We Need a Ban, So Where’s the Plan?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 3 Comments

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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It has been unsettling to watch Scottish politicians line up behind Unite the Union’s “No ban without a plan” campaign to keep Scottish oil fields flowing. I understand Unite’s position on this. They don’t want to see their workers harmed during the largest economic transition Scotland needs to undertake since the oil fields opened. They’ve been promised a “Just Transition” for those workers. And it hasn’t been delivered. The politicians signing up to the “no ban” pledge are the very people who should have come up with “the plan”. They not only didn’t, many have spent their time actively pushing against those who have tried to instead even as news breaks that many of those workers at Grangemouth will be losing their jobs anyway – casualties of being pointed at for headlines but never being heard.

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DeepSunk Costs

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision. – From an IBM staff presentation, circa 1979

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I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) lately but it’s been The Next Big Thing in the tech sector for the past few years. Even if you’ve gone out of your way to try to avoid it, it’s being crammed down your apps just as soon as the companies behind them can update them. You’ll have noticed your internet search engines adding “AI summaries” instead of giving you links to the website you want. The call centres you’re trying to navigate through have replaced overworked and underpaid scut-workers with AI chat bots that on a good day eventually pass you through to one of the remaining scut-workers and on a bad day it’ll break in ways that would be hilarious if not for the fact that these bots are being pushed into mission-critical roles too. You might even have noticed the news that Meta wanted to introduce GAI bots that would set up fake profile pages, post fake posts and then be responded to by fake comments from other bots – all in the name of harvesting ad revenue. That plan lasted less than a week, but will be back as soon as we’re distracted by something else.

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The Scottish and UK Governments are both wrong on DRS

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“This book was written using 100% recycled words.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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a green traffic light sitting next to a store

Both the Scottish and UK Governments are wrong on Deposit Return Schemes.
The DRS is back in the news now that Keir Starmer – in yet another show of policy innovation – has decided to copy/paste the previous Conservative Government’s plan for a deposit return scheme – the proposal where you pay a small deposit when you buy things like drinks and receive the money back when you return the packaging to a deposit return machine (sometimes known as a “reverse vending machine”). His plan includes the previous plan to exclude glass from the scheme and he has refused to allow an exemption to the Internal Markets Act that would allow Scotland to both include glass and to introduce the scheme at all without having to wait for the UK to do it.

It really is impressive to me how the UK can be so backwards that it is utterly unable to bring in a circular economy scheme that is already near-ubiquitous across central Europe (and used to be common in Scotland if you’re old enough to remember Barr’s ‘gless cheques’ before they ended their scheme in 2015) and utterly baffling how vulnerable we are to lobbying by companies who want to keep dumping the costs of their pollution onto consumers and the environment. I’ve told this story many times but I remember being in an informal roundtable in Holyrood in the early days of the planning for the Scottish scheme and a representative from a major supermarket and a representative from a major multinational drinks company both argued against the concept of DRS. Both went a bit more silent when I mentioned that in my previous holiday to Prague I had personally deposited a drinks bottle made by the latter into the DRS machine hosted by the former. If they can do it in one country, why not another? As I say – it was never about “could”, but about “why should we, when we profit more by not doing it?”

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The Dragons Ate Your Lunch

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.” – George Monbiot

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Dragon

One of the arguments in favour of billionaires is that while they are wealthy beyond any possible realistic need, they in turn generate even more wealth by creating and supporting jobs. They might take a share of the production generated by you, their workers, but you wouldn’t be able to generate that production without the risk they took in employing you and providing you with the tools, the capital, that you need to do that job.

What if it wasn’t true?

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To Build Houses, First Buy The Land

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“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” – Margaret Thatcher

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Why are houses so expensive?

