ScottishPolitics

The Scottish Parliamentary Election 2026:- The Manifestos

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

This post and the research underpinning it is undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this work, you can here.

It is that time again. Scotland faces another election for its devolved Parliament at Holyrood. As I have done in the previous several Scottish and UK General Elections, I want to collect here as many of the political party manifestos as I can so that you, the voter, can find them all in one place as they can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to find (they also tend to disappear from the internet after the elections which can make it difficult to hold parties to their promises later – but that’s for a future article.

The Scottish Elections tend to be quite vibrant in terms of the number of parties involved and this year promises to shake the main parties to a degree not seen in generations so I want to give voters the change to see as broad a set of candidates as I can.

Unfortunately, there are limits. It’s difficult in this format to present Independent candidates fairly as they often don’t present a traditional manifesto and even when they do, by definition, they can only stand for one seat in Scotland (constituency or regional).

That said, if you spot a political party manifesto out there in the wild that I haven’t yet listed below, please let me know. The criteria for entry are fairly simple:
1) The party must be registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission.
2) They must be standing at least two candidates across at least two constituencies and/or regions (one person standing in both a constituency and a region doesn’t count).
3) They must have published a manifesto of election promises and commitments to voters. It needn’t be called a “manifesto”. Alternative names like “contract”, “election promise” or similar may be similar enough for inclusion.

This means that “manifestos” produced by trade unions, think tanks or third sector organisations who are seeking to influence politics but who aren’t standing candidates under their party banner won’t be included.

This is going to be live article for the next several weeks to follow me on social media or check back here regularly for updates.

Note:- Parties marked in square brackets are placeholders for now and the prospective list may change as manifestos are published, parties emerge or, indeed, parties drop out of the electoral race. If a party produces several focused manifestos (e.g. a Manifesto for the Islands, or a Manifesto for Young People) then I may link to them, but the main banner image shall point only to their primary manifesto.

Incumbent Parties

The following parties were represented by at least one MSP at some point during the 2021-2026 Parliament and are standing at least two candidates in the upcoming election. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

[Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party]

[Scottish Green Party]

[Scottish Labour Party]

[Scottish Liberal Democrats]

[Scottish National Party]

Reform UK

Insurgent Parties

The following parties were not represented in the 2016-2021 Parliament. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

[Check Back Soon]

[Check Back Soon]

[Check Back Soon]

[Check Back Soon]

 

 

A regulated economy is one that works for all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“They’ll re-regulate within ten years. There’ll be a string of crashes, and they’ll do it. the free marketeers will scream, but the fact is, free markets don’t provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have an SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them too. Believe me, they will.” – Michael Crichton

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 policy page here.

It was a sombre weekend for me last week. The fire at Union Street in Glasgow hit me hard. I know it was by far not the worst disaster happening even at that moment – as Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war spread burning oil rains over Tehran in a manner that would surely be an example of a prosecutable offence under the proposed Scottish Ecocide Bill on top of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But still, that corner of Union Street was Common Weal’s office for several years and I realised that I’m the only member of the team remaining who worked in it on a daily basis (Robin had always habitually worked from home even before the Covid pandemic pushed the rest of us to do it too) and so the pang of personal connection was particularly strong.

As one of our Daily Briefings said this week, there are a lot of questions to be asked about the cause of the fire and many that may never be answered. If early reports are accurate though, it may well be that the vape shop where it started was not properly following business regulations and, simultaneously, the regulations around shops that sell highly addictive and highly flammable substances like vapes is nowhere near strong enough given the risks that the devices pose.

(By the way, if you are subscribed to Common Weal’s weekly Magazine but not yet subscribed to our Daily Briefing newsletter then you’re missing out. Every weekday we’ll send you our take on a news story that caught our eye that morning – one that you may not have noticed or may not have clocked the particular significance of from a Common Weal focus. Subscribe to the Daily Briefings for free here. And if you like it, please consider sending us a wee donation to help us keep it going.)

There are going to be questions in the coming weeks, months and possibly as part of the upcoming Scottish Parliamentary elections about how to better regulate these shops specifically. Even the Reform Party is calling for a review of regulations and they have usually been a party ideologically wedded to the idea that “cutting red tape” is the way to boost the economy.

