Economics

What I’d Sacrifice For Wellbeing

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity.” – Joss Whedon

This is a transcript – edited for text medium – of the speech I gave at the Independence Forum Scotland Conference in Perth on the 14th of June 2025

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Image Source: Independence Live

The previous speaker posed us the question of what would it look like to bridge the gap between defining a Wellbeing Economy and achieving one. I’m going to try to look at that problem through the lens of sacrifice.

Those opposing economic change often frame the transition away from the status quo as causing us sacrifice.

Whether it’s sacrificing something abstract like the idea that “GDP Growth will make you rich”, even though it hasn’t.

Whether it’s “The climate transition will force you to give up your conveniences”, as if the only way to live sustainably is by moving into the forest, gathering berries and being robed in hemp homespun like some kind of hedge witch (actually…that sounds good…)

It’s sometimes even the outright conspiracy theory level of “15 Minute Neighbourhoods will take away your freedom to drive for 45 minutes to find a post box, if you can get past the military checkpoints at the end of your street”.

But what if a Wellbeing Economy wasn’t about sacrificing anything we’d miss? What if it actually was about fixing the things that are wrong with the way we live today?

In the next session you’re all going to be asked the question “What does a wellbeing economy look like?”. I’d like to throw in a few ideas here about what it means to me but looking through the eyes of what I might have to sacrifice to get there.

First – the daily commute. I’ve already sacrificed that. I’ve worked from home since the pandemic. I know. I get the privilege. I have a job that can be worked from home and, more importantly, I have a home that can be worked from. Not everyone who has the former has the latter. I’m a homeowner so I could modify my house to retrofit in an office. Renters in Scotland often can’t. Renters in Germany have the right to make reasonable modifications to their home though. So maybe we need to sacrifice the kind of landlord lobby that holds Scotland back and builds a housing sector for their profit rather than our wellbeing.

On the commute itself, the Scottish Government recently ditched its target of reducing car miles after being told they weren’t doing anything to meet it. The extra pollution this failure will result in will sacrifice people. That’s not a wellbeing economy.

Second, still on houses, I’d like to sacrifice my heating bill. Our housing sector is built for developer profits too, so we get cheap, crap, cold, damp houses that are hard to repair and retrofit. And we have a retrofitting strategy built around dumping the responsibility to fix things on you, rather than treating this as a massive public works infrastructure job for the public good.

I’d like to sacrifice buying things. The biggest mindset shift we as a society went through in the last twenty years was from “I need a thing, I’ll walk down the High Street and buy one” to “I need a thing, I’ll drive to the out-of-town outlet to buy one” to “I need a thing, I’ll buy it from Amazon Prime and have someone with a crap job deliver it to me tomorrow”. The next mindset shift needs to be “I need a thing, I’ll walk down the High Street and borrow one from the library”. The Scottish Government made a promise to the 2021 Climate Assembly to deliver 75 new Tool Libraries by the end of 2024. They only delivered 9. And the Minister at the time told me that they knew that 75 wasn’t enough to create that mindset shift but that they “hoped that the private sector would fill the gap”. Guess what. It didn’t.

While I’m down the High Street, I’d like to sacrifice the Thatcherist mindset that “there’s no such thing as society”. That mindset has actively pushed society out of our lives in favour of consumerism. Think about your community. How many of you can think of a space that you can go to, where you have a reasonable chance of accidentally meeting someone that you know. And it’s a place where you can exist for as long as you like without the expectation of buying something?

The protests over the removal of the steps in Buchanan St in Glasgow are emblematic of this. Let’s face it. Those steps aren’t particularly nice. It’s not a green urban nature reserve – it’s bare stone. They’re not comfy to sit on. It’s in the middle of a walking route. But they are a place to be in the middle of the city where you can gather and not buy and consume. They are a focal point for protest and organisation more generally – if that’s not “society”, what is? Glasgow Council keeps wanting to turn them into shops. I wonder if that plan is about suppressing protest more than it’s about encouraging consumerism.

