Social Security

How To Show Scotland Still Cares

November 1, 2024November 4, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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

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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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We Support An NCS – But Not Like This

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

“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.

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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Billionaire Discovers UBI

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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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If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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.

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A National Care Service Worthy Of The Name

June 25, 2024June 25, 2024 / 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.)

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.

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How John Swinney Can Eradicate Child Poverty

May 9, 2024May 12, 2024 / 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.)

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?”

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A UBI Is Now A Moral Imperative

March 1, 2024March 11, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

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

A new research paper has found that a Universal Basic Income sufficient to eliminate poverty across the entire EU would cost about as much as defence and, in some modelled scenarios, would cost less than the poverty it eliminated. In other words, bringing in a Universal Basic Income could cost less than the price we’re currently paying by not doing it.

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Will I Be Allowed To Retire?

February 9, 2024February 17, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Retire from work, not from life.” – Sukant Ratnakar

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

The Guardian published a piece this week saying that as a result of ageing demographics, the UK’s state pension age may have to rise again and that anyone born after 1970 (including me) would not be able to claim a state pension until we’re 71 (under current rules, I will have to wait till age 68) or perhaps even older.

This claim is based on entirely false assumptions about how the state pension is funded and we determine whether or not such funding is “sustainable” or not.

The book I wrote with Bill Johnston a couple of years ago, All of Our Futures (available here) ended up being a deep and comprehensive study of many aspects of our society that impact and are impacted by age and ageing but the seed of it started as a policy paper about pension reform – in other words, the arguments in the news this week are not new and we’ve already delved into them in considerable detail.

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Protecting Pensioners

August 3, 2022August 7, 2022 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“You’re mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund” – Ben Elton

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

Last year, Bill Johnston and I published our book All of Our Futures – an exploration of ageism in Scotland, how it causes inappropriate policies regarding age and ageing and what Scotland could do instead to create a country that we can all safely, securely and proudly grow older in. In one of the chapters we discuss how an independent Scotland could improve policies around pensions.

This is one of the topics of great interest to everyone on all sides of the constitutional campaign but it’s also a topic that few attempt to tackle in any great detail. However the team here at Common Weal recently realised that while this chapter of the book represents our most up to date thinking on an independent Scotland’s policies towards pensions, we don’t actually have a dedicated Policy Paper on the topic beyond some higher level aspects such as in our 2017 paper on Social Security or discussions around debt and asset transfers found in our book How to Start a New Country or my paper for the Scottish Independence Convention, Parting Ways. This newsletter article will go some way to redressing this but it can only remain a short summary of what is laid out in much greater detail in the book. One thing in particular to bear in mind when discussing pensions is that there are two aspects of them which must be handled differently if not quite entirely separately. The state pension and private pensions.

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We Need To Talk About: Billionaires

May 31, 2022May 31, 2022 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“There is no such thing as philanthropy, because the money that the billionaires pretend to donate, belong to the people anyways.” ― Abhijit Naskar

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

The villagers lived in hopeless fear of the dragon. They worked hard to provide for themselves but it was so hard when the dragon owned the land under their feet, owned the rooves over their heads, owned the tools they used to till the fields and owned the store where they bought the things they couldn’t make for themselves and even owned the carts they used to bring things to market. Everything the villagers did fed the dragon in the end. It took a share at every step of the way and its hoard grew ever higher. The villagers had once tried to slay the dragon – it was a hard fight and cost the lives of many of them – but in the end, the dragon’s offspring just slid onto the top of the hoard and things carried on as they had before. They asked their mayor to tax the dragon, but the dragon whispered promises of power into the mayor’s ear and gave him baubles to make sure it didn’t happen. The villagers tried to vote out the mayor but the dragon whispered into the ears of some of the villagers and told them that if they worked really hard in precisely the way that the dragon didn’t, then they too could become dragons themselves. Even when the mayor was voted out – all the dragon had to do was whisper to the new one and make sure things were never so bad for it in the time it took to ensure the next mayor was more compliant. And so the villagers worked hard – harder than ever before even as the storms that ruined their harvests became stronger and more frequent – and the dragon’s hoard got larger.