politics

John Swinney Is Acting Like a Climate Denier

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.”
But I don’t want your hope.
I don’t want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is.”
– Greta Thunberg

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There was a time when Scotland was proud of its climate credentials. The first national government in the world to declare a Climate Emergency, followed by many of its local councils. Setting ambitious, legally binding targets to reach Net Zero well ahead of the promises being made by peer countries. Even being the first nation in the world to officially admit that the Global North had a responsibility to repair and compensate Global South nations because of the damage we had and were causing to them.

I will grant you that Common Weal has been rightly critical of the actions that proceeded from these words. You should always watch what a politician does rather than what they say.

Scotland declared a Climate Emergency, then tried to avoid changing policies to match the severity of the problem – like someone who response to their home having a Roof Fire Emergency by turning off the gas stove then going back to bed.

The legally binding targets were legally bound but with no clear policy pathway to meeting them. The climate promises made, if added together, would not have created a Net Zero Scotland and we all knew that promises would be broken along the way so that the actual additive impact of actions would fall short by even further.

And while Scotland did put some cash into the fund for Global climate loss and damage, the amount was well short of the actual damage Scotland has caused. Scotland’s bill for our share of global climate emissions amount to something like £2.5 billion per year, every year until we reach Net Zero. Scotland promised a total of £100 million for the fund across just two pledges.

Still. Contrast those lofty promised followed by half-hearted actions with the current Government. This month, John Swinney has been campaigning hard on giving a massive tax bung to oil and gas companies. The same companies that have profited to the tune of trillions of pounds while setting the world on fire. The same companies that have actively lobbied to halt and prevent measures to stop them doing this. The same companies that even as they take more cash to help them make more profits are simultaneously shedding old assets in the same North Sea so that they don’t need to pay to decommission them.

It’s hard to show just how much of a U-turn this is for the Scottish Government but there is one thing that illustrates this.

Donald Trump – a man who vocally denies climate change and erroneously thinks that ‘windmills’ make people poorer and don’t exist in China, while actively waging illegal oil wars in the Middle East and Latin America – also believes that oil companies are making too much money. Right now, John Swinney is more extreme on oil subsidies than Donald Trump.

We can therefore safely assume – in the absence of actions to the contrary – that despite John Swinney serving in the Governments that made those previous commitments, he is himself is acting like a climate denier. He is looking at the Roof Fire Emergency and is actively turning all of the gas hobs to full burn before going back to bed.

I know that Trump isn’t claiming that oil companies are making too much money because he’s secretly a ‘nationalise all assets’ communist who has a strong moral conviction in public good. It’s because he wants the money for himself because if he isn’t personally benefiting from any ‘deal’ then he thinks he’s being taken advantage of and the last thing he wants to be is a ‘loser’.

“Our Common Home Plan remains the most comprehensive blueprint for a Scottish Green New Deal.”

Swinney doesn’t have this excuse though. He should know better. Actions speak far louder than words though and right now we’re seeing the actions of a man calling for oil companies to be able to make even more obscene profits at the expense of the planet at the same time that wildfires are raging through the Cairngorms and heatwaves have killed thousands of people in Britain this summer alone (never mind the thousands more across Europe and even more globally).

I know he still claims to cling to the policy that he’d only approve of new oil and gas extraction if it met certain “climate criteria” but he is yet to lay out what he thinks those criteria would be and whether he thinks any new extraction would pass it. What, precisely, does he think a “Net Zero” oil well would look like?

If I’m wrong and John Swinney is not a climate denier, if he does, in fact, still believe that we’re living in Climate Emergency and that emergency has only gotten worse since his government declared it, then I expect to see another set of actions. I expect him to endorse Monica Lennon’s proposed Ecocide Bill when it returns to Parliament and then to start aggressively prosecuting people who are committing ecocide. I expect him to align all public policy with what the science says Scotland must do to meet our obligations under the climate emergency.

Common Weal has already shown what he can do. Our Common Home Plan remains the most comprehensive blueprint for a Scottish Green New Deal. Following it through to its conclusion would lead us to a world where oil barons no longer have the power to lobby politicians for their own profit because that world simply won’t contain oil barons. This is, of course, why those oil barons continue to try to make sure politicians don’t take those actions.

Right now, John Swinney is taking the actions of a climate denier on behalf of those oil barons. If he wants his political legacy to be something other than that, he knows what he needs to do.

All trans­port in Scot­land should be pub­lic trans­port

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”- Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

As a policy-engineer this week’s coverage of the ins, outs, ups and downs of public transport has been a very enlightening read. I was very happy to be invited to help close out the session with some thoughts of my own, specifically around the topic of who should own our transport sector.

I think there are three ways we could deliver a service like transport. The least “public” is the competitive market model. Many of us have our own private car that we obtained having been given an overwhelming choice of multiple different cars to buy or lease (even if half of the models are all owned by the same few companies and the same few investment firms own shares of all of them so no-one is really “competing” with anyone).

We could consider running a bus service like this, where we arrive at the station and get a choice of several vehicles going our way with companies all jostling and competing on price or amenities, but that seems like a rather chaotic way to run a bus stop.