It’s about sacrificing need and poverty. I want to see a Job Guarantee so that everyone who wants to work can work. But I also want a Universal Basic Income so that no-one needs to work, even if they want to. That need is what really keeps us poor. Keeps us powerless because it keeps us working for crap wages and bad conditions because if we don’t, we’re told that someone more desperate than us can replace us. The rich above us weaponise the poor below us to enrich themselves. It doesn’t even matter where “we” are in that ladder, because there’s always someone richer weaponising someone poorer.

And that’s the final thing I’d like to sacrifice to create a wellbeing economy. The idea that we’re not all in this together. The idea that there are people in this world who are better than you. Whether it’s by dint of Magic Blood, or by the power of their Magic Hat that can make you a Commander of the British Empire. Or whether it’s an overtanned manbaby who wanted to play with real life toy soldiers on his birthday. Or whether it’s any number of warlords who think that history will remember them kindly for their warcrimes or their desire to murder civilians by the score.

That’s what a wellbeing economy means to me. No Kings. Not real ones, not fake ones. Just a society that puts All of Us First.

Burning Down The House of Cards

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“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?” – Michael Lewis, The Big Short

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Image Credit: Dominic Alves

Rachel Reeves has signalled that she is “open minded” about the banks lobbying her to repeal regulations that came in after the 2008 Financial Crash. If she does, she will be accepting responsibility for the next one the banks inevitably cause.

One of the most important films dealing with the financial sector since the 2008 Financial Crash was 2015’s The Big Short. Comedic, irreverent and outright scathing of those involved, yet it remains one of the most incisive explanations of the 2008 Financial Crash and it managed to make the intentionally obscure world of financial alchemy accessible to the lay person. I’d go as far to say that it did for the idea of ‘sustainable investment banking’ as the films Threads and The Day After did for the idea of a “survivable nuclear war”.

If you haven’t seen it, please do so and pay particular attention to the scene explaining the concept of “synthetic CDOs” – where investors could effectively gamble on the possibility of you defaulting on your mortgage, and other investors could gamble on whether or not those investors will win their bet, and more investors could gamble on the outcome of those bets…all without knowing anything at all about your finances and the state of your mortgage.

One of the things that made these ‘financial instruments’ so destructive was that the ‘investment’ side of the banking sector – the bit that involves people effectively gambling amongst themselves with money that maybe was theirs and maybe wasn’t – was entirely leveraged on the ‘retail’ side of the banking sector – that’s the bit where you put money in your savings account and ask the bank for a mortgage to buy a house – but was completely divorced from it to the point that one side didn’t understand what the other side was doing.

When the housing boom of the early 2000s came to an end in late 2007 and people started defaulting on mortgages, this would have normally been tragic for those losing their homes and a sign of a substantial economic recession but would have ultimately resulted in a bounce back. But all of those ‘investment firms’ sitting on top of the sector were gambling with money that they ‘knew’ was ‘safe’ (because ‘safe as houses’) despite the houses not being nearly as safe as people assumed.

Not just assumed. The way the CDOs were structured made it functionally impossible for anyone to actually assess the risk of their failure. Because it was impossible to work how and if they might fail, the credit agencies declared them to be safe (yes, really) which encouraged banks to pile money into them.

It got so bad that the investment sector was gambling with something like $20 for every $1 actually involved in the mortgages. The investment gambling sector was many times larger than the value of thing they were gambling on. The liabilities on the banks ‘if’ their sure bet failed reached the point of being larger than the GDP of the countries they were based in.

It would only take a small increase in the percentage of mortgage defaults to utterly bankrupt the banks. An increase that might be caused by investment bankers encouraging retails bankers to take on ever riskier mortgages (with ever higher profit margins), paying exorbitant bonuses to bankers who could sell larger and larger mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay them.

Which is what happened. And the backlash threatened to pull down other sectors of the economy because the bankers weren’t just gambling on mortgages but on everything just about up to and including whether or not the sky was blue and the fact that the investment wings were entwined with their retails wings meant that if their investment bank failed, the ATMs on the high streets could be shut down too (runs on banks like Northern Rock showed the visceral reality of people faced with losing their savings because of someone else’s mistakes).

