Scottish Budget 2024 – Still Spinning Plates

December 6, 2024December 12, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles.” – Wade Davis

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Finance Secretary Shona Robison must have breathed a sigh of relief at the UK budget the other month (covered by me here) but if she did, it was the shallowest one she could get away with. The extra money from the UK that has gone into this year’s Scottish Budget has largely been accounted for in terms of public sector pay deals and reserved tax rises applied to those wages (not that I’m complaining about those pay deals – quite the contrary, even with them many public sector works are still lagging behind fair pay after over a decade and a half of austerity) or has gone into replacing cuts from last year’s budget so it’s clear that despite the relative expansion to Scottish finances there still wasn’t going to be a huge amount of play in the figures to do much more than work a little less hard to keep all of the plates spinning in the air.

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The Climate Climbdown

November 13, 2024November 13, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“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.
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Scotland – once a nation that held itself up as a world leader in climate ambitions – has formally repealed important carbon emission targets in a vote that would have had unanimous support but for the abstention of the Greens.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has yet to demonstrate how we will actually reach that goal, especially as interim targets like the 2030 target just repealed continue to be missed.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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UK Budget Review – 2024

October 31, 2024November 6, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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.
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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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PfG 2024 – Serving Scotland

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive.” – George Orwell

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Serving Scotland, what exactly?

The Scottish Government’s latest Programme for Government, titled “Serving Scotland”, is little more than a list of platitudes covering some of the most brutal public service cuts in years coupled with a paring back of all sense of ambition in what should be a critical year of laying groundwork for the next election (if you take a short-termist political party view of things) or the rapid ramping up of actions to halt and mitigate climate change (if you’d prefer there to be a liveable biosphere in the next couple of generations).

The PfG is divided into four of the Government’s overarching strategies so it’s worth picking them apart one by one.

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It’s Time To Tax Scottish Land

September 9, 2024September 9, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.” – Henry George

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Last week, I had the pleasure to address SNP members at the Revive Coalition’s fringe meeting on land reform where I presented Common Weal’s proposal to bring a land tax to Scotland. As the meeting wasn’t filmed, I want to discuss the issue here for the benefit of members (and non-members) who couldn’t be there. I am also delighted that after our fringe, members gave overwhelming support to two motions that would enable such a tax. Taxing land in Scotland is now solidly SNP policy and the Scottish Government should bring forward a Bill to enable it at the earliest opportunity. With the Scottish Government pledging to bring in fresh cuts of in excess of £500 million, to ignore a tool that would almost entirely avoid the need for them is simply unacceptable.

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The Devolution Deficit

August 7, 2024August 7, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy” – Milan Kundera

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Despite plenty of warning before the elections, new Chancellor Rachel Reeves has suddenly discovered a massive “hidden” black hole in the UK’s finances and she needs to make “difficult choices” to fix it. This is hardly to excuse the last 14 years of Conservative rule – it’s not as if they made a particular secret about their attempts to hollow the nation out for their own benefit – but as Robin has explained, political figures never seem to make “difficult choices” that would make things difficult for those who can afford it.

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Can An Economy Be ‘Big Enough’?

June 17, 2024June 17, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth E. Boulding

(This blog post previously appeared in The Morning Star. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

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Those of us on the left have rarely been truly excited by the prospect of the Establishment crowning their next temporary placeholder, though I don’t know about you but this upcoming general election seems to offer even less in the way of actual choice or a chance for change than usual.

The Conservatives are in freefall, ejecting ballast as fast as they can (personnel as well as policies), Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party” seems to be trying to do as little as it can to uphold the traditions of the middle word in that catchphrase and even in Scotland, where for the last several elections, the SNP provided some sense of counterpoint (either as a credible voting option or at least as an anchor against rightwards triangulation), that party seems to have hit the end of its road in terms of ideas.

This time around, all of those parties (and several others) have congregated on a single line when it comes to how to manage the economy. Growth at all costs, no matter who profits from it or how much damage is done to the planet in the process.

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Selling The Earth

June 16, 2024June 16, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 5 Comments

“Privatize everything, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize the sea and the sky, privatize justice and the law, privatize the passing cloud, privatize the dream, especially if it’s during the day and open eyed. And finally, for the embellishment of so many privatizations, privatize the States, surrender once and for all their exploitation to private companies through international share offering. There lies the salvation of the world…” – José de Sousa Saramago

(This blog post previously appeared in The National. You can throw me a tip to support this blog here.)

Private

“Natural capital is our geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals.”

Remember that definition, for it is the one the Scottish Government uses to introduce their “Market Framework for Natural Capital”, which they are consulting on at the moment.

Not content with their previous attempts to privatise nature in Scotland (see their “PFI For Trees” scandal last year and their “Green Investment Portfolio” a few years before that), the Government now wants to expand the remit of potential privatisation to all aspects of Natural Capital:- our geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals.

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Extremism Bingo

May 17, 2024May 27, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

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

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Bingo

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

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

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