And this is perhaps the core of the issue. The call for more or fewer regulations in anything from businesses, through banking, to regulations over cross-border food imports and exports, or even the regulation of government itself, appears to run like a swinging pendulum. When things are going fine, people think that the regulations are holding them back and call for the red tape to be cut. We become complacent and perhaps forget that the problems the regulations prevent ever even existed – almost like living in a world where people call for cuts to the fire service because it’s been years since they saw a building burn down.

When things crash (as they so, so often do) people wonder why the regulations didn’t save them and want more to prevent the causes of the previous crash happening again. This works until a different crash blindsides everyone who wasn’t listening to the folk who were warning about it, or folk start to feel safe and start talking about cutting red tape again.

There’s another aspect of regulation that sits underneath that broad cycle of tying up and cutting the red tape and that’s our willingness to enforce the regulations that do exist. This, too, could run from vape shops not being checked to make sure they are registered out to ensuring that the food being imported into the country are actually being checked to make sure they are meeting agreed standards rather than just being ‘waved through’ because there just aren’t the resources there to properly secure the border.

A regulation that isn’t enforced is even worse than one that doesn’t exist because it’s often not never enforced but instead merely enforced selectively. Which means enforced for us, but not those with the money or the power or the “too big to fail” scale to avoid having to play by trivialities like “the rules”.

“We can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business.”

Common Weal has been working on a broad group of policies around the topic of governance – mostly focus at Government itself but this all applies everywhere too. One of the foundational principles is that “no-one should govern themselves”. This means that government isn’t allowed to vote against transparency measures under the excuse that the mandatory rules merely replicate voluntary rules that they’re not following.

It means that the boards that are supposed to govern our regulatory bodies can’t be solely conscripted from the ranks of the bodies they are supposed to be regulating. It means that conflicts of interest must be rooted out and it means that lobbyists who advocate for changes to or immunity from regulations must do so in plain site of our democracy – we now argue that the Lobbying Register is insufficient and that ALL lobbying meetings with the Government (even ours) should be recorded and posted for public scrutiny.

And when it comes to regulation of the private sector, we can no longer allow the failure to regulate to simply be priced into the cost of doing business. There needs to be adequate deterrent and punishment for those responsible for failure that doesn’t just take the form of a fine that is smaller than the cleanup costs. That way lies the principle of CATNAP – Cheapest Available Technology, Narrowly Avoiding Prosecution – where companies don’t even just barely meet what regulations there are but happily sell us illegal products from unsafe vapes to unsafe houses knowing that no-one is about to stop them from doing so.

It’s said that “every rule is written in blood” and this is very much true when it comes to regulatory practices and especially with health and safety. Those who break out the scissors must be able to articulate why those rules came about and what they were designed to protect us from before being allowed to start cutting or even to just stop enforcing what we have – especially in the name of profit.

Otherwise, when the pendulum swings again, the blood that the next set of rules will be written in might well be our own.

 

Process over policy was never a route to Indy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” – Georges Jacques Danton

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 policy page here.

The Scottish Parliament’s Constitution Committee has recently concluded a short investigation into legal mechanisms for triggering a second independence referendum. The final report and the reports of the evidence sessions are worth reading, but the conclusions are fairly simple albeit in a direction that probably won’t please anyone who has an especially vested interest in the process for Scottish independence.

Essentially, the principle of becoming independent is itself legal (as opposed to many states which have constitutions that explicitly prohibit the secession of components of the state) but there is currently no legal mechanism in place that would allow for Scotland either to unilaterally declare independence nor to unilaterally hold a public referendum (even an “advisory” one) on the question of Scottish independence. This stands in contrast with various other states which explicitly legislate to allow components to secede either unilaterally or provide a mechanism to translate the democratic will of their residents into the legislative process of independence.

Instead, the processes which would allow for independence cannot be enacted unilaterally and may only be enacted via the UK Government or UK Parliament. This includes a mechanism similar to the one in place for Northern Ireland which would allow for a poll on leaving the UK and reunifying with Ireland if public sentiment makes it seem likely to the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that such a poll would return a result for reunification. That’s a slightly technical wording but the crucial point is that public polls in favour of reunification are only a mandate for a referendum if the UK Government chooses to not be wilfully blind to them – the veto is still in their hands.