It’s an even worse way to run a train service which is why for many years we used a franchising model for that. Under franchising, a certain route, or area, or entire sector can be handed to a single operator to run as a monopoly for a certain amount of time.

This can work and it can be a fast substitute to proper infrastructure investment. But the downsides are pretty stark. Franchising hands a lot of power over to the service provider. It often doesn’t take long for them to start dictating terms to the government.

And given a limited time to maximise profits, it’s easy to cut corners to maximise profits. One only needs to compare the service provided by Abellio when it ran ScotRail with how they ran their domestic operations in the Netherlands. Strong regulation and strict use of break clauses (as was applied to ScotRail in 2022) are essential to keep a balance of accountability.

But this brings us to the third option: public ownership.

Different models of public ownership suit different types of transport. A national system probably suits trains and ferries as these tend to be highly capital intensive, long distance, fixed routes and, especially in the case of the ferries, the lifeline service is often more important than running at a profit. As we recently co-published with Living Rent and Get Glasgow Moving, there is a good case for regionally controlled public transport such as a Strathclyde Bus Company. And then there are city-run taxis and community bus services like the one the village next to mine runs.

Once you’ve made the case for public ownership of trains, ferries and taxis it becomes hard to not go further. If you own a private car, it almost certainly spends almost all of its time parked somewhere not being used. A community-owned car hire service could serve most people, most of the time and would free up vast areas of our landscape currently given over to car parks and reducing the massive expenditure we give over to leasing, buying and maintaining those cars (never mind the amount skimmed off in interest for hire/purchase agreements, insurance and other costs). These community cars can be paid for as pay-as-you-go, via a member subscription or even as a true free-to-use community service paid via local taxes.

And the same goes for bicycles too. Not just the urban rental bikes that are expanding through Scotland, but for all communities in Scotland. I’m trying to design a modular system whereby any community can plug in their demographics and the system would tell them they need a pod containing X vans, Y cars (including accessible vehicles), and Z bikes (including cargo bikes) and would then cost it up for them. The vehicles could then be provided by a national transport agency, with funding from the Scottish National Investment Bank to support it until it becomes self-sustaining.

I think part of the problem is that we too often have the motivation for better public transport backwards. We look at current demand and then try to match it as best we can. If the Scottish Government wants to hold to its stated principle of encouraging active travel as the primary mode of transport, followed by public mass transit, with private cars only being a last resort, then it has to first build the transport network required to make that world the easiest and cheapest option. If they build it, we will come.

This could be achieved with private ownership of the bike, bus, train and car networks but doing it that way means accepting that vast amounts of the investment money and even more of the money in our pockets will leave Scotland as private profits for the often foreign owned companies involved. To avoid that, to make it easier for the public investments to reach the greatest public good and, above all, to ensure that the returns on those investments stay in Scotland and can be recycled into expanding and strengthening our transport sector, the future of transport – at all levels – should be public transport.

Why Andy Burnham won’t reform Council Tax either

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are — a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.” – Ha-Joon Chang

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Something interesting almost happened down south that would have had major ramifications if it had. It didn’t, and thus we probably now go back to politics as usual, but the reason we couldn’t see some positive change is worth exploring.

A group of MPs in Northern England tried to lobby new Prime Minister Andy Burnham on a plan to reform Council Tax in England. They proposed replacing it (and Stamp Duty) either with some rather undefined Land Value Tax or with a more rigorously defined Property Tax based on the present value of a home (unlike Council Tax which is a banded tax that is based on what your home might have been worth in the early 1990s). The Property Tax proposal is a bit more defined, setting the tax at a single national rate of 0.48% of a house’s present market value.

This is very similar to our own Property Tax proposal which set an illustrative national rate of 0.63% as that would have been the rate in 2020 (and in 2025 when we recalculated it) that would raise the same amount of revenue across Scotland as does the present Council Tax. Of course, we are very clear that local councils should control their own local taxes and that includes setting the rates as well as defining subsidies (such as for single-occupancy or low income) and surcharges (e.g. for multiple home ownership).

I don’t know if the Northern MP proposal aims for revenue neutrality. I suspect that it is actually a bit too low for that, particularly as they also want to fold Stamp Duty (the English equivalent of our Land and Buildings Transaction Tax) into it. A couple of things swing towards that lower number though. The first is that houses in England are generally more expensive than in Scotland. The second is that Council Tax in the richest parts of England is particularly low. I mention this in my article in In Common this week but there’s a townhouse in Mayfair, London on the market for just shy of £50 million. It’s a Band H property but will pay just £2,100 per year in Council Tax. This is just over twice what I pay in my Band A house in South Lanarkshire. Council Tax is just about the most unfair tax in Britain and the one most desperately in need of reform.

This also shows why it is so difficult to reform. Not because it’s technically challenging (my In Common article lays out how we’d go about revaluing houses using data we already have) nor because people are against it (the vast majority of people in Scotland want to see it reformed) but because of the specific people who don’t want reform because it would negatively affect them personally.

Our Property Tax proposal, if set at a national revenue neutral rate, would result in a tax cut for every house worth approximately £400,000 or less. This covers 90% of homes in Scotland. There are going to be examples of even more expensive homes that will pay less or break even under our scheme. A Band H house in Edinburgh worth £632,000 would break about even after the tax change (that kind of money would almost get you a three bed flat just north of The Meadows if you’re interested – though you could also get a substantially cheaper house elsewhere and donate the balance to Common Weal).

