politics

How to Launch a Scottish Wealth Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” – Eugene V. Debs

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

person holding fan of us dollar bill

(Image Source: Unsplash)

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. This used to be the core credo of parties of the Left – particularly the Labour Party in Britain – but it appears to have been eroded to the point of meaninglessness. Wealth inequality is increasing at an unimaginable rate and is currently substantially higher than income inequality. The rich are taking from all of us far more than they need and are giving back far less than what they are able to. This is a self-reinforcing problem such as where people who were able to buy houses when they were cheap (perhaps during Thatcher’s Right to Buy demolition of the social housing sector) became able to rent them out at ever increasing rates to people who can’t now afford to save the deposit to buy a house because house prices are rising faster than they can save due to the amount they have to spend on rent. Even the Office of Budget Responsibility is now warning (as I did several years ago in my book All of Our Futures) of the fiscal risks looming due to the number of people still privately renting when they retire and who will simultaneously be unable to afford to keep paying those rents and won’t have any capital saved in their house to subsidise their inadequate state pensions.

It’s not for no reason that the British public are increasingly demanding that the UK Government brings in a wealth tax to rebalance our increasingly unstable economy. I will say that there are good reasons for the UK to not bring in “a wealth tax” – by which I mean a single annual payment calculated as a certain percentage of the value of all of the assets and possessions that you own. Prof. Richard Murphy has articulated many of them well. It’s hard to value those possessions. Easy to hide them. And there are other taxes that the UK could use – such as reforms to taxes on stocks, shares, pensions and capital gains – that would achieve much of the same result. Not that the UK Government is going to do any of that either unless the pressure escalates to the point that the impossible becomes inevitable.

Let’s say, however, that the Scottish Government wants to take the first step. Could we do it here instead of waiting for the UK?

The patterns of wealth ownership in Scotland are substantially different than in the UK (particularly in London and the South East). We don’t have quite as many financial billionaires floating about the place. We don’t have as much wealth in stocks and shares – mostly because we don’t have a stock exchange in Scotland any more. Our generally lower rates of pay mean comparatively lower rates of wealth stored in pensions. There are, however, two sectors in Scotland where wealth is substantially stored and which could be taxed using devolved tax powers – Land and buildings.

Scotland already has its Land and Buildings Transaction Tax but despite the Scottish Greens seeking to apply what they called a “mansion tax” to it this would remain merely a surcharge on the transfer of assets, not a wealth tax applied to the holding of them. If you never bought another mansion, you’d never pay the mansion tax.

Council Tax is the most outdated and badly broken tax Scotland still insists on inflicting on the poor. The Scottish Government has stated that they’re not even going to think about reforming it until the end of this decade. This is completely unacceptable, especially as the solution is obvious. We need to scrap Council Tax and replace it with a tax based on a percentage of the present market value of the property. Common Weal argued that a rate of 0.63% would have been revenue neutral compared to Council Tax at the time we published the paper. That number could be recalculated now but we estimated then that a “revenue neutral” rate would actually mean a tax cut for eight out of 10 households as the burden of paying the tax would be placed more fairly on those who lived in the most expensive houses. We calculated that the “break even” point then would have been a house worth something like £400,000. This is based one a flat rate of tax too. We would argue that Councils should have the power to add progressive rates on extremely valuable properties like £1mn+ mansions or, as is the case with the current Council Tax, additional multipliers for multiple home ownership.

This would immediately act as a wealth tax both on the most expensive properties but also on multiple property ownership. Unlike Council Tax that is paid by occupants, our Property Tax would be paid by property owners and they could only pass on to their tenants the basic rate of tax. Landlords would have to pay any multiple ownership surcharges themselves.

The second wealth store in Scotland – land – is probably the greatest store of almost untaxed wealth in the country. Many countries tax the ownership of land as a distinct tax from properties built on it (sometimes because of local democracy, for example you might pay the land tax to your municipal government and your property tax to your regional government) but in Scotland there may be good reason to not do that but to simply extend the Property Tax to cover not just the land under and around your mansion but also the broader estate you own with it. Given that the two are often sold together, this will be much easier to put a price on than trying to calculate a separate Land Value Tax. We’ve estimated that doing this at the same flat rate as the Property Tax would bring in around £450 million a year in revenue – though this could be adjusted down to account for subsidies for small farms or up to better tax the 422 people who own half of Scotland.

