Scottish Child Payment policy must always follow the evidence

October 16, 2026October 19, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” – Carl Sagan

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

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A pinboard containing various notes connected by red threads. The focus in the centre is a new note being pinned to the board. It is blank and not connected to the surrounding notes.

Scotland appears to have a real problem with the way that it does policy development that we need to talk about with increasing urgency. You may already have a sense of this from my recent articles on Burnham’s approach to developing a National Care Service or even our recent briefing on John Swinney’s approach to pensions in an independent Scotland, but there’s another story from last year that appears to have returned with a crescendo.

Back in April 2025, Swinney made a statement to the press stating that he was opposed to proposals from childrens’ charities to increase the rate of the Scottish Child Payment – one of Scotland’s recently devolved social security payments made to poorer families with young children – because he believed that an increased rate would discourage parents from entering or re-entering the workforce.

When this news came out we immediately submitted a Freedom of Information request to ask what evidence they had to back this statement up. Specifically, we asked what proportion of households receiving the SCP were households that contained no working adults. If we have that data point, then we can track it with time. If the SCP increases and then so does the number of workless recipient households, then we can correlate the two effects and see how increasing benefits decreases the incentive to work.

The Government responded saying that they weren’t even tracking this data. They had no evidence to suggest that a small or substantial rise in SCP would lead to people not working nor that the SCP was “at the limit” of what it could be before such an effect occurred.

This is an unacceptable way to announce polices. It should not be that the First Minister can just arbitrarily decide whether or not something is true.

It may well have been that a rise in SCP would incentivise parents to not work. It may well be that adding £10 per week would start to cause this effect. It may well not show up until parents are given £10,000 per week.

But this is a testable hypothesis. Data on this can be gathered. In this case, it wasn’t.

Until now.

“In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole.”

This week, the Scottish Government quietly published the results of a study into the increase in SCP that did happen in April 2025 and then again in April 2026. I say quietly published because while it appeared on the Government’s webpage of new publications, it did not appear in their daily 4pm bulletin of the stories they think are important to push and nor have I seen any news reporting on the topic (literally the only other person I could find who appeared to have spotted this report between publication and me writing this was Prof. John Robertson who runs the Talking Up Scotland blog).

As with a story I did on a report into the potential for a Scottish Minimum Income Standard in May 2025 which was similarly published without fanfare and then almost completely ignored (though we may soon get some kind of Minimum Income for Artists out of it). This is once again a time when a fairly substantial story has been noticed not because the Government actively wanted it to be noticed or because the mainstream media were employing enough people that they could dedicate some of them to make sure that the stories were noticed but because a handful of activists happened to be paying attention to the front page of a website that receives dozens of new reports each day, and they just happened to be doing so at the hour or so when the story was visible before it got pushed off the front page and buried forever. This is not good for Government scrutiny.

But back to the report and the results of the study. In short, it found precisely the opposite of the First Minister’s evidence-free claim and found a result much more in line with virtually every other similar study into the work impacts of out-of-work social security.

In short, there was no evidence of negative impact on the labour market when taken as a whole. The vast majority of recipients (around 70%) felt that receiving the SCP had no impact positive or negative on their life (which is not to say that it didn’t, merely that they didn’t feel like they had to change their behaviour as a result of getting the payment. It may well be that they would have had to cut back on spending if the payment was stopped so even where they felt it didn’t have a positive impact, it may have been preventing a negative one).

Only around 4% of respondents said that they or their partner had stopped work or reduced their work as a result of the payment. Once again, and in challenge to the FM’s claim, this is not necessarily a negative impact. A parent reducing their overtime to spend more time with their child is not necessarily a bad thing for the child even if it is for John Swinney’s GDP spreadsheet.

On the other hand, 3% did unambiguously spend more time with their child during a longer parental leave (which still counts as being “in work”), 4% found that the payment let them start work where they previously weren’t working, 7% were enabled to work longer hours (perhaps the SCP helped with childcare costs) and 14% used the SCP to help with costs associated with their work (e.g. travel or clothing). The report also notes gender differences where women were more likely to decrease their work hours (even when they were the main earner) while men were more likely to increase their work hours and that the way this plays out in single-parent households may indicate that lone mothers face “unmeasured barriers not faced by lone fathers”.

In aggregate though, it does appear that an increase to the SCP has no overall impact on the labour market. Judged by these figures, it appears that the payment may help support some people to work more than they otherwise would have (again, it is possible that the payment helps with childcare costs and other additional costs that come with juggling work and raising a child).

Any moment where there is a risk that the payment could reduce work appears to be limited to very specific circumstances such as when taking on more work pushes someone above the threshold for earning Universal Credit and thus causing them to be ineligible for the SCP as well. This means that it is means-testing of social security that is having a negative impact rather than the amount of benefit being received and should be another case in point for more universalism such as via a Universal Basic Income that supports parents regardless of their other or changing circumstances.

Most importantly though is the lesson that this report should send to the Government not just in this policy but in policy-making as a whole. Evidence matters. It should not be acceptable to make statements that affect the lives of people who are, on the whole, already financially vulnerable without having evidenced cause to do so. Certainly, scapegoating poor parents as being lazy and prone to shirking work the moment they are no longer compelled by the threat of destitution to do so (the fundamental implication beneath Swinney’s comment) is not compatible with the stated goal from the same politician to eliminate child poverty.

