Author: Dr Craig Dalzell

Extremism Bingo

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Face your political opponents according to legitimacy, democracy, and the constitution, not hypocrisy, autocracy, and transgression.” – Ehsan Sehgal

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

Bingo

Rishi Sunak’s recent speech on the dangers and risks facing the UK said much more about his perceptions of the risks to his premiership than about the risks facing the people of the country itself.

This week Rishi Sunak gave a speech hosted by the Policy Exchange – a think tank that scores the lowest possible rating for financial transparency and which doesn’t appear on either the UK or Scottish Lobbying Registers. In it he unofficially but totally officially used his position as head of government to launch a party political campaign aimed to try to save his career ahead of a general election that he will have to announce within the next few months (Note: Since the initial publication of this article, Sunak has indeed called that General Election) – knowing that had he given that speech during that campaign, he almost certainly would have been forced to rewrite much of it to stay within election campaign rules. As it is, the “official” transcript of the speech is loaded with redactions where he crossed the line between Prime Minister of the Government and Leader of the Conservatives. Not that anyone who watched the speech on the TV would have been exposed to those redactions. It’s certainly an innovative approach to political transparency – to say things on the record knowing that they’ll be safely redacted from the record.

Continue reading →

Repopulating Cleared Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“This high-souled gentry and this noble and far-descended peasantry, ‘their country’s pride,’ were set at naught and ultimately obliterated for a set of greedy, secular adventurers, by the then representatives of the Ancient Earls of Sutherland.” – Donald Sage

(If you’d like me to speak at your conference or activist group, give me a shout. Find out more about the training and outreach I offer here. If you’d like to throw me a wee personal tip to support that work, you can here.)

brown and grey stone house near hills

My Provocation Speech at Community Land Scotland’s “Own Yersel” land reform conference on 10th May. You can watch my speech and the others in the session below.

Continue reading →

The In Tray

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[The purpose of] clarification is not to clarify things. It is to put one’s self in the clear” – Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay, Yes Minister 

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

I was hoping for a bit more of a shakeup in John Swinney’s Ministerial reshuffle. As it was, it’s barely a wobble. Some space was carved out to give Kate Forbes a Cabinet Secretary position without much in the way of actual power. The changes are most notable in their absences. Just a day before the reshuffle I was in a Committee hearing that discussed, in part, the “signal” sent when the issue of, say, “Older People” is moved from the title of a Cabinet Secretary to the title of a more junior Minister, and then dropped from titles altogether and moved into the middle of the list of responsibilities of a Minister or dropped completely. As Dr Hannah Graham has pointed out on Twitter, the list of terms that no longer exist as Ministerial titles include:- Migration & Refugees, Europe and International Development, Planning, Fair Work, Community Wealth, Just Transition, Biodiversity, NHS Recovery, Active Travel, Innovation and Trade, and Independence. Journalists take note, when those lists are published – the Wayback Machine is your friend. Compare the new list of responsibilities to the old one to see what has been promoted and what has been demoted entirely as an issue of importance for the Swinney Government.

Nevertheless. Even though most of the faces haven’t changed and most of them haven’t even moved office, we do have a new Government and that is always an opportunity for new and returning Ministers to review their goals and objectives. I’d like to place into each of their In Trays at least one Common Weal policy paper relevant to their brief that we’d like them to take on in the coming months.

Continue reading →

How John Swinney Can Eradicate Child Poverty

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
– William Blake

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

a truck driving down a street next to tall buildings

John Swinney is now Scotland’s seventh First Minister. He is also the sixth First Minister to have been, at the time of his swearing in, one of the tranche of “99’ers” – the first generation of MSPs who have held unbroken service in Holyrood since the start of Devolution and the recommencement of the Scottish Parliament. This speaks to the relative youth of that Parliament as does the fact that, at present, we still do not have an elected MSP who is younger than the Devolution era (though we came close in 2021 with the election of then 23 year old Emma Roddick who was born just shortly before the devolution referendum in 1997).

We’re still living in fast-moving times and the period between me writing this column on Wednesday morning and you reading it on Thursday evening is a gaping chasm that none can see across clearly but I did want to take a moment to pick up a point made by Swinney during his speech on Monday when he accepted the mantle of leader of the SNP. It’s a point that I’m slightly surprised that no-one else picked up on because it was his sole tangible policy pledge that couldn’t be discounted as the mere background level of filler (No-one expects a politician to promise to build fewer houses, so a comment about building “more houses” without a tangible target or policy strategy isn’t much more solid).

John Swinney pledged to “eradicate child poverty in Scotland”. So I’d like to take a moment to ask him the hardest question anyone can ask any politician who has made a pledge of any kind.

“How?”

Continue reading →

Profit Extraction Makes Scotland Poorer

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
– Suzy Kassem

(This blog post previously appeared in ROSE Magazine.)

image_2024-01-28_130144225

Scotland is one of the most foreign-owned countries in the developed world and the consequence of this is the loss of more than £10 billion pounds every year mostly as a result of shareholder dividends and other forms of profit extraction.

This is the conclusion of my latest policy paper for Common Weal titled Profit Extraction: How foreign ownership drains Scotland’s wealth and is based on recently updated data from the Scottish Government as well as data from the World Bank.

Continue reading →

A Deal With The Devolved – Part Three

/ 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.

Continue reading →

A Bute House Divided

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s only hubris if I fail”, Julius Caesar, HBO/BBC TV series Rome (2005)

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

The Bute House Agreement has ended. Earlier this month, the Greens notified members that there would be a vote on whether or not to continue the cooperation deal with the Scottish Government within the next few weeks. This morning, stealing the march and despite saying just 24 hours earlier that SNP members didn’t need a vote because they’d certainly back the agreement, Humza Yousaf unilaterally terminated the deal. The Greens have been booted out of government and Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater are no longer ministers.

Continue reading →

Workers With Purpose

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?” – Lucy Parsons

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

Workers

I was pleased to visit the STUC Annual Congress in Dundee this year, representing Common Weal as an observer and speaking at the SNP Trade Union Group’s fringe meeting on Scotland’s Future. The panel of speakers (Seamus Logan from SNP PPC, Stephen Smellie from Unison, Gordon Martin from RMT, and myself) were each asked to present a progressive policy idea as well as to shape that idea around a broader vision of Scotland as we each saw it.

Continue reading →

Shedding Light on Rural Heat

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.” – Victor Borge

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

If the Scottish Government knew they were going to abandon its climate targets (see Robin’s column for more on that) then they could have probably saved themselves a lot of strife last week over their botched policies and communications around rural heating. If they had listened to us almost five years ago when we submitted a comprehensive policy paper and two extensive policy briefings to them on decarbonising heat in off-grid and rural areas, they might have avoided both weeks of bad headlines now.

Continue reading →

Time For Some Tech Optimism

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

 “I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and I know what people can accomplish.” – Bill Gates

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

Despite my scientific training and engineering background (or perhaps because of them) when talking about the climate emergency, I’ve generally been wary about going down the route of tech-optimism, of believing that there’s a technological solution to the problem just around the corner. There are three broad reasons for this. The first is that risk that the tech fails and leaves us in a worse place than we currently are. Continuing to emit carbon until the day that a tech-priest grants us the blessing of effective carbon capture only works if the blessing actually arrives. If it doesn’t, then we’re left with a larger problem and even less time to fix it. And a strategy like “Net Zero” that fixes part of the problem (like EV cars fixing carbon emissions) but doesn’t address the rest of the problem (overall air quality) isn’t even a solution.

Continue reading →