Author: Dr Craig Dalzell

Four Ideas For Housing Scotland

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“The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied, “That’s why I bought the building.”” – Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Màiri McAllan has returned to the Scottish Government after a well deserved period of patient parental leave though has left her former post as Cabinet Secretary for Energy and has been tasked with fixing Scotland’s housing crisis. As a writer of policies on both topics I don’t exactly envy the position but I can at least lay out some of the options I and my colleagues in Common Weal have published over the years on the topic. Housing is about more than homes – as anyone can attest if they have ever objected to a planning application for a new suburban sprawl on the basis that it would add extra pressure to services such as GPs, schools and other public services without adding to provision – but about building a sense of place, of community and about meeting a fundamental human need for shelter. The task is far larger than I can do justice in these few lines of text but I shall offer Màiri four ideas to help fix housing in Scotland.

Actual Land Reform

You cannot build a home without having the land to build on it. This is a particularly acute problem in rural Scotland where despite having the space to build we often cannot access the land due to it being held by mega-estates and is simply not for sale or when it is, the price to buy is being speculated beyond control. We need a land tax and other mechanisms like Mercedes Vilalba’s proposal to cap maximum land ownership. One of the most powerful ideas though would be to allow Councils to buy land at “existing use value”. That is the value of land as it currently is, not an inflated value based on its “potential” for housing or other uses.

Build “Enough” Social Housing

The central reason why Britain’s housing “market” is broken is because we run housing as a market. Thatcher broke the previous system by selling off social housing and making it impossible for Councils to replace them. Social housing should never be the last option before homelessness but the first choice for housing for many. My paper Good Houses for All shows how the borrowing powers of Councils and the Scottish National Investment Bank could build essentially unlimited homes for social rent (Councils aren’t limited in borrowing powers like Holyrood is, so long as the rents are sufficient to pay back the loan). They could be built to the highest possible energy standards to outbid the private sector in both price and quality. And they shouldn’t be built to an arbitrary target of “more houses than the previous government” but based on actual need. Councils should have a waiting list of people who want one of these homes and be resourced to deliver them by a certain date. If we do this, the private sector will be forced to cut rents and increase quality…or their landlords will decide that they can no longer exploit people for a profit and will have to sell.

Fill Vacant Housing

“But what happens to the houses if the landlords sell?” Scotland already has more vacant homes than we have homeless households. Many of those homes are not being sold, but are still being clung on to as a speculative investment because prices are rising higher than costs. We also have even more vacant housing than appears in those statistics because many High Street shops in Scotland have housing units above them that are vacant but are classified as “commercial use” rather than residential. Look above the ground floor in many places in the centre of Glasgow and you’ll start to see them.

Policies like increasing Council Tax multipliers on empty homes and Màiri’s announcement this week of extra vacant housing officers will go a long way towards fixing this. Councils should also be resourced to allow them to use their Compulsory Purchase powers more aggressively – particularly to support them to purchase vacant homes not at “market rate” but at a fair rate that will include consideration of the costs to repair and retrofit the housing up to the standards expected of newbuilds – this will often be far cheaper than building new and therefore will contribute to the solution to the crisis in a much more resource efficient way.

Increase rental building standards

For the housing that remains in private rental hands, we need to continue the work already being done around tenants’ rights, rent controls and quality standards. As hinted above, many private rented houses in Scotland fall far short of energy efficiency and other environmental standards and urgently need retrofitted. France is rolling out a scheme whereby it will be illegal to rent properties that fall below a certain EPC rating and the minimum rating will keep rising every few years. Scotland should do the same. Before those retrofits happen, many of these properties also need to be repaired first (there’s little point in installing solar panels on a leaking roof). The aggressive recapture of housing for social rent mentioned above could also be done with private rented homes that still have sitting tenants if the landlord wishes to sell or is deemed no longer adequately responsible in their management of housing, converting them to social rents and offering a rent-controlled lifetime tenancy to the tenant along with an improving their homes.

Conclusion

The housing emergency in Scotland is perhaps second only to the climate emergency that Màiri was familiar with in her previous brief. The two are, in fact, interrelated and can’t be solved separately. What won’t solve it is shovelling more money into the maws of private developers under the guise of “affordable housing” that is barely either. It’s not going to solved by a single tweak anywhere or even if we only do everything on this list but every step we take will lead to more people living more affordably and more securely in a country that can more than afford to provide that but for too long hasn’t by design.

