Month: February 2026

What is the point of a party manifesto these days?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.” – Aristophanes

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

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human hand forming heart shape

Election time is almost upon us in Scotland and we’re already starting to see the various parties start to make their pitches to voters. Even though the official “campaign period” hasn’t yet started various parties – including the party of Government – have already started caveating their promises with “if we are elected”.

Some of this is certainly for the good, such as news that if the SNP are re-elected then they’ve promised to adopt Common Weal’s plan for a National Housing Agency. We’re already gearing up to hold their feet to the fire on that one and to try to ensure that they don’t water our plans down to homeopathic levels as they did with the Scottish National Investment Bank nor that they mess the thing up so badly that it ends up like the National Care Service.

Promises are just words though and we’re entering an electoral campaign where it feels like those words are going to mean less and less to fewer and fewer people. The electorate has fragmented into camps with very little crossover. Politicians are focusing more tightly on the little crossover that does occur. Advertising becomes ever more focused and targeted (to the point that I might be explicitly excluded by the online algorithms from seeing the advert that you have been targeted to see). And we have new threats rising in the form of AI that will mindlessly lie to you by design.

Amid all of that, it might be worth asking what is the point of a mainstay of election campaigning for decades now: the party election manifesto?

Every election, parties are expected to produce a document outlining their plans, priorities and policies should they get into office post-election or even should they merely get into Parliament and be in a position to influence government policy.

It’s important to note that these are not legally required documents nor are they binding contracts. The state of UK electoral law is that, barring very, very narrow circumstances, there is no requirement for a prospective politician to even tell you, the voter, the truth about their intentions in office. The only real legal requirement is that they do not misrepresent the character of themselves or another candidate for political gain (in 2015, Alistair Carmichael won a court case over his lying during an election campaign on the grounds that he never represented himself to voters as an honest person – perhaps this is a question to ask candidates in your next hustings).

And so in a similar vein, there’s no actual legal recourse if a party of Government starts throwing out the promises they made in order to win power – just look at the manifesto of Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign compared to what he’s actually done in office…

Party Manifestos can be tricky to track down sometimes. Over the last few elections, I’ve tried to collect them on this blog but as you’ll see if you try to download some of them on the most recent list, the parties often chuck them in the digital bin shortly after the election which means if you want to track down historical copies, it can mean having to trawl through digital archives like the Wayback Machine.

“Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast…This should be ethically unacceptable”

What they are though is a statement of intent, a business plan and a means of accountability. Just because we don’t have some kind of legal redress mechanism if politicians fail to live up to their policies, we do have a social means of redress. The largest is, of course, the election itself as parties can and should be judged not just on the manifesto they put forward to voters but the ones they put forward prior to this. They can and should be judged based on their previous performance on promises fulfilled and promises broken, especially if their excuses for the latter are lacking.

Another aspect of the importance of a manifesto is open transparency. It’s not enough for you, a party loyalist, to see what the party you’re loyal to is promising you. Everyone else has to be able to see it too. We live now in an area where political ideological bubbles can be digitally enforced.

You could well be on a list to be targeted by a political advert from some party or another. It might well be that I am on a list to not be targeted by that same advert. This means that if we meet and start discussing the politics that we’ve seen that week, we could be facing entirely different realities of what we think is important or not.

This problem is made even worse with the rise of AI and other forms of fake news and radicalising politics (see, for example, the trend of people putting out fake news about rising lawlessness in London specifically because they were being rewarded in advertising money for doing so).

By giving people some level of an equal baseline in terms of our political understanding then we can become more and better engaged with the politics and politicians courting our votes (especially when they are the ones lying to us). See Bill Johnston’s recent article on informed citizens here for more about how you can become a more deliberative democrat.

We don’t yet know when the party manifestos for the upcoming Scottish election will be published. There has been a somewhat disturbing trend in recent elections where the larger parties especially seem to be trying to be the last to publish their manifesto – possibly in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and accountability and possibly so that they can make last minute edits to outbid their rivals (or avoid a pitfall that their rivals have fallen into).

Some manifestos have even been held back until after the first postal votes have been cast which should be a major alarm sign for our democracy as this means that it’s possible that parties may not be solidifying their promises until after people have started casting their votes. This should be ethically unacceptable.

As the Scottish election campaign lands on us over the next 11 weeks, I’ll be once again collecting as many of the manifestos as I can so that they can be read in one place. I also plan to follow this article up specifically with a look at some of the major party manifestos to see what they actually managed to accomplish over this current Parliament compared to what they promised to do.

This isn’t just an exercise in helping you vote better (though it’ll certainly do that) but when politicians know that we can see right through them maybe they’ll stop acting like they have something to hide. And maybe then, we’ll start to see a few more of those promises actually turn into policy.

