Author: Dr Craig Dalzell

It’s Scotland’s Economy – Or Is It?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.” – Voltaire

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.

Chivas Regal Scotch Whisky

Deliberate Government policy has resulted in Scotland’s economy being outsourced to foreign-owned companies to the point that we scarcely have a home-grown economy left any more. In a world of threats to global trade, this is a major problem.

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Work To Live

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“[W]hen your politics no longer have room for empathy, things spin into an amoral chaos. Not only the desperate suffer. Who gets hurt and who stays safe becomes hard to predict.” – Luis Alberto Urrea

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A new German study into Universal Basic Income publishes its final report, showing once again why UBI is a moral imperative. To illustrate those results we could imagine a world where we already have a UBI, but someone wants to study the effect of taking it away and creating the world we live in right now.

In 2021, 122 volunteers had their Universal Basic Income withdrawn from them in pilot project to study the impact of forcing people to work to earn enough money to survive. The participants in the “Work to Live” (WtL) programme were followed for three years alongside 1,580 people who retained their Universal Basic Income of €1,200 per month, regardless of their circumstances, spending intentions or any income they earned on top of their UBI. In 2025, the project published its final report.

Proponents of the “Work to Live” scheme claimed that inducing the fear of starvation, destitution and homelessness in workers would have multiple positive impacts on economic growth including increased work productivity and an increase in the number of hours worked as those without a UBI would be motivated to ensure that they could afford to keep a roof over their head. They also claimed that removing the UBI would increase people’s freedom to choose how to live their lives, without government oversight.

Now, finally, after three years of study, we have some evidence around those claims.

Jobs

Perhaps the most cited claim of “Work to Live” proponents is the idea that UBI makes workers lazy and idle – happy to coast along in their job knowing that they don’t need to earn enough to pay their bills or, in some circumstance, are content to sit completely idle on their sofa existing entirely on their UBI. The study found some surprising results in this regard. The group who had their UBI withdrawn worked essentially the same number of hours as the control group – both working an average of 40 hours a week – but the WtL group reported a substantial decrease in job satisfaction compared to the control. Satisfaction with the income they did receive also dropped markedly with the largest drop coming shortly after the withdrawal of their Basic Income and the gap only marginally closing again as they adapted to their new income levels.

While WtL proponents claimed that the motivational impact of taking away €1,200 a month would spur people to move out of their dead-end jobs or to try to improve their situation through education and training, the opposite was found to be true with the WtL group less likely to change their job and more likely to drop out of education to seek work. Satisfaction within work also dropped for the WtL group, both for those who did seek different employment and for those who stayed where they were at the start of the study.

Autonomy and Self-Determination

“Freedom” is at the heart of the Work to Live campaign, giving people the choice of how to live their life by choosing how to maintain that lifestyle. Those too poor to live a certain way have the freedom to seek those means or to choose to give up those dreams and live within more modest means.

The Work to Live study again confounded those expectations by noting a significant decrease in perceived autonomy compared to the group who retained their Universal Basic Income, with women in particular feeling more constrained by their life without a Basic Income than men. Paradoxically, participants reported that they felt like they had less “free time” in the day after losing their UBI, despite working similar hours to the control group. WfL participants spent notably less time doing non-productive activities outside work such as “volunteering”, “visiting friends” and “sleeping” with an average WtL participant sleeping on average 75 minutes less per week than a control group peer who retained their UBI – despite not spending that extra time in productive work.

Wellbeing

Work to Live advocates often claim that earning money rather than getting it “for free” would increase the sense of satisfaction of holding it and that this would translate into greater life satisfactions as one could look around at the lifestyle bought with that earned money rather than gained via a “handout”.

The pilot programme found once again that these expectations were not backed up by the lived experience of the participants. Life satisfaction dropped markedly shortly after the withdrawal of the UBI and remained more-or-less static in the three years after. This pattern was shared across other satisfaction metrics such as satisfaction with social interactions, the quality of sleep and satisfaction with the money participants had (even when controlled for the total amount of income). Overall stress levels – stress being a significant causative factor in many chronic health conditions – was higher in WtL participants than in the control group.