As is the legislative process of becoming independent – that can’t be done by the Scottish Parliament passing a ‘Divorce Act’, but instead by Westminster passing legislation to enact independence. The obvious route to my mind is that they would amend the Scotland Act to delete Schedule 5 and so remove the list of reserved powers – essentially devolving everything not already devolved.

Then it might add Scotland to the Statute of Westminster 1931 which essentially says that new UK laws won’t apply to Dominions and the Commonwealth nations unless they explicitly request or consent to it. Only then could this be followed by a Scottish Act or Constitution Article to make it unlawful to request or consent to such laws plus further laws to remove the role of the UK Supreme Court and other state apparatus that may remain plus something to clarify questions around Crown succession or to remove the Magic Hat entirely and become a Republic.

Another crucial conclusion is that there is no international law that can be applied to legislatively compel Westminster to act on public sentiment or on the calls for a referendum. The UN isn’t going to send in blue-helmeted peacekeepers to enforce some hypothetical ‘Decolonialisation Mandate’ or something like that.

Instead, the Committee concludes, that the question of independence was less a legislative question but more a diplomatic and democratic one. Essentially, that independence could be legislated for should it need to be, but this is only going to happen in practice when the UK Government decides that it needs to be.

Here’s the thing – This was also pretty much exactly the thought process that went in to us writing our books Direction in 2023 and our policy paper Within Our Grasp in 2019. It’s important to note that the latter paper was written before the Supreme Court ruled that a unilateral advisory referendum would be unlawful – a decision that at the time seemed likely but far from assured and therefore until that moment was ambiguous.

“Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them.”

We recognised long before this Committee was even conceived that the question of independence was going to be more about democracy and diplomacy than sheer legislation and we’ve taken quite some flak over the years from trying to push back against elements of the independence campaign who tried to magic independence into being by finding ‘one weird trick the lawyers won’t tell you about’ that would somehow invalidate the Act of Union and prove that Scotland had, in fact, been independent all along. I remember with wry fondness one person who reacted to my explainer of the legislative process above by calling me a “Colonialist Westminster Shill”.

Wishing independence into being isn’t going to make it happen, but the lack of a clear legislative process with goalposts and milestones isn’t a weakness either. Goodhart’s Law very much applies here in that some process that demands that, for example, public polls show 60%+ support for a sustained period of six months before a referendum can be considered could always be knocked into the long grass by a single 59% poll or – perhaps worse – could bounce us into campaign mode without a plan for the day after (like Brexit). Even the SNP’s foolish target of calling for a referendum if there’s an SNP majority in May grants the UK Government the ability to decline that offer even if every single MSP in Holyrood is openly pro-indy, but only 63 of them are SNP.

Instead we should recognise that the precise legislative formulation for independence is ultimately irrelevant. If Westminster has the ultimate veto over whether or not it goes ahead, then we must recognise that they will always enact that veto if doing so causes them fewer problems than not doing so. This is why Sturgeon’s 2017 demand for a referendum was dismissed with a curt “now is not the time” and every other attempt with even less.

This was the purpose of our book and policy paper. Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them. I’ll leave the details of that strategy behind the links to the book and paper (please go read them and buy the book) other than to say that only one component of it is building the public support for independence to undeniable levels.

We also need to consider building an escalating pressure campaign whereby Westminster essentially realises that governing a Scotland that no longer wants to be governed is more hassle than it’s worth (which, if the propaganda is true, is already not worth much because we’re such a money sink).

We weren’t invited to give evidence to the Committee, despite the detailed work we’ve done on the topic, but if we had been we may have questioned the reason for the inquiry being called. Its conclusion was obvious to us long before it was even started and so should have been obvious to the people who called it. I fear that the inquiry was never designed to be part of a coordinated ladder of escalating pressure but was instead another attempt at substituting process for policy.

There’s a simple test of whether I’m right or not. One that will separate a checkbox exercise designed to let the parties tell potential voters they’re doing something from one where they are actually doing something to bring about independence.

The Committee’s final conclusion calls for the Scottish Government and UK Government to negotiate a pathway to exercising Scotland’s right to determine its constitutional future as a matter of urgency.

The test is this: What will you, the politicians, do when (not if) Westminster once again says ‘No’?

Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.” – Kim Stanley Robinson

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.

photo of truss towers

Scotland has an extremely poor track record of benefiting from our own energy resources. The decline of the First Age of energy wealth – based on coal – can still be seen in the scars of deprivation it left behind especially in the Central Belt towns and villages around where I live and where mining was most intensive.