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What Scottish Independence Could Deliver For The Welfare State

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.” – Marcus Aurelius

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Back in the early days of Common Weal, while we were still finding our feet and building our reputation, we had an informal rule when it came to policy-making. We had to be able to show the policy working somewhere else.

This was because we felt that Scotland simply wasn’t ready for some of the radical ideas that we wanted to implement so being able to show it already working was a good way of building confidence in a nation too often told “we cannae dae it” (by which our opponents often mean “we shouldnae dae it” which is a different thing entirely).

We’ve since dispensed with that rule and we sometimes broke it even then (one of Common Weal’s very first policy papers, “In Place Of Anxiety”, was an advocacy for Universal Basic Income (UBI) long before it became one of the “cool” policies) but this isn’t to say that we can’t learn lessons from elsewhere.

Just this week, I was asked by a researcher which of our neighbour nations I’d like Scotland to copy if I could. My answer was that we shouldn’t copy any one but that I take a lot of inspiration from Germany on local democracy, from Denmark on energy strategy and from Norway for public ownership. Somewhere else we could do with taking inspiration from our neighbours is on social security.

The scenes this week from the UK’s attempts to hammer the poor and disabled and only backing down after shambolic chaos in the Parliament should be a lesson not just in humanity but in policy-making as well. Never fight a battle you haven’t won in advance. Never assume a large on-paper majority means certain absolute power.

With many of our neighbours basing their politics on proportional representation and coalition politics, this kind of legislation would have undergone a lot of negotiation and compromise long before arriving at the voting chamber.

The way that many of our neighbours deal with the issue of social security is markedly different from the UK in several ways. The first is that the systems are a lot more generous in general. Norway, Denmark and Sweden rank in the top three OECD nations for spending on disability protections at above 3% of GDP while the UK is well below the OECD average at less than 2%.

Many more social securities like unemployment protections follow a different model from the UK when they are calculated. In particular, instead of the flat rate paid under the UK’s Universal Credit, many countries follow a model where the protection you receive is based on a percentage of your previous income.

There are consequences to each of these models. A flat rate tends to be more redistributive if it is generous enough (which Universal Credit isn’t) whereas a proportional rate tends to be less disruptive to an individual who is already going through the shock of losing their job while still having bills to pay.

We’ve seen these impacts in the UK too. During the pandemic, the Covid furlough scheme was paid at a proportional rate to people who were employed but was often paid at a flat Universal Credit rate to self-employed people. This exposed a lot of people who were previously on the side of denigrating poor and vulnerable people as lazy slackers to just how meagre and cruel the UK “benefits” system is.

We had an opportunity then to get some serious change off the back of that and maybe we still see echoes of it in this week’s chaos but largely the Powers That Be wanted to make us forget that moment of reflection as quickly as possible.

On the other side and as tempting as it might be to copy a European-style unemployment insurance based on previous income, and as beneficial that would be to people in well-paid but otherwise insecure jobs, we have to remember that many people are not in well-paid jobs and that wage suppression has been rife in the UK for decades. Receiving 60% of your previous income when you were being paid poverty wages won’t protect you from poverty in unemployment.

So maybe rather than Scotland – particularly an independent Scotland – copying existing social security policies from our neighbours, we need to look to them for inspiration in another way and look back at that paper I mentioned at the start of this column.

Last year, the EU think tank the Coppieters Foundation published a paper called “A European Universal Basic Income” which found that a UBI sufficient to eradicate poverty across the entire union could be entirely paid for by relatively modest changes to income tax and the savings found from the reduction of poverty itself.

Its model called for a UBI of €6,857 per year for adults and half that for children under 14. This is the equivalent of £113 per week for adults and £57 per week for children. The paper claimed that the increase in income taxes to pay for this level of UBI would themselves be relatively modest and the “breakeven” point for people who’d pay more income tax than they’d receive in UBI would be at around the 80th percentile.