Public policy must always follow the evidence. Politicians must stop making claims that they cannot back up with evidence. It is beyond me that this is a lesson that still needs to be learned.

How taxing land can help us find out who owns land

October 9, 2026October 19, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

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.

A stock photo of the Scottish Highlands, largely devoid of people or wildlife apart from some sitka spruce plantations, a cairn and what may be the top of the roof of a house.

The UK as a whole but Scotland in particular appears to be creeping ever closer to the inevitable realisation that a few people hoarding stores of wealth is inherently bad for society and that wealth should be taxed.

The debate at the moment is largely focused on how to do it. The simplest version is probably also the worst. That would be to have everyone whose net worth is above a certain threshold tally up the value of all of their possessions (from housing to company ownership to cars to artworks) and then pay a tax based on a percentage of that value.

It’s often hard enough to do this for someone’s estate when they die – it’s even harder when they are still alive enough to move their mobile assets around to hide them from the Revenuers or to move themselves to somewhere that’s quite happy to host the ultra rich trying to avoid their responsibilities. Richard Murphy makes this point though he also offers suggestions that would work at a UK level such as reforming capital gains tax and corporation tax and removing tax subsidies from high value pensions. His 2024 Taxing Wealth Report can be read here.

In Scotland in particular though, there is a very large store of wealth currently being relatively untaxed that could be directly addressed without fear of the billionaires fleeing – our land and the ownership of it.

No matter where someone resides in the world, they can’t take their owned land in Scotland with them and therefore the land itself can be taxed regardless of who owns it and where.

“Who Owns Scotland?” is a key question, however, and one that is strangely unanswered for a country like ours. Andy Wightman is the go-to source for detailed information of land ownership, especially where that ownership is obfuscated through corporate or financial structures, but even his database currently covers less than 80% of rural land. The Scottish Land Register is, after many years of missed deadlines, still incomplete.

We also know that the land reform legislation passed in the previous Parliament is unlikely to enact meaningful reform of ownership. It may well have positive impacts in the management of land but the regulations only cover the largest estates and there are ways to avoid its strictures (such as by breaking a single estate up and setting up trusts or companies to own each chunk separately, even if a single individual owns all of those companies thus still controls all of the land). Even the rules around forcing some sales to offer lots to communities are unlikely to be meaningful if the communities don’t have the resources to buy the lots.

This is where tax may have to play a role.

One of the barriers currently facing bringing in a land tax is the lack of data not just on ownership but on valuation. The latter isn’t insurmountable and there are ways to do it. The Scottish Land Commission is investigating various approaches to valuation, and these basically boil down to a few key approaches.

The first is an algorithmic approach similar to the way Zoopla values your house and is based on similar nearby sales. This is more complicated for land than housing because land sells less often and has more variation even field-to-field but it can give a rough idea (my own paper on taxing land took a not-dissimilar proxy approach by combining national sales data with agricultural soil grade information).

Another is obviously to update valuations when land is sold or transferred but could also include valuation data captured during events like the owner taking out a loan secured on the land, reinsuring it against damage or when applying for planning permission to build on it. There may also be bespoke site surveys which could happen either as the result of any of the above, randomly to help benchmark the algorithmic approach or if the landowner is unhappy with their algorithmic valuation and wants a manual correction (this last one could be subject to a fee and on the understanding that valuations could go up as well as down – this would deter people disputing their valuation without good reason).

“The good news for land reform campaigners is that there seems to be a lot of things about to happen quite quickly in Scotland.”

Another slightly more radical version – but one not without precedent – is to allow owners to self-value their land but to give local government or communities the right to enact a compulsory purchase at the taxable rate regardless of any potential market rate. If you state that your Highland estate is worth £1 for the purposes of tax, then the local community can purchase your estate for £1. This would naturally incentivise owners to value their land accurately (or, at least, higher than the price the community is able to pay – the land speculation bubble has already priced many of them off the land).

Bringing in a land tax will therefore help to value land. It’s less of a barrier before a tax can be brought in but more like a problem of the land being difficult to value because there’s no tax to compel it to be valued.

I’m increasingly coming to believe that the same might be true for the problem of ownership too. That the barrier isn’t that we can’t introduce a land tax because we don’t know who we’re taxing but instead we’ll very quickly be able to find out who we’re taxing once we start introducing a land tax.

What would happen here is that the owners of land would be responsible for paying their land tax at the end of the year and would connect their payment to their entry or entries on the Land Register. These records could be checked for land that is on the register but which doesn’t have a tax payment linked to it. If tax is not paid on a portion of land and the owner is known, notices to owners could be sent out (along with late fees etc).

If ownership is not known or if the land is not on the register at all, then a public notice could be made calling for the owner to come forward with proof of ownership and an application to register their land. If none present themselves within a reasonable time (say, three or five years) then procedures dealing with ownerless land can be initiated with the land itself being ultimately transferred to a public body (the traditional recipient in Scotland would be the Crown, but I would argue in this post-feudal age that ownerless land should be converted into Common Good ownership).

This is a win-win for Scotland. Either land that is not declared on the Land Register gets registered quick to avoid being chased for tax evasion, or it comes back into public ownership and from there can be better used by an identifiable owner.

