politics

Shedding Light on Rural Heat

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn’t have a fireplace.” – Victor Borge

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

If the Scottish Government knew they were going to abandon its climate targets (see Robin’s column for more on that) then they could have probably saved themselves a lot of strife last week over their botched policies and communications around rural heating. If they had listened to us almost five years ago when we submitted a comprehensive policy paper and two extensive policy briefings to them on decarbonising heat in off-grid and rural areas, they might have avoided both weeks of bad headlines now.

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Glue Traps And Globalisation

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“Defining who is to be protected is in effect defining who is not to be protected” – Stephen D. King

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

The UK Government has announced that they are invoking the Internal Market Act to prevent the Scottish Government from banning the sale of glue traps in Scotland. These horrific devices are have been banned as part of broader concerns around protecting animals from cruel deaths and on the responsible management of land. It’s entirely right that the Scottish Government has acted to ban – rather than merely restrict or licence – these traps.

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Freeports Don’t Come For Free

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red and blue crane under blue sky during daytime

The National dedicated last week to the issue of Freeports and I’m glad they did. These deregulated tax havens have not been interrogated nearly well enough by our politicians or our media and the information coming from the ports themselves – even when asked directly – has been too little and too vague. This hasn’t allowed for a proper democratic debate around their merits or demerits, has allowed their failures to go unreported and, perhaps worse, has allowed outright conspiracy theories to rise up to replace the information vacuum which has, in turn, made it harder to campaign against them on the basis of the facts on the ground (something which suits their proponents whose agenda thrives equally in an empty well of information as it does in a polluted one).

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The Welsh Way Forward – Part 2

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The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced. – Aneurin Bevan

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

Wales risks creeping ahead of Scotland in progressive policy again, if the Welsh Government adopts proposals put forward by the Institute for Welsh Affairs to radically increase the amount of community owned energy in Wales.

Their new paper, Sharing Power, Spreading Wealth, is a comprehensive map of the state of public energy in Wales and identifies just about every angle that we’ve been campaigning for in Scotland (including mention of the role of Ynni Cymru – the new public energy company set up by the Welsh Government based on our Powering Our Ambitions model of a National Energy Company).

The paper, like much of our energy campaigning, identifies profit extraction from energy resources as a major driver of the current cost of living crisis as well as a major barrier against the development of renewable energy around communities (it’s a bit of a hard sell to see your landscape covered in wind and solar generators knowing that your own energy bills keep going up and none of the profits stay similarly within eyeshot) but also identifies that Wales along, with even more limited devolved funding than Scotland has, is unlikely to be able to nationalise the entire sector.

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Paying the Price of Climate Delay

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“How is it that we already have so many solutions to the climate crisis that don’t compromise human rights or justice, but the only solutions being seriously considered are the ones that do?” – Mikaela Loach

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red dragon statue near body of water during night time

The Climate Change Committee has declared that it no longer finds the Scottish Government’s Net Zero plan to be credible. That the Government will breach its statutory duty to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 by 75% (with no catch up plan in place to reach Net Zero by 2045) and that instead of there being a comprehensive strategy to reach Net Zero, the best we have is a serious of ad hoc, disconnected announcements. This comes off the back of the Scottish Government being found to be acting unlawfully by not publishing the expected carbon impact of its policies, in line with those statutory targets. Not to mention that “Net Zero” is itself insufficient as it merely promises that Scotland will continue to pollute until 2045 before stopping but makes no promise to fix the damage we’ve already caused (particularly on the Global South both in the present and during our colonialist exploitation of those nations).

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Land Reform, Or Another Power Grab?

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“The free society is characterized by the radical decentralization of all kinds of power. Confederal structures do not rule over communities; they are the means by which communities cooperate.” – Roy San Filippo

(This blog post previously appeared on Bella Caledonia.)

Corgarff

The Scottish government has introduced land reform legislation to encourage community ownership by granting ministers powers to intervene in the sale of estates of more than 1,000 hectares. The ruling Scottish National party said the bill, the biggest package of reforms in years, aimed to “revolutionise land ownership in Scotland” by empowering rural and island communities and increasing transparency in large land transactions.

In 2016 the last round of Land Reform made it easier for communities to buy out parcels of land, however the rampant rise in land prices – often now driven by so-called “Green Lairds” looking to cash in on carbon credits – have locked those same communities out of being able to afford to buy that land. With a few exceptions – such as in Langholm – the parcels of land being bought by communities have been getting smaller.  A report published in 2022 found that despite a steady rate of successful community buyout projects continuing much as it had since the start of devolution, the actual hectarage of land transferred had all but stalled with around 97% of all community owned land in Scotland being transferred before the passing of the 2016 Act.

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Have The Conservatives Outlawed Themselves?

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“The abyss doesn’t stare back. It winks.” – Kresley Cole

Justice

The UK Conservatives have published their new definition of “extremism” in their continuing attempts to lock down any possibility of dissent against their increasingly authoritarian rule (the hope that that rule will only last another few months as an election looms can be quelled by the fact that the UK Labour Party isn’t particularly likely to roll back on any of these measures.

However, as with many attempts to capture as many “inconveniences” as possible under the new definition, the party has run the risk of putting itself on the list of extremists too.

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A Hollow Frame

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spare your words, your actions will speak for you.” – Akiroq Brost

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

Imagine you’re applying for planning permission to build a house. Normally, the process would involve drawing up fairly detailed plans about what the house would look like. No plan goes perfectly to plan though and some changes are inevitable as the building process occurs but if the final building does deviate substantially from the initial plan there can be consequences up to and including being ordered to tear the whole thing down and start again. What you can’t do is gain permission to build “a house” without answering the basic questions like “What size is it?”, “How many bedrooms will it have?” or “Will it be made entirely of asbestos?”.