Finances

The philosophy of Work to Live teaches that money is a precious commodity and must be used wisely. Proponents have claimed that UBI encourages wasteful spending. The study found instead that withdrawal of UBI caused participants to cut their spending on a wide variety of items, including those vital to living comfortably. The largest cut came to vacations, with WtL participants spending almost 60% less on holidays than their UBI peers despite having the same amount of time off work. They also cut spending on clothing by 25%, 5% on everyday needs like food and 2% less on electricity and heating.

Unexpected Effects

Not all of the assumptions about the Work to Live pilot were borne out and some results were completely unexpected. One of the claims against UBI is that as it is an inherently Socialist idea (despite some Libertarian proponents) and thus those who receive a UBI are highly motivated to vote for left-leaning political parties. The study found that WtL participants did not substantially change their voting intention between parties but were less likely to vote at all whether for their preferred party or another.

Work to Live proponents claimed that UBI would make people inherently lazy, but the study found that, in fact, WtL participants were more likely to procrastinate on tasks or to avoid doing them entirely (perhaps in the hope that a problem they were anxious about would “go away”) though there was little change either way on individual propensities to do a task ahead of a deadline or at the last minute once it was decided that the task could not be avoided.

Finally, the sense of basic risk taking amongst participants was largely unchanged with the exception that WtL participants were less likely to risk changing their current job to take on another, despite the opportunity of potentially achieving higher pay or better conditions.

Conclusion

The Work to Live pilot programme has joined other similar studies in showing that attempting to coerce workers into productivity through the threat of destitution leads to more stress, more anxiety and lower rates of public, social and democratic participation and fails to achieve its goal of leading to more hours worked. It is recommended that participants have their Universal Basic Income restored and that other nations who have not yet implemented a UBI scheme of their own join the rest of the civilised world by doing so as soon as practicable.

And Finally

If you’ll allow me to drop the kayfabe at the end of this piece. This new German study into the impacts of Universal Basic Income joins with and do not contradict the increasingly vast body of all of the other studies that have been done into UBI. The results are as strong as all of the others too but the long term nature of the study adds extra weight to its findings as does the detailed examination of how living without the anxiety that capitalism imposes on us actually improves people’s lives. You can read more about that study here.

Here in Scotland, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in support for a Scottish UBI (the SNP, Greens and Lib Dems both support UBI as party policy and Labour indicate support for a weaker form of Minimum Income) but the UK Government (both Conservative and Labour versions) are ideologically against it, refusing even to facilitate the running of a Scottish UBI pilot despite the success of one in Wales. Studies into the costing of extending UBI schemes across the EU have found that they would be cheaper to implement than is currently being spent mitigating the poverty caused by the lack of one (that is, implementing a UBI would SAVE money, after the costs of poverty are included). The Scottish Government must bring back, as a priority, its plans to test and to ultimately roll out a UBI across Scotland. Much more pressure must be brought to bear on the UK Government to facilitate this rollout as while a UBI would undoubtedly be much easier to implement in an independent Scotland, the costs of poverty – particularly the child poverty that the current First Minister wishes to “eradicate” – are far too high and far to urgent to wait until then. We don’t need more data, or more pilot studies, or more poor people waiting for someone to do something. We just need that action, now, to give us all a Universal Basic Income to allow us to live without the fear, anxiety or exploitation that comes from poverty. Any further argument against UBI has to contend with the data presented in this study and in others and any further argument for delay must accept responsibility for the continued suffering that delay imposes. The time for a UBI is now. Once we have it, I’ll pass over to those who would like to perform a study arguing why it should be taken away.