The good news for land reform campaigners is that there seems to be a lot of things about to happen quite quickly in Scotland. There was a fear for a while that the passing of the Land Reform Act last year would take the wind of out the sails of reform while doing little in itself to create much change but while the latter may yet be true, the former does not.

I can’t say too much at this stage other than to suggest that eyes are turned to the party conferences this year as there may be some interesting things happening. The Revive Coalition, of which Common Weal is a member, will be at both the SNP and Green conferences this month talking about land reform and where policies like a land tax can help to push things forward.

The important thing to remember in this campaign and in all others is to look at challenges not as barriers to prevent change but merely as obstacles to overcome or bypass. If we think we can’t do something, just check to make sure that we’re actually right about that and if we can’t do it in the way we want to, maybe we can do it another way instead. Being focussed on the solutions rather than being stopped by the problems is what will create change.

Taxing wealth is important and popular. Taxing land is one way to do that in Scotland. How to get there, is up to us.

Finally, Local Government Reform – But it must be done right!

October 2, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” – David Fleming

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.

Note:- Since this article was first published, Common Weal’s work on local government reform has been featured in The Herald.

Recently, First Minister John Swinney said that the current way we run Local Government in Scotland means that Local Authorities are “too big to be local and too small to be regional”. Except he didn’t really. He took that line, without credit, from Common Weal and our campaign for local democracy reform.

It’s a pity that he didn’t take more from us or even ask us for a briefing on our own work on the topic before yesterday’s surprise announcement of what could end up being the largest reorganisation of Scottish local government in more than 30 years.

The proposals are, at this stage, just a first stab at this plan and as of the time of writing it’s too early even for a public consultation (which we shall be engaged in) but even at this there are messages worth picking up and informing you about.

The first is that, contrary to previous hints at the Government’s thinking in the Programme for Government, there is actually a local tier of democratic governance in this proposal (the PfG stated only that local communities would be able to “influence local decisions”, not control them). New districts (formally called “Community Authorities”) will be formed by splitting the current Local Authorities into 3-5 sections forming between 120-160 local government bodies across Scotland which will elect Councillors using the same multi-member ward, STV system of voting that Local Authority Councillors are currently elected on.

Simultaneously, the current Local Authority boundaries will be merged so that 32 Councils will become between six and ten Regional Authorities. These will not have elected members or a separate vote but instead each District Councillor will double-job as a Regional Councillor too.

And this leads to a major problem. The dash to prevent the need for “more politicians” (both on cost grounds and likely to avoid political backlash) puts the plan in a double-bind.

As Allan Faulds of Ballot Box Scotland has pointed out, if Scotland maintains the current number of Councillors at 1,227 then District Councils become very small with between 7 and 10 members each. For comparison, an average municipal council in Germany consists of about 20 members but also represents a much smaller population (average 9,000 residents). A German municipality covering a population of the size proposed by these districts (around 35,000 to 45,000 people) would have 30-40 Councillors and only the smallest of municipalities with populations fewer than 1,000 residents would be represented by fewer than 10 Councillors.

The other side of double-jobbing the District Councils means that each Regional Council becomes extremely large, with as many as 200 members sitting on it. Given that Local Authorities have largely sold off the buildings they haven’t used since the 1993 reforms (and we don’t know where the boundaries of the Regions will be yet) there’s a serious issue of where to host the Regional Councils if they are to be this size.

One workaround would be to cap the Regional Councils at, say, 100 members but this means either that Districts have to decide who to nominate to sit at Regional level and means that some of your Councillors will have power over some things that others do not – a much more blatant “two-tier” system than the List MSPs in Holyrood are (falsely) accused of being. Worse, Communities that used to be served collectively by around 30 Local Authority Councillors could find themselves electing as few as four members to run their District. It would be almost trivial for a political party clique (or even a married couple) to take complete control of their District. This is not democratic.

At a Regional level, either the approach of doubling every District Councillor or even nominating just some of them is a better approach than the proposal to directly elect Regional Provosts who would have direct and unilateral control over strategic decisions. This plan – apparently being expanded in England by former Regional Mayor Andy Burnham – would be even less democratic and even more centralised than the plan being proposed by the Scottish Government here (I wonder if this is intentional and that the sudden push for the regionalisation of Scotland has more to do with countering the plan for Provosts than it represents a genuine desire for local democracy, especially given Swinney’s poor track record when it comes to respecting local authorities).

On that note, what happens to Cosla is very much an open question here. Cosla currently represents the collective will of the 32 Local Authorities. Reducing its mandate to representing the Regions risks again making it easier for a small party clique to take control of the whole body – which might be the point. Cosla was one of the major factors in reigning in the worst of the Scottish Government during the National Care Service debate to the point that when Government found that it couldn’t sustain the plan to pull sole control of care away from Councils and give it to Ministers they instead set up a “tripartite” control board consisting of Government, Cosla and the NHS – the latter almost certainly being included as a means of providing a whipped vote in favour of Holyrood.

The proposals for which powers to sit where are not yet well developed though on the face of it, and if we use planning permission as an example, Regional Councils would be responsible for “strategic” decisions like whether or not a developer gets planning permission to build a new housing estate while District Councils would be responsible for “local” decisions like whether you, as a household, get planning permission for an extension on your house. While Swinney did mention ideas like devolving powers from Holyrood “or even from Westminster” to a more local level, it’s hard to find examples of powers at that level that might come to District level, and so this plan does appear to be one of centralising Local Authority powers to Regional levels more than moving powers to District level.

