Scotland

Ageing For Indy?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” – Robert Frost

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I’m writing this on the 18th of September 2024. Ten years on from the independence referendum is a day of sober reflection. I certainly have a lot of memories of that day in particular as I spent it under a warm blue sky (much like today, though not quite as warm) going door-to-door to get out the vote amongst folk our campaign group, Yes Clydesdale, had identified as likely to vote Yes. The shattering of my hope was still several hours away, the grief of the following days and the determination to get back on my feet again was a little further away again. I remember many of my conversations that day but two stick out in particular right now.

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Why We Tax Houses

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.” – Adam Smith

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The past couple of weeks have been incredibly busy with some unprecedented levels of media attention pointing at Common Weal now. As much as I loathe to blow my own trumpet, I ended up appearing in The National five days in a row on various topics like local democracy, ScotWind and our local Property and Land Tax proposals (You can read all of those articles here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

By far the most feedback came from the latter articles on reforming Council Tax (Have you seen our new short video explainers popping up on social media about this and other topics? If so, what do you think of them?) and extending it into land to create a comprehensive Property Tax that would cut taxes for the vast majority of households and bring in over £1 billion a year in new revenue for Scottish Local Authorities.

Of course, not all of the feedback has been entirely positive but much of the rest has been around asking genuine questions about the policy so I thought I’d take the time in my column this week to answer some of them.

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PfG 2024 – Serving Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“When the dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive.” – George Orwell

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Serving Scotland, what exactly?

The Scottish Government’s latest Programme for Government, titled “Serving Scotland”, is little more than a list of platitudes covering some of the most brutal public service cuts in years coupled with a paring back of all sense of ambition in what should be a critical year of laying groundwork for the next election (if you take a short-termist political party view of things) or the rapid ramping up of actions to halt and mitigate climate change (if you’d prefer there to be a liveable biosphere in the next couple of generations).

The PfG is divided into four of the Government’s overarching strategies so it’s worth picking them apart one by one.

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It’s Time To Tax Scottish Land

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All I wish to make clear is that, without any increase in population, the progress of invention constantly tends to give a larger proportion of the produce to the owners of land, and a smaller and smaller proportion to labor and capital.” – Henry George

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

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Last week, I had the pleasure to address SNP members at the Revive Coalition’s fringe meeting on land reform where I presented Common Weal’s proposal to bring a land tax to Scotland. As the meeting wasn’t filmed, I want to discuss the issue here for the benefit of members (and non-members) who couldn’t be there. I am also delighted that after our fringe, members gave overwhelming support to two motions that would enable such a tax. Taxing land in Scotland is now solidly SNP policy and the Scottish Government should bring forward a Bill to enable it at the earliest opportunity. With the Scottish Government pledging to bring in fresh cuts of in excess of £500 million, to ignore a tool that would almost entirely avoid the need for them is simply unacceptable.

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How Not To Dispose Of Disposable Cups

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

If it can’t be reduced –
If it can’t be reduced
Reused, repaired – REUSED REPAIRED
Rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold
Recycled or composted – OR COMPOSTED
Then it should be – THEN IT SHOULD BE
Restricted, redesigned – RESTRICTED
REDESIGNED or removed – REMOVED!
From production – FROM PRODUCTION
– Pete Seeger

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The Scottish Government still doesn’t understand what a Circular Economy is or how to bring the public with them as they implement it. This has been made clear by their latest ad hoc and misjudged approach to dealing with disposable cups. Their consultation on the levy has been launched here and Common Weal will get our response in in due course, please make sure your voice is heard too.

The proposal shouldn’t be as contentious as this and I should shouldn’t be on the side of fighting it – especially as I both agree with and support the goal behind the policy; to reduce resource use and waste produced by our single-use consumerism.

The policy as it stands, a 25p levy on disposable cups purchased as part of a takeaway drinks order, though risks seeing people as consumers to be punished into doing the “right thing” even as producers are allowed to make it impossible to make the right choice.

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The Devolution Deficit

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy” – Milan Kundera

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Despite plenty of warning before the elections, new Chancellor Rachel Reeves has suddenly discovered a massive “hidden” black hole in the UK’s finances and she needs to make “difficult choices” to fix it. This is hardly to excuse the last 14 years of Conservative rule – it’s not as if they made a particular secret about their attempts to hollow the nation out for their own benefit – but as Robin has explained, political figures never seem to make “difficult choices” that would make things difficult for those who can afford it.

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Actions for Peace

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out.” – Noam Chomsky

This blog post previously appeared as an article in Secure Scotland‘s Whit Noo? magazine, for which I received a commission.

Peace

People sometimes mistake pacifism for inaction when it is the very opposite. To choose and to strive for peace is just as affirmative an action as to choose and to strive for violence. It is not something that happens due to the absence of violence or because we are protected by violence from some threat outwith or within. I write these words on the 14th of July 2024. The day after an attempted act of horrific violence against Donald Trump – a person with whom I share little in terms of worldview or aspirations and yet he is a person who, as with all people, I do not wish the harm he received nor the harm he very narrowly avoided and which some others that day sadly did not.

This essay is not about those events nor the events that led to them nor those that shall follow from them other than to say that my mantra that we should all strive always for peace is very much at the top of my mind as I write.

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Vote Dalȝell for Lord Provost! (Please Don’t!)

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” – Gene Sharp

This blog post is an extended edition of an article that previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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How would you feel if I, personally, had total control over the strategic direction of several key areas of public services that affect you? The odds of me being able to make a successful bid to win election as a Scottish “metro mayor” if they are introduced up here are not zero. I’ve been in politics long enough to have become well known at least in political circles, I have a few friends and hopefully not many more enemies. And though I’m not a member of a political party, I do get asked by several of them if I’d be willing to join and even if I didn’t, a run as an independent candidate wouldn’t be impossible. It’s even possible that you’d like some of my policies.

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Unburdening Myself

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.” – Vernor Vinge

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Virus

I spent last Thursday reading the first of the UK Covid inquiry reports and I really can’t tell you how unburdened it made me feel. A stain on my soul that I’ve carried for years may well be healing.

As someone in the world of think (and do) tanks and in lobbying I don’t expect to have everything I say adopted before the ink is even dry on the page. That’s not how it works. Our greatest policy successes have been long, hard struggles and because much of the hardest work happens in the background, when the success does come folk can wonder why we felt we had to fight so hard because, in hindsight, how could it have gone any other way? It led me to coining the phrase that everything in politics seems impossible until the moment it becomes inevitable.

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The Election That Everyone Lost

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

It is almost unnecessary to observe that the British Government had for more than a century been and could only be a Whig Government; and that the present administration is, as every administration in this country must necessarily be, a Whig administration. – UK Government Ministerial Memorandum to the Prince Regent, 1812

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Who were the winners in the General Election? I can tell you who won power for the next few years, but it’s harder to find who actually “Won” rather than just who lost less hard than everyone else. This is a major problem for democracy in the UK and one that needs to be fixed before the next election or we’re going to be put in a potentially very dangerous situation. The low turnout and catastrophically unfair First Past The Post voting system we have has resulted in a government with massive power, almost no possible accountability but simultaneously the most brittle mandate for that power possible.

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