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Three things you might have missed in the UK Budget

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“To implement a budget is to apply one’s ideas about life and spending to the real world.” – Zachariah Renfro

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A stock photo of two small stacks of GBP coins of various denominations.

There’s been plenty to talk about in the UK Budget this week and the media has been largely focused on the smaller gestures designed to push attention in precisely that way. Dropping the gas standing charge (as well as hints at dropping the electricity one at some point in the future) are welcome as will be the direct £100 support payment for households in lower Council Tax bands (why this will result in payments going to fairly wealthy people in undertaxed houses and not to poorer people in overtaxed houses could be the topic of another article but I’ve written a lot about Council Tax Reform lately) but they aren’t the same as the reform needed to pull people out of fuel poverty. Instead, I’d like to point some attention at three stories that caught my eye in the budget that might have passed you by.

Less emphasis on Foreign Direct Investment, but more Public Private Partnerships

One of my constant gripes about the Scottish Government is its obsession with Foreign Direct Investment (also sometimes called Inwards Investment) as a means of economic development. I get why it happens especially in Scotland (due to a lack of public borrowing powers at Holyrood, and their lack of support for Councils to use their borrowing powers as a substitute) but this should be a problem to circumvent rather than one to be boosted. And we know the cost of it – tens of billions of pounds are extracted from the Scottish economy every year to feed the profits of the companies that “inwardly invested” here.

It’s a problem at the UK level too, albeit less so. The UK’s level of profit extraction is only slightly below the expected average for a state of its GDP per capita, rather than one of the worst in the world as is the case for Scotland. Where Scotland lost almost 5.6% of our GDP to net profit outflows in 2021 (still the most recent data we have despite Scottish Government promises to update it), the UK only lost 0.15% of its GDP to the same outwards extraction (about half of the difference can be attributed to Scottish profits being extracted to elsewhere in the UK, for example by London-HQ’d companies, but this doesn’t account for the gap beyond that).

The UK Government, in contrast to the Scottish Government, has decided that this is a problem and the budget promises to try to boost domestic investment, recognising that keeping the returns on those investments within the country is better than seeing them drift away (not that they’re promising to reduce FDI though, they still tout the UK’s place as the “second best” place to invest within the G7).

It’s not a completely rosy picture though. The “domestic investment” they want to focus on is on AI data centres and in the military. I spoke about the dangers of the former at a recent event with Pensioners for Indy and we wrote about the issues with Public Private Partnerships in the military in our Daily Briefing this week. I’d encourage you to watch the former at your leisure and to read the latter after you’ve read this. In short, PPPs are likely to be as much of a disaster for the UK’s military bases and for the long term financial security of the country as they were for the legacies of crumbling hospitals and schools that the previous rounds of PPP were but will be used anyway not to boost investment but to hide the cost of war from the public.

Income Tax for Mayors

If you were blindsided a few weeks ago when John Swinney came out with a proposal to radically reform Local Government in Scotland, so were we and so were a lot of folk who have been deeply involved in local reform for a long time (Lesley Riddoch discusses it in her podcast here). It’s not to say that it’s a bad plan (though it’s not nearly detailed enough yet) but the timing, I highly suspect, has much more to do with Andy Burnham than with Swinney having a sudden Damascene conversion towards the principles of subsidiarity and municipalism.

I believe that Swinney started to feel threatened by the idea that Burnham’s push for more and stronger regional mayors was creeping into Scotland and that they might even be forced upon him. Pushing back with democratic regional councils was a sensible counter-measure and one (subject to it being done right) I actually agree with. Putting power into the hands of a single person isn’t democratic, and so mayors (or, in Scotland, Provosts) cannot and should not hold executive power.

The budget more-or-less confirms those suspicions with English mayors being given a share of business rate income from their region and then, from 2028, a share of income tax raised in their region too. They won’t have the power to change income tax rates, but this will give mayors a substantial budget to deploy and their own discretion. There’s a serious risk of personal fiefdoms growing as a result. It’s far easier to lobby and corrupt one person than it is to corrupt half a council.

There’s a question over how this will work in the substantial areas of England that don’t have elected mayors (which will probably be answered by pressuring them to create the office) or how it will work in the three other nations which have very different setups and, of course, where income tax in Scotland is already substantially devolved. There is a good case to be made for regional or local authorities in Scotland to retain a share of income tax and there have been proposals in the past for a local income tax. As Scotland develops its local government reform, these issues will have to be sorted out to ensure that public services across all local, regional and national areas are sustainable and fair.

But that still doesn’t mean I want a couple of mayors having unilateral control over 20% of my income tax bill.

“So the situation is that in half a decade or so low income carers will no longer go into debt over earning a little on the side, but they’ll still be taxed at a higher rate than the very richest people in the country.”

Carer’s Allowance Reform

This is one of the items from the budget that leaked ahead of time (I’m old enough to remember when a Budget Minister would resign rather than see a single word of their budget appear in the press before it could be presented democratically to Parliament, but those days are long gone in favour of Chancellors leaking good news stories mixed in with catastrophic stories that can be “rolled back” on the day and replaced with mere “bad news”).

Right now, if you’re a carer in receipt of Carer’s Allowance and you deign to try to earn some income in addition it it, you are subject to extremely tight earnings limits. Go a single penny over that limit and you don’t just lose future allowance, but the government will actually claw money back off you. This is a particular problem where carers do freelance work that they can flex around their caring responsibilities as getting a lump sum for a project can easily push them over the weekly limit where a salaried sum spread across the year would not. However it happens, putting carers into debt over as little as a penny of “excess” earnings is not acceptable and the UK Government has finally realised this.

Instead, they have proposed a reform where carers will see their allowance taper off as they earn above the threshold just as it does with some other social security payments like Universal Credit.

There are a couple of kickers though. The first is that this won’t come in until after the next election (IT problems, apparently, which carers must continue to pay the price for). The second is that the taper rate will be £1 for every £1 earned above the threshold. In other words, carers who earn more than a pittance will face, effectively, a 100% income tax rate until they have earned more than their carer’s allowance. This is simply utterly wrongheaded.

Even Universal Credit “only” tapers at 55%, so that low income workers lose 55p of their social security for every £1 they earn.

Meanwhile, the top rate of income tax in the UK is only 45%, so someone earning more than £126,000 or so gets to KEEP 55p of every £1 they earn…and they’re salty enough about that to be pushing for it to come down.

So the situation is that in half a decade or so low income carers will no longer go into debt over earning a little on the side, but they’ll still be taxed at a higher rate than the very richest people in the country.