Also not developed is the cost of the whole endeavour. The 1993 reforms cost around £400 million at the time which in today’s money is closer to £1.2 billion. This isn’t an absolutely outrageous sum in national government terms but it’s a substantial one and may not factor in costs such as the need for the construction or purchase of new Regional Parliaments given that we don’t know how many we need or how large they’ll be.

Borders are easy – but not necessarily simple

September 24, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Once a friend, always a friend. Why should borders stop that?” – Erin Hunter

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.

A photo of the Anglo-Scottish border, from the English side, looking towards the Welcome to Scotland sign. Three saltire flags on flagpoles in the centre.

Image Source: Wikimedia

In our initial promo for our new project – A Prospectus for a New State – we made quite possibly a controversial statement.

In describing the outline of the Prospectus and the kinds of areas it will cover as we lay out the institutions Scotland will need to set up between the point of an independence referendum and Independence Day, we said that compared to some of the other topics “borders are easy”.

It’s worth exploring what we meant by that. We’re not saying that building up the infrastructure to manage Scotland’s independent borders will be easy. We’re saying that the choice whether or not to do so is easy. It’s barely a choice at all.

In How to State a New Country, we laid out the process of becoming an independent country in a linear narrative form, taking the timeline of events that need to happen to show that the whole process should be bound not by arbitrary deadlines (like the “18 months” promised by the Scottish Government in 2014) but by how long it would reasonably take to set up the essentials (for example, we thought that the fastest reasonable time it would take to set up a new currency and the banking infrastructure required to manage it would take about three years).

In this new Prospectus, we’re taking a more project management approach. Each of the tasks we identify (we’ve identified around 80 at the moment) will be split according to various degrees of sovereignty that Scotland will have over the process.

Some we’ve deemed “essential”, as in there is only one clear option and that an independent Scotland must do it. An independent Scotland must have a borders and customs office of some description. It’s an “easy” choice to make that we should do this, because it’s not really a choice at all. It will also be an “easy” task to work out what kinds of job that office will perform and how it could perform them as there are modern international standards that Scotland obviously should abide by. “Should Scotland set up a borders agency?” is an “easy” question – yes we should.

“An independent Scotland will have fully sovereign control over our borders, but there are equally sovereign countries on the other side of those borders too.”

Slightly more complicated are our “options”. When it comes to borders, this is about how that office should be run. Currently, borders and customs are highly reserved to the UK, highly centralised and overly focused on the restricting the movement of people rather than monitoring the movement of goods, and so while we will undoubtedly be able to poach some staff or assets from the UK, we will need to build up the office and run it ourselves.

We may have options on whether to run it as a centralised agency or a decentralised one and we may need to decide pre-independence as this may result in the construction of physical infrastructure at or near borders and ports of entry. It’s possible to run an agency in different ways and so many of these will be true options – equally viable thought with their own trade-offs. Common Weal may have our own opinion on which of those options we pick – but others may disagree with more or less validity.

Next on the list will be “negotiating positions”. An independent Scotland will have fully sovereign control over our borders, but there are equally sovereign countries on the other side of those borders too. When it comes to the movement of people, Scotland may face an exclusive choice between more-or-less free movement with the rest of the UK (via the Common Travel Area) or we may decide to align more with the EU (perhaps via agreed frameworks of association with the EU). What we can’t do is force our counterparts to agree. Scotland may desire to remain in the Common Travel Area but the rest of the UK (perhaps reduced to the Kingdom of England by this point) may decide it wants to build a wall. Scotland doesn’t have a veto on this, but we can have negotiating positions, including potential retaliatory sanctions should our partners decide to be unreasonable.

And then there are the issues that aren’t really options for independence even though they seem as if they might be and so are “not required” at the moment. On day one of independence Scotland will not be a formal member of the European Union (assuming we wish to join – which is an “option” alongside not doing so). We may have strong diplomatic ties with them. We may be submitting our membership application on day one.

We may even have spend several years (perhaps even preceding the referendum) aligning Scots Law to ensure that the membership process runs as smoothly as possible. But the procedure of joining does mean that we need to be independent and then join, not the other way around. That means that in terms of borders we will not be fully integrated into EU customs systems nor will we be a member of the Schengen area.

We may want to do this. There may be good arguments for and against doing this. But those debates are likely to happen after independence, not before. So if it’s a deal-breaker for you that you’ll only support independence if Scotland joins/does not join the EU then you can be assured that it’s currently the wrong question. We can legitimately have that discussion at another time – perhaps the better question to ask would be “Should Scotland have the right to ask that question?”, because right now we don’t. Scotland got the Brexit the UK Government negotiated, largely without the input and even against the wishes and needs of Scotland.

And finally, there’s the topic that will no doubt be the top line headline of the whole project – “Cost”. For borders, we need to know how much it will cost Scotland to set up the required infrastructure, how much it might cost to run it on an annual basis, but also other costs like the cost to the economy of not properly controlling our borders (see the link above about the amount of rotten food that leaks into the UK, but also other issues like drug smuggling coming up north by road or via our porous coastline).

This is a subject that will be easier in some respects than others (we already know roughly how much a Scottish Central Bank would cost to set up an operate, and we can set “percentage of GDP” targets in things like military spending) but other areas may take a bit more research or will be highly dependent on our policy options (e.g. for security, the envelope between an Irish “Peace Force” style security sector and a pro-NATO, pro-Trump interventionist approach).