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The Lie Under The Nuclear Promise

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” – Omar N. Bradley

This is a rough transcript – edited for text medium – of the speech I gave at Scottish CND’s fringe meeting at the STUC Annual Congress on April 29th, 2025.

If you’d like to support this blog, you can throw me a tip at my Ko-Fi.

yellow and black road sign

When I was invited here, I was given a very broad remit for the topic of discussion. I thought I was going to talk today about the economics of nuclear bombs perhaps by way of talking about opportunity costs of investing in nuclear weapons – and what we could be building instead. Or maybe I’d talk about the cost of rebuilding a nuked city – though the images we’re seeing in real time from Palestine show that those costs can be visited upon humanity without us splitting a single atom. But when I sat down to decide what to actually say, something else came to mind entirely.

Here is my proposal for discussion: It is possible for an economy the size of the UK’s to sustain a civilian nuclear power sector without nuclear weapons. It is not possible for it to sustain a nuclear weapons sector without civilian nuclear power. Therefore, when politicians claim to back new nuclear power – especially in Scotland – despite renewables being cheaper, more effective, cleaner, faster to deploy and more secure, what they are actually doing is trying to shore up support for nuclear bomb infrastructure but they know they can’t say that.

To give a bit of a back story about myself and how I very nearly became an example of that proposal in action. Some here might know that I’ve not always been a policy wonk.
My degrees are in physics. I have a Masters in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics and a PhD in two-photon fluorescence with applications in distributed optical fibre sensing (don’t worry – no-one else understands it either).

Back in 2010, I was giving a lecture about my PhD work in London and got talking afterwards with someone who turned out to be from AWE Aldermaston. They were interested in some of the “extreme environment” applications for my research but amusingly, we had to cut the conversation short when he said “I don’t think I should say any more in case you start working out some secrets”. Probably for the best, though I’ll never know if my next thoughts were correct or not…

The point of that story is that I could very well have gone down that route. Several of my friends went into conventional military engineering. A couple went into civilian nuclear – including one who had to leave because he wasn’t willing to give up a dual citizenship for a promotion.

If we only had the couple hundred jobs sustained by the bomb sector, why would unis run those physics courses? As my friend Robbie [Mochrie] on this panel can attest – would he be teaching his courses if there were no jobs for his students to go into?

Where would the physicists and engineers who didn’t get those jobs go? Sure…some might become policy wonks…but while I love my job, I didn’t need to become a laser physicist to get it.

As an analogy, imagine trying to plan for an oil company and someone magics away all of the world’s plastic but nothing else changes. You’d lose a tiny fraction of your customer base but you’d still be selling oil to all the people with cars and gas boilers. You wouldn’t see much change in your business model.

A nuclear bomb sector without a civilian nuclear power sector is a bit like trying to run an oil company when all the cars are electric, the boilers are heat pumps and we recycle all of our plastics. The economics don’t work.

So bear this in mind when the politicians talk about bringing new nuclear power Scotland. There might well be a case for it – I’m not ideologically against it. But renewables are so cheap and Scotland’s potential so great that we don’t need that kind of civilian nuclear sector here. Unless…they want them here for the reason they know they can’t say.

It’s Scotland’s Economy – Or Is It?

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“It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.” – Voltaire

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Chivas Regal Scotch Whisky

Deliberate Government policy has resulted in Scotland’s economy being outsourced to foreign-owned companies to the point that we scarcely have a home-grown economy left any more. In a world of threats to global trade, this is a major problem.

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Tariffs for Penguins

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Well, whiles I am a beggar I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich,
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.”
― William Shakespeare, King John

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white and black penguin on snow covered ground during daytime

Note: This article was published on April 4th and the situation has developed substantially since then with the tariffs on most countries (with the notable exception of China) being reduced to 10% for the next few weeks or until Trump burps out some other policy after breakfast.

Trump’s tariffs are the product of a person who doesn’t understand the levers they are pulling, but the UK responding as if we achieved a victory is a flat out lie.