In the Second Age, our oil wealth was – as Gavin McCrone warned – downplayed and then squandered under successive UK Governments while leaving Scotland vulnerable to oil shocks and we’re now seeing how we’re being held liable for the costs (economic and social) of drawing down the sector as it absolutely must be drawn down as the world wrestles with the challenges of the climate emergency caused largely by that oil even as the rich owners of the assets reap the profits and continue to lobby to delay or prevent change.

The problem is that unlike almost every other country that found itself with large reserves of energy wealth, we collectively decided that Scotland shouldn’t own any of it.

Rather than building up a robust public-owned oil sector, the UK Government flogged off the rights to exploit the resources to the lowest bidder, even offering generous subsidies rather than taxing their profits. The downstream infrastructure was privatised too not just sucked vast amounts of wealth into the pockets of billionaires like Jim Radcliffe but also granting them vast political power and the ability to make hypocritical statements about immigration while living the high life in their own offshore tax haven.

The Third Age of Scottish energy is our Green Transition – built initially around our vast onshore and offshore wind resources but now increasingly diversifying into other areas like solar and battery storage.

We see here that Scotland is in the process of losing out once again when it comes to energy resources that, if anything, vastly outstrip anything the oil sector could have ever promised because, unlike oil, the sun and the wind will continue to deliver that energy long after the last barrel of oil is extracted from the ground.

It promised to finally bring some ongoing benefit to communities that would be hosting the generators but even that failed. Neither Scotland nor the UK showed interest in developing public ownership of the assets and the “community benefit” funds were set at the lowest possible level of £5,000 per MW of capacity for wind (not uprated for inflation) and zero for other forms of renewables. It is estimated that a community owned wind turbine generates around 34 times as much revenue for the local community as does a privately owned one that pays its £5,000/MW community benefit. There is some evidence emerging that even this paltry sum is not being met in many cases with The Ferret reporting a shortfall of about £50 million across Scotland’s community benefit funds.

Offshore is arguable worse with the debacle of the ScotWind auction selling off the options to develop one of the largest offshore wind projects in the world in an auction that, for reasons still not adequately explained, set a maximum price cap on bids and potentially cost Scotland anywhere between billions and tens of billions of pounds in upfront capital.

Most crucially of all, we don’t even make the renewable generators and batteries that we don’t own. Decades of climate-denying politicians telling people that we shouldn’t bother trying to avert climate change because China wasn’t doing anything conveniently ignored that China was, in fact, rapidly building up its industrial base and was starting to sell the generators to the world.

So Scotland now imports the materials to build wind turbines that are owned by multinational companies and foreign public energy companies that export their profits elsewhere and pay communities sometimes less than the bare minimum. We don’t even get cheaper energy for it because the UK’s grid and pricing structures are still based on assumptions laid down in the Coal Age.

So what of the Fourth Age of Scottish energy? The thing about the current generation of privately owned energy assets is that they will eventually need to be replaced, and fairly soon – perhaps in 25 years time. This gives us an opportunity to start planning now.

Scotland needs to start building up its domestic wind and solar manufacturing base. We need to use our excellent universities to develop the materials to ensure that those generators are built to Circular Economy standards (current generation fibreglass wind turbine blades are disposable and are sent to landfill after use). We also need to start aggressively bringing assets into Scottish public ownership. Every time a renewable energy lease is up for renewal, it should be transferred to a Scottish public energy company (nationally or locally owned). This can also happen when a site is up for “repowering” – when old, smaller turbines are replaced with larger, more powerful ones but which exceed the previous lease’s maximum capacity terms.

New renewable sites should have their leases signed aggressively in favour of public ownership too. Rather than 60 or 99 year leases that cover the lifespan of multiple generations of turbines, they should be set to as low as 10 years. Enough time for the private developer to recoup their investment but also enough time for the Scottish public sector to take over the site and also make a profit without merely being saddled with the liability of decommissioning as we’re doing with the oil sector.

If any of this is not possible within devolution (some of it certainly is) and the UK is not willing to allow it, then while we are doing what we can, the case must be made for independence so that we can finish the job.

