The new National Housing Agency must serve people, not profit

February 6, 2026 / 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.
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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.

We Are All Human, Or None Of Us Are.

August 29, 2025September 1, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” – John F. Kennedy

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The UK is slipping even further into a dark, dark place. Let’s just be clear from the outset: once you declare someone, anyone, as not worthy of human rights you are declaring them to not be worthy as humans. And once you declare someone, anyone, as not being a worthy human, you might be next. Human rights apply to all of us, or to none of us.

Watching Nigel Farage spend a day of unrelenting media coverage this week to show off his latest idea of stripping migrants of their human rights and putting them in concentration camps was sicking. Worse, was seeing Keir Starmer’s response which was basically “we’ll do it too, but better”.

Then we got treated to a second day of it as former Conservative MSP Graham Simpson defected and attracted all of the airwaves to Farage again, followed for a third day by another defection in the form of former Labour Councillor Audrey Dempsey. Make no mistake. If you thought that was merely a coincidence, then you missed the deliberate strategy there.

Farage’s proposal is to follow a decade-long Conservative shibboleth of declaring that those “foreign courts” in Europe who safeguard our human rights via the European Convention on Human Rights are the worst kind of evil and the UK needs to withdraw from it. He’ll put in its place a “British Bill of Rights” that will apply only to British citizens and instead of “the state” telling you what you can do, you’ll have the freedom to do anything unless the state says you can’t do it.

One of the things he wants to do is to round up Afghan nationals who collaborated with the British armed forces during the invasion and occupation of that country. Many of these people now live under the threat of torture and execution by the Taliban since the latter reconquered the country and took back control. Many of these people had their personal details of their involvement with British forces leaked due to the UK’s appalling data security. Some received emergency evacuation. Some, it seems, did not.

Not surprisingly, the Taliban themselves appear to be quite happy to “receive” these people if Farage gets to implement his plans. When asked about whether he’d do it too Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, said, effectively, ‘we’re not taking that option off the table’.

Removing the UK from the ECHR is not going to be as easy as waving a legislative wand. The rights bill is baked into the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and can only be amended with the agreement of Ireland. Farage’s entire plan can be vetoed with a single memo containing the word “No”.

Or Northern Ireland could leave the UK, which would considerably smooth the passage of his plan. There’s still a complication in that ECHR is also baked into the Scotland Act and thus any attempt to disapply it to devolved areas in Scotland would require a legislative consent motion. But as Brexit has shown, this can simply be overridden by a Farage (or Starmer) Government. Or they could unilaterally amend the Scotland Act directly. Devolution will be no protection for Scotland in the way that it is for Northern Ireland.

“My partner is a migrant and is not a UK citizen nor likely to become one. Whenever someone says “prioritising British citizens”, they mean deprioritising and delegitimising my family.”

Even if the “British Bill of Rights” contains a carbon copy of the ECHR and it remains applying to everyone in general (i.e. Farage isn’t allowed to disapply it to Irish, Commonwealth, EU or non-EU citizens as he’s hinted) then we still have to remember that the actual purpose of doing this is to disapply it to specific people in specific instances whenever they become a nuisance to The State.

We’ve long been fed lines of the “bad person” who is “abusing human rights law” to avoid deportation for flimsy reasons like their cat is sick or they’d miss chicken nuggets (the actual stories behind those propaganda lines are far more nuanced). The point is that if such a person existed, these radicalised factions within the UK want to declare them less-than-human and to punish them for it.

This all matters because, sooner or later, it may well affect you. It’s certainly already affecting me. My partner is a migrant and is not a UK citizen nor likely to become one. Whenever someone says “prioritising British citizens”, they mean deprioritising and delegitimising my family. We also have to remember that I don’t just support Scottish independence, I work for an activist organisation that advocates for it. I am paid to agitate against the State in support of secession. In some countries, that’s not a job – it’s a death penalty offence. It might be me they strip citizenship from and declare to be unworthy of human rights.

Which, of course, means it might be you too. Or it might be Nigel Farage. Because even he is only a lost election and a charge of “collaboration with the previous regime” away from seeing his human rights abused too. As the famous line from the play A Man for All Seasons goes: “If you cut down the laws, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”

Human rights must apply to all of us or they apply to none of us. So I would ask Farage (and Starmer, and any other MP tempted to support this idea) a question: Please look through the rights guaranteed by the ECHR. Which rights do you wish would no longer apply to you, personally?

