The In Tray

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

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

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

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

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Freeports Don’t Come For Free

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

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The National dedicated last week to the issue of Freeports and I’m glad they did. These deregulated tax havens have not been interrogated nearly well enough by our politicians or our media and the information coming from the ports themselves – even when asked directly – has been too little and too vague. This hasn’t allowed for a proper democratic debate around their merits or demerits, has allowed their failures to go unreported and, perhaps worse, has allowed outright conspiracy theories to rise up to replace the information vacuum which has, in turn, made it harder to campaign against them on the basis of the facts on the ground (something which suits their proponents whose agenda thrives equally in an empty well of information as it does in a polluted one).

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Paying the Price of Climate Delay

“How is it that we already have so many solutions to the climate crisis that don’t compromise human rights or justice, but the only solutions being seriously considered are the ones that do?” – Mikaela Loach

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

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The Climate Change Committee has declared that it no longer finds the Scottish Government’s Net Zero plan to be credible. That the Government will breach its statutory duty to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 by 75% (with no catch up plan in place to reach Net Zero by 2045) and that instead of there being a comprehensive strategy to reach Net Zero, the best we have is a serious of ad hoc, disconnected announcements. This comes off the back of the Scottish Government being found to be acting unlawfully by not publishing the expected carbon impact of its policies, in line with those statutory targets. Not to mention that “Net Zero” is itself insufficient as it merely promises that Scotland will continue to pollute until 2045 before stopping but makes no promise to fix the damage we’ve already caused (particularly on the Global South both in the present and during our colonialist exploitation of those nations).

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Land Reform, Or Another Power Grab?

“The free society is characterized by the radical decentralization of all kinds of power. Confederal structures do not rule over communities; they are the means by which communities cooperate.” – Roy San Filippo

(This blog post previously appeared on Bella Caledonia.)

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The Scottish government has introduced land reform legislation to encourage community ownership by granting ministers powers to intervene in the sale of estates of more than 1,000 hectares. The ruling Scottish National party said the bill, the biggest package of reforms in years, aimed to “revolutionise land ownership in Scotland” by empowering rural and island communities and increasing transparency in large land transactions.

In 2016 the last round of Land Reform made it easier for communities to buy out parcels of land, however the rampant rise in land prices – often now driven by so-called “Green Lairds” looking to cash in on carbon credits – have locked those same communities out of being able to afford to buy that land. With a few exceptions – such as in Langholm – the parcels of land being bought by communities have been getting smaller.  A report published in 2022 found that despite a steady rate of successful community buyout projects continuing much as it had since the start of devolution, the actual hectarage of land transferred had all but stalled with around 97% of all community owned land in Scotland being transferred before the passing of the 2016 Act.

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A Hollow Frame

“Spare your words, your actions will speak for you.” – Akiroq Brost

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

Imagine you’re applying for planning permission to build a house. Normally, the process would involve drawing up fairly detailed plans about what the house would look like. No plan goes perfectly to plan though and some changes are inevitable as the building process occurs but if the final building does deviate substantially from the initial plan there can be consequences up to and including being ordered to tear the whole thing down and start again. What you can’t do is gain permission to build “a house” without answering the basic questions like “What size is it?”, “How many bedrooms will it have?” or “Will it be made entirely of asbestos?”.

Over the past few months Common Weal have been incredibly busy replying to just a few of the public consultations that the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament have been publishing. I’ve written before about the sheer volume of them, how much effort goes into each response and how little they often achieve despite the rare moments of serious influence or the fact that if folk don’t respond to them then vested interests end up dominating the responses and thus what the Government can point to as justification for their plans.

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Devolving Building Safety

“The fact is, free markets don’t provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too.”
– Michael Crichton

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

A couple of weeks ago, Nicola and I chatted on the Policy Podcast about the pile of public consultations overflowing our desks and the desks of our colleagues – it’s worth a listen as while it’s often a thankless task that takes up a lot of time for very little result, the result that comes from it is a vital part of our democracy.

Amusingly, during the podcast I mentioned that because we’re a Scotland-based think tank and Scottish politics structures are an order of magnitude more accessible than UK political institutions are (which isn’t to say that access is easy…) we very rarely engage with UK level public consultations. It’s amusing, because in the past week as I’ve been chipping away at our consultation pile, I’ve ended up responding to two UK consultations – one on the sustainability of UK debt and another on the topic of today’s column – a proposal to devolve a new tax power to Scotland.

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The Welsh Way Forward

“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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The only reasonable constitutional future for Wales that is not viable is the status quo. This was the ultimate conclusion of the final report from the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales which published last week after several years of patient, diligent and thorough work. While initially set up to examine the prospect of Welsh independence, it took a much broader view, pulling in thoughts and ideas from across the constitutional divide in a way that Scotland could and must learn from.

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The Cairngorms Climate Backlash

“The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities” – G.K. Chesterton

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Scotland Deserves Local Democracy

“Nationalism can be a destructive force when it promotes intolerance and division. But it can also be a force for good, when it seeks to defend local autonomy against the homogenizing forces of larger entities.” – Maxime Bernier

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

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At the last UK General Election, the party that would go on to form the Government made a manifesto promise to increase police numbers across the whole of the UK. It was a popular policy and probably won a few votes, but there was a problem with meeting that policy. Policing is a devolved matter. The UK Government only has control over the police in England. They could, of course, invest heavily in police numbers and that investment would increase the Block Grant sent to devolved nations but there’s absolutely no guarantee that the money would be used to increase the number of cops in Scotland. There would be a certain amount of political pressure to “pass the money on” as intended and that pressure has certainly been sufficient in the past, but the structure of devolution means that the Scottish Government has the absolute right to spend the money on anything it sees fit. This makes perfect sense as the needs and demands of policing in Scotland might well be very different from that in England as might the style of policing – Scotland simply may not want or need a highly militarised, American style force designed to suppress any thought of democratic protest. Anyway, the people of Scotland didn’t vote for the policy at the last Scottish election so there was no mandate to act at all.