One of the major advantages of both of these taxes – one that negates objections from both the UK and Scottish Government whenever taxes on the wealth have been suggested – is that it completely bypasses the idea that the rich will simply leave the country. Recent studies have shown that the idea of “millionaire flight” basically isn’t a thing (it’s not just a huge logistical hassle for comparatively little financial gain to pack everything up to go and live in a tax haven, even millionaires have friends and family as do their kids and tearing up those social bonds to save a bit of money just isn’t worth it) but this hasn’t stopped the media pushing that line anyway. Even if it was true, the wealth they have locked up in Scottish land and housing can’t move with them. The tax still needs to be paid by whomever owns them regardless of where they live (and many of the largest landowners in Scotland already don’t live here so the point is particularly moot there).

One of the biggest sources of instability in our current society and economy is wealth inequality. It urgently needs to be reigned in and reversed. If the UK Government persists in refusing to do it then there is at least something that the Scottish Government can do without having to wait for them. And if the current Scottish Government doesn’t want to do it either well, there are elections next year. Maybe politicians could suggest who we should vote for who will?

What Scottish Independence Could Deliver For The Welfare State

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.” – Marcus Aurelius

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.

Back in the early days of Common Weal, while we were still finding our feet and building our reputation, we had an informal rule when it came to policy-making. We had to be able to show the policy working somewhere else.

This was because we felt that Scotland simply wasn’t ready for some of the radical ideas that we wanted to implement so being able to show it already working was a good way of building confidence in a nation too often told “we cannae dae it” (by which our opponents often mean “we shouldnae dae it” which is a different thing entirely).

We’ve since dispensed with that rule and we sometimes broke it even then (one of Common Weal’s very first policy papers, “In Place Of Anxiety”, was an advocacy for Universal Basic Income (UBI) long before it became one of the “cool” policies) but this isn’t to say that we can’t learn lessons from elsewhere.

Just this week, I was asked by a researcher which of our neighbour nations I’d like Scotland to copy if I could. My answer was that we shouldn’t copy any one but that I take a lot of inspiration from Germany on local democracy, from Denmark on energy strategy and from Norway for public ownership. Somewhere else we could do with taking inspiration from our neighbours is on social security.

The scenes this week from the UK’s attempts to hammer the poor and disabled and only backing down after shambolic chaos in the Parliament should be a lesson not just in humanity but in policy-making as well. Never fight a battle you haven’t won in advance. Never assume a large on-paper majority means certain absolute power.

With many of our neighbours basing their politics on proportional representation and coalition politics, this kind of legislation would have undergone a lot of negotiation and compromise long before arriving at the voting chamber.

The way that many of our neighbours deal with the issue of social security is markedly different from the UK in several ways. The first is that the systems are a lot more generous in general. Norway, Denmark and Sweden rank in the top three OECD nations for spending on disability protections at above 3% of GDP while the UK is well below the OECD average at less than 2%.

Many more social securities like unemployment protections follow a different model from the UK when they are calculated. In particular, instead of the flat rate paid under the UK’s Universal Credit, many countries follow a model where the protection you receive is based on a percentage of your previous income.

There are consequences to each of these models. A flat rate tends to be more redistributive if it is generous enough (which Universal Credit isn’t) whereas a proportional rate tends to be less disruptive to an individual who is already going through the shock of losing their job while still having bills to pay.

We’ve seen these impacts in the UK too. During the pandemic, the Covid furlough scheme was paid at a proportional rate to people who were employed but was often paid at a flat Universal Credit rate to self-employed people. This exposed a lot of people who were previously on the side of denigrating poor and vulnerable people as lazy slackers to just how meagre and cruel the UK “benefits” system is.

We had an opportunity then to get some serious change off the back of that and maybe we still see echoes of it in this week’s chaos but largely the Powers That Be wanted to make us forget that moment of reflection as quickly as possible.

On the other side and as tempting as it might be to copy a European-style unemployment insurance based on previous income, and as beneficial that would be to people in well-paid but otherwise insecure jobs, we have to remember that many people are not in well-paid jobs and that wage suppression has been rife in the UK for decades. Receiving 60% of your previous income when you were being paid poverty wages won’t protect you from poverty in unemployment.

