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?”

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Profit Extraction Makes Scotland Poorer

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“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.)

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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.

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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.

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A Bute House Divided

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“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.

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Workers With Purpose

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“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.

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Shedding Light on Rural Heat

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“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.” – Victor Borge

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

If the Scottish Government knew they were going to abandon its climate targets (see Robin’s column for more on that) then they could have probably saved themselves a lot of strife last week over their botched policies and communications around rural heating. If they had listened to us almost five years ago when we submitted a comprehensive policy paper and two extensive policy briefings to them on decarbonising heat in off-grid and rural areas, they might have avoided both weeks of bad headlines now.

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Time For Some Tech Optimism

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 “I’m an optimist because I know what technology can accomplish and I know what people can accomplish.” – Bill Gates

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

Despite my scientific training and engineering background (or perhaps because of them) when talking about the climate emergency, I’ve generally been wary about going down the route of tech-optimism, of believing that there’s a technological solution to the problem just around the corner. There are three broad reasons for this. The first is that risk that the tech fails and leaves us in a worse place than we currently are. Continuing to emit carbon until the day that a tech-priest grants us the blessing of effective carbon capture only works if the blessing actually arrives. If it doesn’t, then we’re left with a larger problem and even less time to fix it. And a strategy like “Net Zero” that fixes part of the problem (like EV cars fixing carbon emissions) but doesn’t address the rest of the problem (overall air quality) isn’t even a solution.

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Glue Traps And Globalisation

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“Defining who is to be protected is in effect defining who is not to be protected” – Stephen D. King

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

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.

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Freeports Don’t Come For Free

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

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red and blue crane under blue sky during daytime

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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The Welsh Way Forward – Part 2

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The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced. – Aneurin Bevan

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

Wales risks creeping ahead of Scotland in progressive policy again, if the Welsh Government adopts proposals put forward by the Institute for Welsh Affairs to radically increase the amount of community owned energy in Wales.

Their new paper, Sharing Power, Spreading Wealth, is a comprehensive map of the state of public energy in Wales and identifies just about every angle that we’ve been campaigning for in Scotland (including mention of the role of Ynni Cymru – the new public energy company set up by the Welsh Government based on our Powering Our Ambitions model of a National Energy Company).

The paper, like much of our energy campaigning, identifies profit extraction from energy resources as a major driver of the current cost of living crisis as well as a major barrier against the development of renewable energy around communities (it’s a bit of a hard sell to see your landscape covered in wind and solar generators knowing that your own energy bills keep going up and none of the profits stay similarly within eyeshot) but also identifies that Wales along, with even more limited devolved funding than Scotland has, is unlikely to be able to nationalise the entire sector.

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