In other words, eight out of 10 people would be directly better off with the UBI. And, to repeat, while this is still a relatively small sum per person if you have no other income, it would be enough to eradicate poverty across the entire EU and would be cheaper overall – after the health, crime and social inequality costs of poverty are factored in – than the current systems.

When this paper came out I argued that this meant a UBI was now a moral imperative because it was cheaper than the cost of poverty, but there’s clearly a financial imperative too. Whether we’re discussing an independent Scotland seeking to create a better country for all of us or even just a cynical UK trying to save money in the face of a humiliating attempt to crush the poor, here is a solution we should all support. Eradicate poverty, save money, implement a Universal Basic Income.

If You Want Jobs; Don’t Prepare For War

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“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” — Albert Einstein

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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a group of men sitting next to each other in a trench

Source: British Library

There are many reasons to oppose the UK Government’s push towards increased militarism in an already unstable and increasingly violent world. Adding more bombs – especially nuclear bombs – to the mix is not going to improve matters. The only thing that ever has has been years and decades longs work by diplomats to de-escalate tensions and to build peace. As Master Yoda once said on being accused of being a “great warrior”, “wars not make one great”.

By far the worst reason to support the extra spending is the usual “enemy-at-the-gates” emotional fearmongering that proponents usually cast about when they want more money for more bombs but the second worst is the claim that such spending will “support jobs and the economy”. I’m going to make the case that spending the same amount of money on just about anything else would do more good for the UK and Scottish economies.

The scale of the UK’s proposed militaristic expansion is vast. We don’t yet know how much extra they plan to spend but an increase from the current 2.3% of GDP to 3% (the minimum required to finance the proposed fleet of new submarines and nuclear-armed fighter jets) would cost around £20 billion more than is currently being spent every year. Increasing spending to match Donald Trump’s demand that the UK spends 5% of GDP would cost £80 billion a year. Bear in mind that this is on top of the UK’s already proportionately massive spending on military matters – it’s instructive to note that the UK spends more per capita on nuclear weapons alone than any nuclear-armed nation other than the USA and Israel at around £90 per person per year (that’s more than I spend on my mobile phone SIM contract!).

Trump isn’t likely to get his wish of Britain spending 5% of GDP – that’s about as much as was being spent during the Falklands War when Britain’s GDP was less than half the size is currently is – and it’s not a commitment that the UK have made quite yet so we should only talk about that £20 billion increase for now. What do we actually get for that?

In economic terms, the material assets are useless. The nuclear submarines and nuclear armed jets don’t themselves produce anything or add value to the economy in the way that a factory might. If they’re ever used, they have a negative economic value but Britain rarely counts the cost of its wars as applied to the people we’re bombing or supporting others to bomb. Even if they’re not used, they are likely to have a negative economic impact on Scotland. Military spending is exempt from the Barnett Consequentials that decide the Block Grants given to devolved governments so if the spending comes not from increased taxes (ruled out by Rachel Reeves) or from increased borrowing (ruled out by Rachel Reeves) but from cuts to Barnett spending like education, social security or something similar then that will mean cuts to Holyrood which is far less able to compensate via borrowing or increased taxes. This will have a devastating impact on public services unlikely to be compensated for even by the few jobs that will be “created or sustained” in Scotland (a number that will likely go up and down in its estimate in line with pro-independence polling, as such promises of UK-backed jobs so often do).

How many jobs are we talking? The Government estimates that the £20 billion will buy 31,000 jobs. How many in Scotland? Unknown, but 20,000 of those jobs have been announced for the submarine programme to be based in Barrow-on-Furnace, 9,000 will be dedicated to building new nuclear warheads – most of which will be based in Aldermaston and the remaining 2,000 will be split across “6 munition factories” of which an unknown number may or may not be based in Scotland.

£20 billion for 31,000 jobs is £645,161 per job, per year. That £20 billion per year would support far more jobs if it was directed to civilian research and engineering as it would go on to boost the economy further through “economic multipliers” and the inventions and technology that would come out of that research. It’s estimated that every £1 of public spending on civilian healthcare research, for instance, returns at least £2 to the economy whereas defence spending usually breaks about even – less so if the spending comes at the cost of public spending elsewhere. Given that the weapons are economically useless if they’re not used and economically negative if they are used, then if the goal is supporting jobs it’d be more effective to pay each of those engineers £645,161 every year to stand by the side of the road and wave at traffic – at least they’d go on to spend that money supporting jobs in the wider economy instead of it sitting there in a bomb waiting to blow up someone else’s economy, house and family. Less flippantly, we could give every single person in the UK a £300 end-of-year bonus for the same price – not quite a sustainable Universal Basic Income but that would become a very valuable economic stimulus package on the scale of the similar dividend that residents of Alaska receive every year.

