tax

Why We Tax Houses

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

image_2024-09-20_100336300

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

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

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

Continue reading →

PfG 2024 – Serving Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

image_2024-09-10_091756759

Serving Scotland, what exactly?

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

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

Continue reading →

It’s Time To Tax Scottish Land

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

image_2024-09-09_204513798

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

Continue reading →

How Not To Dispose Of Disposable Cups

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

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

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

image_2024-08-29_130259512-1

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

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

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

Continue reading →

The In Tray

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“[The purpose of] clarification is not to clarify things. It is to put one’s self in the clear” – Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay, Yes Minister 

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

I was hoping for a bit more of a shakeup in John Swinney’s Ministerial reshuffle. As it was, it’s barely a wobble. Some space was carved out to give Kate Forbes a Cabinet Secretary position without much in the way of actual power. The changes are most notable in their absences. Just a day before the reshuffle I was in a Committee hearing that discussed, in part, the “signal” sent when the issue of, say, “Older People” is moved from the title of a Cabinet Secretary to the title of a more junior Minister, and then dropped from titles altogether and moved into the middle of the list of responsibilities of a Minister or dropped completely. As Dr Hannah Graham has pointed out on Twitter, the list of terms that no longer exist as Ministerial titles include:- Migration & Refugees, Europe and International Development, Planning, Fair Work, Community Wealth, Just Transition, Biodiversity, NHS Recovery, Active Travel, Innovation and Trade, and Independence. Journalists take note, when those lists are published – the Wayback Machine is your friend. Compare the new list of responsibilities to the old one to see what has been promoted and what has been demoted entirely as an issue of importance for the Swinney Government.

Nevertheless. Even though most of the faces haven’t changed and most of them haven’t even moved office, we do have a new Government and that is always an opportunity for new and returning Ministers to review their goals and objectives. I’d like to place into each of their In Trays at least one Common Weal policy paper relevant to their brief that we’d like them to take on in the coming months.

Continue reading →

A Deal With The Devolved – Part Three

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

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

Thanks to an FOI request, I now have evidence that the Scottish Government has applied its devolved Freeport tax cuts without any data saying that they will benefit the Scottish public purse or be offset by other taxes.

Continue reading →

Freeports Don’t Come For Free

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red and blue crane under blue sky during daytime

The National dedicated last week to the issue of Freeports and I’m glad they did. These deregulated tax havens have not been interrogated nearly well enough by our politicians or our media and the information coming from the ports themselves – even when asked directly – has been too little and too vague. This hasn’t allowed for a proper democratic debate around their merits or demerits, has allowed their failures to go unreported and, perhaps worse, has allowed outright conspiracy theories to rise up to replace the information vacuum which has, in turn, made it harder to campaign against them on the basis of the facts on the ground (something which suits their proponents whose agenda thrives equally in an empty well of information as it does in a polluted one).

Continue reading →

Paying the Price of Climate Delay

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“How is it that we already have so many solutions to the climate crisis that don’t compromise human rights or justice, but the only solutions being seriously considered are the ones that do?” – Mikaela Loach

(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)

red dragon statue near body of water during night time

The Climate Change Committee has declared that it no longer finds the Scottish Government’s Net Zero plan to be credible. That the Government will breach its statutory duty to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 by 75% (with no catch up plan in place to reach Net Zero by 2045) and that instead of there being a comprehensive strategy to reach Net Zero, the best we have is a serious of ad hoc, disconnected announcements. This comes off the back of the Scottish Government being found to be acting unlawfully by not publishing the expected carbon impact of its policies, in line with those statutory targets. Not to mention that “Net Zero” is itself insufficient as it merely promises that Scotland will continue to pollute until 2045 before stopping but makes no promise to fix the damage we’ve already caused (particularly on the Global South both in the present and during our colonialist exploitation of those nations).

Continue reading →

Wealth Taxes and Land Reform

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It takes a strong leader to collaborate with others in an effort to bring about real change.” – Germany Kent

(My speech at the 2024 Scottish Labour Spring Conference fringe event on land reform, hosted by REVIVE)

gray concrete building near lake under white sky during daytime

Devolution has meant that Scotland has more responsibility than power. Tax powers as they are have limited scope to effect meaningful change to an unequal society.

Our most powerful devolved tax – income tax – has proven extremely hard to use and eats a lot of political capital – chiefly as it’s too easy for the very rich to avoid and everyone else doesn’t get paid nearly enough.

But income inequality is far outstripped by wealth inequality both in Scotland and in the UK and in a capitalist economy where those with wealth can use it to rent-seek off the backs of the folk who worked to earn it, we have a problem where it matters less who gets paid how much, it’s who hoards it after that.
We need a system of wealth taxes to rebalance our economy, cut down on the dragon’s hordes of the multi-billionaires who could never hope to spend it usefully in a lifetime and to ensure that assets are more efficiently used for the benefit of all of us.

Scotland has a lot of power to do good here if we choose to and while this isn’t the time or the place to discuss what we could do if the Scottish Parliament had more powers, it most certainly is the place to discuss what we can do now.

Continue reading →