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Tariffs for Penguins

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Well, whiles I am a beggar I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich,
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.”
― William Shakespeare, King John

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white and black penguin on snow covered ground during daytime

Note: This article was published on April 4th and the situation has developed substantially since then with the tariffs on most countries (with the notable exception of China) being reduced to 10% for the next few weeks or until Trump burps out some other policy after breakfast.

Trump’s tariffs are the product of a person who doesn’t understand the levers they are pulling, but the UK responding as if we achieved a victory is a flat out lie.

Donald Trump cannot conceive of a “positive sum game”, that is a deal where both parties end up coming away better off than they were before the deal was made. Collaborative community action is a positive sum game when the whole of the community is greater than the sum of its parts (watch once of those “Alone”-style survival programmes to get a glimpse into what true “individualism” actually means).

Trump believes that the only deal possible is a zero-sum game. If there is a “winner”, then there must be an equal and opposite “loser”.

Trump is also deeply narcissistic and believes that if he can perceive you “winning”, then HE must be the “loser” and that cannot be allowed to stand. In his “Art of the Deal”, a “fair” deal is one that he wins.

Now that the world is “fair” again, any attempt by any nation to apply a retaliatory tariff or other sanction will be met with fire, fury and injustice.

Don’t worry if you disagree with his logic or his assumptions here. The key to understanding the trade tariff announcements this week is not whether or not you think he’s right but whether or not HE thinks he is.

Sir Keir Starmer thinks he has won a diplomatic coup. That the “Special Relationship” has saved the UK from the wrath of Trump’s tariffs – at least compared to the EU. The UK got hit with a 10% tariff, the EU got 20%. This, if you watch the UK Government aligned media or commentators, is a sign that all of the begging and grovelling for concessions and special privileges helped take the edge off of a bad situation. Keir Starmer believes that his strategy is a vindication and that we must all “trust the process”.

Sir Keir Starmer is wrong. His actions played absolutely no role in how the tariff was applied to the UK. He could have begged harder and utterly prostrated himself in front of the golden throne. Or he could have stood straight and pushed back. It wouldn’t have mattered. Sir Keir Starmer is an irrelevance to Trump.

With a few exceptions like Trump’s hatred of foreign cars and the fact that these latest tariffs appear to be additional to the tariffs put on countries like China and Canada previously, the calculation of the rate for each country was disturbingly simplistic. For countries where the US has a trade surplus in goods (but not services – this will be important. Trump doesn’t believe that exports like Holywood movies, Microsoft Office subscriptions or licensing deals to produce goods outwith the USA under the Coca-Cola or McDonalds name are worth anything to the US), the rate is 10%. For countries where the goods trade balance is a deficit (i.e. a higher value of goods from country X enter the US that American goods leave for country X), then they took the value of the trade deficit (import value minus export value) and divided it by the value of imports. If a country sells $100 of goods to the US but only buys $60 worth back, then $100-$60 / $100 = 0.4, so they get an 40% tariff. Except Trump then halved the values above the 10% floor because he’s “being nice” (which, of course, undermines his stated purpose of the tariffs being the minimum amount required to restore a trade balance – once again, it doesn’t matter if you see why he’s wrong, only that he doesn’t).

This is why countries like Madagascar and some of the world’s poorest countries are high on the list. The largest single item that Madagascar exports to the USA is vanilla – one of the most valuable spices in the world at around $83 million per year. Goods experts from the USA to Madagascar are comparatively sparse. There isn’t much that the US can send that they can’t get from somewhere closer and, more crucially, high value goods are of limited value to a populace who can’t afford them. Madagascar isn’t “ripping the USA off”. They’re just selling spices that the USA is about to realise they used to really enjoy.