Because if he gets his way, one day they might not.

Scotland: We Have Rockets Too

February 7, 2025February 13, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.” – Francesca Lia Block

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Imagine the pitch. You’ve been instructed by Angus Robertson’s office to cut together a bunch of stock footage for a video showcasing Scotland and [don’t look at the fascism] the USA. Quite artistically, the images are juxtaposed to show the common interests between our two [ignore the ethnic cleansing] nations. For the scene to illustrate the line “we share beautiful places”, what images do you think would show Scotland and the US at their best [Hail King Musk and Viceroy Trump]?
The Scottish Government chose the two above.

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Strangled By The Purse Strings

October 27, 2024October 27, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got lots of numbers in it.” – George W. Bush

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Eyes are on the UK Budget at the moment, and for good reason, but shortly after that we’re going to see what the Scottish Government lays out in its own budget and, given the scope of devolution, that is likely to have much more of an impact on Scottish public services – especially at a local level.

This means that recent news from Shona Robison telling Local Authorities that there’s “no money left” for public sector pay deals should be taken as a threat to local democratic autonomy.

Usually when I write an article like this I start by saying “imagine if Westminster treated Holyrood like this” but in this case I don’t really need to as we have the example of the UK Government’s cut to Winter Fuel Payments in England having a knock-on effect on the Block Grant which put Holyrood in the position of making the choice on whether to cut the equivalent Scottish allowance too. They didn’t have to – the Block Grant is calculated based on how Westminster spends money in England but Scotland is free to spend that Grant as it likes, not just on equivalent policies. In this case though, they did indeed choose to cut the payments.

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Vote Dalȝell for Lord Provost! (Please Don’t!)

July 28, 2024October 5, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” – Gene Sharp

This blog post is an extended edition of an article that previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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How would you feel if I, personally, had total control over the strategic direction of several key areas of public services that affect you? The odds of me being able to make a successful bid to win election as a Scottish “metro mayor” if they are introduced up here are not zero. I’ve been in politics long enough to have become well known at least in political circles, I have a few friends and hopefully not many more enemies. And though I’m not a member of a political party, I do get asked by several of them if I’d be willing to join and even if I didn’t, a run as an independent candidate wouldn’t be impossible. It’s even possible that you’d like some of my policies.

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What Happened To GB Energy?

June 11, 2024June 11, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.” – Chuck Palahniuk

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

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One of Common Weal’s most important policy successes has been how we’ve pushed the debate in Scotland and beyond on the issue of publicly owned energy. Energy is absolutely vital to our entire economy regardless of which side of the left-right spectrum you believe that economy should serve (as Prof Steve Keen puts it: “Capital without energy is a sculpture; Labour without energy is a corpse.”) and in the UK we, unlike many other states, have decided to sell off our energy sector to the point that more of our energy is owned by the public sectors of other nations than is owned by our own, never mind the vast swathes owned by private multinationals that are the size of countries.

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How Scotland Votes: A Guide to the 2024 UK General Election

June 6, 2024June 6, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” – Terry Pratchett

(This post and the research underpinning it was undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support that work, you can here.)

Vote

Disclosure and Disclaimer: Although I am politically active – albeit not a member of any political party – this guide is intended to be objective and politically neutral. This is a guide on how to vote and is written with a first time voter in mind. It is not a blog to try to convince you to vote for or against any particular person or party but to help you cast your vote and to understand how that vote translates and contributes to the final result.

For the first time since 2015, the UK has managed to complete a relatively normal length of time between General Elections, though since the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, a “normal” period of time is no longer the fixed period of five years but may be called at any time by the incumbent Prime Minister so long as not more than five years has passed. The absolute deadline for the current term was January 2025 but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pulled the trigger a little earlier than that (and a little earlier than most commentators expected as many thought we’d see an election around September or October). Whatever his reasons – and he doesn’t strictly need any – Parliament has been dissolved, all of our MPs have lost their jobs and many of them – as well as a slew of other potential candidates – are now courting your vote to try to win a seat in the House of Commons. This vote will take place on Thursday 4^th July 2024.

If you want to take part in this election, and particularly if it’s your first time ever doing so or if it’s not but you’d like to know how your vote translates into seats and MPs, then this guide is for you. If you’re looking for someone to tell you who to vote for, then I won’t do that here but please do check out my list of all of the published party manifestos which may help guide your vote.

