Platform Socialism

“With deregulation, privatisation, free trade, what we’re seeing is yet another enclosure and, if you like, private taking of the commons.” – Elaine Bernard

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Devolved Scotland doesn’t have many powers when it comes to unilaterally defending ourselves against a Trump trade tantrum that Starmer will supplicate and grovel to avoid – but the powers we have are surprisingly powerful.

Canadian tech journalist (and author and wearer of many other hats) Cory Doctorow has been advocating that Canada shouldn’t just retaliate against the Trumpist Trade War with tariffs (which inevitably hurt Canadian consumers who can’t shift their purchases to tariff-free alternatives) but should look at measures that hurt the American economy while BENEFITING Canadian consumers. In fact, he has an idea that could undercut the American economy, would benefit Canadian consumers AND would also benefit American consumers too.

Take a look at your smartphone. How do you install new apps on it? 95% of the time it’ll be by going to the Google/Apple app store (many phones are even set by default to block or throw up warnings against installing apps via any other route). But how do the apps get on the store? Enter, the techfeudal monopoly. Google and Apple both maintain internal monopsony-monopolies within their respective fiefdoms. They don’t aggressively push other forms of app store onto each other’s platform but they DO aggressively push out other app stores from theirs. If you develop an app and want to get it to people then you need to post it to their stores and you need to surrender 30% of the price of buying your app to them. Never mind Trump’s 25% tariffs – your paid apps are already 30% more expensive than they should be because of Apple and Google taking their cut.

So, Doctorow says, Canada should develop a Canadian App Store that undercuts the barons. They don’t even need to do it for free, they can merely charge a more reasonable levy – 5% say – to host those apps and they could provide jailbreaking kits (something that is a felony level crime in the US) to allow people outside Canada to download apps from the store too – The billionaires propping Trump up get hit but ALL OF US benefit. He goes on to suggest jailbreaking other walled tech gardens like the Playstation store or John Deere’s tractors.

One issue with this plan from a political point of view is that retaliatory tariffs are easily reversible. Once issued, they can be retracted. Once the “Canada App” jailbreaks Apple, that can’t so easily be put away again. However I agree with Doctorow that this is a feature, not a bug.

Indeed, we’ve advocated for something very similar that is within Scotland’s power to do right now.

Several websites ago, we published an article pointing out that one of Scotland’s lesser known devolved powers sits in regard to “Crown Use” of patents (yes…it’s another article about copyright and tech). For reasons known only to the beings that bestow the King’s Magic Hat with its power, it is possible for the either the UK Government or the Scottish Government to override patent laws when doing so is “in service to the Crown”. This allows the governments to basically do what they like with inventions – including selling them or services using them – if doing so benefits the Crown (and when these laws have been tested in regards to telecommunications and medicines, basically whatever benefits the Realm and the Crown’s subjects benefits the Crown). There – I bet you didn’t expect a pro-monarchy argument from me ever! (Republics are free to enact similar laws – Editor)

The UK should consider freeing us from the grip of the tech barons not just because Trump is a tariff-happy powerbaby but because the barons who supported him into power need and deserve to have their power broken for the exact same reason that the land barons who own most of Scotland deserve to have their power taken from them. All gatekeepers who skim profits from transactions made more difficult only because of the gates they built should be pushed out of the way. Their rentierism does nothing to benefit anyone other than themselves.

As with the App Store, and hackable-but-not-repairable tractors, so too places like Amazon that forces you to use their store, forces you to jack your prices up everywhere else, forces you to pay to push your products up in the search rankings, then rips off your product and demotes you anyway. Common Weal actually piloted an “Amazon alternative” several years ago. Common Market brought together artists and crafters from across Scotland who couldn’t get their crafts seen by people in Scotland. The pilot was small and short-lived but it not only worked, it proved that even we could do it. So if we can, then surely the Scottish Government could too and how far could it take that principle of giving us right to roam through the virtual spaces. See Kaitlin’s article this week on how this principle could be applied to other platforms like buying gig tickets or even just finding out where the gigs are in the first place.