The End State of Capitalism is Monopoly and then Failure

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“No matter what the industry you choose to ultimately invest all your time and energy in, be sure you’re the owner, founder, and CEO. Remember, if you don’t own it, you can’t control it nor can you depend on it.” – Brandi L. Bates

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our 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.

There’s a crisis going on in the tech sector that you may not have noticed – possibly because it’s not the one you’re looking at. It’s not the AI bubble that is threatening to eat every computer chip and piece of creative human endeavour before it inevitably collapses. It’s not the cryptocurrency bubble which is currently bursting as investors finally realise that burning compute time on an “asset” that has literally no use outwith money laundering is even less valuable than AI chatbots that steal your art then tell you to kill yourself.

The other tech bubble is the one laid out here by Matt Stoller and looks at the way ‘platform decay’ has crippled a huge number of companies -and how they have now started to find a way out of the traps they were in. To understand how this happened, first we need to step back to an underlying truth about our economy: Capitalists hate free markets.

That sounds like an oxymoron. It sounds like the very antithesis of what capitalism is about. Is this whole purpose of capitalism not to sell goods and services through markets that are as unrestrained as possible so as to allow perfect competition – competition which drives innovation and price reductions?

I mean, that’s what we were taught, but it’s not what those at the top actually believe. The capitalists at the top hate competition. Competition, you see, forces them to reduce prices and to spend money on research and development instead of extracting it as a profit for their own use.

And so the ideas of fair competition, of the free market and of providing the best service at the best price are not ideas that are compatible with capitalism as it is implemented in practice.

The first idea is easy to break down. Rather than compete with your competitors you could agree to not compete. Cartels are groups of businesses all mutually agreeing to set prices and/or standards. OPEC is a prominent modern example where the member countries agree to control oil production in order to manipulate oil prices up or down. Cartels exist within many different product sectors though and countries often push back against them with regulations (the power of which are often dependent on how open the cartel is about its price fixing and how easy it is for the cartel itself to corrupt, influence or write the regulations).

Where cartels are insufficient, monopolies are the next stage of this kind of market consolidation. Why compete with another company when you can just buy it and either dissolve it or keep it around as a brand label in order to fake the appearance of choice. You may have heard the story that basically all brands of luxury sunglasses are produced by the same company. You’ve probably also noticed that companies like banks and media producers are basically all owned by the same handful of companies.

Related to this is interference with the concept of the free market. Companies these days are increasingly pushing themselves not as product makers but as platform providers. Amazon is the standout example of this, creating a near-monopoly in internet shopping for almost everything. Except they aren’t just a platform or a provider of market space, but an active and corrupt player in that market too.

There have been plenty of stories of Amazon charging onerous fees for placing your goods on their platform, only for them to create an own-brand copy of your goods and not just sell them for less (because they don’t have to pay themselves the access fee, never mind more nefarious dealings like deliberately loss-leading the goods to drive you out of business) but to actively promote them in the search listings because they control the algorithm. Regulators have been utterly ineffective but I believe the solution here is a relatively simple one – if you own the platform, you don’t get to sell goods on it. It’s too much of a conflict of interest to be otherwise.

And here we get to the specific tech bubble mentioned at the start. Sometimes the platform you’re selling isn’t a marketplace for others to sell on. Sometimes they’re selling the means for you to do business.

An IT platform that runs all of the accounts of your business, or one that manages the financial transactions of your bank, or the patient records of your health service is a platform that once you’ve bought is very difficult to move away from. The upheaval that would come from retraining everyone to use a new system while maintaining customer/client continuity and ensuring that no-ones records got lost or altered in the switch is a daunting task.

Therefore the ‘switching cost’ to another system is so high that it’s not even a matter of price but existential practicality.

This means that the company you bought it from has absolutely zero incentive either to keep prices down (even if they haven’t bought or signed deals with competitors, you aren’t going to switch to a cheaper option) and very little incentive even to improve or basically maintain the platform. It doesn’t need to work the best it can do. It doesn’t need to work well. It just needs to barely function enough to not quite overcome the huge switching costs. Companies have run for decades on inadequate software because switching to better options simply weren’t possible.

But what if the switching cost goes away?

One of the few things that the new generations of AI appear to be not ‘good’ at, but better at than the average lay person is in generating functioning computer code. The code it generates is often bad, it’s often hard to understand and edit, there are sometimes glaring security holes in it and the entire basis of the development of the AI’s ability to code is likely based on the same theft of creative endeavour as AI ‘art’ is. But if you, the computer illiterate company exec, can order ChatGPT to ‘vibecode’ custom software that despite all of those caveats is still better than the thing you were being overcharged for before, you’ll suddenly overcome that switching cost barrier.

And when that happens, several trillions of dollars worth of computer software platform companies that were utterly reliant on you sucking up their terrible platforms become worthless. That began to happen last weekend.