I think we need a rule that states that social security taper rates can never be steeper than the top rate of income tax. If the Government wants to tax carers at 100% then they should be willing to apply a 100% income tax on the very highest earners too. Since that is rather unrealistic, then carers should be taxed at not more than what the government thinks millionaires should be taxed at.

Even better would be to accept that all of these restrictions are really designed to punish poor people into compliance (I see the Government also wants to bring back face-to-face assessments of disabled people with the aim of ‘proving’ that those who can’t comply were probably faking and can have their welfare cut. We’re only a decade and two Labour leaders on from I, Daniel Blake but it seems that the outrage against welfare sanctions has faded enough for the government to bring them back). Instead of taxing carers who are trying to make ends meet in addition to providing care, we could have a Universal Basic Income that supports everyone to do what they want and need to do, including provide care, and start paying workers – especially those in undervalued jobs like care – enough to live on.

Conclusion

A “breathing space” budget this may have been but it was one with enough hidden edges to give pause to anyone who read below the headlines. The next question will be for the Scottish Government to respond to it with their own budget early next year. Some things, like the £100 energy payment, are likely to be copy and pasted but I already see landlords lobbying to avoid additional taxes coming their way for their English counterparts. This should, of course, be resisted and Scotland should perhaps go further and continue pushing for a housing sector that provides homes, not passive incomes for the already wealthy.

I’d be interested to hear your views too though. Was there anything beneath the headlines that stood out to you, good or bad? What do you think the Scottish Government should do in response?

Scottish Child Payment policy must always follow the evidence

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” – Carl Sagan

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A pinboard containing various notes connected by red threads. The focus in the centre is a new note being pinned to the board. It is blank and not connected to the surrounding notes.

Scotland appears to have a real problem with the way that it does policy development that we need to talk about with increasing urgency. You may already have a sense of this from my recent articles on Burnham’s approach to developing a National Care Service or even our recent briefing on John Swinney’s approach to pensions in an independent Scotland, but there’s another story from last year that appears to have returned with a crescendo.

Back in April 2025, Swinney made a statement to the press stating that he was opposed to proposals from childrens’ charities to increase the rate of the Scottish Child Payment – one of Scotland’s recently devolved social security payments made to poorer families with young children – because he believed that an increased rate would discourage parents from entering or re-entering the workforce.

When this news came out we immediately submitted a Freedom of Information request to ask what evidence they had to back this statement up. Specifically, we asked what proportion of households receiving the SCP were households that contained no working adults. If we have that data point, then we can track it with time. If the SCP increases and then so does the number of workless recipient households, then we can correlate the two effects and see how increasing benefits decreases the incentive to work.

The Government responded saying that they weren’t even tracking this data. They had no evidence to suggest that a small or substantial rise in SCP would lead to people not working nor that the SCP was “at the limit” of what it could be before such an effect occurred.

This is an unacceptable way to announce polices. It should not be that the First Minister can just arbitrarily decide whether or not something is true.

It may well have been that a rise in SCP would incentivise parents to not work. It may well be that adding £10 per week would start to cause this effect. It may well not show up until parents are given £10,000 per week.

But this is a testable hypothesis. Data on this can be gathered. In this case, it wasn’t.

Until now.

“In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole.”

This week, the Scottish Government quietly published the results of a study into the increase in SCP that did happen in April 2025 and then again in April 2026. I say quietly published because while it appeared on the Government’s webpage of new publications, it did not appear in their daily 4pm bulletin of the stories they think are important to push and nor have I seen any news reporting on the topic (literally the only other person I could find who appeared to have spotted this report between publication and me writing this was Prof. John Robertson who runs the Talking Up Scotland blog).

As with a story I did on a report into the potential for a Scottish Minimum Income Standard in May 2025 which was similarly published without fanfare and then almost completely ignored (though we may soon get some kind of Minimum Income for Artists out of it). This is once again a time when a fairly substantial story has been noticed not because the Government actively wanted it to be noticed or because the mainstream media were employing enough people that they could dedicate some of them to make sure that the stories were noticed but because a handful of activists happened to be paying attention to the front page of a website that receives dozens of new reports each day, and they just happened to be doing so at the hour or so when the story was visible before it got pushed off the front page and buried forever. This is not good for Government scrutiny.

But back to the report and the results of the study. In short, it found precisely the opposite of the First Minister’s evidence-free claim and found a result much more in line with virtually every other similar study into the work impacts of out-of-work social security.

In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole. The vast majority of recipients (around 70%) felt that receiving the SCP had no impact positive or negative on their life (which is not to say that it didn’t, merely that they didn’t feel like they had to change their behaviour as a result of getting the payment. It may well be that they would have had to cut back on spending if the payment was stopped so even where they felt it didn’t have a positive impact, it may have been preventing a negative one).

Only around 4% of respondents said that they or their partner had stopped work or reduced their work as a result of the payment. Once again, and in challenge to the FM’s claim, this is not necessarily a negative impact. A parent reducing their overtime to spend more time with their child is not necessarily a bad thing for the child even if it is for John Swinney’s GDP spreadsheet.

On the other hand, 3% did unambiguously spend more time with their child during a longer parental leave (which still counts as being “in work”), 4% found that the payment let them start work where they previously weren’t working, 7% were enabled to work longer hours (perhaps the SCP helped with childcare costs) and 14% used the SCP to help with costs associated with their work (e.g. travel or clothing). The report also notes gender differences where women were more likely to decrease their work hours (even when they were the main earner) while men were more likely to increase their work hours and that the way this plays out in single-parent households may indicate that lone mothers face “unmeasured barriers not faced by lone fathers”.

In aggregate though, it does appear that an increase to the SCP has no overall impact on the labour market. Judged by these figures, it appears that the payment may help support some people to work more than they otherwise would have (again, it is possible that the payment helps with childcare costs and other additional costs that come with juggling work and raising a child).

Any moment where there is a risk that the payment could reduce work appears to be limited to very specific circumstances such as when taking on more work pushes someone above the threshold for earning Universal Credit and thus causing them to be ineligible for the SCP as well. This means that it is means-testing of social security that is having a negative impact rather than the amount of benefit being received and should be another case in point for more universalism such as via a Universal Basic Income that supports parents regardless of their other or changing circumstances.

Most importantly though is the lesson that this report should send to the Government not just in this policy but in policy-making as a whole. Evidence matters. It should not be acceptable to make statements that affect the lives of people who are, on the whole, already financially vulnerable without having evidenced cause to do so. Certainly, scapegoating poor parents as being lazy and prone to shirking work the moment they are no longer compelled by the threat of destitution to do so (the fundamental implication beneath Swinney’s comment) is not compatible with the stated goal from the same politician to eliminate child poverty.