There may be legitimate reasons to invest in military spending but stop trying to either frighten us or bribe us into accepting the illegitimate ones instead. Simply put, if your goal is “jobs” then don’t invest in “defence”. Invest in just about anything else. Maybe even invest in peace. Then you won’t need the bombs at all.

What I’d Sacrifice For Wellbeing

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“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity.” – Joss Whedon

This is a transcript – edited for text medium – of the speech I gave at the Independence Forum Scotland Conference in Perth on the 14th of June 2025

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Image Source: Independence Live

The previous speaker posed us the question of what would it look like to bridge the gap between defining a Wellbeing Economy and achieving one. I’m going to try to look at that problem through the lens of sacrifice.

Those opposing economic change often frame the transition away from the status quo as causing us sacrifice.

Whether it’s sacrificing something abstract like the idea that “GDP Growth will make you rich”, even though it hasn’t.

Whether it’s “The climate transition will force you to give up your conveniences”, as if the only way to live sustainably is by moving into the forest, gathering berries and being robed in hemp homespun like some kind of hedge witch (actually…that sounds good…)

It’s sometimes even the outright conspiracy theory level of “15 Minute Neighbourhoods will take away your freedom to drive for 45 minutes to find a post box, if you can get past the military checkpoints at the end of your street”.

But what if a Wellbeing Economy wasn’t about sacrificing anything we’d miss? What if it actually was about fixing the things that are wrong with the way we live today?

In the next session you’re all going to be asked the question “What does a wellbeing economy look like?”. I’d like to throw in a few ideas here about what it means to me but looking through the eyes of what I might have to sacrifice to get there.

First – the daily commute. I’ve already sacrificed that. I’ve worked from home since the pandemic. I know. I get the privilege. I have a job that can be worked from home and, more importantly, I have a home that can be worked from. Not everyone who has the former has the latter. I’m a homeowner so I could modify my house to retrofit in an office. Renters in Scotland often can’t. Renters in Germany have the right to make reasonable modifications to their home though. So maybe we need to sacrifice the kind of landlord lobby that holds Scotland back and builds a housing sector for their profit rather than our wellbeing.

On the commute itself, the Scottish Government recently ditched its target of reducing car miles after being told they weren’t doing anything to meet it. The extra pollution this failure will result in will sacrifice people. That’s not a wellbeing economy.

Second, still on houses, I’d like to sacrifice my heating bill. Our housing sector is built for developer profits too, so we get cheap, crap, cold, damp houses that are hard to repair and retrofit. And we have a retrofitting strategy built around dumping the responsibility to fix things on you, rather than treating this as a massive public works infrastructure job for the public good.

I’d like to sacrifice buying things. The biggest mindset shift we as a society went through in the last twenty years was from “I need a thing, I’ll walk down the High Street and buy one” to “I need a thing, I’ll drive to the out-of-town outlet to buy one” to “I need a thing, I’ll buy it from Amazon Prime and have someone with a crap job deliver it to me tomorrow”. The next mindset shift needs to be “I need a thing, I’ll walk down the High Street and borrow one from the library”. The Scottish Government made a promise to the 2021 Climate Assembly to deliver 75 new Tool Libraries by the end of 2024. They only delivered 9. And the Minister at the time told me that they knew that 75 wasn’t enough to create that mindset shift but that they “hoped that the private sector would fill the gap”. Guess what. It didn’t.

While I’m down the High Street, I’d like to sacrifice the Thatcherist mindset that “there’s no such thing as society”. That mindset has actively pushed society out of our lives in favour of consumerism. Think about your community. How many of you can think of a space that you can go to, where you have a reasonable chance of accidentally meeting someone that you know. And it’s a place where you can exist for as long as you like without the expectation of buying something?