As you can see, this article is over 1,000 words, it only covers borders and it’s only an outline – the Prospectus for a New State is going to be a major undertaking for Common Weal, which is why we’re asking for your support with our crowdfunder to help make it happen. But there is a clear plan there, there are standards and procedures to follow and options to lay out and discuss.

So as we say, “Borders are easy”. But we didn’t say they’d be “simple”.

Burnham hasn’t changed the game, but he has taken to the field

September 11, 2026September 18, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Opportunity does not waste time with those who are unprepared.” – Idowu Koyenikan

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.

A Go board in an advanced state - to the lay observer, it is not clear whether white or black is winning.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham took a significant step into the independence debate recently when, at PMQS, he was questioned by SNP MP Chris Law on the disparity between the constitutional mechanism for Northern Ireland formally seceding from the UK (contained within the Good Friday Agreement) and for Scotland to do the same (there isn’t one). Burnham replied that the mechanism for Scotland was “exactly the same” as for Northern Ireland.

That is, when it “seems likely” to the Secretary of State for Scotland (currently Douglas Alexander) that public opinion is such that a referendum would return a result in favour of Scottish independence, then such a referendum should be arranged.

There are a whole bunch of caveats to this constitutional clause. It is still, by far, nowhere near the democratic right to self-initiated, self-governance (c.f. Article 4 of the Constitution of Liechtenstein which allows any of the municipal councils to self-organise a secession referendum at a time of their own choosing). The clause that an independence referendum could only happen if it “seems likely” to succeed is subject to the Secretary of State not being stubbornly and wilfully blind to rising sentiment on the ground.

It has certainly been the case over the last decade of constitutional squabbling that the UK Government and successive Scottish Secretaries have been quite happy to tangle a target that they thought was unreachable only to yank it away when they realised that it might be. Is “once in a generation” the “not less than seven years” contained within the GFA? Or is it 25 years? Or is it not until every single person who voted in 2014 is dead and buried? UK Government has floated all of these positions at some point or another.

The Scottish Government is, with merit, now trying to bed the principle that Scotland should have the same constitutional right as Northern Ireland into law to make it harder for Burnham or his successor to backslide later.

It is certainly the case however that while Burnham has set a firm and reachable target now, the actual position of the goalpost hasn’t materially changed. The process of becoming independent was never path dependent on a constitutional arrangement and this remains true. The core argument should never have been “How do we get a new independence referendum?” or even “How do we bypass the need for a referendum with this One Weird Trick Lawyers Don’t Want You To Know?”.

It was always “How do we convince a majority of the Scottish population to support independence such that the pressure of their collective voice could not be ignored?”

It we win that consensus, the route to bringing Westminster to the negotiating table to agree and sign the required documents was always going to be a relative formality.

So how do we answer that important question? The key is to understand the demographics of independence. When support for independence rises, it’s not picking people up at random. It’s better to think of the kind of person who would be the next person to change their mind when support rises from X% to X%+1.

We can split Scotland into four groups of people. The “Convinced Nationalists” are those for whom independence is a core part of their identity and will likely always vote for it given the chance. It’s likely that you are one of them. The “Convinced Unionists” are the opposite – with an identity linked to the Union as a concept as strong as a Nationalist’s desire to break away. They will never vote for independence – though they may accept it as the will of the people afterwards in the same way as anti-devolutionists did after 1997. These two groups make up something between half and two-thirds of the population. Neither of these two groups are the target audience right now. Their votes won’t change.

Instead, think of the two groups in the middle – Converted Supporters who were the kind of people who began to support independence during the 2014 campaign as sentiment rose from its pre-2011 baseline of about 25% (the Convinced Nationalists) to 45% on the day. I’m part of that group. Most of this group are now pretty solid in their views. It’s a lot harder to get someone to change their worldview twice than it is to change once. I had to be convinced to support independence. Convincing me not to now would be a challenge. This is the primary reason that, contrary to some expectations, independence support did not fall back to the Nationalist baseline after 2014.

This means that the really important group are the people who sit in that realm of independence support rising from about 50% up to the Unionist ceiling somewhere near 70 or 75% and we really only need to win over about half of them.

“If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, are we, as a movement, prepared for that?”

When you examine the social attitudes of the Convinced Nationalists and the Convinced Unionists, they tend to be (though aren’t exclusively) quite different from each other. Support for independence is wrapped up in a lot of other fairly ideological policies such as being pro-Europe (if not always pro-EU), anti-monarchy, anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear, pro-immigration, Left-of-Centre and quite a few other topics whereas Convinced Unionists are much more likely to be opposed to many or all of these things (again, not exclusively – your individual experience may vary and there plenty of people in the Left of Scottish politics who agree with each other on almost everything except independence even if that one small difference prevents collaboration on everything else).

It’s not the Nationalists who are the isolated group though. The groups in the middle – even the Not-Yet Supporters – tend to be a bit closer in view to the Nationalists and especially to the Converteds than they are to the Unionists. In other words, the type of person who’d vote Yes at 60% is more “winnable” than the type of person who’d vote No at 40%.