So maybe rather than Scotland – particularly an independent Scotland – copying existing social security policies from our neighbours, we need to look to them for inspiration in another way and look back at that paper I mentioned at the start of this column.

Last year, the EU think tank the Coppieters Foundation published a paper called “A European Universal Basic Income” which found that a UBI sufficient to eradicate poverty across the entire union could be entirely paid for by relatively modest changes to income tax and the savings found from the reduction of poverty itself.

Its model called for a UBI of €6,857 per year for adults and half that for children under 14. This is the equivalent of £113 per week for adults and £57 per week for children. The paper claimed that the increase in income taxes to pay for this level of UBI would themselves be relatively modest and the “breakeven” point for people who’d pay more income tax than they’d receive in UBI would be at around the 80th percentile.

In other words, eight out of 10 people would be directly better off with the UBI. And, to repeat, while this is still a relatively small sum per person if you have no other income, it would be enough to eradicate poverty across the entire EU and would be cheaper overall – after the health, crime and social inequality costs of poverty are factored in – than the current systems.

When this paper came out I argued that this meant a UBI was now a moral imperative because it was cheaper than the cost of poverty, but there’s clearly a financial imperative too. Whether we’re discussing an independent Scotland seeking to create a better country for all of us or even just a cynical UK trying to save money in the face of a humiliating attempt to crush the poor, here is a solution we should all support. Eradicate poverty, save money, implement a Universal Basic Income.

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

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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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Poor Show Swinney

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

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John Swinney claims to support the elimination of child poverty from Scotland, but he has admitted that he also believes – without actual evidence – that social security payments discourage poor people from working.

John Swinney’s only tangible policy on which he was elected as leader of the SNP and then First Minister of Scotland was a promise to eliminate child poverty. Note that he didn’t promise to reduce poverty or even to move faster than previous reduction targets (that he is so far failing to meet). He didn’t even, as his predecessor did, celebrate that child poverty in Scotland was merely a little lower than in England. He promised to eliminate child poverty. He has yet to explain “how”.

At the weekend, Swinney appeared to close down one of the tools that the Government has been using effectively to bring down child payment. The Scottish Child Payment is offered to adults who look after one or more children (the payment is on a per child basis – without the two-child limit seen in England) and who qualify for certain social security payments such as Universal Credit (if you think you might qualify you can check here). Frankly, the payment was brought in at a time and in a manner that stretches the devolved Scottish budget to its limits without the introduction of new taxes (such as our Land Tax) to pay for it but its impact on child poverty has been significant. The Scottish Government claims that the payment has contributed – along with their other poverty reduction policies – to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.

Last weekend, Swinney announced that he was not considering further increases to the payment. Not, as might actually be reasonably defensible, on the grounds of budget constraints but because he believed that the payment was now high enough that a further increase would “reduce the incentive to actually enter the labour market.”

In other words, he believes that increasing the child payment to £40 per week – something that the IPPR believes would lift another 20,000 children out of poverty – would discourage poor people from working.

This is, in short, complete crap. It is a claim that is not backed up by any data. In fact, if you have read my UBI article from the other week, you’d know that it is a claim that is completely countered by the facts. Giving people enough money to live on regardless of their life circumstances does not discourage people from working. In the most recent long-running study it was found that the total number of hours worked by UBI recipients did not change compared to their peers in the control group but that may did take the opportunity of the financial safety net to take a chance on a better paid, more worthwhile or more enjoyable job. Where studies have noticed UBI recipients dropping out of work it is almost universally not because “poor people are lazy and want to sit on the sofa” but because people use their safety net to study, to reduce hours as they run up to retirement or – pertinent to this article – to spend more time looking after their children.

With his comments, John Swinney is repeating the Conservative prejudice that the poor only work because it is marginally preferable to starvation and so any attempt to increase the number of workers in the economy can only be done by ramping up the costs of not working.

What Swinney is essentially saying is that while we shouldn’t have child poverty in Scotland, just bringing people to a penny over the poverty line would be enough for him, regardless of what that means for the people involved.

Cutting off the possibility of increases to social security because of self-imposed fiscal limits or rules (self-imposed even in this case not just because of slavish adherence to the philosophy of the 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission but due to a refusal to look at alternative mechanisms within devolution to increase revenue – see, again, our Land Tax) would be bad enough, but Swinney is making his case based on poverty being somehow the consequences of a lifestyle choice or moral failing. The poor, he apparently thinks, deserve their poverty unless they prove they are willing to not be poor.