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“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” – Terry Pratchett

Vote

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A Deal With The Devolved – Part Three

May 3, 2024May 12, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

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

Thanks to an FOI request, I now have evidence that the Scottish Government has applied its devolved Freeport tax cuts without any data saying that they will benefit the Scottish public purse or be offset by other taxes.

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Judge Them By Our Actions

February 23, 2024February 28, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.” – Noam Chomsky

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The scenes coming out of Israel and Gaza are beyond abhorrent – and unlike wars of even just a few years ago, it’s playing out in real time on our own screens – atrocity careful curated by algorithm to keep us watching whatever social media platform we’re watching it on. The scenes this week of the UK Parliament almost collapsing into party-tribal anarchy over what flavour of “ceasefire” is the only one they could support has done the UK no favours in terms of its international reputation or its ability to be a responsible and reliable partner for peace when negotiations do finally, too late, begin to end the conflict, hopefully once and for all.

But the problems for the UK’s involvement in this run deeper. Before the chaos of the Opposition Day Motion debate in Parliament many of the detractors on social media attempted to delegitimise the concept of the debate saying that the UK simply had no possible influence over the situation and that the calls for a ceasefire were purely symbolic at best and grandstanding at worst.

However, the UK is not a purely symbolic bystander in this (not that should excuse those who are bystanders. As Desmond Tutu said, those who remain “neutral” in situations of injustice, side with the oppressor). The actions of the UK are deeply entwined with the humanitarian disaster unfolding in front of us.

For a start, the UK is the only country that has consistently abstained from United Nations level votes for a ceasefire in Gaza. These abstentions wouldn’t have swung the vote (which have been consistently vetoed by the USA regardless of their overwhelming result) but that abstention does provide the US the diplomatic cover of not being the only ones to oppose peace. That is a symbol that cannot be ignored.

More directly, the UK is openly providing military aid with the specific aim of supporting Israel and Israel has used UK infrastructure (including Scottish Government owned Prestwick airport) for military purposes. If the International Court of Justice does find that their observed plausible risk of genocide is borne out, then the UK must ask itself (or be asked by the court) to what extent that military assistance opens the UK to a charge of complicity in any war crimes that may have taken place.

Another problem is in the nature of international law itself as far too many countries – the UK included – appear to treat it as an inconvenience only to be obeyed when someone they don’t like breaks it.

With that in mind, I have been watching part of the case moving through the ICJ this week where Palestine has asked the court to make a ruling on whether or not the occupation of Palestine by Israel is illegal. In brief, the case is that while the occupation of foreign territory during wartime can be legal, the continued occupation of that territory beyond what is absolutely necessary both in scale, scope and time is unlawful and that those limits have been exceeded. The case can be watched here, with the UK’s own submission to the case due some time on Friday 23rd.

That submission will be interesting because Palestine themselves used the UK’s own actions as precedent in its evidence session on Monday. Specifically, the UK’s occupation (and forced deportation) of the Chagos Islands that was declared unlawful in 2021. The UK Government had been making some moves towards obeying the order to end the occupation but this itself appears to have reversed since the return of David Cameron to Government and who in January completely halted and cancelled talks and “ruled out” return of the islands to those the UK had forcibly removed from their homes claiming – despite evidence – that it was “not possible” for people to live there any more. If an occupier has left occupied land incapable of supporting those removed from it, then that is a problem for the occupier to fix.

There is a real danger of this story repeating itself in Gaza, with the continued destruction of homes and infrastructure and the sheer amount of unexploded ordinance surely hiding under the rubble of those homes making the prospect that people who have been forcibly displaced ever returning more remote and more unlikely by the day.

If and when the UK does decide that it can no longer stand by from or actively support atrocity, then it will have to reflect on the atrocities it has committed in turn. There will come a time to prosecute the war crimes committed over the course of the conflict in Israel and Palestine and each and every one of those crimes absolutely must be prosecuted whether committed by an enemy or an ally (or, indeed, by oneself). But the UK’s own actions are being held up to the world as an example of unacceptable behaviour and this matters because if it does not accept that behaviour as unacceptable by ourselves then we provide cover for those who wish to commit those same crimes on others. The world is judging others by our actions and we are falling woefully short of any measure that we should hold up as an example to aspire to.

Postscript:- The UK’s evidence to the ICJ quite brazenly started off with a statement to the effect of “We know you’re looking at our actions in Chagos – Please don’t judge Israel by our actions.”