Donald Trump cannot conceive of a “positive sum game”, that is a deal where both parties end up coming away better off than they were before the deal was made. Collaborative community action is a positive sum game when the whole of the community is greater than the sum of its parts (watch once of those “Alone”-style survival programmes to get a glimpse into what true “individualism” actually means).

Trump believes that the only deal possible is a zero-sum game. If there is a “winner”, then there must be an equal and opposite “loser”.

Trump is also deeply narcissistic and believes that if he can perceive you “winning”, then HE must be the “loser” and that cannot be allowed to stand. In his “Art of the Deal”, a “fair” deal is one that he wins.

Now that the world is “fair” again, any attempt by any nation to apply a retaliatory tariff or other sanction will be met with fire, fury and injustice.

Don’t worry if you disagree with his logic or his assumptions here. The key to understanding the trade tariff announcements this week is not whether or not you think he’s right but whether or not HE thinks he is.

Sir Keir Starmer thinks he has won a diplomatic coup. That the “Special Relationship” has saved the UK from the wrath of Trump’s tariffs – at least compared to the EU. The UK got hit with a 10% tariff, the EU got 20%. This, if you watch the UK Government aligned media or commentators, is a sign that all of the begging and grovelling for concessions and special privileges helped take the edge off of a bad situation. Keir Starmer believes that his strategy is a vindication and that we must all “trust the process”.

Sir Keir Starmer is wrong. His actions played absolutely no role in how the tariff was applied to the UK. He could have begged harder and utterly prostrated himself in front of the golden throne. Or he could have stood straight and pushed back. It wouldn’t have mattered. Sir Keir Starmer is an irrelevance to Trump.

With a few exceptions like Trump’s hatred of foreign cars and the fact that these latest tariffs appear to be additional to the tariffs put on countries like China and Canada previously, the calculation of the rate for each country was disturbingly simplistic. For countries where the US has a trade surplus in goods (but not services – this will be important. Trump doesn’t believe that exports like Holywood movies, Microsoft Office subscriptions or licensing deals to produce goods outwith the USA under the Coca-Cola or McDonalds name are worth anything to the US), the rate is 10%. For countries where the goods trade balance is a deficit (i.e. a higher value of goods from country X enter the US that American goods leave for country X), then they took the value of the trade deficit (import value minus export value) and divided it by the value of imports. If a country sells $100 of goods to the US but only buys $60 worth back, then $100-$60 / $100 = 0.4, so they get an 40% tariff. Except Trump then halved the values above the 10% floor because he’s “being nice” (which, of course, undermines his stated purpose of the tariffs being the minimum amount required to restore a trade balance – once again, it doesn’t matter if you see why he’s wrong, only that he doesn’t).

This is why countries like Madagascar and some of the world’s poorest countries are high on the list. The largest single item that Madagascar exports to the USA is vanilla – one of the most valuable spices in the world at around $83 million per year. Goods experts from the USA to Madagascar are comparatively sparse. There isn’t much that the US can send that they can’t get from somewhere closer and, more crucially, high value goods are of limited value to a populace who can’t afford them. Madagascar isn’t “ripping the USA off”. They’re just selling spices that the USA is about to realise they used to really enjoy.

Other anomalies abound like the mention of sub-national states like the Falkland Islands and France’s “we don’t call them colonies any more” territory of St Pierre and Miquelon that sits off of Newfoundland in Canada. There are two main theories why these substates are included. One being that some Musk-ish techbro made the list by asking Grok or another chatbot for a “list of countries” and it returned a list of countries that have a country code top level internet domain like .uk or .eu (though if they did, I’m surprised that they had the awareness to remove .su so they didn’t try to apply a tariff on the Soviet Union despite America being somehow completely unable to export ANYTHING to them for going on 35 years now). The other is that they just copy/pasted the CIA Factbook list of notable polities which includes several sub-state territories of various kinds. (Fun Fact: I had to do this precise kind of filtering while writing our Profit Extraction paper because the World Bank’s database I used also includes various substates, suprastate regions like “West Africa” and multiple nations that no longer exist but did exist when the Bank started tracking their data).

The omissions are interesting too. Russia and Belarus were omitted “because we already have sanctions on them” but Iran – which is also under US sanctions – was not. There’s a very telling thing going on when you look at the nations that Trump is willing to break the sharpie out and deviate from the formula for.