This is a far cry from just a few years ago when there was a demonstrable majority across the Scottish Parliament for a guaranteed minimum income for all or a true Universal Basic Income (which probably explains the lack of push to bring in those policies).

The 2016 Holyrood elections are looming to the point of candidates being selected and manifestos being written. Swinney is obviously concerned enough about the rise of the far right to hold a summit about it (ineffectual as it was) but he surely must realise that the means of defeating the far right does not lie in gaming the political system to lock them out (see Germany), or in adopting their policies to try become them (see the UK) but in offering a real, credible alternative to Centrist Austerity and policy failure that leads to those populists gaining a base.

Instead of poor showmanship, Swinney could be providing leadership and actually taking action to meeting the goals he has set himself. The Scottish Government already has a poor track record of cancelling “inconvenient” government targets like climate emissions or reductions in car miles. Let’s not see the target of eliminating child poverty in one of the world’s richest nations become another one.

Fair Pay For All

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Employees keep the business doing what it does. It’s important to pay them accordingly.” – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

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The Scottish Government’s approach to Fair Work Principles are laudable, but should they go further by not just mandating minimum pay standards for low paid workers, but also maximum pay standards for the CEOs who underpay them?

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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.

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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.

Work To Live

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[W]hen your politics no longer have room for empathy, things spin into an amoral chaos. Not only the desperate suffer. Who gets hurt and who stays safe becomes hard to predict.” – Luis Alberto Urrea

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A new German study into Universal Basic Income publishes its final report, showing once again why UBI is a moral imperative. To illustrate those results we could imagine a world where we already have a UBI, but someone wants to study the effect of taking it away and creating the world we live in right now.

In 2021, 122 volunteers had their Universal Basic Income withdrawn from them in pilot project to study the impact of forcing people to work to earn enough money to survive. The participants in the “Work to Live” (WtL) programme were followed for three years alongside 1,580 people who retained their Universal Basic Income of €1,200 per month, regardless of their circumstances, spending intentions or any income they earned on top of their UBI. In 2025, the project published its final report.

Proponents of the “Work to Live” scheme claimed that inducing the fear of starvation, destitution and homelessness in workers would have multiple positive impacts on economic growth including increased work productivity and an increase in the number of hours worked as those without a UBI would be motivated to ensure that they could afford to keep a roof over their head. They also claimed that removing the UBI would increase people’s freedom to choose how to live their lives, without government oversight.

Now, finally, after three years of study, we have some evidence around those claims.

Jobs

Perhaps the most cited claim of “Work to Live” proponents is the idea that UBI makes workers lazy and idle – happy to coast along in their job knowing that they don’t need to earn enough to pay their bills or, in some circumstance, are content to sit completely idle on their sofa existing entirely on their UBI. The study found some surprising results in this regard. The group who had their UBI withdrawn worked essentially the same number of hours as the control group – both working an average of 40 hours a week – but the WtL group reported a substantial decrease in job satisfaction compared to the control. Satisfaction with the income they did receive also dropped markedly with the largest drop coming shortly after the withdrawal of their Basic Income and the gap only marginally closing again as they adapted to their new income levels.

While WtL proponents claimed that the motivational impact of taking away €1,200 a month would spur people to move out of their dead-end jobs or to try to improve their situation through education and training, the opposite was found to be true with the WtL group less likely to change their job and more likely to drop out of education to seek work. Satisfaction within work also dropped for the WtL group, both for those who did seek different employment and for those who stayed where they were at the start of the study.

Autonomy and Self-Determination

“Freedom” is at the heart of the Work to Live campaign, giving people the choice of how to live their life by choosing how to maintain that lifestyle. Those too poor to live a certain way have the freedom to seek those means or to choose to give up those dreams and live within more modest means.

The Work to Live study again confounded those expectations by noting a significant decrease in perceived autonomy compared to the group who retained their Universal Basic Income, with women in particular feeling more constrained by their life without a Basic Income than men. Paradoxically, participants reported that they felt like they had less “free time” in the day after losing their UBI, despite working similar hours to the control group. WfL participants spent notably less time doing non-productive activities outside work such as “volunteering”, “visiting friends” and “sleeping” with an average WtL participant sleeping on average 75 minutes less per week than a control group peer who retained their UBI – despite not spending that extra time in productive work.