The protests over the removal of the steps in Buchanan St in Glasgow are emblematic of this. Let’s face it. Those steps aren’t particularly nice. It’s not a green urban nature reserve – it’s bare stone. They’re not comfy to sit on. It’s in the middle of a walking route. But they are a place to be in the middle of the city where you can gather and not buy and consume. They are a focal point for protest and organisation more generally – if that’s not “society”, what is? Glasgow Council keeps wanting to turn them into shops. I wonder if that plan is about suppressing protest more than it’s about encouraging consumerism.

It’s about sacrificing need and poverty. I want to see a Job Guarantee so that everyone who wants to work can work. But I also want a Universal Basic Income so that no-one needs to work, even if they want to. That need is what really keeps us poor. Keeps us powerless because it keeps us working for crap wages and bad conditions because if we don’t, we’re told that someone more desperate than us can replace us. The rich above us weaponise the poor below us to enrich themselves. It doesn’t even matter where “we” are in that ladder, because there’s always someone richer weaponising someone poorer.

And that’s the final thing I’d like to sacrifice to create a wellbeing economy. The idea that we’re not all in this together. The idea that there are people in this world who are better than you. Whether it’s by dint of Magic Blood, or by the power of their Magic Hat that can make you a Commander of the British Empire. Or whether it’s an overtanned manbaby who wanted to play with real life toy soldiers on his birthday. Or whether it’s any number of warlords who think that history will remember them kindly for their warcrimes or their desire to murder civilians by the score.

That’s what a wellbeing economy means to me. No Kings. Not real ones, not fake ones. Just a society that puts All of Us First.

This Article Has Been [Redacted]

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.” – Mahatma Gandhi

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Source: Unsplash

The Scottish Government continues to show bad faith when it comes to Freedom of Information, spending more time and effort to conceal information than it would take to simply comply with the spirit of the legislation.

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Burning Down The House of Cards

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“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?” – Michael Lewis, The Big Short

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Image Credit: Dominic Alves

Rachel Reeves has signalled that she is “open minded” about the banks lobbying her to repeal regulations that came in after the 2008 Financial Crash. If she does, she will be accepting responsibility for the next one the banks inevitably cause.

One of the most important films dealing with the financial sector since the 2008 Financial Crash was 2015’s The Big Short. Comedic, irreverent and outright scathing of those involved, yet it remains one of the most incisive explanations of the 2008 Financial Crash and it managed to make the intentionally obscure world of financial alchemy accessible to the lay person. I’d go as far to say that it did for the idea of ‘sustainable investment banking’ as the films Threads and The Day After did for the idea of a “survivable nuclear war”.

If you haven’t seen it, please do so and pay particular attention to the scene explaining the concept of “synthetic CDOs” – where investors could effectively gamble on the possibility of you defaulting on your mortgage, and other investors could gamble on whether or not those investors will win their bet, and more investors could gamble on the outcome of those bets…all without knowing anything at all about your finances and the state of your mortgage.

One of the things that made these ‘financial instruments’ so destructive was that the ‘investment’ side of the banking sector – the bit that involves people effectively gambling amongst themselves with money that maybe was theirs and maybe wasn’t – was entirely leveraged on the ‘retail’ side of the banking sector – that’s the bit where you put money in your savings account and ask the bank for a mortgage to buy a house – but was completely divorced from it to the point that one side didn’t understand what the other side was doing.

When the housing boom of the early 2000s came to an end in late 2007 and people started defaulting on mortgages, this would have normally been tragic for those losing their homes and a sign of a substantial economic recession but would have ultimately resulted in a bounce back. But all of those ‘investment firms’ sitting on top of the sector were gambling with money that they ‘knew’ was ‘safe’ (because ‘safe as houses’) despite the houses not being nearly as safe as people assumed.

Not just assumed. The way the CDOs were structured made it functionally impossible for anyone to actually assess the risk of their failure. Because it was impossible to work how and if they might fail, the credit agencies declared them to be safe (yes, really) which encouraged banks to pile money into them.

It got so bad that the investment sector was gambling with something like $20 for every $1 actually involved in the mortgages. The investment gambling sector was many times larger than the value of thing they were gambling on. The liabilities on the banks ‘if’ their sure bet failed reached the point of being larger than the GDP of the countries they were based in.