Other anomalies abound like the mention of sub-national states like the Falkland Islands and France’s “we don’t call them colonies any more” territory of St Pierre and Miquelon that sits off of Newfoundland in Canada. There are two main theories why these substates are included. One being that some Musk-ish techbro made the list by asking Grok or another chatbot for a “list of countries” and it returned a list of countries that have a country code top level internet domain like .uk or .eu (though if they did, I’m surprised that they had the awareness to remove .su so they didn’t try to apply a tariff on the Soviet Union despite America being somehow completely unable to export ANYTHING to them for going on 35 years now). The other is that they just copy/pasted the CIA Factbook list of notable polities which includes several sub-state territories of various kinds. (Fun Fact: I had to do this precise kind of filtering while writing our Profit Extraction paper because the World Bank’s database I used also includes various substates, suprastate regions like “West Africa” and multiple nations that no longer exist but did exist when the Bank started tracking their data).

The omissions are interesting too. Russia and Belarus were omitted “because we already have sanctions on them” but Iran – which is also under US sanctions – was not. There’s a very telling thing going on when you look at the nations that Trump is willing to break the sharpie out and deviate from the formula for.

There are two most “fun” additions to the tariff list. The British Indian Ocean Territory which is essentially exclusively inhabited by a US military base (the people who used to live there before the UK and USA ethnically cleansed them call them the Chagos Islands). The other, being widely reported, is the Australian external territory of the Heard and McDonald Islands. They got a 10% tariff as well (remember, 10% is the floor rate for countries where the US is already “winning” on trade). Major exports from these islands are…nothing. There is no trade. There are no people there. It’s mostly just penguins. Penguins aren’t widely known for their genius at negotiating international trade deals, but still somehow they managed to achieve the same level of success against Trump as Sir Keir Starmer.

And this is the core point. The Trump Trade War of 2025 has no logic to it (see Robin’s briefing this week on how nations SHOULD be applying tariffs as a means of correcting for pollution and other “externalities” that capitalism fails to pay for), it’s going to spiral worse for the countries that fight back, worse still for American consumers, and only marginally better for the countries that lick the boot to try to pick off country-specific, sector-specific or even just personal exemptions – at the cost of their own surrendering their own sovereignty to the Great Orange One.

But don’t be fooled by any of Starmer’s claims that he has steered the UK through the choppy waters better than, say, the EU. The numbers are there and plain to see. The UK got 10% not because of “winning”, or “losing”, or diplomatic ability, but because the UK simply doesn’t matter to Trump.

But still. “Trust the process”, Starmer asked us to believe, while failing to negotiate any better than a penguin.

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The Last Stand of the Oil Barons

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  – R. Buckminster Fuller

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.

Station

The oil and gas sector advocacy group Offshore Energies UK has claimed that if it gets more political and financial support than the sector already gets then the UK could produce half of the 15 billion barrels of oil we’ll need before 2050 with the rest being imported from increasingly unstable and unreliable countries like the USA.

However, rather than feeding even more monetary and political capital into the insatiable maw of the companies that caused the climate emergency, it would be a far better idea would be to aggressively drive down that demand by investing instead in a Green New Deal that would reduce the heat we need in our homes, remove the need for that heat to be produced by oil and would retire fuel-hungry modes of transport like internal combustion cars in favour of active travel and electrified public transport.

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Demolishing Our Future Again

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.” – Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy )

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The demolition of the Wyndford towers in Glasgow marks a sad end for the residents and campaigners who fought for years to prevent their loss. The fall of those towers represents a lot about failings in Scotland – and particularly in Glasgow – around approaches to construction, approaches to place-making and our approach to what we think residential housing is for.

The destruction of the towers was done almost entirely on short term financial grounds and because the owners of the towers were able to pass the costs of the demolition onto others rather than paying it themselves.

There were two chief arguments used. The first was a design argument that said that the buildings couldn’t be adequately retrofitted but this case was expertly dismantled by architect (and Common Weal Director) Malcolm Fraser. The second was a financial one that said that it was cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to retrofit.

This, again, was refuted on the grounds that the demolition plan didn’t take into account of the environmental impact of the resources used to rebuild.