The AI bubble is still coming though and I think the big players still stand to massively crash, but every tech bubble results in something useful coming out of the ruins. I think the future of generative AI won’t be massive data centres that eat your entire town’s electricity and water to burn out GPU cards in a matter of months. It’ll be smaller, more specialised models that run locally on your PC or even your phone. It needn’t be companies buying cloud services only for an overtanned dictator to turn them off because he had a bad night’s sleep, but more local IT infrastructure and a crowd of misfits in the basement holding it all together.

And, of course, for the companies who can’t or don’t want to do that, the service providers will still be around and may well now have the incentive to actually improve their products.

This isn’t a defence of AI specifically but it is a warning to economic planners and politicians. If you want an economy based on free market capitalism (and I’ll have the debate about that desire in another article) then you have to defend it. Because capitalists fundamentally hate free market capitalism and if they can’t mutate it into rentierism, cartelism and monopolies then they absolutely will. And then they’ll suck all value out of everything the own until it collapses under its own weight or, if we’re lucky, it’ll cling on just long enough to be replaced. The end state of the capitalism that they want is always monopoly and then failure.

The new National Housing Agency must serve people, not profit

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” – Confucius

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.

Common Weal has been campaigning for the best part of a decade on overhauling and improving the Scottish housing sector. While we haven’t been named in the announcements, the SNP’s new proposal to launch a National Housing Agency should they return to Government after the elections is a policy taken straight out of our strategic roadmap which called for what we termed a Scottish National Housing Company.

It is far too easy for Governments to talk big about housing but to do little. Even in previous election campaigns, it has been considered sufficient for a political party to just look at the raw number of houses being built in Scotland and to either say that they would build X thousand homes (where X is a larger number than their rival party is promising to build, or that the previous government actually built) without paying much attention to other vital factors such as where the houses are built, what standards they are built to, how much they’ll cost, what kind of tenure will be offered to residents or who will profit from the construction of the buildings (particularly if policies come with significant amounts of public money attached). This number goes up and down with the political winds but rarely is it based on anything other than that kind of political party promise. It’s almost certainly never based on whether or not that number of houses is ‘enough’ to satisfy immediate and long term demand.

In these respects, the Government has been taking some welcome steps particularly with policies around rent controls and energy efficiency standards (though we still have significant disagreements around how far those proposals should go – the current rent control plan all-but guarantees above inflation rent increases and the energy efficiency standards appear to be being significantly watered down from the “PassivHaus equivalent for all new homes” originally promised).

But a more strategic approach to housing is still needed beyond piecemeal interventions and broad frameworks so in this respect, that the Government has adopted our Housing Agency is something to be celebrated.

The devil is in the details however and Common Weal is now gearing up to develop our proposals and to try to ensure that the Government adopts them in full.

In our original plan, the Housing Agency would be a direct construction body – public owned and employing the people who actually build our houses.

Direct construction bypasses the biggest limitation of every housing policy that has come before. Private housing developers aren’t in the business of building ‘enough’ houses. A basic rule of economics is that price is determined by supply vs demand. Scarcity results in higher prices. This means that developers can charge higher prices by not building homes as quickly as they could or by “banking” land they own to prevent another developer from buying it and building (see my article in In Common last November which breaks down why this and other factors increases the price of an average UK home by around £67,000).

We also can’t keep building houses purely to chase the highest possible price when it comes to tenures. We’ve heard a lot about “affordable homes” in recent years despite no real definition of what that actually means beyond developers being forced to sell a few homes in each block of houses a little bit cheaper than they otherwise would (even when “a little bit cheaper” is still very much unaffordable for many).

A strategic plan led by a National Housing Agency would not be concerned about quick profits and so could build houses with a longer term view. Housing for social rent especially should be built to a standard that minimises ongoing costs like heating and maintenance thus makes living in the houses cheaper for social tenants. (See my 2020 policy paper Good Houses for All for more details on how that would work).

This would benefit Local Authorities in the long term as once the construction costs of the houses are paid off in 25 or even 50 years time, the ongoing rents will still provide a safe and steady income for decades to come. By contrast, the cheap and flimsy houses being built today are being put up by developers who don’t particularly care if the house outlives its mortgage – if it doesn’t, they’ll happily sell you another one.

This is the important point about the role of a National Housing Agency. It cannot be a mechanism for laundering public money into private developers. It absolutely must be a force that outcompetes or plays a different game from the private developers. It must disrupt the market to the point that people would actively seek out a high quality, efficient and cheap to live in Agency house rather than a private developer “Diddy Box”, especially one being offered at exorbitant private rents because the only people able to actually buy them are private equity funded landlords.

Houses should not be an inflatable capital asset designed to enrich the already wealthy and to suck wealth out of the pockets of everyone else. Houses should, first and foremost, be a home. This is the measure of the ambition that the National Housing Agency should be aiming to achieve. Common Weal is very happy to see this policy enter the politician discussion space. We stand ready to help whichever Government comes out of the elections this year to build the Agency we need so that it can build the homes that all of us deserve.