It would only take a small increase in the percentage of mortgage defaults to utterly bankrupt the banks. An increase that might be caused by investment bankers encouraging retails bankers to take on ever riskier mortgages (with ever higher profit margins), paying exorbitant bonuses to bankers who could sell larger and larger mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay them.

Which is what happened. And the backlash threatened to pull down other sectors of the economy because the bankers weren’t just gambling on mortgages but on everything just about up to and including whether or not the sky was blue and the fact that the investment wings were entwined with their retails wings meant that if their investment bank failed, the ATMs on the high streets could be shut down too (runs on banks like Northern Rock showed the visceral reality of people faced with losing their savings because of someone else’s mistakes).

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A Minimum Income Would Be A Real Cost Of Living Guarantee

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“Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man’s true worth.” – Criss Jami

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(Image Source: Flickr)

Instead of a “Cost of Living Guarantee” that doesn’t actually guarantee that you can meet the cost of living, John Swinney should adopt the long-awaited publication of a proposal for a Minimum Income Guarantee.

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Poor Show Swinney

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

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John Swinney claims to support the elimination of child poverty from Scotland, but he has admitted that he also believes – without actual evidence – that social security payments discourage poor people from working.

John Swinney’s only tangible policy on which he was elected as leader of the SNP and then First Minister of Scotland was a promise to eliminate child poverty. Note that he didn’t promise to reduce poverty or even to move faster than previous reduction targets (that he is so far failing to meet). He didn’t even, as his predecessor did, celebrate that child poverty in Scotland was merely a little lower than in England. He promised to eliminate child poverty. He has yet to explain “how”.

At the weekend, Swinney appeared to close down one of the tools that the Government has been using effectively to bring down child payment. The Scottish Child Payment is offered to adults who look after one or more children (the payment is on a per child basis – without the two-child limit seen in England) and who qualify for certain social security payments such as Universal Credit (if you think you might qualify you can check here). Frankly, the payment was brought in at a time and in a manner that stretches the devolved Scottish budget to its limits without the introduction of new taxes (such as our Land Tax) to pay for it but its impact on child poverty has been significant. The Scottish Government claims that the payment has contributed – along with their other poverty reduction policies – to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.

Last weekend, Swinney announced that he was not considering further increases to the payment. Not, as might actually be reasonably defensible, on the grounds of budget constraints but because he believed that the payment was now high enough that a further increase would “reduce the incentive to actually enter the labour market.”

In other words, he believes that increasing the child payment to £40 per week – something that the IPPR believes would lift another 20,000 children out of poverty – would discourage poor people from working.

This is, in short, complete crap. It is a claim that is not backed up by any data. In fact, if you have read my UBI article from the other week, you’d know that it is a claim that is completely countered by the facts. Giving people enough money to live on regardless of their life circumstances does not discourage people from working. In the most recent long-running study it was found that the total number of hours worked by UBI recipients did not change compared to their peers in the control group but that may did take the opportunity of the financial safety net to take a chance on a better paid, more worthwhile or more enjoyable job. Where studies have noticed UBI recipients dropping out of work it is almost universally not because “poor people are lazy and want to sit on the sofa” but because people use their safety net to study, to reduce hours as they run up to retirement or – pertinent to this article – to spend more time looking after their children.

With his comments, John Swinney is repeating the Conservative prejudice that the poor only work because it is marginally preferable to starvation and so any attempt to increase the number of workers in the economy can only be done by ramping up the costs of not working.

What Swinney is essentially saying is that while we shouldn’t have child poverty in Scotland, just bringing people to a penny over the poverty line would be enough for him, regardless of what that means for the people involved.

Cutting off the possibility of increases to social security because of self-imposed fiscal limits or rules (self-imposed even in this case not just because of slavish adherence to the philosophy of the 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission but due to a refusal to look at alternative mechanisms within devolution to increase revenue – see, again, our Land Tax) would be bad enough, but Swinney is making his case based on poverty being somehow the consequences of a lifestyle choice or moral failing. The poor, he apparently thinks, deserve their poverty unless they prove they are willing to not be poor.