We’ve talked about this phenomenon before. That the people we just barely failed to convince in 2014 weren’t ideologically against us. They actually agreed with the kind of Scotland they thought we were presenting. The problem wasn’t the vision, but the execution. They didn’t believe we’d fulfil our promises. And, frankly, who could blame them?

This is the main issue we’ve squandered over the past decade. We’ve been arguing process instead of policy. We’ve been hoping for “One Weird Trick” like a previously unknown legal route to indy or a Unionist politician standing up and say “Ah, go on then”. We haven’t really been preparing for what to do if that happened.

Seriously ask that question now. If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, what would be the next step? Are we, as a movement, prepared for that?

Not only do we need to be prepared, the act of the preparation is the thing that will convince the people who would bring support from 50% up to 60%. The act of preparation is the thing that will apply the pressure on Andy Burnham and Douglas Alexander that is needed for them to decide that independence “seems likely”.

In 2018, Common Weal produced our book How to Start A New Country which detailed the steps that need to be taken between referendum day and formal independence day in order to create a viable, independent nation state. It went through all of the institutions Scotland would need to set up or reform in order to take over the jobs currently being done “for” us in London. It’s still a powerful book but it’s getting on a bit and the world has changed a lot since it was written (the long version of the book is also almost entirely sold out, though you can get a digital copy here and we still have plenty of copies of the shorter version). It could use a bit of a refresh itself especially if it “seems likely” that it’s going to be needed sooner rather than later.

Next week, we’ll tell you what we’re planning to do about that.

The Programme for Government 2026

September 6, 2026September 6, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” – Walter H. Cottingham

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.

An excerpt from the cover of the PfG

Ambitious for Scotland
Programme for Government 2026-2031

(Image Credit: Scottish Government)

Last year’s Programme for Government was a lackluster affair, as could well be expected. It came just a year before the election and so it was always unlikely that there would be any brand new initiatives given that there would be no time to legislate for them never mind implement them (the tail end of the last Parliament saw many important bills get dropped for ‘lack of time’ such as Monica Lennon’s Ecocide Bill, but that’s a topic to come back to).

In a year where the election results in a change of Government, we would expect the first PfG to be an ambitious period as the new party settles their feet under desks and starts to work out how the hell they’re going to deliver on their promises. It’s slightly different for a returning government. They have to come up with new ideas while remembering that there was little to stop them doing it before. A new plan to reform Council Tax, for instance, has to deal with the problem that next year will be the 20th anniversary of the SNP Government promising that they’ll reform Council Tax.

Still though, this is the first Programme for Government of the returning Government and can use this one not just as a plan for the next year but as a prospective for the next five years in Government. Plans can afford to be a little larger or longer range. And we’ve certainly see that, with some proposals here being substantial, multi-year projects. As we shall see from this list of some of the policies that caught my eye this year, this doesn’t necessarily mean that I think they are projects that we should be doing.

Local Government Reform: Centralising power

This has been headlined as the largest government reform of the devolved era and it’s probably not wrong in that. There has been a lot of talk recently about bring the English model of regional mayors to Scotland – largely driving by people who think that we could do with more folk like Andy Burnham taking unilateral control over large chunks of the country. My own thoughts on that particular plan can be read here…short version – I’m not a fan. A single person cannot be elected via a proportional democratic vote, therefore I do not believe that a single person should ever hold office with executive power.

This isn’t what John Swinney is proposing, in fairness. No mention is made of elected mayors over massive regions. He is, however, proposing the second part. Local Authorities to be combined in some way (it’s not clear if this would be a formal amalgamation or another tier of umbrella organisations) and given executive powers.

He even stole Common Weal’s language to help describe why he wants to do this – the current Local Authorities are simultaneously too large to be be “local” and too small to act regionally (this was the intention of the previous round of reforms after Scottish regional governments proved a nuisance to the Scottish Office). There are indeed powers that could be given to these regional councils that could be useful, like transport or energy strategy.

The big problem is that few of those powers sit at Holyrood or even Westminster. They mostly sit at Local Authority level and will be ‘pooled’ into the regional tier. And thus this reform will not decentralise power but will massively centralise it. The same goes for plans to amalgamate Scotland’s 14 Health Boards into just two.

The ‘local’ part of these reforms is non-existent. Rather than restore Scotland’s district councils (as the Greens propose) or to follow our plan to bring Scotland into line with Europe’s system of municipal councils, the ‘local’ part of Swinney’s reform is merely to “[empower] people to influence local decisions”. Not to control local decision-making. Or to make decisions for themselves. Merely to “influence” them. Which is basically the non-power that our community councils have at the moment.

Inwards Investment: The Scottish Fire Sale Continues

If there’s one thing John Swinney is known for, it’s his great love of ‘foreign direct investment’. FDI has basically been the only game in town (a term once reserved for PFI funding) for Scottish economic development for a number of years now. The problem with inwards investment like this is that, by definition, it demands a return in the form of profits that can be extracted from Scotland.

In our paper on Profit Extraction, we found that Scotland was one of the most intensively extracted nations on the planet – to a degree worse than some of the poorest and most heavily exploited nations in Africa. Between 1999 and 2021, more than a quarter of a trillion pounds has been net extracted from Scotland, largely in the form of dividends paid to shareholders and parent companies based elsewhere. One can only speculate as to what Scotland would look like if that money had been used to bootstrap up Scottish companies or had been paid to Scottish workers instead.

And it’s about to get worse.

