Author: Dr Craig Dalzell

The Climate Climbdown

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“If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.” – Andreas Malm

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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Scotland – once a nation that held itself up as a world leader in climate ambitions – has formally repealed important carbon emission targets in a vote that would have had unanimous support but for the abstention of the Greens.

The Scottish Government still holds that Scotland will be a “Net Zero” nation by 2045 but has yet to demonstrate how we will actually reach that goal, especially as interim targets like the 2030 target just repealed continue to be missed.

To be clear on why this vote took place, the Scottish Government put the target into actual legislation as a show of force on its climate ambitions. A “mere” government policy target could have simply been broken and forgotten about as is all too common amongst governments of all colours but once placed in law, the government would have been acting unlawfully if the target was missed.

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The Shape Of Solar Scotland – Part II

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“In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people’s needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.” – Cornel West

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

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.
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A year ago this month I told the story of a new renewables development that had been planned for next to my village and how it put me in the very unexpected position of actively opposing something that most would expect me to have been wildly in favour of. A 100MW solar farm, plus another 100MW worth of battery capacity, worth around £150 million that would produce more power than this village could use ten times over. At the time of its initial proposal it would have been the largest solar farm not just in Scotland but in the entire UK (though since then, several larger projects have been proposed – I’ll come back to that in a bit).

My objection has never been about the renewables themselves – we need more in general and we really need more solar power in particular to balance a grid that is a little too tilted towards wind power – but it has been about control and who benefits from a project that would, in effect, turn a semi-rural Clydesdale village into an industrial estate power station with some houses on the edge. We do now have a few updates, courtesy of a meeting facilitated between the company and the local residents association (the unelected body we have representing the village because we don’t even have an elected Community Council here, never mind proper European-style municipal government) and held in the office of our constituency MSP and Cabinet Secretary for Energy and Net Zero Màiri McAllan. I should say that I, personally, wasn’t at this meeting (and neither was Màiri herself as she’s on parental leave) and only found out that it happened at all when the association published the minutes of the meeting on the village Facebook page almost a month after the fact.

My main objection to the project has never been about the renewables themselves but about place, ownership and benefit.

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How To Show Scotland Still Cares

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“In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me.” – Tia Walker

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

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A lot is happening in politics circles right now from the budgets (UK and Scottish) through to Common Weal’s own tenth birthday (did you see our celebration email? If not, you can read it here).

As someone who’s own political journey basically started because of what would become Common Weal (you can read about my first ever encounter with Robin McAlpine here) it’s been an incredible journey that I remain proud to be a part of especially through my contribution to the policy library which, as our celebration email mentioned, now stands at 112 policy papers plus dozens more briefing notes and consultation responses. That’s an average of one paper per month (excluding the Christmas break…mostly…) for a solid decade. We couldn’t have done it without you.

It’s the latest of those 112 policy papers that I want to spend a bit of time talking about in our newsletter this week. It came out last Friday – just a bit too late for my writing deadline then – and is essentially a last ditch effort to salvage some good out of the seemingly doomed National Care Service Bill.

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UK Budget Review – 2024

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“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.” – Margaret Mitchell

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
You can read my donations and support policy here and if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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The first budget of the new Labour Government and the first in 14 years is one that would have been more hotly anticipated if it wasn’t for the fact that the Government leaked so much of it to the media ahead of time – in direct contravention of Parliamentary procedure and in a way that would have seen Ministers resign not many years ago – and would have seen Labour complain about had they still been in Opposition. The Speaker rebuked them thoroughly, but – of course – lacks the power to actually sanction anyone involved (in Holyrood, the Presiding Officer could have technically cancelled the budget speech but even when the Scottish Government has leaked material like this, they’ve managed to stay on the side of a mere threat).

Nevertheless, the budget was delivered and it’s worth us taking a look at just a few of the things that happened that will affect Scotland.

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How To Replace Council Tax

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“Is this Paradise?’
‘I can guarantee you that it isn’t,’ Jubal assured him. ‘My taxes are due this week.” – Robert A. Heinlein

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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Last week I took part in The National’s series on Council Tax reform with a 20 minute conversation with journalist Xander Elliards on some of Common Weal’s ideas for replacing Council Tax with a value-proportionate Property Tax and then extending that tax to create an effective Land Tax.