This is Platform Socialism: the ability for the spaces around us – real and virtual – to be used by All of Us, for the Common Good. Not enclosed and corralled for the benefit of a billionaire who likely wouldn’t have gotten to where they are today without the use of that common good for themselves no matter how “self-made” they tell themselves they are. This is the “Free Market” that Adam Smith advocated for. Not one free from “regulations” that keep us safe, but free from landlords who charge us rent to use things that they and only they insist we must use. Trump has precipitated this round of trade wars and we need to protect ourselves from his next tantrum but be under no illusions that the alternative is to just wait till a “more reasonable” politician takes over from him because it was the “reasonable” ones who created the techbarons in the first place.

Democracy By All Of Us

“Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.” –  Lucille Ball

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With a single act, the Scottish Parliament could radically overhaul our devolved democracy and put people at the heart of holding our legislators to account.

I’m grateful for the coverage The National gave to the the Independence Forum Scotland National Convention last weekend. It was wonderful to see the building activism in the room and delegates certainly kept me on my toes during the Energy World Cafe. The desire to see Scotland bring more of its energy resources into public hands is strong and I was glad to lay out how it could be done despite the limited powers of devolution.

Another question came out of the day about navigating similar limits in another area. One of Common Weal’s calls for the strengthening of our democracy is the creation of a second chamber in the Scottish Parliament that could take some of the weight off of the scrutiny committees, could make sure our laws are fit for purpose and – perhaps most crucially – could oversee the Parliamentarians themselves and hold them to account if and when they fall short of the standards expected of them. In this way it would act very much like the House of Lords down south or the elected or appointed upper chambers in many other countries (Scotland is one of the very few national-scale polities that don’t have an upper chamber – even most of the US states have one) but we want to improve on the highly corruptible model of appointing Lords for life based on their loyalty or political donations (still waiting on Labour delivering on the manifesto promise they made over a century ago to fix that one down south) or even the counter productive model of electing party-loyal people to that chamber (and thus replicating the US model where there is zero accountability when one party controls both houses and zero progress when they don’t). Instead, we want a Citizens’ Assembly where all registered voters in Scotland are entered into a lottery similar to jury duty and are called to serve in the Parliament. Appointments would be by random selection initially but the long list would be adjusted to ensure that the actual Assembly is balanced demographically across age, income, geographic representation and other factors (this model was used to great success in the 2021 Scottish Climate Assembly). Appointments would be generously paid (on par with MSP salaries) and would last a fixed time – we suggest a one year appointment with a third or a half of the chamber rotating out periodically – and there would be the same protections on returning to your job as there are for jury duty or paternal leave. The comparison to juries is a strong one. If we trust our peers to determine if it has been proven or not proven that someone has broken the law, then we are more than capable of determining whether or not the laws themselves are broken.

Sounds great, but the question we were asked at the Convention was whether or not Scotland has the power to set up such a Chamber.

If we were independence, it would be a relatively trivial matter to write the structure of the Chamber into our constitution but until then, the constitutional document we have to follow is the Scotland Act. Yes, the UK does have a constitution – it’s just not written down in one place and unlike the constitution of most nations, Westminster has sovereignty over it rather than being subordinate to it and so can change it whenever it likes.

As the Scotland Act doesn’t mention an Upper Chamber in its framework and as Westminster is extremely unlikely to exercise its power to write one into the Act, how could we set one up pre-independence?

Essentially we act as if we can.

The Scottish Parliament can set up advisory bodies or Commissioners to oversee the work of Parliament and even though we couldn’t mandate that they must follow the advice of those bodies (this was ultimately the source of the failure of the Climate Assembly – the Government decided they didn’t like the advice they were given so largely ignored it), Parliament and Government could collectively agree to follow those instructions – there’s nothing in the Scotland Act that actively prevents them from doing this just as nothing prevents parties whipping their members into voting along certain lines despite that not being an “official” part of our democracy.