Houses more expensive than this have been underpaying their property taxes for over 30 years and everyone under this line have been subsidising them.

“The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.”

If we implemented the Common Weal Property Tax then my own house would see its tax due drop by about half. And this is before we even think about things like progressive taxation on more expensive properties with surcharges like “mansion taxes”. That £50 million house in Mayfair shouldn’t be paying £1,800 per year. Under the Northern MPs’ scheme, it would owe about £240,000 per year in Property Tax. Under the Common Weal plan, it would owe closer to £300,000 per year. Someone who puts £50 million in the bank could expect close to £2.5 million per year in interest. If they’re buying property as an investment rather than a “nice place to live” then they must be expecting to earn more than this otherwise a passive bank account would be much less hassle. In short, I’m saying that they can afford to pay a fair Property Tax.

But they won’t want to. And this is the reason that neither the SNP in Scotland nor Andy Burnham in England will reform Council Tax unless they are dragged kicking and screaming to the table to do it.

The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.

What the very, very top have is lobbying power. They can afford to pay think-tanks (though, for obvious reasons, not us) to tell everyone why it would be a bad idea to tax them fairly. They can bankroll political campaigns. They can buy media outlets to tell us what we should think about their situation and how terrible it would be if they were taxed like the rest of us.

What the people just below them but above 90% of the rest of us have is voting power. They are the ones who consume those media outlets and use it to inform their vote. This Professional Class tends to consider themselves to be about average in our society rather than being amongst the bottom edge of the elite.

So what we get is a democracy where the 1% tells the 9% that they will be hard done by if their wealth taxes increase even a smidge and so the 90% must continue to subsidise them.

This isn’t just a UK problem, it happens in Scotland too. The Scottish Government currently has a “mansion tax” consultation out there that folk should respond to. For a £1m house, the proposed rate is actually almost exactly the equivalent of the 0.48% proposed by the Northern MPs but it only goes down from there. A £2m house would pay only 0.38% and that £50 million Mayfair Townhouse, if it was in Edinburgh, would pay an effective rate of just 0.015% (the extra zero is not a typo). Meanwhile, my wee house – which is amongst the cheapest 10%-15% of houses in Scotland – pays an effective Property Tax rate of 1.3% (again, not a typo). My property tax would be, under the Scottish Government’s “mansion tax” proposal, eighty-six times higher per pound of total value than someone who could afford to buy what would be the most expensive house in Scotland.

So no, I’m nor surprised that Burnham bottled the chance to fix the mess that Council Tax is just as I’m not surprised that the Swinney continues to do so. This isn’t an excuse for them to change tack though. Or to admit failure and tell us who’ll do it for them instead.

Defining the Right to Grow Old

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.” – Jules Renard

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

I’ve written before about one of the successes of the Scottish Parliament in recent years to do with its attitude both towards human rights and towards international treaties.

On the latter, Scotland’s lack of independence means that our country can only join international treaties as part of the UK and the Scottish Government has no direct say on whether or not we can do so. For example, Scotland cannot formally sign the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child but we can do something else which can signal our support of it.

We can simply pass legislation that acts “as if” we were members of the convention anyway. The CRC isn’t the best example of this in that the UK has been a member of it since the early 1990s but on the other hand, the UK is a “dualist” country which believes that international laws do not apply until and unless the UK passes an appropriate domestic law to bring it into effect (this allows the UK to maintain the stance that its Parliament is superior to international law rather than subordinate to it as is the case with “monist” countries like Germany).

But this approach doesn’t always mean that the UK adopts those conventions as thoroughly as it could, which is why the CRC does give a good example of Scotland deciding to go further in 2024 by incorporating the Convention into domestic law even where the UK’s laws in Scotland didn’t not yet apply.

There was a limit to this. A successful Supreme Court challenge by the UK Government saw the Scottish law modified to make it clear that it didn’t apply to the UK Government’s actions in Scotland (again, allowing the UK to maintain the stance that its Parliament was superior over the Scottish one). This particularly meant that the UK Government could potentially legally treat unaccompanied children claiming asylum in Scotland in ways that would be illegal if the Scottish Government did it. This is a flaw that can only be corrected through independence.

Still, Scotland has successfully pushed forward in protecting the rights of children in Scotland and this is a good thing. There is an opportunity coming up to potentially do it again but this time with respect to the rights of older people. The UN has started the process that may eventually lead to a Convention on the Rights of Older People that would aim to prevent ageism and protect older people in areas where they are currently discriminated against such as the workplace, polices affecting the rights of people in care homes, policies that protect or fail to protect people due to climate change and even policies that discriminate arbitrarily based on age (such as state pension provisions or blocking older people from serving on juries) which may not be appropriate as life expectancies increase or may be better served with individual health and capability assessments.

Many of these areas are subjects that I and Bill Johnston covered in our book All of Our Futures so it is welcome to see parallel developments reach the United Nations in a way that may one day become law.