You can watch the interview here

You can read Common Weal’s policy papers on Council Tax replacement here:
A Property Tax for Scotland
Taxing Land In Scotland

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Strangled By The Purse Strings

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

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

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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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Scotland’s Population

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“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” – Carl Sagan

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

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Every year the National Records of Scotland produces an annual population estimate for the nation. While not quite as comprehensive as the once-per-decade census (at least, when the census isn’t marred by the problems of the 2022 Scottish census), it provides a good rolling picture of Scotland’s population both at a national level and at a more local level both on the scale of Local Authorities and per NHS Health Boards (the latter being important for the allocation of healthcare budgets and is gathered because one of the tools used to estimate population change is the number of people who present to the NHS with an illness or injury in a given year). Indeed, a report was published in March comparing the rolling mid-year estimate to the 2022 census and found that the estimate was within around 1% of the census value (which is a fair bit more precise than, say, the 3.4% margin of uncertainty in the revenue estimates in GERS).

The headline figure you’ll have gathered from the news is that Scotland’s population is growing faster than it has since the end of the Second World War (itself a statistical glitch as many thousands of soldiers returning all at once tended to bump the numbers) and that the growth rate is being driven by immigration to Scotland.
I fully expect that line to get more negative attention than it should given the rabidly anti-migrant stance that the UK is rapidly slipping down, driven by increasingly extreme social media cesspits – certainly a view backed up by the fight going on in the comments section of the BBC article reporting on the new figures – so it’s worth doing the thing I often do with reports like this and taking a dip beneath the headlines for a more detailed and nuanced view of Scotland’s changing demographics.

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We Support An NCS – But Not Like This

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“It’s easy for common people to say what they think about the government. No one listens to them.” – Ljupka Cvetanova

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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So NOW the Scottish Government wants to talk?

In the wake of Cosla withdrawing their support for the National Care Service Bill, the Scottish Government has called for talks to resolve the dispute and to help get their flawed Bill across the line.

The problem is that there’s very little trust left among stakeholders in the care bill – including campaigners like Common Weal. We sympathise with Cosla who were placed in a very difficult position right from the start. Common Weal cannot support the Bill in its current form, or even if the Scottish Government’s proposed Stage 2 amendments pass as they currently are. We, too, are forced to say now that the Bill needs to be massively overhauled or killed and started again.

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The Sun Still Has Not Set

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“You can’t have occupation and human rights.” – Christopher Hitchens

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal, see my donate page here.

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I threw out this week’s planned newsletter (a defence of the Tourist Levy) in response to some breaking news on Thursday morning that concerns a story that I’ve been following for some years (albeit very much from the farthest fringes of the outside).

The UK, after many years of arguing against an international consensus that campaigned against their illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Chagos Islands, has agreed to hand sovereignty of the islands back to Mauritius who were stripped of the territories when they won their independence from the UK in 1968.

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September in Common Weal

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“This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.” – Cal Newport

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

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Common Weal is one of Scotland’s most prolific think tanks, especially given our size and shoestring budget (you can help us by throwing us a few more shoestrings here). Since I’ve been a part of the team here we’ve had a target of releasing around one publication per month but every year we completely blow past that target. This year is looking like it’ll be no different, especially given that this month we’re publishing FOUR papers for your reading pleasure. This is a testament to our expert working groups – our stalwart teams of some of the best minds in Scotland who volunteer far more of their time than we have any right to ask for to help produce this work. They really have been the model to follow and one that I hope to spend next year developing in a replicable way.

Of course, both of the groups who did the work I want to talk about this week themselves work in very different ways – our Care Reform Group have met via Zoom almost every week for almost four years now whereas our Energy Group function more as an email forum who form ad hoc cells of specialists when they want to talk about a specific topic (such as National Grid transmission or heating Scottish homes). In both cases, they’ve acted as ambassadors to other stakeholders in their respective fields and the result is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the Scottish Government to talk to anyone without encountering our ideas whether they want to or not. I’m immensely grateful for everything our Groups do for us and for the way that they’ve helped make Scotland a better place for All of Us.

As to the papers themselves, since there are so many of them this week, I thought I’d use my newsletter column to give you a quick summary of them and point you to them if you want to read more.

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