ScottishPolitics

What Scotland can learn from the world’s first UBI

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” – Confucius

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.

(Image Source: Wikimedia)

I like to say that in politics everything seems impossible right up until the moment it becomes inevitable. What this means is that in hindsight, it’s easy to see how something happened even though the campaign had to fight through a mire of “it’ll never happen” almost all the way.

Few campaigns exemplify this maxim for me better than the campaign I’ve been a part of for more than a decade for Scotland to introduce a Universal Basic Income. What began as a campaign so outlandish and so seemingly utopian that we may as well have promised the Moon and the stars has reached the point where, in theory at least, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in favour of the principle of a UBI (The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems all support one in principle and Scottish Labour supports the weaker idea of a Minimum Income Guarantee though I do not believe they’d vote against a UBI if it came to it), even if the barriers to actually implementing one largely prevent it from happening quite yet (barriers largely within the power of the UK Government to remove…we’ll come back to that in a bit).

But still, elsewhere in the world, the impossible truly has become inevitable. This year, a news story happened that has been covered extensively outwith the West and Global North but which you almost certainly haven’t heard about. In November, the Marshall Islands became the world’s first UN Member Nation to announce the implementation of a full Universal Basic Income.

It’s still not “a lot”, even for the local economy, but it will be enough to make a meaningful difference. The UBI is set at 200 US dollars per quarter plus a system of additional rates for people who live in the more outlying islands in the state as well as for retirees, people with disabilities and others who qualify for a top up. It is expected that the system will have a gross cost around 8% of the state’s GDP for the foundational UBI. The payment can be made in the form of paper cheque, direct bank transfer or via cryptocurrency – the latter garnering some attention in crypto circles despite only a dozen or so people opting for this method of payment.

The UBI is largely being funded externally. The Marshall Islands are a sovereign state that is in a “free compact” with the USA – the UK equivalent would be something like an Overseas Territory like the Falkland Islands, albeit with more power over foreign affairs than the UK allows its former colonies – and the bulk of the money will draw from a trust fund set up by the US as part-compensation for the damage wrought by nuclear weapons testing.

We don’t (yet?) have a wealth fund like that but let’s consider what a UBI could look like if Scotland followed the example of the Marshall Islands.

At 8% of GDP, Scotland’s UBI would translate to around £3,200 per person per year or about £60 per week. This is around half of the maximum amount of Universal Credit so it probably strains the definition of “basic” at this level. And yet, we’ve seen in Scotland that even smaller payments, like the £27/week Scottish Child Payment, has already made a massive difference to those who receive it.

The gross cost of an 8% of GDP Scottish UBI would be £40 billion per year or about a third of the total Scottish public sector expenditure budget. But this is misleading on the face of it for the same reason that it would be misleading to judge the Marshall Islands’ UBI on its gross cost.

In Scotland’s case, the implementation of a UBI would require an overhaul of existing social securities. An independent Scotland would be free, of course, to design the system from the ground up but a devolved Scotland would have to renegotiate the Block Grant and devolved Fiscal Framework with the UK Government so that the UBI could part-replace Universal Credit or the state pension without being unfairly clawed back (the failure to agree this scuppered plans for a Scottish UBI pilot scheme a few years ago). Transferring, say, a third of the existing social protection budget into the UBI would reduce the gross cost by around £11 billion.

And then there’s the Scottish tax system. The principle of universality underlying a UBI states that it’s much easier to ensure that no-one who needs it doesn’t get it and that no-one who doesn’t qualify for it doesn’t cheat the system if everyone gets it unconditionally – from the poorest to the richest. Of course, those who “don’t need it” can simply have their total income tax increased to tax it back off them. A simple way of doing it would be to set a line – perhaps at the UK Minimum Income Standard level of around £31,000 per year for a single person with no children – and tax the UBI back off those who earn more. As this would cover around half of Scottish income tax payers – 1.5 million people – this would reduce the gross cost again by another £5 billion or so.

We could close the gap further by making the tax progressive and by targeting wealth as well as income via a land tax and reformed property taxation so that those who earn and own much more than most of us could “pay for” the UBI of several people.

As people spend their UBI, they will pay VAT and companies that receive extra custom due to people being able to afford to buy things will pay corporation taxes (both are currently reserved taxes and therefore raising complications around fiscal transfers under devolution). We could also look at using devolved taxation powers to target Scotland’s keystone exports of energy, whisky and salmon (sectors which are highly foreign-owned and therefore also export their profits from Scotland, contributing to a loss of more than £10 billion per year from Scotland).

Taking these into account reduces the total actual bill for a Scottish UBI from “impossible” to a scheme that starts to look just about possible even under devolution (so long as Westminster abstains from its effective veto over implementation). But there’s one final aspect of a UBI to consider. The cost of poverty within the current system.

If we consider the cost of healthcare resulting from poverty-related conditions, the loss of productivity from poverty (the chronic stress of poverty makes for less productive workers and blocks the ability to take risks such as entrepreneurship), the cost of delivering expensive services such as crisis care for homeless people rather than simply making affordable housing a human right, the additional costs of administering “means-tested” social securities which sometimes exceeds the cost of the benefits being withheld because the punitive nature of the system is part of the point.

This kind of poverty may well be more expensive than the overall net cost of a UBI sufficient to eliminate it. At this point, we see that a UBI isn’t an impossible utopian dream, but becomes a moral imperative that must happen if we are to continue to call ourselves a civilised nation.

The Marshall Islands have proven that the impossible can become inevitable. I look forward to the day that Scotland inevitably does the same.

Approaching 2026 With Hope

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

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

My last Common Weal Magazine article was my sum up of Common Weal’s year in policy for 2025. If you haven’t read that, go and recharge your beverage of choice (it’s a long article) and give it a read. I’m sure there were a couple of our successes this year that you’ve missed.

Next year will be one that starts off running. The Scottish elections are scheduled for May and that means for think tanks like us, a lot has to get done – thought perhaps not quite in the way that you might think.

The first couple of months will be busy as the Parliament rapidly runs through its “wash up” period. A feature of our democracy is that if any legislation hasn’t been finished and fully voted on by the time that Parliament shuts down for the election in March then it doesn’t roll over into the next Parliament. It “falls” and has to be started again from scratch. This goes just the same for a relatively inconsequential Member’s Bill as it does for a flagship manifesto promise from the Government, so there’s a lot of pressure from a lot of parties to get things done.

We’ve already seen a couple of bits of legislation that we’re interested in fall by the wayside (the attempt from Mercedes Vilalba to impose a maximum cap on land ownership is still technically a Member’s Bill but when the Government voted down an amendment to the Land Reform Bill that would have incorporated it, that pretty much ended hope of them supporting it as standalone legislation). We’re also still waiting to find out if Katy Clark’s Bill to extend Freedom of Information rights in Scotland will get time to finish its process and we’ll be applying pressure to try to make that happen.