The PfG is going to accelerate FDI via several schemes like a “High Growth Unit” and a “Major Projects Office” designed to “unlock private investment across strategic sectors”. Most disconcertingly is that the Government appears to have listened to our plea that the Scottish National Investment Bank should be investing more in housing and energy by instructing it to “leverage further private commercial capital and investment into housing…including social housing”. Even if you are being housed by the public sector, your rent may soon be subsidising the dividends of a wealthy absentee shareholder.

“Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally””

Energy: Fossil Fuels and Data Centres

The Government fell short of growing rumours of a moratorium on data centres. Instead, the Scottish Government will attract more data centres so long as they are “responsible, green data centres”. No, I have no idea what that means either but I suspect that it’s something a bit like Swinney’s support for “climate compatible” oil extraction. That is to say, it’s a thing to say when someone asks about these things that means that he doesn’t have to definitively say that he supports or does not support them.

One thing the Government does support right now is the cutting of profit taxes on oil companies to encourage more North Sea drilling (you know…so long as it’s “climate compatible” and it’s not necessarily any particular named project that you might be complaining about specifically).

I published my own thoughts on how those data centres should be regulated as a bare minimum – I do not expect many or any currently in the pipeline would meet these reasonable expectations. I also do not expect that the Government’s own “strategic approach” will meet or exceed these standards. Or perhaps we need to apply a bit more pressure in our campaigning to make that happen.

Health, Care and Older People: Amalgamated, Subsumed and Ignored

In that order. I’ve already mentioned the proposed centralisation of health in Scotland and we published in one of our Daily Briefings this week that we’re concerned that care is being subsumed into health as Swinney has long been obsessed with “delayed discharge” as the only metric worth measuring – if he can dump people from hospitals into care homes, then who cares, right?

Our Care Reform Group will be discussing this in more detail in the weeks to come. Another point that is missing from the PfG almost entirely is how to better support older people. The term ‘older’ does not appear at all in the PfG and ‘ageing’ only once and strictly in the context of rising pressure on health services. A “prevention-first” health strategy mentioned in this section is laudable – essential even – though it does require actual work to prevent health issues.

Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally” and privatising the funding of housing while maximising the incentives to push up house prices runs directly against the goal of more healthy housing.

Land Reform: This far and apparently no further

Land Reform was high on the agenda in the last Parliament. The Land Reform Bill eventually passed was weak and insufficient, but it was there. This PfG – which I remind is a strategy for the next five years – does not mention land reform or land taxation at all. Some mention is made of more support for crofting communities to support environmental work but with the proposal to centralise of many aspects of environmental governance (such as SEPA, NatureScot and Zero Waste Scotland) into a single body it seems hard to see how more localism over the control of land can come out.

Our coalition partners will be at the SNP conference next month in a campaign for a Scottish Land Tax – I know such a thing is overwhelmingly popular with party members as I’ve seen their response to it myself when I’ve been at previous conferences. Perhaps it’s time for members to make it clear to leadership that this omission is not acceptable.

Conclusion

I know this has been a negative article. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to see ambition and progressive moves for change in this agenda. There are good policies in there (like the well publicised £2 bus fares or, with caveats, the food price caps) that we’ll be tracking and encouraging but they are all relatively small compared to the massive centralising reform that is about to crash down upon us.

The Scottish Government used to believe in subsidiarity – the principle that governance should take place at the most local level possible and only devolved upwards when absolutely necessary. It appears that that principle is not just dead but is being actively held in contempt. This is something that must be pushed back on. Democracy should be for and by all of us, not just for the one person who thinks he should be in control over everything that he can’t sell off to an inwards investor for the lowest price possible.

How to break an investment bank

August 28, 2026September 2, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren’t they held accountable for their absurd debts? – Yanis Varoufakis

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.

A broken piggy bank spilling coins onto a white surface.

The Scottish National Investment Bank is back in the news this week with its annual accounts showing that annual losses have been mounting again. A series of high profile failures of companies that it was exposed to (such EV charging infrastructure company Trojan, the laser company I used to work at M Squared Lasers, and satellite company Orbex) have contributed to an annual loss of £138 million and the fifth consecutive year of losses for the state-owned company. There are serious questions looming over the survival of the bank if many more of these losses undermine its financial foundations.

This is really bitter news for us at Common Weal as SNIB is very much our baby. We were the ones who first made the case for patient investment financing in Scotland and we were the ones who wrote the first comprehensive blueprint for how the bank could operate. We were also the ones who led the campaign for the bank against opposition from the Scottish Government that was so firm that we redesigned the way we fight political campaigns to get it pushed through.

We were, of course, cut out of a lot of the development work after that point. We responded the consultations and we attended the parliamentary evidence sessions but the SNIB that came out the other end of the whole process did so with substantial deviations from our original blueprint. We believe that those deviations are at the heart of why the bank is in trouble today.

One of the first big changes was to the governance structure of the bank. We envisaged a tripartite structure. The first would be the actual governors of the bank who would manage the day-to-day operations. The second would be Scottish Government Ministers who would own the bank, would be the people the governors reported to for reasons of democratic accountability and who would set the Missions that the bank would have to meet with its investments.

The third would be an Advisory Council made up of trade unionists, industry specialists, staff representatives, members of non-government political parties and other civic representatives who would monitor progress towards the Missions and would recommend changes to them if required. The stakeholders would also be able to make recommendations about the level of funding the SNIB was receiving from Government and about how much the SNIB could loan out at any one time.