The Scottish Government should pay attention to this move and monitor it to see where they can legislate domestically to bring Scottish law up to its standards if and where we currently fall short. As with the rights of the child, there are limits to what we can do pre-independence over reserved issues like Pensions though Scottish devolved benefits may be usefully employed if need be and the Government should push harder for the power to introduce a Scottish Universal Basic Income that would allow people to retire earlier if their health requires it while not forcing them to just because they hit a certain age. In some respects we may already go further than this potential treaty might in that we already have the UK Equalities Act which prevents discrimination based on age.

Therein, though, lies the fundamental issue with rights-based legislation.Rights are only as powerful as the rights-holder’s ability to have them upheld. If someone breaches your rights, you need to know that your right has been broken and you need to have the ability to, for example, take the person responsible for upholding your right to court to challenge the failure and seek redress, and those responsible for protecting your rights need to have the resources to be able to do so. This can be difficult or impossible which is why discrimination based on age still takes place in the workplace and why children are still homeless in Scotland despite every Local Authority being legally bound to eliminate child homelessness.

The Scottish Government can’t sign this potential new treaty on the rights of older people but they could get involved with those shaping it to present best practice as applied in Scotland and to show where we ourselves could go further too. If we still can’t sign it by the time it comes into force, then we can do as we did for children and bring our laws up to its standards where they fall short.

Acting “as if” we are part of the international community when it comes to shaping and protecting human rights will be an important step towards us gaining acceptance by that community when we are finally ready to join it formally. Who knows, we might even be able to bring the UK along with us too.

How to make the sun shine at night

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“O, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.” – Roman Payne

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.

The problem with renewable energy, we’ve been told for decades, is that it doesn’t work on the schedules of our choosing. Turbines don’t turn when there’s no wind. The sun doesn’t shine at night. And therefore we need fossil fuels and nuclear power plants. Only they are reliable enough to power our society 24 hours a day.

And so, even though we bake in the hottest year of our lives, again, and look forward to every year of the rest of our lives being even hotter. Even though thousands in Britain and thousands more across Europe will not now ever live to see a hotter year – the magnitude of death going almost unnoticed by the media in a way that it would not had it been an act of terrorism. Even as the same people who caused those deaths lobby our governments to let them cause more and make money doing so. Even as all that happens, we’re still told that renewables could never replace fossil fuels because the sun doesn’t shine at night.

What if it did though?

I’m not talking about the Techbro supervillain idea being trailed by an American company to put mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight. That won’t work, will only burn billions of dollars that could have been spent more sensibly and even if the mirrors launch they will cause untold damage to the environment, to scientific equipment like telescopes and will further wreck our shared Commons that is our view into space.

A much more down-to-Earth solution is, of course, batteries. Battery technology has come on faster than anyone – including renewable energy optimists – could have predicted. Twelve years ago, while Scotland was having its independence referendum, a grid-scale battery cost around $300 per kWh (a kilowatt.hour is a unit of stored energy – a 1kWh battery could run a 1kW electric heater continuously for one hour).

By 2019 when we published our Common Home Plan, the price had more than halved and was closing in on $100/kWh which was considered a major milestone in technological achievement (not for any real physical reason – humans just like round numbers). Now, batteries cost closer to $60/kWh and we’re starting to approach a real milestone. One that will really change the game in terms of how we use these things.

“Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to”

That milestone is $20/kWh. At $20, these batteries cross a threshold. Connected to enough solar panels to charge them (solar panels have also dropped in price by an astounding degree and now generate human-usable energy cheaper than any technology ever invented by humans going right back to when we first harnessed fire), a $20 battery is capable to delivering energy cheaper than coal, cheaper than nuclear and cheaper than gas.

With just solar panels and batteries, the economic case for burning fossil fuels at night disappears. The fact that batteries can ramp up their delivery very quickly also means that they can take over the job currently done by “peaker” gas turbines that kick in when there is sudden high demand for short periods of time. These peaker plants are the most expensive form of generation on the grid and so replacing them with cheap batteries will have a substantial impact on our energy bills as well as our environmental emissions.

Chinese company BYD has announced that it aims to be the ones to crack that threshold (with their rivals CATL trying to do similar). They are launching a $40/kWh battery next year with further improvements in the months after. Unlike the lithium batteries which have dominated the sector until now, the new battery will be based on sodium.

Sodium is safer to deploy (sodium fires aren’t great, but they’re not as runaway explosive as lithium fires are), easier to extract (you can get it from the salt in seawater) and is a lot cheaper and overall more plentiful than lithium. The major downside is that a sodium battery of a certain size will never store as much energy as the same size of lithium battery. This is a problem for electric vehicles (though sodium battery cars designed to make short hops within towns are coming online too) but less so for grid-scale batteries where space is less of a factor.

Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to. Scotland doesn’t have substantial lithium deposits but we have plenty of salt in our seas!

Of course, the substantial delays in the kind of investment that Scotland should have been doing to make that happen mean that China has stolen a march on us as they have in so much else of the energy sector. It’s not too late for Scotland. As I said in a recent column (“Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do.”, The National, 26th February 2026), even if we’re forced to buy Chinese tech to push forward our green transition as urgently as we need to right now, we should also recognise that that tech has a finite lifespan of a few decades and so we should be investing now so that the tech we replace it with is manufactured domestically.