Public policy must always follow the evidence. Politicians must stop making claims that they cannot back up with evidence. It is beyond me that this is a lesson that still needs to be learned.

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How taxing land can help us find out who owns land

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A stock photo of the Scottish Highlands, largely devoid of people or wildlife apart from some sitka spruce plantations, a cairn and what may be the top of the roof of a house.

The UK as a whole but Scotland in particular appears to be creeping ever closer to the inevitable realisation that a few people hoarding stores of wealth is inherently bad for society and that wealth should be taxed.

The debate at the moment is largely focused on how to do it. The simplest version is probably also the worst. That would be to have everyone whose net worth is above a certain threshold tally up the value of all of their possessions (from housing to company ownership to cars to artworks) and then pay a tax based on a percentage of that value.

It’s often hard enough to do this for someone’s estate when they die – it’s even harder when they are still alive enough to move their mobile assets around to hide them from the Revenuers or to move themselves to somewhere that’s quite happy to host the ultra rich trying to avoid their responsibilities. Richard Murphy makes this point though he also offers suggestions that would work at a UK level such as reforming capital gains tax and corporation tax and removing tax subsidies from high value pensions. His 2024 Taxing Wealth Report can be read here.

In Scotland in particular though, there is a very large store of wealth currently being relatively untaxed that could be directly addressed without fear of the billionaires fleeing – our land and the ownership of it.

No matter where someone resides in the world, they can’t take their owned land in Scotland with them and therefore the land itself can be taxed regardless of who owns it and where.

“Who Owns Scotland?” is a key question, however, and one that is strangely unanswered for a country like ours. Andy Wightman is the go-to source for detailed information of land ownership, especially where that ownership is obfuscated through corporate or financial structures, but even his database currently covers less than 80% of rural land. The Scottish Land Register is, after many years of missed deadlines, still incomplete.

We also know that the land reform legislation passed in the previous Parliament is unlikely to enact meaningful reform of ownership. It may well have positive impacts in the management of land but the regulations only cover the largest estates and there are ways to avoid its strictures (such as by breaking a single estate up and setting up trusts or companies to own each chunk separately, even if a single individual owns all of those companies thus still controls all of the land). Even the rules around forcing some sales to offer lots to communities are unlikely to be meaningful if the communities don’t have the resources to buy the lots.

This is where tax may have to play a role.

One of the barriers currently facing bringing in a land tax is the lack of data not just on ownership but on valuation. The latter isn’t insurmountable and there are ways to do it. The Scottish Land Commission is investigating various approaches to valuation, and these basically boil down to a few key approaches.

The first is an algorithmic approach similar to the way Zoopla values your house and is based on similar nearby sales. This is more complicated for land than housing because land sells less often and has more variation even field-to-field but it can give a rough idea (my own paper on taxing land took a not-dissimilar proxy approach by combining national sales data with agricultural soil grade information).

Another is obviously to update valuations when land is sold or transferred but could also include valuation data captured during events like the owner taking out a loan secured on the land, reinsuring it against damage or when applying for planning permission to build on it. There may also be bespoke site surveys which could happen either as the result of any of the above, randomly to help benchmark the algorithmic approach or if the landowner is unhappy with their algorithmic valuation and wants a manual correction (this last one could be subject to a fee and on the understanding that valuations could go up as well as down – this would deter people disputing their valuation without good reason).

“The good news for land reform campaigners is that there seems to be a lot of things about to happen quite quickly in Scotland.”

Another slightly more radical version – but one not without precedent – is to allow owners to self-value their land but to give local government or communities the right to enact a compulsory purchase at the taxable rate regardless of any potential market rate. If you state that your Highland estate is worth £1 for the purposes of tax, then the local community can purchase your estate for £1. This would naturally incentivise owners to value their land accurately (or, at least, higher than the price the community is able to pay – the land speculation bubble has already priced many of them off the land).

Bringing in a land tax will therefore help to value land. It’s less of a barrier before a tax can be brought in but more like a problem of the land being difficult to value because there’s no tax to compel it to be valued.

I’m increasingly coming to believe that the same might be true for the problem of ownership too. That the barrier isn’t that we can’t introduce a land tax because we don’t know who we’re taxing but instead we’ll very quickly be able to find out who we’re taxing once we start introducing a land tax.

What would happen here is that the owners of land would be responsible for paying their land tax at the end of the year and would connect their payment to their entry or entries on the Land Register. These records could be checked for land that is on the register but which doesn’t have a tax payment linked to it. If tax is not paid on a portion of land and the owner is known, notices to owners could be sent out (along with late fees etc).

If ownership is not known or if the land is not on the register at all, then a public notice could be made calling for the owner to come forward with proof of ownership and an application to register their land. If none present themselves within a reasonable time (say, three or five years) then procedures dealing with ownerless land can be initiated with the land itself being ultimately transferred to a public body (the traditional recipient in Scotland would be the Crown, but I would argue in this post-feudal age that ownerless land should be converted into Common Good ownership).

This is a win-win for Scotland. Either land that is not declared on the Land Register gets registered quick to avoid being chased for tax evasion, or it comes back into public ownership and from there can be better used by an identifiable owner.

The good news for land reform campaigners is that there seems to be a lot of things about to happen quite quickly in Scotland. There was a fear for a while that the passing of the Land Reform Act last year would take the wind of out the sails of reform while doing little in itself to create much change but while the latter may yet be true, the former does not.

I can’t say too much at this stage other than to suggest that eyes are turned to the party conferences this year as there may be some interesting things happening. The Revive Coalition, of which Common Weal is a member, will be at both the SNP and Green conferences this month talking about land reform and where policies like a land tax can help to push things forward.

The important thing to remember in this campaign and in all others is to look at challenges not as barriers to prevent change but merely as obstacles to overcome or bypass. If we think we can’t do something, just check to make sure that we’re actually right about that and if we can’t do it in the way we want to, maybe we can do it another way instead. Being focussed on the solutions rather than being stopped by the problems is what will create change.

Taxing wealth is important and popular. Taxing land is one way to do that in Scotland. How to get there, is up to us.

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The pension triple lock became a problem that a double lock won’t solve

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund” – Ben Elton

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A pink piggy-bank wearing glasses and staring at a calculator

Andy Burnham has injected a case for optimism into the UK political sphere and has genuinely proposed some interesting ideas for the future. More crucially, as I point out in In Common in The National this week, his approach to making policy – by taking a step back and doing the detail work before trying to launch the idea – is the complete opposite of the Scottish Government’s approach of announcing an empty “Framework” then trying to backfill the detail on the fly. The Scottish Government could learn a lot from his approach to building a National Care Service just as Burnham should learn the lessons on why the Scottish attempt failed.