We also see Bills pass and fail in somewhat strange ways. The Bill to specifically criminalise the theft of dogs passed this week – despite existing legislation covering the theft of property more generally both already covering dogs and imposing potentially harsher punishments for doing so, meaning that you could interpret the new legislation as posturing at best and the part-decriminalisation of theft at worst. Even as a cat-lover myself, I can’t help but wonder if this was the best use of limited Parliamentary time.

Meanwhile other Bills with arguably much larger social impacts have been dropped such as plans to accelerate the decarbonisation of home heating (albeit not in the way we’d prefer to see) or plans to cut speed limits on roads which absolutely would have saved lives.

All this is to say that the first couple of months trying to sort out what we can help get done (or help to avoid happening) is going to take up a fair bit of time in the first part of the year.

During the election period itself though, think tanks like ours can be remarkably quiet. Sure, you might see some of us as talking heads and pundits on various commentary outlets or perhaps even on election night itself (not that I’ve been invited yet – though I have done the 10pm-5am stint in a previous election) but in terms of policy and lobbying, all of the manifestos have been written and we have no idea who will and will not have a seat until the count happens.

After that, depending on how shaken up Parliament is, we’ll have our work cut out of us to introduce ourselves to the various new (and returning) Ministers and party spokespeople and to start laying out what we can do given the balance of parties. Who knows. We might well get a progressive alliance of parties looking for fresh ideas. We might get a collection of conservative (small-c) “old guard” who need to be strongly nudged along the way. We might well get a Parliament that is openly hostile to our views and needs to be opposed to prevent them from doing damage to the fabric of Scotland. Whichever way, there’ll certainly be a role for Common Weal and I hope you’ll continue to follow and support us on that journey.

Beyond that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. Our policy pipeline remains a long one and we have some major work upcoming on inequality, on education, on healthcare reform and on digital security as well as ongoing work from folk like our Care Reform Group and Energy Working Group who have been making real strides in changing legislation and regulation in Scotland and in the UK (for just the latest example, see our mention in the Committee evidence report on the Children’s Care Bill published this week where we’ve been advocating for the Scottish Government to keep its promise to remove profit from such care).

“But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were.”

This year has been a dark one. I’m personally extremely worried about the rise of militarism and the pulling away from the only things that will ever actually prevent wars before they start – the world appears to be collectively abandoning climate action, foreign aid, help for displaced peoples and peaceful diplomacy.

But there’s hope too. It’s hard to see the work that went into preventing a war that was never fought. Or to prevent the famine in which no-one starved. But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were. There’s hope that what is happening can therefore be undone and reversed – perhaps with the appreciation now of what could be.

For the smallest glimmer of that, this week I finished work that I’ve spend the last two years working on alongside SCIAF and Friends of the Earth Scotland in which we drew together a dozen people from across four continents for a consultation on how Scotland can make its Circular Economy strategy more powerful.

We’ll be reporting on that next year too but it was an empowering thing to see Scotland actively reach out to others beyond our borders to ask them how our policies on trade, manufacturing and waste management was affecting them and how we could improve ourselves. One of the attendees openly said that this might be the first time that a Global North Government has done consultation on domestic policy in this way and they hoped that it might become the inspiration for others to follow. I’m thankful to the Scottish Government for taking to our pitch with the enthusiasm that they did and for their support in making it happen.

And I’m grateful to all of our readers and supporters who keep us doing what we’re doing. Common Weal is an unusual think tank. We’re not beholden to a particular political party, or to government funding (while the Scottish Government funded the project I’ve just mentioned, neither I nor Common Weal took a fee or compensation from that pot – not even expenses), and our policy programme isn’t dictated to us by the demands of advertisers or funding bodies.

We’re supported by you and people like you. While this means that our funding is a fraction of what it could be (seriously, the First Minister earns more in a year than Common Weal as a whole does), it gives us the freedom to live our principles. If you’re not already a donor or if you know someone who might like to sign up and start supporting us, then please visit our donate page.

Other than that, my final message of the year is my hope that you all have a peaceful and happy winter break – however you may mark it – and that I’ll be back in the New Year rested, full of cheese and raring to go. I’ll see you there.

How to profit from not-for-profit care

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Just because brokerages disclose a convoluted web of profiteering doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. It just means they are hiding these questionable practices in plain sight with a mountain of compliance language that no one will ever read.” – Christopher Manske

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters here.

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

I would like you to imagine the following scenario: You are a company owner or shareholder. Like every ‘good’ Capitalist, you want to leverage your assets to make as much money as you can. The issue is that you work in a sector where making a profit has been deemed by the Government to be unacceptable and they have banned you from making one. How do you extract as much as you can?

As a bit of background, this thought experiment stems from the conclusions of our latest policy paper, Why and how the Scottish Government must end private provision of children’s care, which has found that private companies, including ostensibly ‘not-for-profit’ companies, that deliver children’s care services are extracting an average of £28,000 per child per year from care services. This includes an average of £9,000 per child per year from foster care specifically where, in Scotland, it is explicitly illegal to make a profit..

These findings have come off the back of the Scottish Government making a pledge to eliminate profit from children’s care and they themselves have described our findings as “shocking”, though they are sticking by their current action plan to merely “limit” profit in such care. The problem as we see it though is that there are various mechanisms open to companies to allow them to extract money from the system in ways that wouldn’t be counted as ‘profit’.

This is because ‘profit’ has very narrow meaning in this context. It’s just what a company has left over after all of its expenses are subtracted from its income. In a for-profit company, this is often distributed to owners and shareholders as a dividend (see my recent article on the financialisation of housing and why that is costing you an average of £67,000 in extra mortgage payments for an example of this in action).

It would be perfectly possible for the Scottish Government to ban the sharing of such dividends for children’s care services and to legislate that only not-for-profit companies can bid for care contracts. However, this is not enough to prevent people from making money from children’s care. To that end, we’ve concluded in our paper that the only way to avoid profit extraction from children’s care is to bring the whole sector into public ownership.

If we don’t, then we’ll just end up with ‘profit’ being shifted into some of the following means of making money without making a profit.

1. Pay yourself as much as you need

The simplest and easiest way of extracting money now that your company has been banned from giving you a dividend, is to simply pay you more. Whatever the company’s surplus was last year, you can just pay to yourself as a salary. There will be tax implications for this – you’ll be paying income tax instead of Capital Gains tax so, especially in Scotland, the tax on your earnings will be substantially higher than if you were paying yourself a dividend, but that might still be worth it.