Environmentalists have predicted this moment for decades – decades that were stretched out longer because the oil barons convinced politicians to line their pockets a little longer – but economics now mean that it’s finally here. The transition is unstoppable. Renewables are the future we need. Scotland should work to be on the right side of that future rather than being left behind with the past.

On a reality-based security strategy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There is an observation amongst peace-campaigners that politicians claim that there is never enough money to spend on social welfare but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war.

That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way. Now we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so the social welfare has to go to pay for it. The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.

This will have multiple impacts on public spending. The first is the impact of the direct cuts, as mentioned. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending – investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish budget but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn out of the transport budget and putting it into the military means an effective cut of £80mn to the Scottish budget. The third is that as a “job creation tool”, the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but spending £1bn on just about anything else – particularly things like energy infrastructure – would create even more jobs. It is likely that this defence plan will be net-negative for job growth. And that’s before we consider the final point – money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on. War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.

And this is all assuming that this is what the UK actually needs or should be doing right now. The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson rather ironically saying in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it.”

But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like to have, we need a reality-based security strategy.

The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem and it is now too late to prevent but not too late to limit or to adapt to. But doing so will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time. It’s not just the climate itself, but Trump’s illegal war with Iran and Putin’s with Ukraine has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we now have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted in the way those wars did to our fuel supplies. Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.

Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the ones recently spotted outside Holyrood last week. These are all policing matters rather than military though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.

The same goes for non-climate environmental threats. If we wanted a reality-based security strategy to consider the number of British people killed each year then we’d be waging war against pollution. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3,000 lives per year (I haven’t been able to find comparable data for Glasgow or Edinburgh’s LEZ impacts yet). If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3,000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. If a politician tried to win an election on the promise of murdering 3,000 people, I doubt they’d win a vote. And yet, there are politicians and political parties still claiming to want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.

Next on the threat scale is probably something like Hybrid War – unconventional attacks on our infrastructure via things like hacking attempts and drone warfare. The UK has, in fact, experienced attacks like this from state actors – we now know that Russia was likely behind the shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover last year. We also know that Trump’s USA has been actively spying on European Governments, digitally sanctioning human rights lawyers, and is quite capable of ordering Microsoft to lock down Scotland’s ability to pass legislation should he choose to. The threat from this kind of hybrid war isn’t therefore coming only from our “enemies” and cannot be defended against by building more bombs to aim at them. A reality-based security strategy would be following the EU’s lead and developing a digital sovereignty strategy to remove the threat of such hacks from the table. Common Weal are actively working on what a Scottish digital strategy could look like.

“If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.”

On the far side of the threat spectrum in terms of probability is actual territorial invasion which is vanishingly low for somewhere like Britain. The country being held up as a threat in this regard, Russia, has already shown the limits of its capabilities in Ukraine. It may well still be a threat on the borders of NATO, but that’s a very different prospect to the idea of seeing T-90 tank in Tottenham. Once again, when considering territorial invasion, we cannot ignore our supposed “ally” the USA, which is still threatening to annex Greenland. However, the thought does bring up the thing that has been absolutely missing from discourse on defence spending till now – time.

The new Starmer plan has a long time horizon. It will be years before the actual money starts to ramp up weapons production and development and decades before the results of that spending results in deployable equipment (this is particularly the case with things like nuclear weapons and new submarines to launch them). If we take as given that Putin’s Russia is the massive overbearing threat that the establishment would have us fear, then we have to remember that Putin himself is mortal and already past UK state retirement age. He will quite likely be dead or otherwise no longer in power before any of Starmer’s new weapons can be aimed at him. Who will replace him? What can the UK and Europe do now to normalise relations with his successor so that post-Putin Russia is not a threat? Would doing that be cheaper than us threatening to nuke Moscow, murdering 5 million civilians in the process? Might it work better?

Pacifists like myself are never listened to in times of peace. In times of war, we are openly scorned as not having the solutions to the conflict that could have been avoided had we been listened to in times of peace. Warmongers need war and the threat of war to justify their own existence and to bloat their already unjustifiable budgets and they must be called out on this fact. If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead. If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers would prefer we were afraid of instead.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

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Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.

The Climate Emergency is Uninsurable

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“What happened to fun?”
“Our insurance doesn’t cover it!”
– Charles M. Schulz

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

In an uncertain and unpredictable world, insurance is mostly a good thing (I’ll write an article sometime about when it’s not – it’ll mostly be about the US healthcare system). Climate change is proving to be a challenge for it, though – one that might actually be the thing that forces global adaptation and policy change when other things like activist campaigning or actual scientific data have not.

Consider your house. You live on a flood plain, which means that your house is in a zone covered by a “100 year flood”, meaning that you could expect a flood severe enough to damage your house once every century. Such a flood would cause £100,000 worth of damage. You could fairly expect the insurance value of your house to be about £1,000 per year. An insurance company that charged less than that would eventually find itself paying out more than it brought in.

