Power For People, Not Parties

November 15, 2024November 18, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 3 Comments

“We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.” – Oscar Wilde

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Done badly, the only thing worse than an unelected House of Lords might well be an elected one.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a defence of the current system whereby the laws of the UK are made, in part, by people who got the job by dint of patronage to the right party, correct worship of the right deity, or descent from the right person but the proposals to reform the Lords that passed in the House of Commons this week threaten to take the closest mechanism we have of holding absolute power to account and making it even more beholden TO that power.

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Scotland – once a nation that held itself up as a world leader in climate ambitions – has formally repealed important carbon emission targets in a vote that would have had unanimous support but for the abstention of the Greens.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has yet to demonstrate how we will actually reach that goal, especially as interim targets like the 2030 target just repealed continue to be missed.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

November 8, 2024November 19, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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.

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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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How To Replace Council Tax

October 31, 2024November 4, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Is this Paradise?’
‘I can guarantee you that it isn’t,’ Jubal assured him. ‘My taxes are due this week.” – Robert A. Heinlein

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Last week I took part in The National’s series on Council Tax reform with a 20 minute conversation with journalist Xander Elliards on some of Common Weal’s ideas for replacing Council Tax with a value-proportionate Property Tax and then extending that tax to create an effective Land Tax.

You can watch the interview here

You can read Common Weal’s policy papers on Council Tax replacement here:
A Property Tax for Scotland
Taxing Land In Scotland

Strangled By The Purse Strings

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

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got lots of numbers in it.” – George W. Bush

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Eyes are on the UK Budget at the moment, and for good reason, but shortly after that we’re going to see what the Scottish Government lays out in its own budget and, given the scope of devolution, that is likely to have much more of an impact on Scottish public services – especially at a local level.

This means that recent news from Shona Robison telling Local Authorities that there’s “no money left” for public sector pay deals should be taken as a threat to local democratic autonomy.

Usually when I write an article like this I start by saying “imagine if Westminster treated Holyrood like this” but in this case I don’t really need to as we have the example of the UK Government’s cut to Winter Fuel Payments in England having a knock-on effect on the Block Grant which put Holyrood in the position of making the choice on whether to cut the equivalent Scottish allowance too. They didn’t have to – the Block Grant is calculated based on how Westminster spends money in England but Scotland is free to spend that Grant as it likes, not just on equivalent policies. In this case though, they did indeed choose to cut the payments.

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Scotland’s Population

October 16, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” – Carl Sagan

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Every year the National Records of Scotland produces an annual population estimate for the nation. While not quite as comprehensive as the once-per-decade census (at least, when the census isn’t marred by the problems of the 2022 Scottish census), it provides a good rolling picture of Scotland’s population both at a national level and at a more local level both on the scale of Local Authorities and per NHS Health Boards (the latter being important for the allocation of healthcare budgets and is gathered because one of the tools used to estimate population change is the number of people who present to the NHS with an illness or injury in a given year). Indeed, a report was published in March comparing the rolling mid-year estimate to the 2022 census and found that the estimate was within around 1% of the census value (which is a fair bit more precise than, say, the 3.4% margin of uncertainty in the revenue estimates in GERS).

The headline figure you’ll have gathered from the news is that Scotland’s population is growing faster than it has since the end of the Second World War (itself a statistical glitch as many thousands of soldiers returning all at once tended to bump the numbers) and that the growth rate is being driven by immigration to Scotland.
I fully expect that line to get more negative attention than it should given the rabidly anti-migrant stance that the UK is rapidly slipping down, driven by increasingly extreme social media cesspits – certainly a view backed up by the fight going on in the comments section of the BBC article reporting on the new figures – so it’s worth doing the thing I often do with reports like this and taking a dip beneath the headlines for a more detailed and nuanced view of Scotland’s changing demographics.

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The Sun Still Has Not Set

October 4, 2024October 11, 2024 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“You can’t have occupation and human rights.” – Christopher Hitchens

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I threw out this week’s planned newsletter (a defence of the Tourist Levy) in response to some breaking news on Thursday morning that concerns a story that I’ve been following for some years (albeit very much from the farthest fringes of the outside).

The UK, after many years of arguing against an international consensus that campaigned against their illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Chagos Islands, has agreed to hand sovereignty of the islands back to Mauritius who were stripped of the territories when they won their independence from the UK in 1968.

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