This is a far cry from just a few years ago when there was a demonstrable majority across the Scottish Parliament for a guaranteed minimum income for all or a true Universal Basic Income (which probably explains the lack of push to bring in those policies).

The 2016 Holyrood elections are looming to the point of candidates being selected and manifestos being written. Swinney is obviously concerned enough about the rise of the far right to hold a summit about it (ineffectual as it was) but he surely must realise that the means of defeating the far right does not lie in gaming the political system to lock them out (see Germany), or in adopting their policies to try become them (see the UK) but in offering a real, credible alternative to Centrist Austerity and policy failure that leads to those populists gaining a base.

Instead of poor showmanship, Swinney could be providing leadership and actually taking action to meeting the goals he has set himself. The Scottish Government already has a poor track record of cancelling “inconvenient” government targets like climate emissions or reductions in car miles. Let’s not see the target of eliminating child poverty in one of the world’s richest nations become another one.

Fair Pay For All

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Employees keep the business doing what it does. It’s important to pay them accordingly.” – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

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The Scottish Government’s approach to Fair Work Principles are laudable, but should they go further by not just mandating minimum pay standards for low paid workers, but also maximum pay standards for the CEOs who underpay them?

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The Lie Under The Nuclear Promise

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” – Omar N. Bradley

This is a rough transcript – edited for text medium – of the speech I gave at Scottish CND’s fringe meeting at the STUC Annual Congress on April 29th, 2025.

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yellow and black road sign

When I was invited here, I was given a very broad remit for the topic of discussion. I thought I was going to talk today about the economics of nuclear bombs perhaps by way of talking about opportunity costs of investing in nuclear weapons – and what we could be building instead. Or maybe I’d talk about the cost of rebuilding a nuked city – though the images we’re seeing in real time from Palestine show that those costs can be visited upon humanity without us splitting a single atom. But when I sat down to decide what to actually say, something else came to mind entirely.

Here is my proposal for discussion: It is possible for an economy the size of the UK’s to sustain a civilian nuclear power sector without nuclear weapons. It is not possible for it to sustain a nuclear weapons sector without civilian nuclear power. Therefore, when politicians claim to back new nuclear power – especially in Scotland – despite renewables being cheaper, more effective, cleaner, faster to deploy and more secure, what they are actually doing is trying to shore up support for nuclear bomb infrastructure but they know they can’t say that.

To give a bit of a back story about myself and how I very nearly became an example of that proposal in action. Some here might know that I’ve not always been a policy wonk.
My degrees are in physics. I have a Masters in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics and a PhD in two-photon fluorescence with applications in distributed optical fibre sensing (don’t worry – no-one else understands it either).

Back in 2010, I was giving a lecture about my PhD work in London and got talking afterwards with someone who turned out to be from AWE Aldermaston. They were interested in some of the “extreme environment” applications for my research but amusingly, we had to cut the conversation short when he said “I don’t think I should say any more in case you start working out some secrets”. Probably for the best, though I’ll never know if my next thoughts were correct or not…

The point of that story is that I could very well have gone down that route. Several of my friends went into conventional military engineering. A couple went into civilian nuclear – including one who had to leave because he wasn’t willing to give up a dual citizenship for a promotion.

If we only had the couple hundred jobs sustained by the bomb sector, why would unis run those physics courses? As my friend Robbie [Mochrie] on this panel can attest – would he be teaching his courses if there were no jobs for his students to go into?

Where would the physicists and engineers who didn’t get those jobs go? Sure…some might become policy wonks…but while I love my job, I didn’t need to become a laser physicist to get it.

As an analogy, imagine trying to plan for an oil company and someone magics away all of the world’s plastic but nothing else changes. You’d lose a tiny fraction of your customer base but you’d still be selling oil to all the people with cars and gas boilers. You wouldn’t see much change in your business model.

A nuclear bomb sector without a civilian nuclear power sector is a bit like trying to run an oil company when all the cars are electric, the boilers are heat pumps and we recycle all of our plastics. The economics don’t work.

So bear this in mind when the politicians talk about bringing new nuclear power Scotland. There might well be a case for it – I’m not ideologically against it. But renewables are so cheap and Scotland’s potential so great that we don’t need that kind of civilian nuclear sector here. Unless…they want them here for the reason they know they can’t say.