There’s a problem with the assumption that your house will only get flooded once per century. The climate is shifting rapidly. I’m writing this piece on the day that the UK once again breaks high temperature records. I also read a piece this week about the danger of romanticising the 1976 UK summer heatwave, while reflecting that the UK hasn’t seen average annual temperatures as low as that of the average temperature in that heatwave year since 2012 – the dangerously extraordinary has become dangerously normalised. (1976 was before my time. The first heatwave I have strong memories of is the 1998 one. It’s unlikely I’ll live to see a world as relatively cold as that year was either.

But this (overly) simple calculation doesn’t tell the whole story. If you made an insurance claim after your house was damaged, you’d rarely expect to get the full £100,000 paid out to you. Insurance policies often have an ‘excess’, an amount you have to pay yourself before damage in excess of that amount is paid by the company (in the US, they call it a ‘deductable’, an amount the company deducts from their payment to you).

This linguistic choice tells us a lot about whether the sector is focused on the company first or on the person making the claim. Further, there are often reasons that a company would not pay out. For instance, many people whose flights were cancelled or disrupted due to Trump’s attack on Iran found that their insurance didn’t cover losses due to acts of war. We’re also assuming that your policy would actually cover £100,000 worth of damage – many people are ‘underinsured’ for the true cost of their losses, particularly if they haven’t updated their policies recently to account for inflation and increases in building costs.

Looking to the future and accelerating climate damage, if a ‘100-year flood’ starts happening every 50 years, your insurance costs would have to double. If you start getting flooded out every decade, you’d probably be cheaper moving elsewhere – but good luck finding someone who’ll buy your house from you. You can run the same kind of calculation about your risk due to sea level rise, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, storm damage, and every other impact being made worse by the climate emergency.

And that’s if the insurance companies get their estimates right in the first place. If they cost your insurance based on a 100 year flood in a world of 10 year floods, they will very quickly go bankrupt. This is the problem facing global insurance companies, as per a new report from Moody’s.

Between excesses, exclusions, people not buying insurance, and the trouble with estimating insurance values, they estimate that the changing climate could result in $41.4 trillion per year worth of uninsured climate damage globally by 2040. They’ve even created a global map of where and how those losses may manifest. For instance, the rising frequency and intensity of Californian wildfires mean that it’s increasingly difficult now to cover fire damage – 30 per cent of losses are likely to be uninsured.

“It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.”

By this measure, the UK comes off actually quite lightly. The near ubiquity of home and property insurance (usually a basic requirement if one has a mortgage) means that basic cover is quite broad. But still, there is a rising threat of things like flood and storm damage, which means that Moody’s estimates that 25% of the cost of damage and loss from either would be uninsured by 2040.

Part of the problem is that climate damage has been creeping up on us quite slowly, and insurance companies have tended to be reactive rather than proactive – they increase rates after they see their claims start to rise, rather than modelling ahead of time what they could become.

The costs of climate losses are becoming significant, though. They almost certainly outpace the annual profits of the oil companies that have produced the climate damage – yes, this means that the price of oil (high as it is) would be selling at a loss if the oil companies had to pay to clean up their own mess. Instead, we all have to pay even more because they don’t.

Climate activists have been campaigning to try to prevent the climate emergency for decades. Scientists have known it would happen for well over a century. Oil lobbyists have spent lavishly on our politicians to ensure even greater profits can be reaped without having to pay for the consequences. And wars have and are still being fought to keep the pipes flowing.

It didn’t have to be that way, but where scientists and activists could be ignored, it might well be that the insurance agents are the ones that can’t be. It might well be that the threat of losing money proves to be the thing that pulls over those who weren’t convinced by inconvenient things like actual data.

The problem is that this is a reactive force. Only once people see the damage happening will they respond. But the climate effects are so gradual that even if we collectively stopped emitting CO2 globally today, the climate will continue to get worse for perhaps decades still before things begin to repair.

This isn’t a reason not to do that. Every tonne of pollution makes the problem worse. Every day of delay makes the problem worse. Every politician calling for more oil extraction despite all of the evidence to the contrary makes their own contribution to global ecocide worse. But also, every tonne of pollution avoided by switching to renewables or reducing unnecessary demand makes the problem less worse by the same degree.

The solution is in front of us. We know how to fix the climate emergency. It won’t require magic technology, mass poverty, or a collapse in wellbeing – quite the opposite. The solution is a world that, once we live in it, we’ll wonder why we didn’t demand it sooner.

Who Watches the Watchdogs?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we’ll never know.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Almost buried under other political scandals afflicting the Scottish Government and the SNP right now was the news that the Government was found in contempt of court in a case involving the Scottish Information Commission.

The details of the case aren’t particularly relevant to this article though they are part of one of those other scandals. It involved an FOI request to release the legal advice given to the Scottish Government relating to an ethics inquiry into Nicola Sturgeon after an accusation that she breached rules during the investigation into Alex Salmond. While Sturgeon was cleared of wrongdoing following that investigation, a Freedom of Information request to reveal the advice was upheld as valid and the Government was ordered in November 2025 to release the files by January 15th 2026.

The Government failed to do so and the Information Commissioner began legal proceedings over the matter while extending a further deadline of January 22nd. The Government did release the files more than a month after the extended deadline but this month the court found that the delay was deliberate (rather than merely a symptom of the size and complexity of the files as the Government claimed) and disregarding both the Commissioner and the courts amounted to contempt.