We found examples of children’s care companies in Scotland where the Director was being paid almost £350,000 per year – and we’ve found similar examples in other ‘not-for-profit’ care sectors like social work. This is more than twice the annual salary of the Scottish First Minister. Note that these high levels of pay often do not filter down to the front-line care staff who are, in fact, often paid less than their public sector counterparts as well as losing out on benefits and rights such as better conditions or union representation. While it is important to ensure that expenditure matches income to avoid ‘profit’, it’s clear that some expenditures are more worthy than others…

This is one area that might still be an issue if the sector is brought into public ownership – a prominent current example is the dispute over the pay rises granted to Scottish Water executives. However, this is still a better idea than the current system allows for. Partially because the Scottish Water scandal is a scandal precisely because it is public owned.

This means that such pay is democratically accountable and Ministers can be challenged for their oversight and the executive salaries are all public knowledge rather than being hidden or woven through opaque company accounts (in our report we couldn’t track down the executive pay of more than a couple of companies because some simply do not disclose it). Also though, Scottish Water has a near-monopoly on service provision in Scotland because it is public owned. In the care sector it’s not just the Director of one company whose salary is under question but multiple companies all working all across the care sector.

2. Lease yourself to yourself

If your care company is banned from making a profit then you can split that company into two. The ‘not-for-profit’ company that actually provides the care services might be banned from making a profit but the for-profit company that is also owned by you is the one who owns the building that the not-for-profit uses. This company charges a lease to the not-for-profit for the use of the building that just so happens to be high enough to eat their operating surplus.

‘Management Fees’ are another way of making these kinds of transfers from a subsidiary to a parent company and come with the added benefit of not being tied to a physical asset like a building and thus there’s no risk of someone noticing that you’re charging far higher rents than would be expected in the local market.

This is also a common tactic amongst multinational companies who want to shift money into tax havens or ‘tax friendly’ institutions. Coffee company Starbucks is well known for buying its coffee beans via a subsidiary company in Switzerland and charges its UK and other branches just enough for those beans to conveniently make sure that their UK outlets never make a ‘profit’ and thus pay little tax in the UK.

3. Give out a loan, and make them pay it back

One of the touted advantages of being owned by a larger company is that they can bring investment cash your way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible to get. Of course, investments always demand a return and the money your parent company loans to your subsidiary (remember, in this scheme you own both companies) should be paid back… with interest.

Even better, because this is an internal company loan rather than one via a regulated bank, you can charge whatever level of interest that you like and easily tailor the repayments to ensure that the not-for-profit company never makes a profit. If you ever wonder why profitable companies end up completely loaded with debt just a few years after being bought out by a global equity fund, this is very likely what has happened.

4. Receive a loan, and keep it.

It doesn’t need to be the parent company passing debt down, of course. This kind of financial transaction can happen the other way too. If the not-for-profit finds itself with a substantial surplus that it can’t get rid of before tax day, then it can loan that cash to the parent company or its Directors (e.g. you). The difference here is that you don’t charge above market rates for this upwards loan.

Maybe you don’t charge any interest at all. Maybe you don’t even expect the parent company to repay the loan ever. Sure, it’ll appear on the parent company’s books as a debt and that could be a problem in certain circumstances but there’s an easy way to deal with that. Simply wind up the not-for-profit company and the debt can be written off and the parent keeps the cash.

How to avoid profit in children’s care

The Scottish Government’s response to our paper was that the figures involved – £28k profit per child, per year – are “shocking” but also that they are not going to deviate from their paradoxical position that while any profit in children’s care is unacceptable, they are merely going to legislate to “limit” it.

As I hope we’ve seen here, that isn’t going to be enough. Even if the ‘limit’ on companies making a ‘profit’ from children’s care is set to zero, it won’t prevent those companies from extracting money from care or – by dint of paying workers as little as they can get away with – from carers. The only solution we can see is to bring the entire children’s care sector – both residential care and fostering – into public control.

This would, of course, be easier if we had a National Care Service to oversee the whole process but the failure of that Bill this year means we’ll need to take a more roundabout way of doing things. We still support an NCS and want to see it created in the next Parliament but children and carers can’t wait till then when we have opportunities now.

The next stage for our work on this will be to try to work out how much it will cost to bring that care into public ownership. We’re stymied by lack of data in this respect but early figures indicate that it might not be as huge of a problem as some fear – possibly on the scale of tens of millions of pounds rather than hundreds of millions. In this respect, it’s probably not dissimilar to our per capita estimates for nationalising all care in Scotland. After all, once we accept that it’s not acceptable to make a profit from caring for children, why should we treat adults any different?

Post-script – The Scottish Parliament’s report on the consultation on profit in children’s residential care can now be read here.

Use energy to win independence, rather than independence to win energy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The problem with the idea of cause and effect is that what is deemed the cause is an effect.” –  Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Scotland doesn’t need independence to start owning our own energy.

It feels like 2025 has come full circle for us at Common Weal. January started for us with an announcement from the Scottish Government that it was “not possible” to bring Scottish renewable energy into public ownership – an announcement made after the publication of a poll showing that more than 80% of people in Scotland favoured them doing so. We responded with a briefing paper called “How to own Scottish energy” which laid out the logic behind their announcement, why that logic was flawed and how they could bring energy into public ownership despite their own objections.

In short, the Government’s stance is based on an extremely narrow reading of the Scotland Act which actively prohibits the Scottish Government or Scottish Ministers from owning electricity generating, storage or transmission assets. Under this reading, there cannot be a “National Electricity Company” designed and owned in the same way as some public corporations in Scotland like CalMac or ScotRail.

However, we showed in our paper that various options were not blocked by this prohibition. For example, a Minister-owned “National Heat Company” could be designed to build and own district heat networks to keep us all warm (the prohibition is specifically about electricity, not other forms of energy). The Government could also build a National Energy Company and hand ownership over to a consortium of Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities. Or each Council could own their own energy companies. Or the Government could back the creation of a private energy company that is mutually owned by every adult resident of Scotland. Or, instead of complaining about the limits of devolution, they could be applying pressure on the UK Government to amend what is very clearly a completely obsolete prohibition in the Scotland Act (especially as a narrow reading of it also prohibits the Scottish Government from erecting solar panels on its own buildings).

Come forward now to December and the SNP have kicked off their 2026 election campaign with a new paper essentially saying the same thing as they did earlier this year except framing it around “we’ll do it, but only after independence”. On public ownership in particular, they aren’t advocating for the full-scale nationalisation of energy but their ambition appears to extend only to communities owning up to 20% of local renewable projects.