Such an “unofficial” upper chamber wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as a constitutionally mandated one but that’s not to say that it would be powerless. Yes, something created by an Act of Parliament alone could be scrapped by one (a constitutional amendment would require a referendum). Yes, the Government could simply stop listening to its advice. This would place it on par with the other Commissioner bodies that exist around the Scottish Parliament. Yes, Westminster could overrule the Scottish Parliament and write a specific prohibition into the Scotland Act or elsewhere. This would place it on par with any other piece of legislation the Scottish Parliament has ever passed. If either of these barriers are enough to stop us, we might as well just give up on devolution entirely.

Scenes playing out across the world right now only serve to highlight how precious and vulnerable the very concept of democracy is and how no single person or even multi-person office can be trusted with more power than it needs. Scotland’s highly centralised form of government needs to be spread out a lot more locally but we also need more scrutiny and accountability at all levels from the top down. The best people to do that are All of Us appointed not to a House of Lords, but to a House of Citizens.

Scotland: We Have Rockets Too

“Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.” – Francesca Lia Block

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Imagine the pitch. You’ve been instructed by Angus Robertson’s office to cut together a bunch of stock footage for a video showcasing Scotland and [don’t look at the fascism] the USA. Quite artistically, the images are juxtaposed to show the common interests between our two [ignore the ethnic cleansing] nations. For the scene to illustrate the line “we share beautiful places”, what images do you think would show Scotland and the US at their best [Hail King Musk and Viceroy Trump]?
The Scottish Government chose the two above.

The image of America is of a severely depleted reservoir (I think it’s Lake Mead, on the Colorado river, upstream from Hoover Dam). I was last at Hoover Dam in person in 1999 and even then that white band of deposited salt that marks the dropping water level was evident and a concern. As you can see from Google Maps Street View (see the option to go back in time), the problem has only gotten worse since. What was once the icon of the New Deal has become the epitome of hydrological mismanagement as farms and cities more or less plunder the waterway to the point that one of North America’s mightiest rivers now scarcely reaches the sea (to the detriment of the Mexican farmers who used to rely on it.

And on the Scotland side (thanks to Andy Wightman for identifying it as Loch Leven)? What do you see there? A lush and pleasant coastal scene? Look closer. I see fish cages. One of Scotland’s three iconic exports (alongside oil and whisky) is salmon but as The Ferret has pointed out multiple times, the way we farm salmon in Scotland is often appalling both in terms of animal welfare and the pollution dumped into our coastal seas, with companies deliberately coming here to do what they’re not allowed to do in their own countries and to export the profits of their extraction back there. How about on land? That’s a nice forest isn’t it? Well, much of it is sitka spruce plantation. An invasive non-native plant grown in dense monoculture again purely for profit and again, often for foreign profit (see Andy Wightman’s recent blog about the French Government putting their Scottish plantations on the market). And in the background? The glorious Highland hills? They look a bit bare – not even a sitka plantation on them and a far cry from the “mosaic of life” that they once were and should be returned to. In fact, if you look really closely, there are signs of muirburn – the deliberate incineration of the hillsides so that very, very rich people can more easily shoot birds for fun.

Is this really the image of Scotland’s “beautiful places” that Angus Robertson wants the world to see? We’re just like America, you see? Our land is similar. Our sports with not-round balls are almost identical. We have rockets too! Their Saturn V rocket is just like our space program! (look – I’m proud of Scotland’s contributions to the space sector. We’ve written policy papers about how the Scottish Government can improve our standing there too but there’s a bit of a difference in scale there between a lunar mission and a ranging rocket that didn’t get as high as a passenger jet, never mind out of the atmosphere) We even have a financial sector where you can come and take all of our money!
In fact, does he even want the world to see this? What budget has the Scottish Government put behind broadcasting this advert across the US? Will it appear during the Superbowl this year? Between prime time news segments? Maybe sandwiched between funny-if-they-weren’t-horrifying pharmaceutical adverts on a late night shopping channel? Maybe they’ll be on constant loop on a TV in the basement of the British embassy? Will we ever get to see an impact assessment on how many tourists and how much investment came to Scotland from the US after seeing those ads?