This attitude doesn’t necessarily extend too all aspects of the plans announced at the Labour conference this week and I think the one that is likely to have the longest term impact is the dropping of the state pension triple lock.

The triple lock is the mechanism by which the UK state pension was automatically uprated each year by the highest of the previous year’s rate of inflation, average rate of wage increases, or 2.5%.

It was brought in in 2010 by the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition Government and it did have noble reasons behind it. It has often and for many years been pointed out that the UK’s rate of state pension income is amongst the lowest in the developed world. Pensioner poverty for those reliant only on the state pension was becoming a major political scandal and it was urgent that the state pension be increased.

The doesn’t tell the whole picture because it doesn’t include private pensions and other income but we’ll come back to that. It’s also important to note that the increase in the state pension came around the same time as rapid rises to state pension age and increasing protests from groups like the WASPI women and so an increase to the rate of pension was somewhat of a sweetener to offset the fact that people would have to work longer before receiving their pension.

And finally, it cannot be ignored that there was a very deliberate political element to this. The reason why the Conservatives were for increasing social security for older people and were and still are against increasing it for younger people comes right down to the voting patterns of those two groups. Political parties of all colours play to their respective bases when they can or must.

With that preamble being necessary to start to grapple with this very complex issue, we can now look at Burnham’s reform. To replace the triple lock with a double lock of only uprating pensions by the highest of inflation or 2.5%, without automatic reference to wages.

This means that if wages are consistently higher than inflation and if inflation remains above 2.5% (despite the Bank of England’s target to keep it around that level) then pensioners will not get any poorer with relation to prices but they also won’t get any richer in relation to workers.

There are a lot of “ifs” in that aspiration. For a start, I believe that the fear that pensioners were getting drastically wealthier as a result of the triple-lock is based on a faulty reasoning. This did happen in the past few years because of the very particular circumstances of the Covid pandemic. When we went into lockdown, wages dropped quite drastically for a lot of people while supply chains took a massive hit. This meant that in the lockdown year, even though inflation outstripped wage growth (wage decline at its worst) both were below the 2.5% triple lock floor and pensioners became relatively wealthier compared to both prices and workers.

“It’s a bit like your landlord saying that instead of them increasing your rent by £200 next year, they’ll only increase it by £100 so now you have £100 to spend on dinner tomorrow night.”

After lockdown, shifts in the economy caused a massive spike in wage growth not (mainly) because people wanted paid more to come back to work but because “returning to normal” suddenly was a big proportional spike up compared to the layoffs and furlough funding of the previous year. Pensioners benefited from wage growth going to 7% and rapidly outstripping prices. Then, in 2022, the invasion of Ukraine plus other geopolitical factors (and outright corporate profiteering) have seen inflation blow past the steady post-Covid wage increases and have again seen pensioners do well out of the whole process.

All this is to say that the last few years broke the triple lock model in a way that wasn’t envisaged when it was created (you can read more about this in our 2021 book All of Our Futures). I’m not convinced that moving from a triple lock to the double lock is a solution to the problem nor am I convinced that the problem they are trying to solve is one that is likely to happen again as it did in 2020.

Burnham is essentially gambling that wage increases will stay both higher than inflation and higher than 2.5% per year. This is the only way that the state pension will increase slower than it would under the triple lock but that scenario has also been a rarity in the years since the 2008 Financial Crisis. He also undermines this objective by stating that pensions won’t lose value in relation to wages in the long term. This makes sense if the objective is indeed to avoid model-breaking short term shocks, but it doesn’t make sense if the long term goal is to have pensions grow at a slower rate than wages.

His claim that he can use the “saved” money to fund a National Care Service is obviously a political sweetener itself – people are often happier with a bit of policy pain if they think something good will come from it – but I don’t see how that can add up either.

It’s trying to predict both inflation and wage growth decades into the future. This is perfectly valid as a modelling exercise and to do things like try to work out the potential impact on pensioner income and to the Barnett Formula as funding shifts from a reserved policy to a devolved one (or vice versa), but it’s harder to say for sure that you can “use” money that isn’t even a real saving but merely a slower-than-otherwise increase in future costs. It’s a bit like your landlord saying that instead of them increasing your rent by £200 next year, they’ll only increase it by £100 so now you have £100 to spend on dinner tomorrow night.

The triple lock served a purpose of reducing pensioner poverty but I’m also not convinced that either it or the double lock are fit for that purpose without making changes to the other side of pensions – the private sector.

When I said that the UK’s state pension is among the lowest in the developed world and that this doesn’t tell the full story, it’s because a large amount of total retirement income in the UK is derived from private pensions and from the “housing ladder” (wealth built up in housing that can be released by “downsizing” upon retirement). In All of Our Futures, we found that the UK’s total pensioner income was closer to the average of developed countries (so, still not great) but that around half of it comes from private pensions or housing wealth.

There is a very good argument to be made that the Thatcher era that created the marketisation of housing as a capital growth asset and which unleashed the previously restrained pension financial sector and turned them into GDP-boosting risk-machines allowed the UK to deliberately keep its state pension low for only the cost of turning housing and the financial sector into economic bombs that have gone off repeatedly and are likely to do so again.

So continuing the job of reducing pensioner poverty while maintaining fairness across generations and between pensioners and workers is not going to be possible without reining in the financial sector and private pensions while also decapitalising housing.

There are solutions. We should re-socialise the housing sector by aggressively replacing private rented housing with social housing (which will reduce the problem of pensioner poverty for those who retire without owning a house to downsize from, while reducing the wealth inequality caused by landlords who bought their houses when they were cheap). We should better regulate and seek to replaced the private pension sector with a public-owned workplace pension scheme (see Jim Osborne’s work on this which is closely in accord with but much more developed than the work we could do in our book).

And we should replace the state pension with a Universal Basic Income at not less than the same rate as this would help to deal with issues such as regions of the UK where high deprivation means people working during ill health or dying before state pension age (creating a tax transfer from poor areas to richer areas with higher life expectancy). A UBI would also help end the discrimination of “retirement age” where people who are able and do want to work past an arbitrary timeline are more than welcome to do so.

The most vital thing is that any attempt at social security reform – be it pensions or anything else – must not be used to divide society either young against old or workers against retired people. All this does is distract from more serious divisions such as the reasons why the super-wealthy have left us all poorer or how tech oligarchs are literally stealing the future of this planet out from under us.