20% is far better than the current level of a rounding error above 0%, but it’s clear that even within devolution, the Scottish Government could do far more than it’s currently doing to support communities by giving them grants and loans to purchase stakes in developments, to pressure developers to sell or grant those stakes to communities as a condition of planning permission or the renewal of licences and to actively use opportunities like the “repowering” of developments, the end of their licence periods and break-clauses in contracts that would allow poorly performing developers to have their licences withdrawn and transferred to public bodies (in much the same way as the Government took ScotRail back from Abelio in 2022)

This doesn’t get the UK Government off the hook though.

Their recent announcement that some £28 billion will be added to consumer energy bills to pay for vital energy grid upgrades is going to stick in the craw of people whose energy bills are already too high. Worse will be that most of the profits of that investment will flow into multinational companies – including foreign public energy companies – with none returning to the consumers themselves. These investments, too, should be made on a staked ownership basis so that the people paying for them – us – should become shareholders in the investments and see a return on our investment. To make things perfectly clear, if the UK Government had announced that it was going to fully publicly own the assets built via this spending, then the added costs on your bill would be the same. In other words, the choice to publicly own the UK’s new energy assets will cost you the same as the choice to leave them in private hands.

“Can’t we use our public owned energy to help win back our independence, rather than claiming more weakly that we can use independence to win back our energy?”

The same will be true of assets in an independent Scotland – but given the Scottish Government’s “all in” approach to “inward investment” (something their plan published this week mentions more often than public ownership), I can completely see them making the same mistake and forcing us to pay for assets that someone else will profit from.

I freely admit that there are aspects of Scotland’s energy transition that are not in Scotland’s hands and which are not likely to be easily negotiated away as part of an adjustment to devolution such as Scottish consumers being forced to pay for extremely expensive and risky nuclear projects that even NESO (formerly, the National Grid) now says are not needed to meet Green energy targets but this does not let the Scottish Government off from making the changes it can make now rather than using the dangling carrot of independence as a means of delaying action. If anything, independence will come less from making a promise that might be fulfilled afterwards but by taking tangible actions now that push devolution to the limit and then saying to voters “if you want more, you know what to do”.

If it truly is, as the Scottish Government says, Scotland’s Energy – then shouldn’t we take back as much as we can now as use that as leverage to win the rest? Can’t we use our public owned energy to help win back our independence, rather than claiming more weakly that we can use independence to win back our energy?

Communities have been priced out of owning Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain…There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.” – Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle’s Speech (1854)

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

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

Two new reports show that the rate of land transfers to community ownership in Scotland has dropped to the lowest level since the start of devolution and that a poll of the Scottish public shows near-unanimous support for more land reform over and above that which may be delivered by the recent Land Reform Bill.

The recently passed Land Reform Bill is simultaneously “the most radical land reform legislation in the history of devolution” (the Government’s characterisation of it) and so weak that even before it has achieved Royal Assent, 96% of people polled say it doesn’t go far enough and that they want more. Who the other 4% are is not known but they’re probably the kind of person who would answer in the negative to a question like “Are puppies cute?”

How these two statement can both be true and accurate is a reflection not of the strength of the 2025 Land Reform Bill but a reflection of the weakness of the previous round of land reform in 2016.

This Bill was designed to strengthen community right to buy rules laid down in yet still previous land reform attempts in 2015 and 2003, specifically granting Ministers the power to force a compulsory sale of sale to communities for the purposes of sustainable development even if the land owner wasn’t willing to sell or couldn’t be identified.

A few years ago, I wrote an analysis of a report published looking at the rate of transfers of land to Scottish communities since the start of devolution. The results were stark. It found that despite the 2016 round of reforms being specifically aimed at making community land transfers easier, there were serious other barriers looming. In particular, the assets being transferred were getting smaller and smaller even though the overall number of transfers were still proceeding steadily. What this meant is that where before a community might have been able to enact a community buyout of the entire estate on which they lived or their local wind farm, communities were instead only buying out perhaps their village hall or even just the old phone box to turn into a medical station or pop-up craft store.

I’m not berating some of these initiatives as they are undoubtedly a good thing. I’m not even trying to suggest that communities lack ambition in their purchases. I’m saying that they are being blocked from realising their ambition by land prices surges that are making it impossible to purchase land.

One of the aspects of the latest Bill is that communities must be notified ahead of a large land sale and must be given time to put together a purchase bid. But if the price is still so high that they cannot put together the cash regardless of time, then the notice is merely an insult added to the injury.

Move forwards three years to now and that community land report has been refreshed and brought up to date. Unfortunately, the results are even worse now. In the years between 2000 and 2023, an average of 7,023 hectares of land were transferred to community ownership each year. In 2024, just 8.46 hectares were transferred to community ownership. This is the lowest rate of transfer in a single year since 2000.

Worse, the total number of transfers has fallen off a cliff too. From a peak of 80 transfers in 2021, Scotland only transferred 23 parcels of land to communities in 2024.

Now, that peak of 80 in 2021 does show some evidence of delays caused by Covid in 2020 but even then, while the country was in total lockdown for much of that year, 43 transfers were made covering 423 hectares. In 2020, during the worst global pandemic of a lifetime, Scotland managed to transfer to community ownership 50 times as much land as it was able to do in 2024.

The drop in 2024 represents a total reversal of the progress made from 2014 which saw a substantial and sustained rise in communities being able to buy the land under their feet. These results show that far from the 2016 Act accelerating land transfers, they have almost halted since then. 95% of all of the land in community ownership in Scotland was transferred to communities before the 2016 Act took effect.

“The latest round of Land Reform clearly won’t be enough to fix this problem and it’s clearly not enough to satisfy what is as close to a unanimous poll of the Scottish public as it is practically possible to find.”

I believe that the reason for this stagnation is the same as the one I noted in 2022. Scottish land prices are being inflated beyond any reasonable expectation by speculators going all in on buying up land for carbon offsetting, encouraged by a Scottish Government that is similarly all in on encouraging “foreign direct investment” as the sole tool of boosting Scottish GDP, regardless of the cost to our future economy or our present communities.

The thing is though, I wonder if the votes on the Land Reform Bill might have been different had this latest report been public knowledge before it passed. It would have been valuable leverage for those campaigning for strong powers of community buyouts in that Bill. It might well have led to amendments designed to counter this trend of people being priced off the land.

I wonder why the Government didn’t publish this report then or even allude to its findings via its own amendments. I’m fairly sure that they would have had advance knowledge of the findings of the report to some degree (I know this because I recently had a Freedom of Information request on another issue knocked back on the excuse that while the Government had the data, it was due to be published anyway within a couple of months – which it duly was). Yet little was said during the various debates around this Bill.

