tax system. The principle of universality underlying a UBI states that it’s much easier to ensure that no-one who needs it doesn’t get it and that no-one who doesn’t qualify for it doesn’t cheat the system if everyone gets it unconditionally – from the poorest to the richest. Of course, those who “don’t need it” can simply have their total income tax increased to tax it back off them. A simple way of doing it would be to set a line – perhaps at the UK Minimum Income Standard level of around £31,000 per year for a single person with no children – and tax the UBI back off those who earn more. As this would cover around half of Scottish income tax payers – 1.5 million people – this would reduce the gross cost again by another £5 billion or so.

We could close the gap further by making the tax progressive and by targeting wealth as well as income via a land tax and reformed property taxation so that those who earn and own much more than most of us could “pay for” the UBI of several people.

As people spend their UBI, they will pay VAT and companies that receive extra custom due to people being able to afford to buy things will pay corporation taxes (both are currently reserved taxes and therefore raising complications around fiscal transfers under devolution). We could also look at using devolved taxation powers to target Scotland’s keystone exports of energy, whisky and salmon (sectors which are highly foreign-owned and therefore also export their profits from Scotland, contributing to a loss of more than £10 billion per year from Scotland).

Taking these into account reduces the total actual bill for a Scottish UBI from “impossible” to a scheme that starts to look just about possible even under devolution (so long as Westminster abstains from its effective veto over implementation). But there’s one final aspect of a UBI to consider. The cost of poverty within the current system.

If we consider the cost of healthcare resulting from poverty-related conditions, the loss of productivity from poverty (the chronic stress of poverty makes for less productive workers and blocks the ability to take risks such as entrepreneurship), the cost of delivering expensive services such as crisis care for homeless people rather than simply making affordable housing a human right, the additional costs of administering “means-tested” social securities which sometimes exceeds the cost of the benefits being withheld because the punitive nature of the system is part of the point.

This kind of poverty may well be more expensive than the overall net cost of a UBI sufficient to eliminate it. At this point, we see that a UBI isn’t an impossible utopian dream, but becomes a moral imperative that must happen if we are to continue to call ourselves a civilised nation.

The Marshall Islands have proven that the impossible can become inevitable. I look forward to the day that Scotland inevitably does the same.

The Common Green

Dr Craig Dalzell

Month: January 2026

Scotland could lead the UK by upholding international law