I have a great deal of hope right now thanks to Burnham’s new optimism. I hope it rubs off elsewhere too and we start to see more exciting and better thought through policies from all governments. Early signs are good, though we must make sure that areas like pensions are treated with the respect due to the sheer complexity of the task of making sure that wherever we live, within the UK, within an independent Scotland or anywhere else, we build a country that all of us can be proud to grow older in.

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Finally, Local Government Reform – But it must be done right!

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” – David Fleming

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Note:- Since this article was first published, Common Weal’s work on local government reform has been featured in The Herald.

Recently, First Minister John Swinney said that the current way we run Local Government in Scotland means that Local Authorities are “too big to be local and too small to be regional”. Except he didn’t really. He took that line, without credit, from Common Weal and our campaign for local democracy reform.

It’s a pity that he didn’t take more from us or even ask us for a briefing on our own work on the topic before yesterday’s surprise announcement of what could end up being the largest reorganisation of Scottish local government in more than 30 years.

The proposals are, at this stage, just a first stab at this plan and as of the time of writing it’s too early even for a public consultation (which we shall be engaged in) but even at this there are messages worth picking up and informing you about.

The first is that, contrary to previous hints at the Government’s thinking in the Programme for Government, there is actually a local tier of democratic governance in this proposal (the PfG stated only that local communities would be able to “influence local decisions”, not control them). New districts (formally called “Community Authorities”) will be formed by splitting the current Local Authorities into 3-5 sections forming between 120-160 local government bodies across Scotland which will elect Councillors using the same multi-member ward, STV system of voting that Local Authority Councillors are currently elected on.

Simultaneously, the current Local Authority boundaries will be merged so that 32 Councils will become between six and ten Regional Authorities. These will not have elected members or a separate vote but instead each District Councillor will double-job as a Regional Councillor too.

And this leads to a major problem. The dash to prevent the need for “more politicians” (both on cost grounds and likely to avoid political backlash) puts the plan in a double-bind.

As Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland has pointed out, if Scotland maintains the current number of Councillors at 1,227 then District Councils become very small with between 7 and 10 members each. For comparison, an average municipal council in Germany consists of about 20 members but also represents a much smaller population (average 9,000 residents). A German municipality covering a population of the size proposed by these districts (around 35,000 to 45,000 people) would have 30-40 Councillors and only the smallest of municipalities with populations fewer than 1,000 residents would be represented by fewer than 10 Councillors.

The other side of double-jobbing the District Councils means that each Regional Council becomes extremely large, with as many as 200 members sitting on it. Given that Local Authorities have largely sold off the buildings they haven’t used since the 1993 reforms (and we don’t know where the boundaries of the Regions will be yet) there’s a serious issue of where to host the Regional Councils if they are to be this size.

One workaround would be to cap the Regional Councils at, say, 100 members but this means either that Districts have to decide who to nominate to sit at Regional level and means that some of your Councillors will have power over some things that others do not – a much more blatant “two-tier” system than the List MSPs in Holyrood are (falsely) accused of being. Worse, Communities that used to be served collectively by around 30 Local Authority Councillors could find themselves electing as few as four members to run their District. It would be almost trivial for a political party clique (or even a married couple) to take complete control of their District. This is not democratic.

At a Regional level, either the approach of doubling every District Councillor or even nominating just some of them is a better approach than the proposal to directly elect Regional Provosts who would have direct and unilateral control over strategic decisions. This plan – apparently being expanded in England by former Regional Mayor Andy Burnham – would be even less democratic and even more centralised than the plan being proposed by the Scottish Government here (I wonder if this is intentional and that the sudden push for the regionalisation of Scotland has more to do with countering the plan for Provosts than it represents a genuine desire for local democracy, especially given Swinney’s poor track record when it comes to respecting local authorities).

On that note, what happens to Cosla is very much an open question here. Cosla currently represents the collective will of the 32 Local Authorities. Reducing its mandate to representing the Regions risks again making it easier for a small party clique to take control of the whole body – which might be the point. Cosla was one of the major factors in reigning in the worst of the Scottish Government during the National Care Service debate to the point that when Government found that it couldn’t sustain the plan to pull sole control of care away from Councils and give it to Ministers they instead set up a “tripartite” control board consisting of Government, Cosla and the NHS – the latter almost certainly being included as a means of providing a whipped vote in favour of Holyrood.

The proposals for which powers to sit where are not yet well developed though on the face of it, and if we use planning permission as an example, Regional Councils would be responsible for “strategic” decisions like whether or not a developer gets planning permission to build a new housing estate while District Councils would be responsible for “local” decisions like whether you, as a household, get planning permission for an extension on your house. While Swinney did mention ideas like devolving powers from Holyrood “or even from Westminster” to a more local level, it’s hard to find examples of powers at that level that might come to District level, and so this plan does appear to be one of centralising Local Authority powers to Regional levels more than moving powers to District level.

Also not developed is the cost of the whole endeavour. The 1993 reforms cost around £400 million at the time which in today’s money is closer to £1.2 billion. This isn’t an absolutely outrageous sum in national government terms but it’s a substantial one and may not factor in costs such as the need for the construction or purchase of new Regional Parliaments given that we don’t know how many we need or how large they’ll be.

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Burnham hasn’t changed the game, but he has taken to the field

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Opportunity does not waste time with those who are unprepared.” – Idowu Koyenikan

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A Go board in an advanced state - to the lay observer, it is not clear whether white or black is winning.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham took a significant step into the independence debate recently when, at PMQS, he was questioned by SNP MP Chris Law on the disparity between the constitutional mechanism for Northern Ireland formally seceding from the UK (contained within the Good Friday Agreement) and for Scotland to do the same (there isn’t one). Burnham replied that the mechanism for Scotland was “exactly the same” as for Northern Ireland.

That is, when it “seems likely” to the Secretary of State for Scotland (currently Douglas Alexander) that public opinion is such that a referendum would return a result in favour of Scottish independence, then such a referendum should be arranged.

There are a whole bunch of caveats to this constitutional clause. It is still, by far, nowhere near the democratic right to self-initiated, self-governance (c.f. Article 4 of the Constitution of Liechtenstein which allows any of the municipal councils to self-organise a secession referendum at a time of their own choosing). The clause that an independence referendum could only happen if it “seems likely” to succeed is subject to the Secretary of State not being stubbornly and wilfully blind to rising sentiment on the ground.

It has certainly been the case over the last decade of constitutional squabbling that the UK Government and successive Scottish Secretaries have been quite happy to tangle a target that they thought was unreachable only to yank it away when they realised that it might be. Is “once in a generation” the “not less than seven years” contained within the GFA? Or is it 25 years? Or is it not until every single person who voted in 2014 is dead and buried? UK Government has floated all of these positions at some point or another.