And so the Scottish Government now has a criminal record for contempt of court. Not that it particular matters in any real sense as the punishment levied was merely an admonishment (the lightest sentence in Scots Law and really just a formal and legal version of a stern talking to) and an order to pay the Information Commission’s legal costs (given that the Commission is entirely funded by the Scottish Government this just means the same public money going to lawyers, just via a different accounting line).

This is the first time that any Scottish Government has been found in contempt like this and it’s certainly the most serious breach of information regulations that I can find but it’s hardly the first. Both the current Information Commissioner David Hamilton and his immediate predecessor Daren Fitzhenry have been scathing about the Government’s approach to Freedom of Information.

It’s not even the first time John Swinney has transgressed the lines – in 2018, Fitzhenry published an “intervention report” warning about Ministers, including Swinney, deliberately obstructing the FOI process by treating requests from journalists in a different manner from those submitted by the general public, resulting in more rejections and delays to responses if a journalist was identified as making the request. By 2023 as Fitzhenry was passing over to his successor, the final progress report into the Government’s reforms to this behaviour were noted as inadequate with the report saying:

“The Commissioner anticipated that this report would announce the successful conclusion of this intervention, but, unfortunately, the Scottish Government’s improvement activity has not reached a point where this work can be appropriately concluded.”

I have nothing but admiration for Hamilton and Fitzhenry. It’s a difficult job holding Government to account. It’s harder still within the context of the “Commissioner Landscape” that Scotland is in. Previous Governments have been farming out a lot of roles to Commissioners over the years and the varying statuses of each of them has made things extremely messy.

Some positions, like the Information Commissioner, have extremely well defined roles and significant powers – as evidenced by the contempt verdict – but others appear to be little more than purely advisory and have little recourse when the Government decides to ignore the advice.

=Others still chafe under the pressure of making sure that the advice they give to Government is the advice that they already want to hear (in 2023, the then Children’s Commissioner Bruce Adamson only gave a furious rebuke towards the failings of Nicola Sturgeon’s Government to properly embed human rights legislation a week before he left the office, though it’s noteworthy that his successor Nicola Killean is publicly warning this week of the Swinney Government’s failure to ensure that homeless children are placed in safe temporary accommodation).

There was also an identified risk of Commissioners being set up in response to political events such as the downgrading or removal of Ministerial responsibilities – hence the calls for roles such as a Commissioner for Older People, which we supported on the merits of the case for the role even though it added to the broader landscape problem.

In 2024, Common Weal responded to a Scottish Government consultation on reforming this landscape essentially by calling for a standardisation of the role of Commissioners and to make it far more clear who they report to within the Scottish governance structure. Commissioners shouldn’t be seen as merely advisors to Ministers or as a second-best alternative to them but should be seen as the right arm of Parliament (not Government) in holding Government to account.

This principle is, of course, complicated by the realities of politics. For a start, while it is indeed Parliament (not Government) who approves of appointments to the top jobs in a Commission (technically they are appointed by the King, on the nomination by Parliament but with the understanding that the King could appoint anyone they like but promise not to, because monarchies remain a ridiculous way to run a country), it is Government who decides the budget for the Commission. And herein lies the risk in a time where Governments keep being told what to do by people they control the purse strings of.

A few years ago, Audit Scotland started producing more and more critical reports of Government spending only to find that their budget was slashed in 2022. It’s not hard to see how a Government that is constantly being reminded that its projects are late and over budget might prefer for those reports to go away and if the problem can’t be solved, they could simply defund the messenger.

There’s no evidence of this happening at the Information Commission at the moment – their latest accounts show an increase in their operations over the previous year – though it’s worth noting that the Commissioner has already warned that the time spent forcing the Government to comply with the law is eating too much of their resources. I worry that between this new contempt judgement and a stated objective of the current Government to cut the public sector it might be that this office is one that is ordered to accept its (not so) “fair share” of those cuts.

This would obviously be deleterious for both Parliament, the public and our very democracy. Voters cannot hold Government to account if we can’t see what they are doing and so Freedom of Information is, in a very real sense, the foundation stone of our democracy.

All parties in Parliament have a vested interest in ensuring that all Governments are maximally transparent (they can’t hold the Government to account if they can’t see what’s happening either) but I’m going to single out just one. Fresh from their victory (tinged by party tribalism as it was) in securing an independent inquiry of political party finances, I’m going to lay the job of protecting the Information Commission at the door of the Scottish Greens in particular. It’s well within their remit of party policy but more than that, as a party with a history of supporting Government budgets I would say that failing to protect the functions of vital watchdogs from potential cuts would mean complicity in those cuts.

Even this is only a temporary patch on the problem though. Scotland would only be one hostile majority government away from being able push through cuts even despite a united opposition. This is why Common Weal advocates for a Citizens’ Assembly to oversee our elected chamber and we suggest that Commissions and Commissioners should be tasked with submitting their desired budgets to the Assembly to be approved before they are passed to Government to include in the national budget. This would apply a level of safeguarding and scrutiny to the whole process to make sure both that demands are not excessive and that any changes in funding from the Government are driven by need and not by political advantage.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the need for transparent government. It won’t be the last. The moment we stop being able to see what Government is doing is the moment they stop caring about being seen when doing things. This goes for when the regulations aren’t good enough. This goes for when the regulations aren’t followed and no-one holds them to account. We’re lucky that this time both worked. We need to be lucky every time though. A Government that decides it wants to pull down the curtain of secrecy only needs to be lucky once.