Wellbeing

Work to Live advocates often claim that earning money rather than getting it “for free” would increase the sense of satisfaction of holding it and that this would translate into greater life satisfactions as one could look around at the lifestyle bought with that earned money rather than gained via a “handout”.

The pilot programme found once again that these expectations were not backed up by the lived experience of the participants. Life satisfaction dropped markedly shortly after the withdrawal of the UBI and remained more-or-less static in the three years after. This pattern was shared across other satisfaction metrics such as satisfaction with social interactions, the quality of sleep and satisfaction with the money participants had (even when controlled for the total amount of income). Overall stress levels – stress being a significant causative factor in many chronic health conditions – was higher in WtL participants than in the control group.

Finances

The philosophy of Work to Live teaches that money is a precious commodity and must be used wisely. Proponents have claimed that UBI encourages wasteful spending. The study found instead that withdrawal of UBI caused participants to cut their spending on a wide variety of items, including those vital to living comfortably. The largest cut came to vacations, with WtL participants spending almost 60% less on holidays than their UBI peers despite having the same amount of time off work. They also cut spending on clothing by 25%, 5% on everyday needs like food and 2% less on electricity and heating.

Unexpected Effects

Not all of the assumptions about the Work to Live pilot were borne out and some results were completely unexpected. One of the claims against UBI is that as it is an inherently Socialist idea (despite some Libertarian proponents) and thus those who receive a UBI are highly motivated to vote for left-leaning political parties. The study found that WtL participants did not substantially change their voting intention between parties but were less likely to vote at all whether for their preferred party or another.

Work to Live proponents claimed that UBI would make people inherently lazy, but the study found that, in fact, WtL participants were more likely to procrastinate on tasks or to avoid doing them entirely (perhaps in the hope that a problem they were anxious about would “go away”) though there was little change either way on individual propensities to do a task ahead of a deadline or at the last minute once it was decided that the task could not be avoided.

Finally, the sense of basic risk taking amongst participants was largely unchanged with the exception that WtL participants were less likely to risk changing their current job to take on another, despite the opportunity of potentially achieving higher pay or better conditions.

Conclusion

The Work to Live pilot programme has joined other similar studies in showing that attempting to coerce workers into productivity through the threat of destitution leads to more stress, more anxiety and lower rates of public, social and democratic participation and fails to achieve its goal of leading to more hours worked. It is recommended that participants have their Universal Basic Income restored and that other nations who have not yet implemented a UBI scheme of their own join the rest of the civilised world by doing so as soon as practicable.

And Finally

If you’ll allow me to drop the kayfabe at the end of this piece. This new German study into the impacts of Universal Basic Income joins with and do not contradict the increasingly vast body of all of the other studies that have been done into UBI. The results are as strong as all of the others too but the long term nature of the study adds extra weight to its findings as does the detailed examination of how living without the anxiety that capitalism imposes on us actually improves people’s lives. You can read more about that study here.

Here in Scotland, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in support for a Scottish UBI (the SNP, Greens and Lib Dems both support UBI as party policy and Labour indicate support for a weaker form of Minimum Income) but the UK Government (both Conservative and Labour versions) are ideologically against it, refusing even to facilitate the running of a Scottish UBI pilot despite the success of one in Wales. Studies into the costing of extending UBI schemes across the EU have found that they would be cheaper to implement than is currently being spent mitigating the poverty caused by the lack of one (that is, implementing a UBI would SAVE money, after the costs of poverty are included). The Scottish Government must bring back, as a priority, its plans to test and to ultimately roll out a UBI across Scotland. Much more pressure must be brought to bear on the UK Government to facilitate this rollout as while a UBI would undoubtedly be much easier to implement in an independent Scotland, the costs of poverty – particularly the child poverty that the current First Minister wishes to “eradicate” – are far too high and far to urgent to wait until then. We don’t need more data, or more pilot studies, or more poor people waiting for someone to do something. We just need that action, now, to give us all a Universal Basic Income to allow us to live without the fear, anxiety or exploitation that comes from poverty. Any further argument against UBI has to contend with the data presented in this study and in others and any further argument for delay must accept responsibility for the continued suffering that delay imposes. The time for a UBI is now. Once we have it, I’ll pass over to those who would like to perform a study arguing why it should be taken away.

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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

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

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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

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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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