The latest round of Land Reform clearly won’t be enough to fix this problem and it’s clearly not enough to satisfy what is as close to a unanimous poll of the Scottish public as it is practically possible to find. This is clearly an issue that must be revisited in the next Parliament. We’ll be keeping a close eye on manifestos as they are published and, of course, we’ll continue to campaign (with your support) for real land reform so that Scotland can start working for All of Us, rather than just the very few who can afford to buy the land under our feet.

Covid lessons should have been learned in real time

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.” – Joanne Harris

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

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 stock photo of vials of Covid-19 vaccines

Common Weal looks at the second report of the UK Covid Inquiry with some frustration. It’s not that we don’t agree with the findings, its that we were reporting on these issues in real time. There is no finding in this report that Common Weal did not raise at the time.

We believe there is a conclusion to be drawn from this; society needs more than a small political class talking to a small community of corporate and public sector leaders in private and a small media class in public. We need national debate to include many more voices and perspectives and for those to be taken seriously.

Let’s look at three of the key findings. First, that we were lax to begin the lockdown and poorly prepared for it when we did. This is something Common Weal identified early. We were warning that we should have moved to lock-down early in March 2020 and had already been raising fears the previous month.

By 16 March 2020 we were utterly bemused at the decision to allow 9,400 people to attend a Lewis Capaldi concert in Aberdeen less than a week before we were in full lockdown. We were issuing almost daily warnings in the week running up to lockdown. And then, when lockdown started, Common Weal warned that the UK Government was making a mess of it and that Scotland’s determination to stick to a ‘four nations’ approach was a mistake.

So when Scotland gradually started to diverge, we warned that it was too little too late. Again, as we approached the end of the first lockdown we warned that nothing like sufficient preparation had been made to suppress the virus once we were (partially) reopened.

But it is perhaps the second main conclusion that is most important here – the failure of testing. The difference between needing one lockdown and needing multiple lockdowns was the extent to which we could suppress the virus in the interim period via a testing regime. The entire first lockdown should have been focussed on developing a comprehensive approach. We warned this at the time.

Yet against all the global public health advice, the official Scottish Government position was that “testing is a distraction”. This was inexplicable and we were so concerned that Common Weal strayed out of our comfort zone to produce a public health policy paper in which we set out a testing regime we thought had the best chance of successfully suppressing Covid.

We published it as Ending Lockdown. The Scottish Government ignored it and so as the second lockdown approached we produced a more detailed version. Eventually a watered-down version of our proposals was belatedly put in place. We continue to believe that there remains a chance that the second lockdown could have been avoided altogether if a more rigorous approach was taken.

It is also worth noting that while Common Weal suggested that an elimination strategy was the only one that had actually worked (in New Zealand), it would take steps the Scottish Government would see as too radical to achieve that – closing roads outside airports, ports and the border and putting ‘testing borders’ in place.

For some reason the then First Minister thought it was possible to start talking about a strategy of elimination without taking any of these measures. That she did anyway certainly justifies the criticism of this stance in the report. It was vainglorious rather than credible.

And that leads to the third main conclusion – that there was a narrow and closed-off leadership approach which harmed policy creation, and that the First Minister spent too much time doing television briefings which should have been shared among other senior figures.

Again, this problem was quite clear at the time and something that we commented on a number of times but was not picked up in wider media debate. This resulted in a failure to scrutinise what was actually happening.

There are other issues we expect the Scottish inquiry to cover, including the cover-up of the first outbreak of Covid which took place in a large corporate hotel and policy of sending Covid-positive patients into care homes. Certainly there is no doubt that in Scotland we did not see the utter chaos and rampant corruption that we saw at Westminster, but this is a low bar.

While this report is welcome, we believe that there remains insufficient scrutiny of the extent to which civic Scotland stopped asking questions and stopped challenging decisions for months on end. Common Weal managed to derive policy positions which are now being vindicated from publicly available source material and we did it at the time. Nothing in the inquiry report published yesterday cannot be found from the content in the links above.

The problem is that the sense of national emergency, the political culture of the Sturgeon court, the legitimate universal fear and uncertainty that the lockdown induced and unhelpful and uninformed social media commentary combined to suspend politics and reduce scrutiny at a point where it was never more needed.

What is the lesson we should really learn from the pandemic? Don’t wait for lessons to be learned, pay attention at the time and ask difficult questions. It leads to better decisions. Then again, we did warn about this in the first week of lockdown…

Covid lessons should have been learned in real time

SNP Members back Common Weal’s public energy strategy (again)

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It’s that simple.” – Michael Hureaux-Perez

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

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

The SNP members at their conference this month backed a major energy motion supported by the SNP Trade Union Group (TUG). This motion was developed in consultation with the STUC and with energy experts including myself and deeply integrates several aspects of Common Weal’s proposals for reform of the Scottish energy sector – including by moving forwards plans to bring energy into Scottish public ownership.

The motion was passed by acclaim and without objection meaning that this is now the fourth time that the SNP members have voted for an energy motion including public ownership at their national conference – each time achieving overwhelming or unanimous support. You can watch the presentation of the motion starting from the 1 hour 10 minute mark here.

The motion itself (pictured above) focusses on six key areas which are worth explaining in some detail.

1. Achieving Equity Stakes

Something that Common Weal has long advocated for is for the Government to stop just handing money to very large, often already very rich, companies in the form of tax breaks, loans or outright grants is no longer appropriate for a renewable energy sector that has for many years now demonstrated the ability to make a profit without public subsidy. At the same time, we’ve been shouting for some time about the obscenely high level of foreign ownership in the Scottish economy – particularly within the fundamental economy like energy.

Instead of just throwing money at the sector, the Scottish Government should demand equity – ownership shares – in return for public money and should even demand a public equity share as a precondition for planning permission or the granting of option rights in projects like the successors to ScotWind. Denmark recently did precisely this, calling for a minimum 20% public stake in offshore renewable projects.

This is, of course, a bit easier for Denmark as they have several publicly owned energy companies who, by definition, meet that stake simply by doing their job. Scotland – starting from the position of not having a public energy company – may have to take a position similar to that of GB Energy, being a kind of silent investment partner who merely provide the money and take the profits rather than taking an active role in developing the project.

However this should be merely a first step where small stakes are used as a training ground to build up the experience needed for the Scottish energy company to start joining projects as a co-developer, start to bid for projects on their own and then to move to a “no bid” process whereby the Scottish energy company simply start running all new Scottish energy projects by default.

The second part of the proposal is important for the initial “silent investor” stages. It would not do for the Scottish Government to be effectively investing in and buying ownership stakes in companies who treat their workers unfairly, so this provision would be an additional incentive for companies that if they want the support of Government then they have to meet a minimum standard of workers’ rights.

