Scottish Politics

Unburdening Myself

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.” – Vernor Vinge

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

Virus

I spent last Thursday reading the first of the UK Covid inquiry reports and I really can’t tell you how unburdened it made me feel. A stain on my soul that I’ve carried for years may well be healing.

As someone in the world of think (and do) tanks and in lobbying I don’t expect to have everything I say adopted before the ink is even dry on the page. That’s not how it works. Our greatest policy successes have been long, hard struggles and because much of the hardest work happens in the background, when the success does come folk can wonder why we felt we had to fight so hard because, in hindsight, how could it have gone any other way? It led me to coining the phrase that everything in politics seems impossible until the moment it becomes inevitable.

Continue reading →

A National Care Service Worthy Of The Name

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo F. Buscaglia

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

woman in black crew neck shirt wearing blue earbuds

Common Weal has spent four years campaigning hard for a National Care Service (NCS) that would be as worthy of that name as we all believe that the National Health Service should be of its name.

When the initial National Care Service (Scotland) Bill was published and introduced we were so concerned with the lack of vision and purpose and with the massive ministerial power grab contained within it, we successfully campaigned alongside the Scottish Trade Union Congress to get the Bill paused so that we could have a thorough period of co-design with various care stakeholders to bring the Bill up to worthy standard.

Despite many hundreds of hours spent collectively by dozens of organisations across Scotland, progress from the Scottish government remained slow and even at times counterproductive.

Continue reading →

The In Tray

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[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.

Continue reading →

How John Swinney Can Eradicate Child Poverty

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
– William Blake

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

a truck driving down a street next to tall buildings

John Swinney is now Scotland’s seventh First Minister. He is also the sixth First Minister to have been, at the time of his swearing in, one of the tranche of “99’ers” – the first generation of MSPs who have held unbroken service in Holyrood since the start of Devolution and the recommencement of the Scottish Parliament. This speaks to the relative youth of that Parliament as does the fact that, at present, we still do not have an elected MSP who is younger than the Devolution era (though we came close in 2021 with the election of then 23 year old Emma Roddick who was born just shortly before the devolution referendum in 1997).

We’re still living in fast-moving times and the period between me writing this column on Wednesday morning and you reading it on Thursday evening is a gaping chasm that none can see across clearly but I did want to take a moment to pick up a point made by Swinney during his speech on Monday when he accepted the mantle of leader of the SNP. It’s a point that I’m slightly surprised that no-one else picked up on because it was his sole tangible policy pledge that couldn’t be discounted as the mere background level of filler (No-one expects a politician to promise to build fewer houses, so a comment about building “more houses” without a tangible target or policy strategy isn’t much more solid).

John Swinney pledged to “eradicate child poverty in Scotland”. So I’d like to take a moment to ask him the hardest question anyone can ask any politician who has made a pledge of any kind.

“How?”

Continue reading →

A Deal With The Devolved – Part Three

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

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

Thanks to an FOI request, I now have evidence that the Scottish Government has applied its devolved Freeport tax cuts without any data saying that they will benefit the Scottish public purse or be offset by other taxes.

Continue reading →

A Bute House Divided

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s only hubris if I fail”, Julius Caesar, HBO/BBC TV series Rome (2005)

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

The Bute House Agreement has ended. Earlier this month, the Greens notified members that there would be a vote on whether or not to continue the cooperation deal with the Scottish Government within the next few weeks. This morning, stealing the march and despite saying just 24 hours earlier that SNP members didn’t need a vote because they’d certainly back the agreement, Humza Yousaf unilaterally terminated the deal. The Greens have been booted out of government and Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater are no longer ministers.

Continue reading →

Workers With Purpose

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Oh, working man! Oh, starved, outraged, and robbed laborer, how long will you lend attentive ear to the authors of your misery?” – Lucy Parsons

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

Workers

I was pleased to visit the STUC Annual Congress in Dundee this year, representing Common Weal as an observer and speaking at the SNP Trade Union Group’s fringe meeting on Scotland’s Future. The panel of speakers (Seamus Logan from SNP PPC, Stephen Smellie from Unison, Gordon Martin from RMT, and myself) were each asked to present a progressive policy idea as well as to shape that idea around a broader vision of Scotland as we each saw it.

Continue reading →

Submerged In Leith

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.” – Jimi Hendrix

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

Why is Edinburgh considering building housing on land that may be underwater before their mortgages are paid off?

In the Herald this week, a plan was announced to build 300-odd houses in a currently brownfield site at Edinburgh Harbour in Leith. This comes just over a year after approval was granted for a 600 home development at the other end of the harbour. Scotland has a housing crisis and the only way out of it is to build up housing stock so that it exceeds demand and begins to bring house prices down to actually affordable levels again and we build them in a way that doesn’t subject the residents to fuel poverty or, as may be the case here, assets stranded as a result of poor construction or the climate emergency. Scotland may have been one of the first countries in the world to declare a climate emergency but we’re still far from acting like it when it comes to policy.

In 2019, Edinburgh Council followed Holyrood in accepting that climate emergency and soon after they published a climate readiness plan on what they planned to do about it. It’s actually pretty good in terms of the policies it lays out and from what I’ve seen of Edinburgh lately, they seem to be making a decent shout of making progress towards the goals as stated, however there is one glaring omission to the plan and it pains this resident of a land-locked Local Authority to point it out – the plan only mentions the threat of sea level rise once, only does so in passing and does not recommend any policies or actions to address it. I’ve discussed this issue before with respect to Scotland’s airports, but it’s obviously time to look at it again.

Continue reading →

Paying the Price of Climate Delay

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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.)

red dragon statue near body of water during night time

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).

Continue reading →

A Hollow Frame

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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.

Continue reading →