Many of our building materials are carbon intensive – particularly concrete and steel (alternatives to both are coming online but aren’t quite there yet) – thus whenever we have a building in place, we have to consider the “embodied carbon” involved. Once a block of concrete is cast and all of the carbon it emits during its manufacture, transport and curing has been emitted then it doesn’t emit any more. However, grinding it into dust, throwing it into landfill and replacing it with a new block of concrete will result in more carbon emissions. Wood is kind of the opposite but still worth mentioning. Wood absorbs carbon when it grows but emits it when it rots or is burned as waste. Either way, when a building material is replaced with a new one, the “embodied carbon” price has to be paid. Obviously, therefore, to avoid more emissions than necessary, building materials should be used for as long as possible, should be RE-used when possible and replaced as infrequently as possible.

The problem is that we don’t have an effective carbon or externality tax in the UK that would price in such an effect. If it’s cheaper to tear down and building and let the planet pay the cost in emissions, that’s what Capitalism doesn’t just suggest should happen but actively demands must happen.

There is another aspect to the financial case though that has nothing to do with the carbon aspect and that is VAT. Right now in the UK if you want to buy materials for a new building, you’ll pay a reduced VAT rate of 5% but if you want to buy the same materials to retrofit that building you’ll pay 20% VAT. So there is a strong incentive for buildings to be torn down and replaced if that means qualifying for what amounts to a very large tax cut.

There are solutions to this. The obvious one would be to change VAT. In an era of climate emergency and in the absence of a full externality tax, the obvious solution would be a reversal of that situation to actively encourage retrofit over rebuild but most campaigners (like Fraser) would be content with at least an equal playing field.

Unfortunately, the UK Government isn’t moving very quickly in this field (though the previous Conservative government did temporarily cut VAT on some energy efficiency products) and while the Scottish Government is just as corralled by the volume developers who represent the companies who build many of the overpriced, cold and damp blocks of appreciating capital assets that some of us call “homes” but they do have the advantage of not having to worry much about VAT given that it’s a reserved tax. There are devolved options out there though.

Back in 2022, I was working with Malcolm on an idea to write up a proposal for a devolved tax that could try to level the VAT distinction between repair and rebuild. The Scottish Government couldn’t (or couldn’t cheaply) offer a tax rebate to subsidise the VAT on retrofits and couldn’t adjust the reserved tax directly and, as with the problems they have with bringing in a national land tax, they’d find it difficult to bring in a national construction tax. But the Scottish Government DOES have the power to bring in a local levy controlled by Local Authorities. Our idea then was that Scotland could bring in a Demolition Tax to intentionally raise the price of incidents like Wyndford tower to the point that repair and retrofit would be cheaper than the alternative.

But then, we were beaten to the punch by the Chartered Institute of Building who published essentially an identical proposal and did it likely better than I would have so I’ve been more than happy to endorse their work. I’m also pleased to note that the Scottish Greens have done likewise though I think they are currently the only party in Parliament to have done so. I’d like to know the reasoning behind why the other parties haven’t, if they’d like to tell me.

The devil in such a tax is in the detail though. If it’s set too low then it won’t discourage demolitions. If it’s set based on tax arguments like the infamous “Laffer Curve” so beloved by politicians who want to use it as a misguided excuse to cut taxes then it it’ll end up being “optimised” to maximise tax revenue. A properly set Demolition Tax should, in theory, eliminate all but the most essential of demolitions (demolitions on safety and disaster grounds should probably be exempt) and thus shouldn’t actually raise any tax revenue at all. Of course, this also raises the prospect of an owner letting their property simply decay rather either repair OR replace it – something that can be fixed by enforcing already extant regulations around maintaining buildings in good order along with early use of Local Authority powers to compulsory purchase property from landlords who fail in their responsibilities.