This is the approach the Scottish Government took to distinguish themselves from the UK with their “Green Freeports” which does show that the Fair Work principles are themselves not strong enough and might be of limited actual impact, but they do still represent a floor below which Government-supported jobs should not fall.

2. Appropriate ownership limits and break clauses

One of the things we discovered when researching for our second ScotWind paper was the discovery that the lease terms for offshore wind projects can stretch into multiple decades despite the turbines themselves reaching “breakeven” and starting to make a profit sometimes after only five or seven years or so. The “NR4” round of offshore wind in England promised a 60 year lease period for wind turbines.

With a normal lifespan of 20 to 30 years, this means that the lease would cover the operational lifespan of two or three generations of such turbines and if the five year payback period is achieved, then the lease could generate up to 50 years worth of energy profits.

Our default position is that until Scotland has the capacity to manufacture and install turbines ourselves then it’s fine to hire a developer to do it for us and perfectly acceptable for them to expect to recoup their investment and make a reasonable profit but that after a lease period that is as short as practical (say, ten years), ownership of the turbine should then be transferred to Scottish public ownership.

There is a caveat here. If the turbines have a 20 year lifespan, then nationalising them on year 19 would effectively just mean letting the corporations take all the profits and then socialising the decommissioning costs (much like what has happened with the Scottish oil sector).

In addition to a short lease there should also be strict break clauses whereby if the developer does not meet minimum standards such as on workers’ rights or if they break promises to invest in local supply chains or otherwise no longer meet reasonable standards as an operator in Scotland then the Government should activate a break clause in the contract, pull the lease in and give it to a Scottish public operator – this is precisely what the Government did in 2021 to nationalise ScotRail.

This is also how Scotland effectively nationalises all of our renewable energy for no cost to the electricity consumer. All we need to do is ensure that the current generation of generators are brought into public hands soon enough that they can pay for their replacements. This doesn’t just need to happen at a national scale with large developments like ScotWind. This can scale down to the community level where communities should be able to take over small onshore wind and solar farms.

That a community in Scotland recently failed to take over their local wind farm because a Scottish public body didn’t even consider the possibility of this shows how badly out of step Scottish policy is with the will of the people right now (I’m told that the community in question is now in the process of trying to buy out the land under the turbines so that they’ll get the rent from that and will control the next round of leases in the future – good luck to them).

3. Local supply and retrofitting

There is a massive mismatch between the Scottish Government’s energy supply policy and their energy demand policy (such that the latter exists). We all recognise that the climate emergency means that we need to use resources more efficiently. We also recognise that the vast majority of fuel poverty is caused by the fact that we need so much fuel to heat our homes. New buildings could be (but aren’t being) built so that they use an absolute minimum of energy (a properly built Passive House can use less energy to heat in a year than yours does in a winter month).

Transport policy could also be built to minimise energy use via much greater use of public transport for the vast majority of people. That traffic jam your stuck in where every car has an average of 1.1 people inside it is just about the least efficient way of moving people that could possibly be devised. Turning that traffic jam from a queue of fossil fuel burning cars into one of electric cars might be cleaner, but it’ll still double Scotland’s current electricity demand (inefficient heating would double it again).

So this part of the motion aims to double down on efforts to retrofit buildings and to boost local supply of materials to do so (for instance, the vast majority of sustainable insulation made from things like cellulose is imported into Scotland despite so much of our land being covered by monoculture sitka spruce plantations)

This week in one of our daily briefings (sign up here to get a short article on a news story that caught our eye every weekday) was on the story that one of the UK’s insulation projects had failed so badly that 98% of homes covered by it need to get it ripped out and redone. We outlined how to do this kind of work better not by relying on throwing money at companies and then not checking their work but by establishing the task as a public works infrastructure project to properly coordinate it and make it cheaper and more efficient to do. This plan has won favour at previous SNP conferences but, as with so many of our plans for public infrastructure, has been ignored by the leadership.

4. Establish an energy company

The SNP membership has supported a Scottish public energy company since we started lobbying for it in 2017. The SNP leadership has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards that support too. The first Scottish Government plan for a Scottish electricity retail company fell afoul of a UK energy market that overwhelmingly favours large cartels over small providers and, as we warned at the time, an energy company that lacked its own generators and other assets would be entirely at the mercy of global energy price spikes. That proposal was dragged along without the reforms we warned would be needed until it was scrapped in 2021.

Earlier this year, another push from members to get the policy back on the books was blocked by the Government under the excuse that it couldn’t be enacted under the limits of devolution. We responded with a paper laying out six ways that Scotland could own Scottish energy assets under devolution – including via a network of municipal energy companies or via a National Mutual model where Scottish residents are shareholders in the company instead of Scottish Ministers (which is the actual thing that the Scotland Act blocks).

“The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.”

This paper forms the heart of this part of the motion and we’re very happy that the SNP conference unanimously supported it. It is now clear SNP policy that Scotland should publicly own Scottish energy assets via whichever means that Devolution allows. I would favour either the Mutual model where the company is collectively owned by all of the people of Scotland or, failing that, by a National Energy Company collectively owned by the 32 Local Authorities.

Either way, the NEC should be combined with a mandate for the NEC to actively support municipal and community energy companies – co-investing with them in Public/Public Partnerships to help them bootstrap each other up to the point where the larger scale proposals outlined above like taking over existing developments at end-of-lease or outright developing ScotWind-scale projects becomes viable.

What is clear now is that the Scottish Government has run out of excuses. Their refusal to adopt a policy of publicly owning Scottish energy has not more legislative barriers left and now flies directly in the face of the will of their own party. I would expect to see their upcoming election manifesto reflect this will and, should the SNP be part of the Government after the elections, I expect to see proposals to bring about the NEC laid down and developed with all possible speed.

5. Invest in training and a Just Transition Jobs Register

The Just Transition is not going well. Despite the best efforts of polluting megacorporations to try to ride their climate emergency through just a few more quarterly shareholder targets, people are leaving the sector in Scotland either through choice or – as the closure of Grangemouth has highlighted – through the choice of others. However, we’re not seeing these skilled workers move into the renewables sectors at anywhere near the rate we need.

A policy passed at SNP conference a few years ago was the idea of a Just Transition Jobs Register. This would track how many people where being employed in the fossil fuel sectors and in the renewables sectors, would measure how many people were moving from the former to the latter each year and would actively seek to improve pathways to increase that flow. When the policy initially passed it was, again, completely ignored by the party leadership so its inclusion here in another motion must serve to highlight its importance.