Westminster’s defence was that it simply didn’t trust the calibre of politicians in Holyrood to act responsibly and it didn’t really matter what they thought given that they were either safely compliant or could be written off as merely the opposition complaining for the sake of complaining (damned if you do; damned if you don’t). The UK Government really wanted to meet that manifesto pledge however and decided it wouldn’t look good if the devolved nations resist their will so it took steps. Three options were available. They could, with ease, simply pull the powers over policing away from the Scottish Government and place them in the hands of the UK Justice Minister. All that would take is a simple majority vote in the Commons, which they could easily whip through. The second option was to ring-fence the funding – to simply tell the Scottish Government that they weren’t getting it unless they promised to use it as the UK Government wanted. Finally, they could outright threaten Holyrood with “financial penalties” if they tried to divert the money elsewhere.

If this happened, I’m sure that Holyrood’s response would be similar to yours – one of democratic outrage and calls for Westminster to back off and stop stepping on the toes of devolution. How dare they even make a manifesto promise that lay outwith their powers?

Do we all share the same outrage when the Scottish Government does something similar to Scottish Local Authorities?

Scotland is one of the most centralised states in Europe (especially as we don’t have an actually-local tier of municipal government – our “Local” Authorities would be called Regional Government almost everywhere else in Europe). In fact, if Scottish independence resulted merely in all reserved powers at Westminster transferring to Holyrood then a single national Government would directly control more than 85% of all public spending in Scotland. This figure is even worse when we consider the amount of money that is ring-fenced by Holyrood and merely administered by Councils. Holyrood has in recent years directly threatened Councils with withheld funds unless Councils used their powers over one of the few taxes that they actually control to maintain the Council Tax freeze and, just last week, has actively threatened to fine Councils unless they use money as directed to boost teacher numbers. Meanwhile, John Swinney’s recent budget stated that he was using Holyrood’s powers “to the maximum extent that is responsible” which carries the implication that using Holyrood’s powers to pass reforms to Local Authority tax raising powers would be “irresponsible”.

This week, Scottish Local Authorities having been negotiating their budgets for the year. It’s a grim process. Folk I’ve spoken to in several councils and across multiple parties have been essentially saying that they’re being put in the position of either breaking the law by not passing a budget or breaking the law by passing a budget that causes active harm to people because of the inevitable cuts to social services. After years of “trimming the fat”, then “cutting to the bone”, Councils are at the point of outright amputations – simply closing down leisure centres or stopping care services for folk who need them. If you’ve seen more potholes in your local roads due to the last rounds of cuts then we might expect them to not get repaired or to get worse in coming years.

The strictures of Devolution are tight but they are not nearly as tight as the Scottish Government have implied. Whenever groups like ourselves have campaigned for the broadening of the Scottish tax base via tools like Council Tax reform, land taxes, wealth taxes or pollution taxes, we’re told that the Scottish Government doesn’t have the power to do so. This is only a half-truth. These taxes cannot be implemented as national taxes controlled by Holyrood and where the revenue flows to Holyrood, but many of them can be implemented if they are done so as local taxes where the revenue flows to the relevant Local Authority.

In 2013, the Scottish Government made its pledge towards treatment of Local Government, including promises of maintaining subsidiarity and local decision-making. More recently, they have pledged a reform of local government finances, guided by a Citizens’ Assembly, by the end of this Parliament though they’ve also made it clear that the reforms themselves would only be implemented beyond the next electoral horizon (should they be in power to do so). It is likely far too late now to give Local Authorities the powers to avert a budget crisis this year and I’ve yet to see willingness from Government to spend their way out of this hole – we’ll see soon what the implications of that will be – but this only heightens the urgent need for reform of Scotland’s finances and democratic frameworks to make them more sustainable and to avoid this kind of crisis in the future. Enabling legislation should be passed as soon as possible to give Councils more control over their own finances and to set local taxes as they deem appropriate, including in areas such as wealth, land and pollution.

With the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon this week and the SNP now likely to fight a leadership contest that hasn’t been seen in the party essentially for decades, it would be worth all candidates considering their pitch not just as one where they believe that they are the best personality to lead the party and, likely, the country but also one where they consider their policy pitch and agenda for their tenure. I will be watching closely to see if any of the candidates promise to uphold and accelerate those pledges. Who knows, we might even end up with something really radical – like the kind of truly local democracy that almost all of our peer nations in Europe simply call “normal”.

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Better For Who?

“If politicians don’t care about the electorate and lie to them, they can’t expect the electorate to care back and vote them in. An election must be more than a search for honesty in a snake pit.” – Stewart Stafford

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

This month marked eight years since the Scottish Independence Referendum and it’s fair to say that they have not been a quiet eight years. Brexit, pandemic, economic turmoil and the grinding poverty caused by over a decade of Austerity are taking their toll on the wellbeing of the country. It’s certainly not the promised “sunlit uplands” or even the pre-2014 “status quo” that many thought they were voting for. As we move into a fresh independence campaign, it’s worth looking back at some of the things we were promised in 2014 by the pro-Union campaign and how those promises have panned out since.

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