The Scottish Government is, with merit, now trying to bed the principle that Scotland should have the same constitutional right as Northern Ireland into law to make it harder for Burnham or his successor to backslide later.

It is certainly the case however that while Burnham has set a firm and reachable target now, the actual position of the goalpost hasn’t materially changed. The process of becoming independent was never path dependent on a constitutional arrangement and this remains true. The core argument should never have been “How do we get a new independence referendum?” or even “How do we bypass the need for a referendum with this One Weird Trick Lawyers Don’t Want You To Know?”.

It was always “How do we convince a majority of the Scottish population to support independence such that the pressure of their collective voice could not be ignored?”

It we win that consensus, the route to bringing Westminster to the negotiating table to agree and sign the required documents was always going to be a relative formality.

So how do we answer that important question? The key is to understand the demographics of independence. When support for independence rises, it’s not picking people up at random. It’s better to think of the kind of person who would be the next person to change their mind when support rises from X% to X%+1.

We can split Scotland into four groups of people. The “Convinced Nationalists” are those for whom independence is a core part of their identity and will likely always vote for it given the chance. It’s likely that you are one of them. The “Convinced Unionists” are the opposite – with an identity linked to the Union as a concept as strong as a Nationalist’s desire to break away. They will never vote for independence – though they may accept it as the will of the people afterwards in the same way as anti-devolutionists did after 1997. These two groups make up something between half and two-thirds of the population. Neither of these two groups are the target audience right now. Their votes won’t change.

Instead, think of the two groups in the middle – Converted Supporters who were the kind of people who began to support independence during the 2014 campaign as sentiment rose from its pre-2011 baseline of about 25% (the Convinced Nationalists) to 45% on the day. I’m part of that group. Most of this group are now pretty solid in their views. It’s a lot harder to get someone to change their worldview twice than it is to change once. I had to be convinced to support independence. Convincing me not to now would be a challenge. This is the primary reason that, contrary to some expectations, independence support did not fall back to the Nationalist baseline after 2014.

This means that the really important group are the people who sit in that realm of independence support rising from about 50% up to the Unionist ceiling somewhere near 70 or 75% and we really only need to win over about half of them.

“If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, are we, as a movement, prepared for that?”

When you examine the social attitudes of the Convinced Nationalists and the Convinced Unionists, they tend to be (though aren’t exclusively) quite different from each other. Support for independence is wrapped up in a lot of other fairly ideological policies such as being pro-Europe (if not always pro-EU), anti-monarchy, anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear, pro-immigration, Left-of-Centre and quite a few other topics whereas Convinced Unionists are much more likely to be opposed to many or all of these things (again, not exclusively – your individual experience may vary and there plenty of people in the Left of Scottish politics who agree with each other on almost everything except independence even if that one small difference prevents collaboration on everything else).

It’s not the Nationalists who are the isolated group though. The groups in the middle – even the Not-Yet Supporters – tend to be a bit closer in view to the Nationalists and especially to the Converteds than they are to the Unionists. In other words, the type of person who’d vote Yes at 60% is more “winnable” than the type of person who’d vote No at 40%.

We’ve talked about this phenomenon before. That the people we just barely failed to convince in 2014 weren’t ideologically against us. They actually agreed with the kind of Scotland they thought we were presenting. The problem wasn’t the vision, but the execution. They didn’t believe we’d fulfil our promises. And, frankly, who could blame them?

This is the main issue we’ve squandered over the past decade. We’ve been arguing process instead of policy. We’ve been hoping for “One Weird Trick” like a previously unknown legal route to indy or a Unionist politician standing up and say “Ah, go on then”. We haven’t really been preparing for what to do if that happened.

Seriously ask that question now. If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, what would be the next step? Are we, as a movement, prepared for that?

Not only do we need to be prepared, the act of the preparation is the thing that will convince the people who would bring support from 50% up to 60%. The act of preparation is the thing that will apply the pressure on Andy Burnham and Douglas Alexander that is needed for them to decide that independence “seems likely”.

In 2018, Common Weal produced our book How to Start A New Country which detailed the steps that need to be taken between referendum day and formal independence day in order to create a viable, independent nation state. It went through all of the institutions Scotland would need to set up or reform in order to take over the jobs currently being done “for” us in London. It’s still a powerful book but it’s getting on a bit and the world has changed a lot since it was written (the long version of the book is also almost entirely sold out, though you can get a digital copy here and we still have plenty of copies of the shorter version). It could use a bit of a refresh itself especially if it “seems likely” that it’s going to be needed sooner rather than later.

Next week, we’ll tell you what we’re planning to do about that.

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All trans­port in Scot­land should be pub­lic trans­port

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”- Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

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.

A photo of a rack of public rental bicycles.

As a policy-engineer this week’s coverage of the ins, outs, ups and downs of public transport has been a very enlightening read. I was very happy to be invited to help close out the session with some thoughts of my own, specifically around the topic of who should own our transport sector.

I think there are three ways we could deliver a service like transport. The least “public” is the competitive market model. Many of us have our own private car that we obtained having been given an overwhelming choice of multiple different cars to buy or lease (even if half of the models are all owned by the same few companies and the same few investment firms own shares of all of them so no-one is really “competing” with anyone).

We could consider running a bus service like this, where we arrive at the station and get a choice of several vehicles going our way with companies all jostling and competing on price or amenities, but that seems like a rather chaotic way to run a bus stop.

It’s an even worse way to run a train service which is why for many years we used a franchising model for that. Under franchising, a certain route, or area, or entire sector can be handed to a single operator to run as a monopoly for a certain amount of time.

This can work and it can be a fast substitute to proper infrastructure investment. But the downsides are pretty stark. Franchising hands a lot of power over to the service provider. It often doesn’t take long for them to start dictating terms to the government.

And given a limited time to maximise profits, it’s easy to cut corners to maximise profits. One only needs to compare the service provided by Abellio when it ran ScotRail with how they ran their domestic operations in the Netherlands. Strong regulation and strict use of break clauses (as was applied to ScotRail in 2022) are essential to keep a balance of accountability.

But this brings us to the third option: public ownership.

Different models of public ownership suit different types of transport. A national system probably suits trains and ferries as these tend to be highly capital intensive, long distance, fixed routes and, especially in the case of the ferries, the lifeline service is often more important than running at a profit. As we recently co-published with Living Rent and Get Glasgow Moving, there is a good case for regionally controlled public transport such as a Strathclyde Bus Company. And then there are city-run taxis and community bus services like the one the village next to mine runs.