The change came with the third part, the Advisory Council. Essentially, the Government didn’t want anyone other than themselves to be able to tell the bank what to do so when the SNIB was founded, the Council was dropped entirely as a part of the governance model. After several years of our campaigning, Government eventually relented and set up a Ministerial Advisory Group but ensured that it couldn’t talk to the bank directly – it would report only to Ministers.

It took years again for the Board to be formally launched at the tail end of 2024. It has met together only five times since, the last time being in February of this year. It’s also worth noting that Common Weal was not invited to join the Advisory Board.

The second change came in the Missions. The Missions of the Bank, as developed by Ministers without the guidance of an Advisory Council, are brief, vague and don’t have specific targets associated with them and some seem to run contrary to the bank’s core purpose of patient, long-term finance. This is particularly true with their Innovation mission that drives so much of their funding.

The problem with the bank’s focus on start-ups is that they are hugely risky. You can’t pick winners without also picking losers and so losses have to be expected. The bank shouldn’t be getting attention for seeing some of its investments not pay off but because those failures are risking the integrity of the bank. This is the most important change that the government made to the bank that deviated from our blueprint and it’s the one that may well cause it to fail.

We recognised the risks of this kind of lending and so our plan was to ensure that the bank could afford to fail. We said that there should be three tiers of lending in the bank.

The first should be in social housing. This is extremely long term funding, not expected to make a profit for the bank for decades, but it would do much for the fundamentals of the Scottish economy and for the bank itself. In our paper Good Houses For All, we called for the SNIB to fund essentially unlimited social housing on a demand-led basis and in a way that would disrupt and outcompete the rest of the housing sector on both quality on price (meaning that developers of private rented and private owned houses would have to up their game to keep sales).

There are other ways to fund this kind of housing – like Local Authorities borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board – and these can and should be used too, but a Mission for the bank should have been to receive enough rental income from its share of social housing investments that it could cover all of its day-to-day running costs. The bank would never be able to go bankrupt so long as people in Scotland needed a roof over their heads.

“As it stands, the bank is just about “all-in” on tech and has invested little in energy and essentially nothing in social housing.”

The second tier of funding would be into public energy. This is more capital intensive than housing and it’s a bit riskier, but investing in public-owned or community-owned energy would also bring in larger returns than housing. The goal of this tier would be to bring in enough relatively stable revenue to expand the bank as well as to reshape the Scottish economy to bring down energy costs and free up our own money to be used elsewhere (not only has growth in our wages stagnated in recent decades, the share of our household income that is being absorbed by housing and energy costs is rising, meaning we have less to spend elsewhere even if our wages are keeping up with inflation).

Only at the third tier of funding should we be looking at investing in the innovative tech sector. This is important for the future of the Scottish economy but the bank must be resilient if some or even all of these investments fail. It wouldn’t be so bad if the “investment” mission was linked to the Scottish Government’s industrial and economic strategy but because we don’t even have one of those, the bank is effectively just taking random punts based on potential short term gains or which ever company can charm them with the juiciest story about their cut of the “next big” tech IP (this is probably how my former laser company got their money, their pitch at the time would have involved words like “laser”, “space-based”, “quantum” and “nanotechnology”).

As it stands, the bank is just about “all-in” on tech and has invested little in energy and essentially nothing in social housing. It doesn’t look like a patient finance investment bank. It looks like a business accelerator fund with less of an idea of what it wants to be than, say, Scottish Enterprise which is essentially being forced to compete with a SNIB that appears to be actively working against them. Without the energy and housing tiers supporting the fundamentals of the bank’s portfolio, it might only take a few more high profile tech sector collapses (perhaps due to the AI data centre bubble popping) to bring it down entirely.

The truth is that the Scottish Government never believed in the potential of the Scottish National Investment Bank. They formed it because they were pushed into a corner by our successful campaign but that didn’t mean that they were forced to make the bank become a success. So instead of following the vision given to them, they designed the bank to be captured by the same banking elite that caused the problems in our investment landscape that the bank was supposed to solve.

This could be fixed before the next big crash. It’ll involve redeveloping the Advisory Board to let it do its job, revamping the missions along the lines we’ve suggested here and probably replacing a good chunk of the governance board of the bank where those currently in can’t or won’t adapt to the changes demanded. The bank has to re-focus its investments to secure its own foundations through housing and give itself a stable expansion platform through energy. Once and only once this has happened can it start aligning itself to Ministerial investment strategy and resume investing in the industries that would take us towards those objectives.

We’ve never complained that the bank is investing in things that might fail. Failure is inevitable in investments. The bank should be resilient in the face of those failures. It should be a bank not chasing headlines due to its annual statements but focused on what it will help Scotland become in the next decade or even in the next century. Failure in investments is inevitable. The failure of the Scottish National Investment Bank should not be.

John Swinney Is Acting Like a Climate Denier

August 10, 2026September 2, 2026 / 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.

A photo of an oil rig bracketed by a blue sky and blue ocean.

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

August 8, 2026September 2, 2026 / 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.

A photo of a rack of public rental bicycles.

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

August 5, 2026September 2, 2026 / 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.

A stock photo of a luxury car parked outside an equally luxurious mansion.

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.