All of this will take time to set up which is why we need to start preparing the ground now. I don’t want to be here in 25 years talking being asked to comment on why we’re importing the next generation of technology and exporting the profits again. If we want to sit under a tree in 2050, maybe the best time to plant it is today.

It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.” – William Golding

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

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a significant intervention into the upcoming Scottish election, saying that the next Parliament must stop cringing away from reforming Council Tax.

The Scottish Government’s current position is that they can’t make that change because there’s no political consensus for what comes next. This is a disingenuous take, given the chances they’ve squandered or deliberately suppressed in order to manufacture that situation.

Everyone, even the Scottish Government, agrees that the Council Tax is fatally broken. No other tax is based on valuations that were set a third of a century ago (imagine suggesting that your income tax should be based on what your salary was in 1991). No other tax so badly misvalues so many houses (imagine there was a 50:50 chance that your income tax code wasn’t even based on the job your doing right now). Almost not other tax gives such a high tax break to so few at the expense of so many. It absolutely must change and should have changed 30 years ago.

There have been several alternatives to the Council Tax that have been mooted over the years. Some have been better than others. But to my mind at this point there really are only two possible positions in the debate.

On one side, there are those who advocate for a fair and proportionate Property Tax that applies the tax based on a percentage of the present value of a home. Our own proposal to this effect models – for the purposes of making the argument – a flat percentage rate across all homes but there’s absolutely no reason why that rate can’t be varied by Local Authorities, surcharges for multiple ownership or even, as our friends at Future Economy Scotland have mooted this week, why there couldn’t be a progressive element for very high value homes.

The key point to this though is that if your neighbour who differs from you only in that they own a house that costs ten times as much as yours does, then it is fair and just that they pay ten times as much Property Tax than you do.

On the other side of the argument there is everyone else – who, regardless of what they are putting forward in terms of a reform plan – fundamentally believe that the top 10% of property owners in Scotland should have their lifestyles subsidised by the rest of us – even those of us who are going increasingly into debt just trying to keep a roof over our heads.

That sounds harsh, but let me explain.

If you believe in a banded Council Tax similar to the current one or perhaps modified by the proposals in the recent Scottish Government consultation (or their plan for a mansion tax that came out of nowhere while that consultation was still live) then houses in the top band will always and by definition win a tax cut. Even under the “mansion tax” proposal, a £20 million house will pay the same Council Tax as a £2 million house. This is not fair.

Under our proportionate Property Tax and even under its nation-wide flat rate of 0.63% (or £630 per year on a £100,000 house) we found that despite bringing in the same amount of total revenue, almost everyone whose house cost less than £400,000 would get a tax cut. The same would also be true if any of the Government’s consultation options were adopted and then we decided to move to out Property Tax later. The banded system simply doesn’t work and ALWAYS leads to a subsidy for the rich.

The same is also true for replacing Council Tax with an income tax (a position the SNP had in 2007 and some other parties still have). Wealth inequality is far higher than income inequality and property speculation is itself a major driver of that wealth inequality. Failing to tax wealth would release the brakes even further on property speculation and allow those who bought houses when they were cheap to profit even more when they sell them (The myth of the aged widow with no income living alone in their mansion with no-where else to go is largely that and would be better solved with individual discounts or exemptions and providing more appropriate housing they could move to).

But if, after that, the political parties still can’t agree to reform Council Tax in the only way they should then they should have stopped being the problem. In the run up to the 2021 election, the SNP made a manifesto promise to hold a Citizens Assembly on local tax reform, including Council Tax reform. They failed to deliver on that promise. That Assembly could have created the consensus that Robison is using as a shield against inaction – which is probably why they failed to deliver.

As I point out when I wrote about this last time, the major weakness of the idea of a Citizens Assembly is that politicians fundamentally don’t want them to work. For them to work, the politician has to step out of the way. They have to accept that the Assembly is happening because they weren’t able to do their job. They have to give the power to make the decision to the citizens who form the assembly and then they have to agree – ahead of time and not just if the final answer suits them – to carry out the instructions given to them by the Assembly.

If Shona Robison or her successor wishes to claim that the reason they can’t reform Council Tax is because of a lack of consensus then it is incumbent on them to create that consensus. If they can’t do it themselves, then they need to accept that they are part of the cause of that lack of consensus and should step out of the way.