Once you’ve made the case for public ownership of trains, ferries and taxis it becomes hard to not go further. If you own a private car, it almost certainly spends almost all of its time parked somewhere not being used. A community-owned car hire service could serve most people, most of the time and would free up vast areas of our landscape currently given over to car parks and reducing the massive expenditure we give over to leasing, buying and maintaining those cars (never mind the amount skimmed off in interest for hire/purchase agreements, insurance and other costs). These community cars can be paid for as pay-as-you-go, via a member subscription or even as a true free-to-use community service paid via local taxes.

And the same goes for bicycles too. Not just the urban rental bikes that are expanding through Scotland, but for all communities in Scotland. I’m trying to design a modular system whereby any community can plug in their demographics and the system would tell them they need a pod containing X vans, Y cars (including accessible vehicles), and Z bikes (including cargo bikes) and would then cost it up for them. The vehicles could then be provided by a national transport agency, with funding from the Scottish National Investment Bank to support it until it becomes self-sustaining.

I think part of the problem is that we too often have the motivation for better public transport backwards. We look at current demand and then try to match it as best we can. If the Scottish Government wants to hold to its stated principle of encouraging active travel as the primary mode of transport, followed by public mass transit, with private cars only being a last resort, then it has to first build the transport network required to make that world the easiest and cheapest option. If they build it, we will come.

This could be achieved with private ownership of the bike, bus, train and car networks but doing it that way means accepting that vast amounts of the investment money and even more of the money in our pockets will leave Scotland as private profits for the often foreign owned companies involved. To avoid that, to make it easier for the public investments to reach the greatest public good and, above all, to ensure that the returns on those investments stay in Scotland and can be recycled into expanding and strengthening our transport sector, the future of transport – at all levels – should be public transport.

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On a reality-based security strategy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There is an observation amongst peace-campaigners that politicians claim that there is never enough money to spend on social welfare but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war.

That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way. Now we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so the social welfare has to go to pay for it. The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.

This will have multiple impacts on public spending. The first is the impact of the direct cuts, as mentioned. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending – investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish budget but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn out of the transport budget and putting it into the military means an effective cut of £80mn to the Scottish budget. The third is that as a “job creation tool”, the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but spending £1bn on just about anything else – particularly things like energy infrastructure – would create even more jobs. It is likely that this defence plan will be net-negative for job growth. And that’s before we consider the final point – money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on. War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.

And this is all assuming that this is what the UK actually needs or should be doing right now. The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson rather ironically saying in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it.”

But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like to have, we need a reality-based security strategy.

The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem and it is now too late to prevent but not too late to limit or to adapt to. But doing so will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time. It’s not just the climate itself, but Trump’s illegal war with Iran and Putin’s with Ukraine has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we now have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted in the way those wars did to our fuel supplies. Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.

Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the ones recently spotted outside Holyrood last week. These are all policing matters rather than military though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.

The same goes for non-climate environmental threats. If we wanted a reality-based security strategy to consider the number of British people killed each year then we’d be waging war against pollution. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3,000 lives per year (I haven’t been able to find comparable data for Glasgow or Edinburgh’s LEZ impacts yet). If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3,000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. If a politician tried to win an election on the promise of murdering 3,000 people, I doubt they’d win a vote. And yet, there are politicians and political parties still claiming to want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.

Next on the threat scale is probably something like Hybrid War – unconventional attacks on our infrastructure via things like hacking attempts and drone warfare. The UK has, in fact, experienced attacks like this from state actors – we now know that Russia was likely behind the shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover last year. We also know that Trump’s USA has been actively spying on European Governments, digitally sanctioning human rights lawyers, and is quite capable of ordering Microsoft to lock down Scotland’s ability to pass legislation should he choose to. The threat from this kind of hybrid war isn’t therefore coming only from our “enemies” and cannot be defended against by building more bombs to aim at them. A reality-based security strategy would be following the EU’s lead and developing a digital sovereignty strategy to remove the threat of such hacks from the table. Common Weal are actively working on what a Scottish digital strategy could look like.

“If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.”

On the far side of the threat spectrum in terms of probability is actual territorial invasion which is vanishingly low for somewhere like Britain. The country being held up as a threat in this regard, Russia, has already shown the limits of its capabilities in Ukraine. It may well still be a threat on the borders of NATO, but that’s a very different prospect to the idea of seeing T-90 tank in Tottenham. Once again, when considering territorial invasion, we cannot ignore our supposed “ally” the USA, which is still threatening to annex Greenland. However, the thought does bring up the thing that has been absolutely missing from discourse on defence spending till now – time.

The new Starmer plan has a long time horizon. It will be years before the actual money starts to ramp up weapons production and development and decades before the results of that spending results in deployable equipment (this is particularly the case with things like nuclear weapons and new submarines to launch them). If we take as given that Putin’s Russia is the massive overbearing threat that the establishment would have us fear, then we have to remember that Putin himself is mortal and already past UK state retirement age. He will quite likely be dead or otherwise no longer in power before any of Starmer’s new weapons can be aimed at him. Who will replace him? What can the UK and Europe do now to normalise relations with his successor so that post-Putin Russia is not a threat? Would doing that be cheaper than us threatening to nuke Moscow, murdering 5 million civilians in the process? Might it work better?

Pacifists like myself are never listened to in times of peace. In times of war, we are openly scorned as not having the solutions to the conflict that could have been avoided had we been listened to in times of peace. Warmongers need war and the threat of war to justify their own existence and to bloat their already unjustifiable budgets and they must be called out on this fact. If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead. If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers would prefer we were afraid of instead.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.

2026 Scottish Parliamentary Elections: The Day After

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn’t matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did.” – Cassandra Clare

This is an original post, not previously published elsewhere. If you would like to support me or this blog, please see my donate page here.

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

The results are in and we now know the shape of the Scottish Parliament. 58 SNP, 17 Labour, 17 Reform, 15 Green, 12 Conservative and 10 Liberal Democrats.

We don’t yet know the shape of the Scottish Government but the result is pretty certain so long as there are no major U-turns from the political party promises beforehand. The SNP will form a minority government and try to get their budgets and bills passed on an ad hoc basis.

I do not believe we’ll see a formal coalition agreement or even a looser cooperation agreement of confidence and supply (where a smaller party promises to support the annual budget and other votes where failure would result in the automatic fall of the government). The SNP still feel rather burned by the failure of their cooperation agreement with the Greens and while I think the Greens would consider a second shot, they are rather wary of being used and discarded again like they were last time.

The other probable source of a kingmaker is the Liberal Democrats who have outright refused to join a formal coalition with the nationalists but have signalled willingness to support budgets etc. Indeed, I believe courting Lib Dem votes for the last budget before the election was the SNP’s way of testing whether such an agreement would be acceptable to their own members (who skew rather more left and green than the leadership does).

