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.

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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.

England isn’t going to steal Scotland’s water

July 30, 2026September 2, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” – Terry Pratchett

This is an original post, not published elsewhere. If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A viral image of an OS-style map showing a water pipeline running from Inverness to London

There’s an image going viral around Scottish nationalist circles right now about hypothetical plans to build an aqueduct to move water from Scotland to England. There are grains of rationality behind it. England is suffering widespread and worsening droughts due to climate change, Scotland still has reasonably abundant water and low demand, at least one UK Prime Minister has actively floated the idea in the past, and there is a long history of Scottish resources being exported from Scotland without the people of Scotland being adequately compensated.

The problem with this idea is that it won’t work – the physics is against it.

For water to flow under gravity, there needs to be a minimum gradient. Current British water pipe standards suggest about 1:100 as a rough rule of thumb – for every 100m the conduit runs horizontally, it needs to drop 1m vertically. The shallowest Roman aqueducts ran at 1:1,000 though they clogged up pretty quickly without constant maintenance. The longest Roman aqueduct – about a 5th of the length of this proposal – had a gradient of about 1:660 along much of its course.

A photo of the ruins of a Roman aqueduct in Cologne, Germany showing a very thick layer of encrusted deposits narrowing the channel.

The straight-line distance between Aberdeen and London is 720km. This means the pipe at Inverness would need to be between 720m-7,200m above sea level to drop the water down to London. If your reservoir is on top of a Munro and you can build like a Roman, you might make it so long as there are no other hills in the way. If you build to British water standards, I doubt you will.

Ah, but we have pumps! Pumps can lift water back up so you can make many small steps down instead on one large one. Yes. That’s the second issue. Pumps cost energy to run. To lift 1,000kg (1 cubic metre – enough for one household for 2-3 days) of water from sea level to between 720m and 7,200m and to transport it at a rate of 1 cubic metre per hour, will cost you between 2kWh and 20kWh. It doesn’t matter how much that costs or whether you get the power from fossil fuels or from solar panels, you still need that power.

To desalinate 1,000kg from sea water in the South East will cost you between 1kWh and 3.5kWh per cm/h.

Therefore, to make an aqueduct from Scotland to England economically viable [See Note] we need a) the capital costs of the longest aqueduct in the UK to be massively lower than that of a bunch of desalination plants and b) to build the pipes more efficiently than current British water standards.

And this is before we consider that a more effective means of supplying demand might be to introduce better, more local resource efficiency measures, to build more reservoirs to store water for the dry seasons or to nationalise the private water companies and prosecute the former directors to recover the costs to repair the leaking pipes.

We also need to consider that a transnational water conduit that the SE absolutely requires is going to be an absurd national security risk given that it could be burst open by a single drone anywhere along its length. Desalination plants are already vulnerable as we can see by the war crimes currently being committed by the US and Iran to that effect, but at least they can be distributed so that taking out one still means that some water can flow.

So no. England isn’t going to build an aqueduct to transport all of Scotland’s water away. It’s going to be much easier for England to build power cables to transport away Scotland’s energy to feed their desalinators instead.

Note:- There are extremely long water pipelines in the world – the longest feeds from a pressurised fossil aquifer so has a degree of head lift that surface water does not and others tend to drop down from mountains rather higher than Scotland’s.

There are also extremely long, economically viable pumped oil pipelines. Oil costs between a hundred and a thousand times more than water on a per litre basis, so the economics of energy use are very different.

Defining the Right to Grow Old

July 24, 2026July 29, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

July 4, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Climate Emergency is Uninsurable

June 26, 2026September 2, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Watches the Watchdogs?

June 19, 2026July 4, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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