6. Putting Communities and Workers First

Where the Just Transition is happening it’s too often being seen as a thing to do to workers, not as a thing for and by workers. I’ve seen corporate “Just Transition” plans that were entirely designed to transition the /company/ to a more sustainable footing but did so by replacing older workers with new apprentices rather than retraining existing staff. Meanwhile, studies like the one done by Platform in 2020 show that workers in the affected sectors already have very good ideas about how they’d like to see a transition happen while highlighting their concerns that they lack the power to do it.

Communities have similar ideas but also lack power. There are growing concerns about the flood of renewable developments in and around communities or the rise of electrical pylons designed to shunt energy past communities who are suffering from fuel poverty while not receiving any of the benefits of hosting the infrastructure. Even a plan such as ensuring that solar panels are built on houses and brownfield sites before taking away amenity space or Common Grazing land from locals would go a long way to helping people buy into the transition rather than turning against it because they see their environment transformed only to benefit companies and landowners.Conclusion

This motion represents a major victor for Common Weal’s influence within Scotland’s political circles but it’s an even bigger one for SNP members who have voted, again, for policies like this despite the party leadership trying to tell them that it couldn’t be done. The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.

This isn’t merely an issue confined to the SNP, however. The other progressive parties in Scotland are all overwhelmingly in favour of policies like this too. It would be a Courageous Decision (in the Yes Minister sense) for leadership to continue to ignore not just the will of a majority of Scottish voters on this issue but the unanimous decision of their own party’s membership at their own conference.

Which hasn’t stopped them up till now – and therein lies the issue even with motions like this. There is still a vast gulf between “what members instruct their party to do” and “what the party actually does” with very little in the way of accountability or oversight to bridge that gap.

This is a problem in all political parties and may be a fundamental problem with political parties that limit their ability to manage a democratic government. The solutions to that are probably a topic for another time, but until then I encourage the members who supported this motion to make their voices heard. Do what you can to ensure that its principles make it into the upcoming manifesto. Do what you can to ensure that your local candidates support those principles. And make sure that they understand that your support of their election is dependent on them listening to their members.

And the message to other parties: If the SNP won’t do this despite that election, who will? Perhaps you?

If You Want To End Homelessness, Give People A Home

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
–  Jeanette Winterson

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

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

Image Source: M J Richardson, CC-BY-SA. The Social Bite Village in Granton, Edinburgh

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between ‘good’ policies and ‘easy’ policies. There are some ideas out there that politicians find very easy to do, regardless of whether they are good or bad. And some that politicians find very hard to do no matter how much good they’d do.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an excellent example of this. As a paper exercise, it looks fairly straightforward. Just find out where everyone is, identify a means of paying everyone and then just pay everyone a certain amount of money regardless of whether they ‘need’ it or not.

It has been shown dozens of times now that these kinds of unconditional cash payments work. They reduce all of the negative markers of poverty, they do it more effectively than ‘means tested’ alternatives, and they do so so effectively that several recent pilots have found that the money granted in the UBI was less than the cost of ‘fixing’ the poverty caused by not having a UBI.

This is a massively ‘good’ policy but it’s not an ‘easy’ one. The challenges of unwinding the existing welfare system – and all of its deliberately punitive negatives – is extremely difficult in the sense that if you happen to miss a month between someone’s last Universal Credit payment and their first UBI payment, then that person could suffer extreme hardship.

It’s hard in the sense of identifying everyone who should be paid and how to pay them – including people who don’t have bank accounts or stable addresses or who may have their finances constrained for any number of reasons. It’s also hard in the political sense that the first reaction from too many who would reach to oppose a UBI is “Why should they get something for nothing?”.

There’s another policy that is pretty much objectively proven now to result in overwhelming positive outcomes, has been shown to be cheaper than not doing it, and will almost certainly get that same final question in response to it – Housing First.

The principle of Housing First is that everyone, regardless of means or circumstance, should have a roof over their head. If someone finds themselves homeless, then this principle means that you don’t wait until support services have deemed whether or not they are worthy of support.

You don’t have the person jump through all kinds of paperwork to prove they need that support. You don’t make judgements on whether or not their lifestyle meets some kind of moral minimum before granting them support. Instead, the first thing you do is provide that person with a house that they can live in for as long as they want at no cost.

You can see the objection immediately. “I pay my rent/mortgage! I didn’t get my house for free!”. Well, I didn’t either, and nor have I had the misfortune of having to sleep rough but I know people who have and I’m well aware that any of us are only one bad day away from having it happen to us.

An excellent paper was published last week by the English think tank the Social Market Foundation that reviews Housing First pilot schemes in Scotland, England, Finland and Canada as part of a campaign to roll Housing First out to all rough sleepers in England and to, in effect, end homelessness.

“In Scotland, it was found that giving someone a ‘free’ house was about £10,000 per person, per year cheaper than just leaving them to sleep on the streets.”

The details of the schemes differ slightly – mostly in whether the house granted to the person is part of a ‘homeless village’ or whether the houses are embedded within communities, but all share the principle that a house is not a reward for taking part in the scheme nor are moral judgements around sobriety or substance use either a barrier to entering the scheme or a cause for eviction. In the words of the Finnish study “dwelling is the foundation on which the rest of life is put back together”.

The Scottish examples orbit around the Pathfinder programme that ran from 2019-2022 and found that while the average cost per participant in the programme was around £13,350 per year, the average cost of homelessness was estimated to be about £23,000 per person, per year. In other words, giving someone a ‘free’ house was about £10,000 per person, per year cheaper than just leaving them to sleep on the streets.

Similar levels of savings were found in the Finnish example (€15,000/£12,770 per person per year) and in the Canadian example ($CAD 4,850/£2,611 per person, per year). The SMF estimate that if Housing First was rolled out to as many rough sleepers as is currently possible (i.e. all those who aren’t barred from accessing public funds) then around 9,300 people would avoid sleeping rough and the public purse would save around £178 million.

On that subject of people who have no recourse to public funding, they do advocate that this should change. In all the current rancour about migration right now, you might have failed to spot a very obvious flaw in the current system for supporting asylum seekers. In the UK, asylum seekers – those who have claimed asylum from political repression or other forms of discrimination – are barred from working, are barred from many forms of housing and often don’t have their own funds to fall back on.

They are provided meagre housing by the state (getting a room, basic food and a £10 a week is not the High Living that those stoking xenophobia in Britain right now claim it is. If anyone wishes to dispute this point, I challenge them to live for six months on only the means provided to an asylum seeker and write a report of their experiences.)

But they are often turned out of that housing the moment their asylum claim is deemed legitimate and they become political refugees. Without work up till that point, with few support networks around them and without any other fall back plan – it’s no wonder that so many new refugees in Britain end up spending that first night of freedom – or an extended period afterwards – sleeping rough.