The debate on Council Tax reform has gone on far too long. Everyone agrees that things need to change. No-one, it appears, wants to be the one to take the responsibility of making that change happen. This isn’t good enough. I’ll be watching the party manifestos closely in the coming weeks. If any of my local candidates can’t tell me what their party is going to do about this failure of responsibility that leads to 90% of people in Scotland effectively subsidising the top 10%, then I’m going to have to ask them who I should vote for instead of them.

The new National Housing Agency must serve people, not profit

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” – Confucius

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.

Common Weal has been campaigning for the best part of a decade on overhauling and improving the Scottish housing sector. While we haven’t been named in the announcements, the SNP’s new proposal to launch a National Housing Agency should they return to Government after the elections is a policy taken straight out of our strategic roadmap which called for what we termed a Scottish National Housing Company.

It is far too easy for Governments to talk big about housing but to do little. Even in previous election campaigns, it has been considered sufficient for a political party to just look at the raw number of houses being built in Scotland and to either say that they would build X thousand homes (where X is a larger number than their rival party is promising to build, or that the previous government actually built) without paying much attention to other vital factors such as where the houses are built, what standards they are built to, how much they’ll cost, what kind of tenure will be offered to residents or who will profit from the construction of the buildings (particularly if policies come with significant amounts of public money attached). This number goes up and down with the political winds but rarely is it based on anything other than that kind of political party promise. It’s almost certainly never based on whether or not that number of houses is ‘enough’ to satisfy immediate and long term demand.

In these respects, the Government has been taking some welcome steps particularly with policies around rent controls and energy efficiency standards (though we still have significant disagreements around how far those proposals should go – the current rent control plan all-but guarantees above inflation rent increases and the energy efficiency standards appear to be being significantly watered down from the “PassivHaus equivalent for all new homes” originally promised).

But a more strategic approach to housing is still needed beyond piecemeal interventions and broad frameworks so in this respect, that the Government has adopted our Housing Agency is something to be celebrated.

The devil is in the details however and Common Weal is now gearing up to develop our proposals and to try to ensure that the Government adopts them in full.

In our original plan, the Housing Agency would be a direct construction body – public owned and employing the people who actually build our houses.

Direct construction bypasses the biggest limitation of every housing policy that has come before. Private housing developers aren’t in the business of building ‘enough’ houses. A basic rule of economics is that price is determined by supply vs demand. Scarcity results in higher prices. This means that developers can charge higher prices by not building homes as quickly as they could or by “banking” land they own to prevent another developer from buying it and building (see my article in In Common last November which breaks down why this and other factors increases the price of an average UK home by around £67,000).

We also can’t keep building houses purely to chase the highest possible price when it comes to tenures. We’ve heard a lot about “affordable homes” in recent years despite no real definition of what that actually means beyond developers being forced to sell a few homes in each block of houses a little bit cheaper than they otherwise would (even when “a little bit cheaper” is still very much unaffordable for many).

A strategic plan led by a National Housing Agency would not be concerned about quick profits and so could build houses with a longer term view. Housing for social rent especially should be built to a standard that minimises ongoing costs like heating and maintenance thus makes living in the houses cheaper for social tenants. (See my 2020 policy paper Good Houses for All for more details on how that would work).

This would benefit Local Authorities in the long term as once the construction costs of the houses are paid off in 25 or even 50 years time, the ongoing rents will still provide a safe and steady income for decades to come. By contrast, the cheap and flimsy houses being built today are being put up by developers who don’t particularly care if the house outlives its mortgage – if it doesn’t, they’ll happily sell you another one.

This is the important point about the role of a National Housing Agency. It cannot be a mechanism for laundering public money into private developers. It absolutely must be a force that outcompetes or plays a different game from the private developers. It must disrupt the market to the point that people would actively seek out a high quality, efficient and cheap to live in Agency house rather than a private developer “Diddy Box”, especially one being offered at exorbitant private rents because the only people able to actually buy them are private equity funded landlords.

Houses should not be an inflatable capital asset designed to enrich the already wealthy and to suck wealth out of the pockets of everyone else. Houses should, first and foremost, be a home. This is the measure of the ambition that the National Housing Agency should be aiming to achieve. Common Weal is very happy to see this policy enter the politician discussion space. We stand ready to help whichever Government comes out of the elections this year to build the Agency we need so that it can build the homes that all of us deserve.

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 / 2 Comments

“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?