“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” –
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In December 2021, the Scottish Government made a promise to the Scottish Climate Assembly. In December 2024, their deadline passed with the promise now overdue.
“Work as if you were to live a thousand years, play as if you were to die tomorrow.” – Ben Franklin
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Sir Keir Starmer, Knight of the Realm and Man of the Working People, has declared again that thou shalt work or thou shalt starve.
It’s becoming an increasingly common political line in the UK that the economic woes are all caused by people not working hard enough and there is particular ire being levelled at those who are neither employed nor unemployed (a quite narrow measure of people who are not in but who are actively looking for work) but who are “economically inactive” – who are neither working nor who are looking for work. The other line is that work is the only thing that gives someone’s life purpose and that if you’re not working then you’re a lesser kind of person than someone who is – a failure, or an immoral shirker.
“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
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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.
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable. ” – Adam Smith
This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
(Image Source: Unsplash)
Ahead of the reopening of the UK Parliament next week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer painted a bleak picture of a broken Britain that he plans to break further so that he can mend it in the service of his “number one priority”, GDP growth and “wealth creation”. He’s going to ask us to accept “short term pain, for long term good”.
If that sounds like a promise you’ve heard before then you are, like me, old enough to remember George Osborne making a very similar promise in 2010 when he kicked off the decade and a half of Conservative Austerity that we’ve endured ever since.
The big difference between then and now, of course, is that more Labour pain is coming on top of that previous Conservative pain so it’s little wonder that many are asking how much more we need to bear.
There were very few actual policies – and fewer new ones – in Starmer’s speech and those that were there are doing a lot more heavy lifting than he’s likely to let on. GB Energy, which he mentioned several times, is going to be miniscule. With only £8 billion worth of funding, it wouldn’t be big enough to renationalise the energy sector enough to make a difference. It might be one of the best public energy schemes the UK has seen since the Scottish Government dropped their plans for a public energy company, but it’s almost being deliberately designed to NOT disrupt the energy market that has been largely responsible for the inflation and cost of living crises of the past few years.
If Starmer wants to actually get to the root of the problem, to actually plan long term for the benefit of the UK and everyone who lives here then he needs to understand that a good chunk of that root is, in fact, his number one priority – chasing after GDP growth and “wealth creation”. GDP has been growing for decades without solving our economic problems so we need to ask if it is the solution, how much more does it need to grow before it starts working?
It’s not the solution because whenever GDP growth has occurred, the benefits of its have almost always gone mostly to the already wealthy. It has also almost always resulted in more damage to the environment. A long-term beneficial economy is one that focuses on sustainability and wellbeing instead and regardless of growth. Britain needs fewer prisoners, not more prisons. Fewer shops and more libraries (a policy that would improve wellbeing while actively shrinking GDP). And we need fewer of us working to barely meet our needs while we enrich others, and more from the already rich using their ability to do more to make it all happen. A smarter man than myself said something similar once. I don’t think he’d be too welcome in Starmer’s Labour party these days. That, too, is probably part of the problem.
“The coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of cataclysmic event that brings about drastic changes. I think Medicare For All and UBI are now inevitable. It’s either that, or complete chaos.” – Oliver Markus Malloy
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Techbro Billionaire and founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has just concluded one of the longest running Universal Basic Income experiments to date. He launched the project after becoming intrigued albeit unconvinced by the idea (and as accusations grew that tools like his AI could become an increasing threat to jobs) and he made a show of personally funding the scheme that saw 1,000 low income people being paid $1,000 a month plus 2,000 people receiving $50 as a control group. All participants had a household income below 300% of the federal poverty line (the limit below which people start to qualify for federal low income support – the various thresholds can be found here) and the average household income of participants was $29,000 (approx £22,500 as of current exchange rates).
The results of the study have been overwhelmingly positive and entirely in line with other studies of UBI.
“No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.” – Maajid Nawaz
The following are two short articles I had published last week. The first, on Foreign Direct Investment, appeared in The Herald and the second, on Ed Milliband ending oil licences, appeared in The National.
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Ian McConnell’s highlighting of Scotland’s continued dependency on “foreign direct investment” offers a welcome opportunity to once again explain why the policy – supported by multiple Scottish Governments – is acting to the detriment of the Scottish economy.