Outcomes for those passing through Housing First programmes have almost without exception delivered better outcomes for participants than the services available to them before they entered the programme. In the Scottish programme, more than 80% of participants were still in housing after two years. Not a single participant was evicted from the programme.

In the English pilot schemes, not one participant who left the programme ended up sleeping rough again within the first year. In all of the studies, the mental and physical health of participants improved, they were less likely to commit a crime and less likely to be the victims of a crime.

There appears to be almost no downside of a policy like Housing First and yet I still describe it as politically hard to do largely because of the political cost rather than the financial, moral and social cost of homelessness. This needs to be tackled head on. If it produces better outcomes than existing policies and is cheaper than those policies then it becomes a moral imperative to do that hard thing.

Scotland can end homelessness, end the negative stigma around people who lose the roof over their head, can increase social cohesion and heal some of the divides between us and can do it while saving money. All we need to do to make this happen is to give a homeless person a free house.

Same Spin Everywhere

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.” – Hank Green

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

(The wind farm site discussed in this article will interpose between this ridge and the mountains in the background)

I was up in Skye this week to give one of my regular talks to activists and campaign groups around Scotland. It’s one of the aspects of my role at Common Weal that I enjoy the most and get the most out of even though it often means a lot of travelling. I’m very grateful to my hosts for not just organising the meeting but also putting me up for the night.

The evening was organised by the Breakish Windfarm Action Group who are currently concerned by plans to build a large windfarm development on a visually prominent part of the island. The estate owner, Lady Lucilla Noble, stands to profit massively from the site as will the Swedish developers Arise while tenant farmers are likely to see their livelihoods disrupted and restricted on what has been up till now land held as Common Grazings. They asked me to give a broader overview of how and why this is happening in Scotland and I duly prepared a presentation based around our proposals for how Scotland can publicly own our energy generation despite the Scottish Government’s excuse that “it’s reserved”. Shortest possible version: It’s only reserved if we want Government Ministers to own the energy. If we allow Local Authorities or communities to own it, it’s perfectly possible. It could even be funded in the same way. The only “downside” is that the Scottish Government wouldn’t get to control it. See Common Weal’s policy paper “How to own Scottish energy” for more details.

What I heard during the night though had both myself and my partner shaking our heads in disbelief. The story in Skye is that a landowner has contracted with a foreign company to extract vast profit from the resources of Scotland over the objections of the local community, without adequately compensating or benefiting said community, while obfuscating the planning process and making it is difficult as possible for the community to “properly” object as processes such as environmental studies and public inquiries cost tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds to complete – trivial amounts for the corporations but far beyond the reach of ordinary people to compete with. Everyone involved fully expects that even if the community is able to punch above its weight in terms of negotiating and bargaining power, Scottish Ministers will just override any objections because the Government’s primary goals are to make the Scottish GDP line go up by means of encouraging “inwards investment” – if doing that pushes climate goals too, then they suppose that’s fine too.

This is precisely the same story that is happening in my village at the moment where a French company is negotiating with a local land owner to build a massive solar farm and battery park. Just about the only thing that differs are the names of some of the people (and even then only some of them because it turns out that Ross Lambie, one of the local councillors for the ward I live in and who sits on our local Planning Committee is an absentee landlord bidding to use some land he owns in Skye to host a temporary housing for the construction workers being shipped in to install the turbines).

We’re not the only two communities facing this. Scotland is awash with largely foreign capital flooding places with applications for developments that even at their best won’t benefit communities nearly as much as they should (the £5,000 per Megawatt of community benefit funding that some of these developments offer is a shadow of the 30 to 100 times as much local revenue retained by full community ownership). Local planning offices report being completely overwhelmed trying to properly scrutinise applications and that goes double for areas with active community councils where volunteer councillors are expected to scrutinise highly technical documents without the resources to do so. Scottish Ministers are far too prone to allow projects to move up to the Energy Consents Unit to ensure that they can make the decisions – overriding local democracy as they do so – but this just concentrates the problem further. The ECU is similarly overwhelmed with more than 4,500 projects having been passed to them since December 2018. An average of almost two new applications per day. Ministers cannot not be expected to properly scrutinise these projects even if this was their only full time job.

And what happens if a dodgy developer does, by chance or fortune, get their application denied or made conditional to the point that they decide the profit margins aren’t high enough? Well, they just resubmit the application and try again or move on to the next community and hope they can’t pay as much attention. Communities need to be lucky every time. Corporations only need to get lucky once.
I’m not against renewable energy as a rule. We need more of it. What I’m asking for is for the Scottish Government to start abiding by its own party-approved policies. We need a Scottish Energy Development Agency (SEDA) to start producing a proper strategic map of Scotland. A map not just of where Scotland’s renewable resources are but where our actual demand is too. The overflow of development without coordination (compounded by frankly idiotic policies from Westminster such as blocking policies like Zonal Pricing) is leading to millions of pounds of consumer’s money being paid to energy generators in constraint payments. Wind turbines already generate profit almost for free once they’re built – the only way to make them more profitable for the multinationals and foreign public energy companies who own them is for them to make the profit without even generating the energy.

In addition to the SEDA we urgently need the Scottish Government to stop its opposition to public ownership of energy and to start allowing Scottish communities to be the owners of these developments.
Communities have been left alone to fight each application individually when it turns out that they are all facing the same spin everywhere. I am very happy to see that communities are increasingly banding together such as the 9CC group in Ayrshire or the recent conference of Community Councils in Inverness, but it’s clear that these groups themselves need support to start talking together, across Local Authority lines. Maybe that’s what it’ll take for Ministers to start paying proper attention. Maybe the next conference has to happen outside Holyrood itself.

The injustice of situations like where I live or in Skye or in hundreds of other communities is going to seriously harm public support for the renewable transition that we need. I’m not against renewable energy. I am against being screwed over by the people who own them. I’m against the injustice of communities not being given a stake in that transition and being told that their voice is irrelevant or a nuisance. But if my experience this week in Skye tells me anything, it’s that communities are ready to make that voice exactly as loud as it needs to be, especially as the elections approach. I hope Ministers will be listening. Or that their replacements might be.

So You’ve Won Capitalism: An Open Letter To The Billionaires

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Democracy is supposed to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Capitalism is ‘of the capitalist, for the capitalist’. Period.” – Jerry Ash

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

a bird's eye view of a beachfront home

Dear Billionaires,

I think we can all agree that you’ve won Capitalism. If the goal of Capitalism is to accumulate wealth via the canny deployment of capital (yours or someone else’s) for the purpose of spending that wealth on goods and services to improve your own lifestyle then you have been successful beyond measure. As a billionaire, you now possess more wealth than can be reasonably spent by any individual in a lifetime. In fact, you passed that measure a long, long time ago.

Continue reading →