Over the past few months Common Weal have been incredibly busy replying to just a few of the public consultations that the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament have been publishing. I’ve written before about the sheer volume of them, how much effort goes into each response and how little they often achieve despite the rare moments of serious influence or the fact that if folk don’t respond to them then vested interests end up dominating the responses and thus what the Government can point to as justification for their plans.

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Judge Them By Our Actions

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.” – Noam Chomsky

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

The scenes coming out of Israel and Gaza are beyond abhorrent – and unlike wars of even just a few years ago, it’s playing out in real time on our own screens – atrocity careful curated by algorithm to keep us watching whatever social media platform we’re watching it on. The scenes this week of the UK Parliament almost collapsing into party-tribal anarchy over what flavour of “ceasefire” is the only one they could support has done the UK no favours in terms of its international reputation or its ability to be a responsible and reliable partner for peace when negotiations do finally, too late, begin to end the conflict, hopefully once and for all.

But the problems for the UK’s involvement in this run deeper. Before the chaos of the Opposition Day Motion debate in Parliament many of the detractors on social media attempted to delegitimise the concept of the debate saying that the UK simply had no possible influence over the situation and that the calls for a ceasefire were purely symbolic at best and grandstanding at worst.

However, the UK is not a purely symbolic bystander in this (not that should excuse those who are bystanders. As Desmond Tutu said, those who remain “neutral” in situations of injustice, side with the oppressor). The actions of the UK are deeply entwined with the humanitarian disaster unfolding in front of us.

For a start, the UK is the only country that has consistently abstained from United Nations level votes for a ceasefire in Gaza. These abstentions wouldn’t have swung the vote (which have been consistently vetoed by the USA regardless of their overwhelming result) but that abstention does provide the US the diplomatic cover of not being the only ones to oppose peace. That is a symbol that cannot be ignored.

More directly, the UK is openly providing military aid with the specific aim of supporting Israel and Israel has used UK infrastructure (including Scottish Government owned Prestwick airport) for military purposes. If the International Court of Justice does find that their observed plausible risk of genocide is borne out, then the UK must ask itself (or be asked by the court) to what extent that military assistance opens the UK to a charge of complicity in any war crimes that may have taken place.

Another problem is in the nature of international law itself as far too many countries – the UK included – appear to treat it as an inconvenience only to be obeyed when someone they don’t like breaks it.

With that in mind, I have been watching part of the case moving through the ICJ this week where Palestine has asked the court to make a ruling on whether or not the occupation of Palestine by Israel is illegal. In brief, the case is that while the occupation of foreign territory during wartime can be legal, the continued occupation of that territory beyond what is absolutely necessary both in scale, scope and time is unlawful and that those limits have been exceeded. The case can be watched here, with the UK’s own submission to the case due some time on Friday 23rd.

That submission will be interesting because Palestine themselves used the UK’s own actions as precedent in its evidence session on Monday. Specifically, the UK’s occupation (and forced deportation) of the Chagos Islands that was declared unlawful in 2021. The UK Government had been making some moves towards obeying the order to end the occupation but this itself appears to have reversed since the return of David Cameron to Government and who in January completely halted and cancelled talks and “ruled out” return of the islands to those the UK had forcibly removed from their homes claiming – despite evidence – that it was “not possible” for people to live there any more. If an occupier has left occupied land incapable of supporting those removed from it, then that is a problem for the occupier to fix.

There is a real danger of this story repeating itself in Gaza, with the continued destruction of homes and infrastructure and the sheer amount of unexploded ordinance surely hiding under the rubble of those homes making the prospect that people who have been forcibly displaced ever returning more remote and more unlikely by the day.

If and when the UK does decide that it can no longer stand by from or actively support atrocity, then it will have to reflect on the atrocities it has committed in turn. There will come a time to prosecute the war crimes committed over the course of the conflict in Israel and Palestine and each and every one of those crimes absolutely must be prosecuted whether committed by an enemy or an ally (or, indeed, by oneself). But the UK’s own actions are being held up to the world as an example of unacceptable behaviour and this matters because if it does not accept that behaviour as unacceptable by ourselves then we provide cover for those who wish to commit those same crimes on others. The world is judging others by our actions and we are falling woefully short of any measure that we should hold up as an example to aspire to.

Postscript:- The UK’s evidence to the ICJ quite brazenly started off with a statement to the effect of “We know you’re looking at our actions in Chagos – Please don’t judge Israel by our actions.”

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Wealth Taxes and Land Reform

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It takes a strong leader to collaborate with others in an effort to bring about real change.” – Germany Kent

(My speech at the 2024 Scottish Labour Spring Conference fringe event on land reform, hosted by REVIVE)

gray concrete building near lake under white sky during daytime

Devolution has meant that Scotland has more responsibility than power. Tax powers as they are have limited scope to effect meaningful change to an unequal society.

Our most powerful devolved tax – income tax – has proven extremely hard to use and eats a lot of political capital – chiefly as it’s too easy for the very rich to avoid and everyone else doesn’t get paid nearly enough.

But income inequality is far outstripped by wealth inequality both in Scotland and in the UK and in a capitalist economy where those with wealth can use it to rent-seek off the backs of the folk who worked to earn it, we have a problem where it matters less who gets paid how much, it’s who hoards it after that.
We need a system of wealth taxes to rebalance our economy, cut down on the dragon’s hordes of the multi-billionaires who could never hope to spend it usefully in a lifetime and to ensure that assets are more efficiently used for the benefit of all of us.

Scotland has a lot of power to do good here if we choose to and while this isn’t the time or the place to discuss what we could do if the Scottish Parliament had more powers, it most certainly is the place to discuss what we can do now.

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