There’s an important point in this story that goes beyond the material and the engineering and that’s the lack of social planning and protection of communities. The Wyndford tower has taken 600 homes and will turn them into just 400 homes. Even if every former resident was offered a guaranteed place in one of the new homes (they weren’t) at a price they could afford there wouldn’t be enough houses for all of them. This demolition represents yet another dispersal of a community in a city that has basically defined itself by dispersal of communities for several generations now. Each one, even when they’ve created objectively better living conditions than what was there before (the New Towns project was a decidedly mixed bag in that regard – a subject for another time), that loss of community, of dislocation from friends and family, was often profound and itself generational in its impact. This is why one of our Big Ideas isn’t “Housing” but “Place”, because while four walls and a roof are a necessary component of living well in the modern world, it’s not a sufficient one and where it is and what it is connected to is important. Decidedly unmodern gendered language aside, John Donne was correct to say:

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse…”

— John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

But if the continent of community is diminished when but a single part is torn away, what happens when every part is blown down and scattered to the winds?

Every decision that led to those towers coming down last week was made either uncaring of the community who called them home or despite those cares. Where the people were considered, it was done on an individualistic basis, as if each island would be fine if it was picked up and placed anywhere else.

I fear that lesson will be missed again. I see little evidence that the replacement buildings will endure for centuries longer than the less than four score and ten that their predecessor will. They’re certainly not being built with the kind of resource-preserving Circular Economy principles that we MUST be using in our constructions during a climate emergency. Otherwise, likely within the lifetime of some of those new residents, I fear that someone will be writing another eulogy similar to this one.

Image Credit: Ian Dick

Disabling People

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“Just knowing your rights (or your worth or value) will never be enough if you are powerless to force someone else to respect them.” – Alice Wong, Disability Visibility

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Chair

The UK Labour Government is doing to disabled people what the Conservatives before them didn’t think they could get away with.

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Covid – Five Years On

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.” – Brennan Manning

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Sand Timer

My memories of this time five years ago remain stark. I remember the conversations with folk in the office about getting increasingly worried that the government wasn’t taking things as seriously as they should. Watching the number of Covid cases in Scotland rise (though we would find out later that it had arrived in Scotland some weeks earlier than we were told then but the Government chose to cover that information up). And I remember on the morning of Thursday 12th March deciding that I, personally, didn’t want to risk travelling into the office that day. I never returned to that room for work – the “no non-essential contact” order went out on Monday 16th and by then I was already set up to work from home (I recognise the privilege that my partner and I both had in that both of our jobs could be worked from home AND we both had homes that could be worked from, even if trying to avoid simultaneous Zoom calls from the same living room was a challenge). I was next back in our by then closed office almost a year later to recover the corpses of some plants and to pack up the remaining office supplies I had left there.

My partner and I played things as safe as we thought we could. I remember one last shopping trip around the 20th of March deliberately buying non-perishables because I could feel the lockdown coming. That was a harrowing trip. Crowds of panicking shoppers coughing over each other and doing almost the opposite of following any kind of then non-binding government advice.

I’m pretty sure it was that trip that exposed me to Covid for the first time as I didn’t leave the house between then and falling ill. I started feeling the symptoms on the 25th of March, just two days after the first full lockdown. Of course while my symptoms matched those of that first wave almost perfectly (the only one I didn’t get was the fever) I’ll never know if I actually had Covid. We weren’t testing people unless they were sick enough to go to hospital. Testing others, we would be told a week later, was a “distraction”.

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Democracy By All Of Us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.” –  Lucille Ball

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Chamber

With a single act, the Scottish Parliament could radically overhaul our devolved democracy and put people at the heart of holding our legislators to account.

I’m grateful for the coverage The National gave to the the Independence Forum Scotland National Convention last weekend. It was wonderful to see the building activism in the room and delegates certainly kept me on my toes during the Energy World Cafe. The desire to see Scotland bring more of its energy resources into public hands is strong and I was glad to lay out how it could be done despite the limited powers of devolution.