There are many reasons. To take just a few, Developers only build private housing at a rate just high enough to keep prices up and subsidies flowing, certain areas are being particularly pressured by those rich enough to own multiple homes at the expense of the local community, and – as we pointed out in our book All of Our Futures – the UK’s decision to push the burden of pensions away from the state and onto individuals has created a culture of “climbing the housing ladder” with “victory” meaning extracting the wealth you’ve accumulated through ever increasing house prices so that you can pay for retirement or, increasingly, so that you can give it to a private care firm owned by a tax-dodging hedge fund. That is, if you’re allowed to buy a house at all and aren’t destined to be one of the increasing number of private renting pensioners who face destitution due to rents and the lack of means to pay for care (something we warned about in All of our Futures but only recently being picked up as a problem by places like the FT).

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Tool Libraries Are Overdue

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

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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.

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A Year In Common Weal – 2024 Policy Review

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.” – Roy T. Bennett

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Intro

Welcome to the end of 2024. I can feel the Dùbhlachd tightening around me these days. I’ve always been a rather solar powered person (with a longtime ritual of greeting midsummer by reading outdoors under the midnight glow) and while I’m not afflicted – as some of my friends are – with full blown Seasonal Affective Disorder, I do feel the urge to crawl under a duvet and hibernate until the sun returns. Humans weren’t made to run a summer schedule in the middle of winter – we should be huddled around the hearth telling stories and hoping that the pickled fruits last till Spring.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to my winter break and some time to switch off, chill, and break into the aforementioned pickles – possibly with some home smoked cheese!
Until then, I want to leave you this year with a round up of what we got up to at Common Weal – especially as this year marked our tenth anniversary! We remain very possibly the most productive think tank in Scotland (supporting all of our staff members while the whole think tank earns less that the First Minister does – if you’d like help us correct that, then please sign up as a regular donor). We published 12 substantial policy papers, policy briefings or consultation responses this year plus we submitted several more less substantial consultation responses to the Scottish or UK Governments (many really are barely worth the time to submit but if we don’t then it gets held against us when it comes time to lobby properly for the outcome we want). This is all in addition to the whole staff writing in our weekly newsletter and our regular In Common Column in The National, plus all of the other media appearances we make with our work. Not a bad return for an average donation of £10/month! Regular newsletter readers will, no doubt, remember many of the stories and policy papers but newer subscribers or folk who have been a bit overwhelmed with the news of the year (i.e. all of us) may have missed a few things.

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Scottish Budget 2024 – Still Spinning Plates

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles.” – Wade Davis

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Finance Secretary Shona Robison must have breathed a sigh of relief at the UK budget the other month (covered by me here) but if she did, it was the shallowest one she could get away with. The extra money from the UK that has gone into this year’s Scottish Budget has largely been accounted for in terms of public sector pay deals and reserved tax rises applied to those wages (not that I’m complaining about those pay deals – quite the contrary, even with them many public sector works are still lagging behind fair pay after over a decade and a half of austerity) or has gone into replacing cuts from last year’s budget so it’s clear that despite the relative expansion to Scottish finances there still wasn’t going to be a huge amount of play in the figures to do much more than work a little less hard to keep all of the plates spinning in the air.

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Just Work It Off

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“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.

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Undermining Our Principles

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The more expeditiously we can end this plague on earth caused by the landmine, the more readily can we set about the constructive tasks to which so many give their hand in the cause of humanity.” – Diana, Princess of Wales

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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In a year of countless and boundless horrors, where war crimes and crimes against humanity are now so routinely fed to us in real time on social media that we are seemingly utterly numb to those suffering them and indifferent to or even cheering on those who commit them, who had “Scottish First Minister apparently breaches international land mine ban treaty” on their list of things to watch out for?

As reported by LBC’s Gina Davidson, last week, outside a primary school where he was launching a new literacy programme, FM John Swinney was asked about the then breaking news that the USA was changing its policies and giving Ukraine anti-personnel land mines to deploy during its war against Russia. Swinney stated that territorial integrity must be defended and that he “supported the actions taken”.

There’s a problem with this – that statement looks very much like a breach of Article 1(c) of the 1997 Ottawa Treaty that banned the use of AP mines – and in particular banned any state signed up to the treaty from taking any action to “assist, encourage or induce” any other state (whether signed up to the treaty or not) from using such weapons. The UK – and thus Scotland – is a state party to the treaty and all aspects of government, including the devolved governments, are bound by it.

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