There are two most “fun” additions to the tariff list. The British Indian Ocean Territory which is essentially exclusively inhabited by a US military base (the people who used to live there before the UK and USA ethnically cleansed them call them the Chagos Islands). The other, being widely reported, is the Australian external territory of the Heard and McDonald Islands. They got a 10% tariff as well (remember, 10% is the floor rate for countries where the US is already “winning” on trade). Major exports from these islands are…nothing. There is no trade. There are no people there. It’s mostly just penguins. Penguins aren’t widely known for their genius at negotiating international trade deals, but still somehow they managed to achieve the same level of success against Trump as Sir Keir Starmer.

And this is the core point. The Trump Trade War of 2025 has no logic to it (see Robin’s briefing this week on how nations SHOULD be applying tariffs as a means of correcting for pollution and other “externalities” that capitalism fails to pay for), it’s going to spiral worse for the countries that fight back, worse still for American consumers, and only marginally better for the countries that lick the boot to try to pick off country-specific, sector-specific or even just personal exemptions – at the cost of their own surrendering their own sovereignty to the Great Orange One.

But don’t be fooled by any of Starmer’s claims that he has steered the UK through the choppy waters better than, say, the EU. The numbers are there and plain to see. The UK got 10% not because of “winning”, or “losing”, or diplomatic ability, but because the UK simply doesn’t matter to Trump.

But still. “Trust the process”, Starmer asked us to believe, while failing to negotiate any better than a penguin.

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The Last Stand of the Oil Barons

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“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  – R. Buckminster Fuller

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Station

The oil and gas sector advocacy group Offshore Energies UK has claimed that if it gets more political and financial support than the sector already gets then the UK could produce half of the 15 billion barrels of oil we’ll need before 2050 with the rest being imported from increasingly unstable and unreliable countries like the USA.

However, rather than feeding even more monetary and political capital into the insatiable maw of the companies that caused the climate emergency, it would be a far better idea would be to aggressively drive down that demand by investing instead in a Green New Deal that would reduce the heat we need in our homes, remove the need for that heat to be produced by oil and would retire fuel-hungry modes of transport like internal combustion cars in favour of active travel and electrified public transport.

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Where Next For Grangemouth?

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“Nobody wants to spend money to build a more resilient city because nobody owns the risk.” – Jeff Goodell

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The Scottish Government risks throwing good money after bad in its latest promise to take £25 million from the remaining ScotWind fund and use it to prop up Grangemouth.
This is in addition to the more than £100mn already earmarked between the Scottish and UK Governments amongst which is “Project Willow” – a plan that was launched to reduce the carbon footprint of the refinery and to find uses for it beyond fossil fuels. [Edit: Since writing this, the UK Government has also matched the Scottish Government’s £25mn pledge with an additional £200mn – but it’s for the same schemes so this article is for them now too]

That plan, however, was upended when owners Ineos decided to close down the plant because in this country we let billionaires decide the future of nationally strategic assets instead of our democratic governments.

I’ve written before about my position on a lot of this. I’m a full advocate for a Just Transition for workers who are facing losing their job as their workplace reaches its entirely foreseen and entirely necessary closure or reformation in light of the climate emergency. What I’m appalled about is politicians using that idea of a Just Transition as an excuse to do anything about that transition. As I wrote last week, “No ban without a plan” is an entirely justifiable slogan – except for the people who were supposed to come up with the plan.

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Scotland: We Have Rockets Too

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“Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.” – Francesca Lia Block

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Imagine the pitch. You’ve been instructed by Angus Robertson’s office to cut together a bunch of stock footage for a video showcasing Scotland and [don’t look at the fascism] the USA. Quite artistically, the images are juxtaposed to show the common interests between our two [ignore the ethnic cleansing] nations. For the scene to illustrate the line “we share beautiful places”, what images do you think would show Scotland and the US at their best [Hail King Musk and Viceroy Trump]?
The Scottish Government chose the two above.

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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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19036219

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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The Dragons Ate Your Lunch

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“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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