Another question came out of the day about navigating similar limits in another area. One of Common Weal’s calls for the strengthening of our democracy is the creation of a second chamber in the Scottish Parliament that could take some of the weight off of the scrutiny committees, could make sure our laws are fit for purpose and – perhaps most crucially – could oversee the Parliamentarians themselves and hold them to account if and when they fall short of the standards expected of them. In this way it would act very much like the House of Lords down south or the elected or appointed upper chambers in many other countries (Scotland is one of the very few national-scale polities that don’t have an upper chamber – even most of the US states have one) but we want to improve on the highly corruptible model of appointing Lords for life based on their loyalty or political donations (still waiting on Labour delivering on the manifesto promise they made over a century ago to fix that one down south) or even the counter productive model of electing party-loyal people to that chamber (and thus replicating the US model where there is zero accountability when one party controls both houses and zero progress when they don’t). Instead, we want a Citizens’ Assembly where all registered voters in Scotland are entered into a lottery similar to jury duty and are called to serve in the Parliament. Appointments would be by random selection initially but the long list would be adjusted to ensure that the actual Assembly is balanced demographically across age, income, geographic representation and other factors (this model was used to great success in the 2021 Scottish Climate Assembly). Appointments would be generously paid (on par with MSP salaries) and would last a fixed time – we suggest a one year appointment with a third or a half of the chamber rotating out periodically – and there would be the same protections on returning to your job as there are for jury duty or paternal leave. The comparison to juries is a strong one. If we trust our peers to determine if it has been proven or not proven that someone has broken the law, then we are more than capable of determining whether or not the laws themselves are broken.

Sounds great, but the question we were asked at the Convention was whether or not Scotland has the power to set up such a Chamber.

If we were independence, it would be a relatively trivial matter to write the structure of the Chamber into our constitution but until then, the constitutional document we have to follow is the Scotland Act. Yes, the UK does have a constitution – it’s just not written down in one place and unlike the constitution of most nations, Westminster has sovereignty over it rather than being subordinate to it and so can change it whenever it likes.

As the Scotland Act doesn’t mention an Upper Chamber in its framework and as Westminster is extremely unlikely to exercise its power to write one into the Act, how could we set one up pre-independence?

Essentially we act as if we can.

The Scottish Parliament can set up advisory bodies or Commissioners to oversee the work of Parliament and even though we couldn’t mandate that they must follow the advice of those bodies (this was ultimately the source of the failure of the Climate Assembly – the Government decided they didn’t like the advice they were given so largely ignored it), Parliament and Government could collectively agree to follow those instructions – there’s nothing in the Scotland Act that actively prevents them from doing this just as nothing prevents parties whipping their members into voting along certain lines despite that not being an “official” part of our democracy.

Such an “unofficial” upper chamber wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as a constitutionally mandated one but that’s not to say that it would be powerless. Yes, something created by an Act of Parliament alone could be scrapped by one (a constitutional amendment would require a referendum). Yes, the Government could simply stop listening to its advice. This would place it on par with the other Commissioner bodies that exist around the Scottish Parliament. Yes, Westminster could overrule the Scottish Parliament and write a specific prohibition into the Scotland Act or elsewhere. This would place it on par with any other piece of legislation the Scottish Parliament has ever passed. If either of these barriers are enough to stop us, we might as well just give up on devolution entirely.

Scenes playing out across the world right now only serve to highlight how precious and vulnerable the very concept of democracy is and how no single person or even multi-person office can be trusted with more power than it needs. Scotland’s highly centralised form of government needs to be spread out a lot more locally but we also need more scrutiny and accountability at all levels from the top down. The best people to do that are All of Us appointed not to a House of Lords, but to a House of Citizens.

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Platform Socialism

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we’re seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons.” – Elaine Bernard

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Devolved Scotland doesn’t have many powers when it comes to unilaterally defending ourselves against a Trump trade tantrum that Starmer will supplicate and grovel to avoid – but the powers we have are surprisingly powerful.

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