Workers aren’t lazy; they’re being left behind

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. – Bertrand Russell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

You will probably know the story right now. That the way to get the UK’s economy growing is to get more people working. And the reason that they’re not working is because a bunch of young people are lazy, feckless and that people are faking mental illness to avoid work and sponge off the benefits system. Claims that the benefit bill now exceeds income tax revenue are flowing around right-wing media outlets to try to delegitimise the entire social security system.

The problem with the story is that much of it is flat out false and most of the rest is misleading to the point of meaninglessness.

To take that last claim head-on, Full Fact did a thorough debunking of it. The total UK social security ‘bill’ has been higher than income tax revenue for quite some time now, but even that point is utterly irrelevant. Income tax is not the only tax paid as a result of wages, National Insurance is too. So even if the benefit bill was only paid for out of direct taxation on worker wages, the claim would be false. But even that idea is itself wrong.

Direct income taxes aren’t hypothecated to pay for social security (not even National Insurance which only sits in a separate pot for historical reasons – all UK public spending comes out of the general Consolidated Fund). Saying that benefits are unsustainable because they cost the country more than it receives in income tax is precisely as illogical as saying that the UK’s military budget is unsustainable because it costs more than revenue from landfill taxes. National budgeting simply does not work like that (I’ll go into the MMT model of how national public budgeting for a currency-sovereign nation actually works another time).

The argument itself begs an important question. If the claim was true – what would its right-wing promoters want to do about it? ‘Cut benefits’, sure, but which ones? The state pension? Anything they personally claim? What kind of world do they think they would create if they ‘won’?

A similar story emerges when looking at young workers. A lot of newspaper lines have been written about unemployed people and feckless ‘NEETs’ who are neither working nor seeking work. To fix the economy, we’re told, those people need to be starved into working via benefits cuts.

Never mind that it won’t work (plenty of data shows that a Universal Basic Income – giving poor unemployed people more money, not less, is the key to improving life chances by allowing people to work under less duress or to improve their prospects through education and training rather than taking the only job that lets them eat tonight).

A large number of people who are ‘NEET’ are people who no reasonable person thinks should be told to drop what they’re doing and go work. The vast majority (in order of size of group) have a long term illness, are students, care for someone, or are retired while younger than state pension age.

What we’re actually seeing among vulnerable workers is a ladder being pulled away from them. There are currently approximately 700,000 job vacancies across the UK. There are approximately 1.8 million people currently unemployed (plus another million who are NEET). This means that there are about 2.5 people actively looking for work for every posted vacancy. This number rises to four people per job if you force the NEETs out to work regardless of their circumstances.

Those two numbers don’t equally divide into each other either. Employment isn’t fungible. A newly redundant senior civil servant isn’t going to take an entry level cafe job if they can help it. A newly graduated student isn’t going to walk into the vacancy left behind by the civil servant. Neither are going to think a job in Kent is going to be worth much to them if they both live in Inverness and can’t or don’t want to move. At some point this kind of ‘structural unemployment’ starts to matter more than the ‘frictional unemployment’ that happens when, for example, the laser engineer I used to be moves from one laser company to another.

“Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life.”

This means that it’s simply not a matter of cutting benefits till people squeak and go get a job if the job doesn’t exist for them to get.

And it’s about to get worse, especially for young workers. The latest figures show that not only are posted job vacancies not there, the number of jobs in the economy may be shrinking – around 100,000 jobs were lost in April this year, mostly in sectors like retail and food services. This paints a picture of households starting to cut back on eating out or even on how much they are buying as an economic system rocked by global instability starts to bite.

It’s not just the poor who need more money, it’s everyone else too – at least insofar as the current economic structure is concerned. If politicians want a growing economy based on consumerism, then they are going to need more consumers (immigration rates are falling again and the number of births and deaths in the UK is already nearly net-zero…) and those consumers are going to need more money to spend on consumption. This model of economics simply is not working and is about to come right off the rails even before the impacts of the Iran war and the rise of AI really start feeding through.

Common Weal will soon be publishing a new report looking in detail at the state of income and inequality in Scotland and the results are shocking but one of the most shocking results is the extent to which households fall below not the official poverty line but the line of a ‘minimum decent standard of living’. Even relatively well off households are struggling to raise kids to a decent standard. Beyond this paper we’re going to have to look at how we can pull even those households up not just through better jobs and more income but by changing the way the economy works.

If you can’t afford to buy books, it shouldn’t matter because we have more libraries. Your house should be a decent home at a decent price, not a leaking mould trap that your landlord is profiting from. And the basic infrastructure of your life, like energy, should be there to support you, not pad the profits of the shareholders of the equity funds that own your energy supplier.

Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life. What we actually bought was hard work without the reward while still being blamed for not working hard enough by those who got the reward without even having to do the work.

This says that the entire game is rigged against us. Perhaps it’s time to play a different game.