It is notable that the same is true for the other parties as well. Any combination of SNP plus one other party would allow a Bill to pass and that technically should mean a fair bit of power-brokering or at least the SNP playing parties against each other. In practice, the Conservatives and Reform are so ideologically opposed to the SNP to support anything and La

For me as a political lobbyist, this was a good result all-in. A majority government tends to be one that closes ranks and pushes outside voices completely outside (or brings them in so close that everyone else can’t see them…but that’s a transparency talk for another time)

For the third time in a row since 2011, we have a pro-independence Parliament with 73 MSPs being representatives of pro-independence parties (if any MSPs on the other side would like to raise their personal convictions despite their party position, do let me know) though this was gained on just 41% of the proportional vote (the discrepancy is because while the Scottish Parliament is more proportional than the UK Parliament, it’s still got a built in advantage for the largest party). This is a drop from 48.4% of the proportional vote for the SNP + Greens in 2021. There have been increasing signs that while sentiment towards independence has been rising, there is a growing dissatisfaction with political parties in their delivery. This could prove important in the coming months especially now that there are openly pro-nationalist governments in place in all three of the devolved nations of the UK. This is probably the most important point to note out of the elections generally. While this doesn’t mean that independence is now inevitable in any or all of those nations, had this happened, say, to a Soviet or colonial bloc in the 20th century, pundits would indeed be predicting the bloc’s imminent demise and they would probably have been right.

Back to the parties though, there is going to be a lot more relief and disappointment than glee in the first week of the Parliament.

SNP

The SNP lost seats and lost vote share. Even though they remain the largest party, remain in government, held most of their “big hitter” politicians (with the notable departure of Angus Robertson who came third in his constituency seat, now taken by Green Lorna Slater) they did not make advances and fell back significantly from latter-day polling that suggested they might be in the running for an outright majority. They remain in a commanding position in Parliament – not least because of the fragmentation of their opponents – but being seven seats short of winning a vote means that they will be extremely reliant on other parties to get anything done. They may try to just do things boldly and challenge others to stop them but John Swinney isn’t Alex Salmond. I’ve never known him to start a fight that he didn’t know he’d already won and I’ve rarely known him to be sure that he’s won until he has.

Labour

This was a disaster of a campaign for Labour. Overshadowed by the scandals hitting their parent party and Keir Starmer down south, they decided not to campaign on policy but on a popularity contest. They pumped massive amounts of money into an advertising campaign for Anas Sarwar specifically and it didn’t work. He lost his constituency seat (though he remains an MSP due to his position on the Regional List) and oversaw a substantial loss of seats. It was, however, not as bad as some polls suggested and even though they are (joint) 2nd place in terms of seats, they were hard done by by the electoral system. In a truly proportionate system, they should have won 20-21 seats, rather than the 17 they have now.

Still, this leaves Labour largely frozen out of the Scottish politics as a party. Their best hope of influence is to do what they accidentally did last Parliament. Back then Sarwar lacked control over his MSPs and basically let them put forward Members’ Bills in areas of interest. This led to the PassivHaus Bill, substantial movements in Freedom of Information, a Land Reform policy that the Government voted down but which has since been adopted by the Greens and others. The party’s fortunes are going to remain closely tied to that of Starmer and Sarwar…but their MSPs may have fight in them yet.

Reform

This is objectively another disappointing result for Reform. Their polls have peaked in recent months and global setbacks to the Far-Right Movement may have ripples here too. The party that was almost certain to go from near-zero to the 2nd party in Parliament only managed joint-second and with far fewer than the up-to 30 seats they were aiming for. I believe their leader’s performance in the debates played a role here. Malcolm Offord’s blithe comment about his multitude of houses and yachts did not endear him to a public for whom the cost-of-living crisis is growing and is plainly being exacerbated by Reform’s allies rather than the immigrants that the party rose to power by demonising.

Greens

One of the winners of the elections, the Greens pulled off some noteworthy victories including their first set of constituency wins (it wasn’t that long ago that they were told by opponents that they weren’t even a “real” party if they couldn’t win in the constituencies. While that slur hasn’t been deployed in a while, it’s certainly no longer applicable anyway). The planet is in greater need of climate action than ever and between the SNP’s continued attempts to backslide on climate policy and Reform’s outright climate denial policies, there is a risk to Scotland here that the Greens will have to work hard resist.

Conservatives

Another of the election’s losers. Devoured by Reform even as they tried to radicalise to save themselves, only to find that the radicals devouring them could do it better. Nevertheless, the Conservatives held up rather better than I expected. Their strongholds in the South remain. My experience of farmers is that where they skew Conservative and Localist, it’s mostly because they want to be left alone rather than out of ideological rightward skew. For reasons mentioned above, the Tories will be largely frozen out of the Parliament this session. When the Right speak, Reform will be louder and first in the pecking order so the Conservatives will have to find a way of distinguishing themselves. There is merit to the idea of them pulling back to a centre-right “Ruth Davidson” position as that is now a clear gap in Scottish politics, but we’ll have to see if there’s anyone left in the party to pull that off.

Liberal Democrats

Probably the biggest winners of the election given the power they might soon have, the Lib Dems should be celebrating this weekend. I’ll admit that there’s plenty in their manifesto that should appeal broadly even to the Left should they want to push it so they may well get a lot done this session. Their vulnerability is that they can’t push too hard or the SNP will just pick another partner to get a vote passed but this is true for everyone else too. We’ll have to see which tail wags which dog going forward.

And everyone else

No other party got elected to Parliament nor did any independents. This is despite the Extremely Online set of supporters who were absolutely convinced that with the power of a tweet, they could get 125% of SNP voters to vote for them on the List and thus win an absolute super-majority. The high profile failures of Alba and Your Party are also a lesson to be learned. Building political parties is not easy. It takes years and maybe even decades of work to build success (seriously…both the SNP and Nigel Farage’s various parties are a lesson here in how long it takes) and even then it’s not a given and everything can blow away like smoke with a single bad headline.

No, it’s not fair that Scotland has such a high effective electoral threshold before votes become seats but we’re not looking at a German system here where a party was locked out because it got 4.9% of the vote but missed the 5.0% threshold. None of the parties who didn’t get a seat managed to clear 1% of the vote. The “best performing” one, with 0.88% of the vote, wasn’t even a real party but is a front group designed to try to confuse and steal votes from Green voters. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for smaller parties – I genuinely wish we had a more diverse Parliament – but it won’t happen without hard graft in the communities to build votes and to win people with your policies. There are five years until the next election. That isn’t as long as one might think.