All investment demands an expectation of a return on that investment and the fact that the investment is coming from outwith Scotland obviously means that those returns must leave via the same route. Scottish Government figures show that since the start of devolution, more than a quarter of a trillion pounds has been net extracted from Scotland and that around £10 billion was extracted from Scotland in the most recent year we have data for. Further analysis by Common Weal shows that as a proportion of our economy, this is the highest rate of profit extraction of any of our peer nations with the exception of a handful of micro-states and tax havens as well as higher than any of the World Bank’s income groups, including the poorest and most indebted nations. Scotland, in that sense, runs an economy with European levels of economic development but with West African levels of foreign exploitation and profit extraction.
This isn’t just an issue of money. Companies that are mobile enough to invest in Scotland are mobile enough to remove that investment unless they get the political kickbacks they want (see the discussions around Scotland’s Green Freeports, for example. Or Grangemouth.) and thus present a direct intervention against our democracy. They also tend to more weakly embed jobs and skills in the economy and are more willing to leave workers on the scrapheap if some other nation decides to attract their “investments” instead of us.
The Scottish Government should drop its addition to FDI and should concentrate on building up domestic sources of investment (starting with reforms to the Scottish National Investment Bank) and should focus not on quick “GDP Growth” and accelerations of shareholder profits but on sustainable development not just of companies but of their workforces and the wellbeing of the communities in which they live.
The news that Ed Milliband has halted new oil and gas licences is a very welcome change of direction for UK politics and effectively brings the UK Government into line with what was the Scottish Government’s policy on new oil and gas in January last year. As it stands now though, the Scottish Government has backtracked on their opposition to new oil and has been extremely vague about the conditions under which it would support a ban. To be clear, it is one thing to state that you’d only support a licence if environmental checkpoints are met but if you don’t state what those checkpoints are or what a properly compliant oil licence would look like, then all you are doing is deferring responsibility for the decision either way.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last month that oil extraction must fully account for all oil emissions is significant here. Until then, a case was being built that a “Net Zero” oil rig would be one that transported workers to and from it without burning fossil fuels (Scope 1 emissions) and was powered by renewable energy instead of a fossil fuel power plant (Scope 2 emissions) but that basically washed its hands of whatever happened to the oil it extracted (Scope 3 emissions). If you bought some of their oil and burned it, that wasn’t their problem. This can no longer be the case and so brings into question the very possibility of a compliant oil rig. The Scottish Government should outright admit that either their support for oil must be ditched, or their remaining climate policies must.
As welcome as Milliband’s decision is, it likely doesn’t go far enough. He’s equally stated that he won’t revoke licences already granted but not yet being exploited nor will he shut down oil wells that are still economically producing oil. Half a decade ago in 2019, Friends of the Earth’s “Sea Change” report found that if the world is to meet its collective climate targets then not only must new licences be blocked and unexploited licences revoked, at least 20% of the economic oil in wells that are currently open must stay in the ground.
A Just Transition for workers is vital and I sympathise with Unite’s “no ban without a plan” slogan, but I fear that the politicians will stick to the easy option of “no ban” rather than what they should do, which is to bring those workers into the room immediately and help them design the plan that grants them the Just Transition they want and deserve before another political deferral forces a chaotic collapse of the oil industry and sees oil workers dumped just like their predecessors in the coal industry were.
“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.)
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.
“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.)
“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.
“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
– Suzy Kassem
(This blog post previously appeared in ROSE Magazine.)
Scotland is one of the most foreign-owned countries in the developed world and the consequence of this is the loss of more than £10 billion pounds every year mostly as a result of shareholder dividends and other forms of profit extraction.
This is the conclusion of my latest policy paper for Common Weal titled Profit Extraction: How foreign ownership drains Scotland’s wealth and is based on recently updated data from the Scottish Government as well as data from the World Bank.
“Defining who is to be protected is in effect defining who is not to be protected” – Stephen D. King
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The UK Government has announced that they are invoking the Internal Market Act to prevent the Scottish Government from banning the sale of glue traps in Scotland. These horrific devices are have been banned as part of broader concerns around protecting animals from cruel deaths and on the responsible management of land. It’s entirely right that the Scottish Government has acted to ban – rather than merely restrict or licence – these traps.
The Common Green 