I don’t think we will. I don’t think the US public is even the target audience. I think it’s us. I think this is the Scottish Government trying to run a PsychOps campaign to bed the idea into our heads that we can be good and loyal Atlanticists both pre- and post-independence. Loyal allies of the American regime as it uses us for its own purposes. Robertson’s faction within the SNP are the ones that brought the party into the smothering embrace of NATO and are the ones furiously trying to extricate the party from its promise to ban nukes from Scotland. I believe that this advertising campaign is aimed at that. The timing – right after Mr “Art of the Deal” came back into office – cannot be a coincidence (even if his commitment to ethnic cleansing was underestimated by the Scottish Government before hitting the “launch” button on the ad) other than as a small attempt to try to avoid Mr “Tariffs are the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and his trade war? I think this is an attempt to sanitise Trumps actions as Scottish Ministers cuddle up closer and beg for a few more scraps or at the very least another ticket to Tartan Week. Maybe the question isn’t what the Scottish Government is trying to sell with this ad (unless the answer is “us”) but what do they want to buy from him instead. It’s certainly a far cry from what Scotland should be doing with our international outlook (see Robin’s article here for that).
Scotland’s space programme isn’t the only place where we can find total rockets if they think this is the best that Scotland can aspire to.

If you care about our land, please go and contribute to Revive’s Big Land Question where you can tell us how you’d like to see Scotland’s land actually reformed. Hopefully, you’ll agree with us that Scotland shouldn’t be a playground for billionaires with guns, golf clubs and grabby little hands. Maybe one day, we’ll run an advert showing how the people of Scotland have become custodians of an actually lush and verdant land not just now but for many generations to come.

Postscript:- At 0800 7th February, Robertson published this new video, perhaps suddenly realising that there was another country on the continent of North America that it might be a little more politically palatable to cosy up to.

The Scottish and UK Governments are both wrong on DRS

“This book was written using 100% recycled words.” – Terry Pratchett

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Both the Scottish and UK Governments are wrong on Deposit Return Schemes.
The DRS is back in the news now that Keir Starmer – in yet another show of policy innovation – has decided to copy/paste the previous Conservative Government’s plan for a deposit return scheme – the proposal where you pay a small deposit when you buy things like drinks and receive the money back when you return the packaging to a deposit return machine (sometimes known as a “reverse vending machine”). His plan includes the previous plan to exclude glass from the scheme and he has refused to allow an exemption to the Internal Markets Act that would allow Scotland to both include glass and to introduce the scheme at all without having to wait for the UK to do it.

It really is impressive to me how the UK can be so backwards that it is utterly unable to bring in a circular economy scheme that is already near-ubiquitous across central Europe (and used to be common in Scotland if you’re old enough to remember Barr’s ‘gless cheques’ before they ended their scheme in 2015) and utterly baffling how vulnerable we are to lobbying by companies who want to keep dumping the costs of their pollution onto consumers and the environment. I’ve told this story many times but I remember being in an informal roundtable in Holyrood in the early days of the planning for the Scottish scheme and a representative from a major supermarket and a representative from a major multinational drinks company both argued against the concept of DRS. Both went a bit more silent when I mentioned that in my previous holiday to Prague I had personally deposited a drinks bottle made by the latter into the DRS machine hosted by the former. If they can do it in one country, why not another? As I say – it was never about “could”, but about “why should we, when we profit more by not doing it?”

So why do I say that the Scottish Government are wrong too (other than the fact that they wanted to take public waste disposal out of Local Authority hands and both centralise it and privatise it to an American private equity firm that is now suing them for their failure to deliver)? Yes, they included glass bottles in their proposed scheme but it was quite crucially only ever about recycling those bottles – breaking them down, remelting the glass and making a new bottle or other glass product. Glass is a great material for that. Barring issues with colourants or other adulterants in the glass (don’t recycle your great-gran’s uranium plates please), glass can be remelted and remade quite easily without degrading in quality the way plastic does. But there’s an even easier and more efficient way to turn an old bottle of Irn-Bru into a new one – wash the bottle and refill it.

That’s the element that was missing from the Scottish scheme. Rather than a proper Circular Economy approach to waste management, the Scottish Government focussed, and are still focussed, mostly on just recycling.

It’s very different in other countries that have a DRS. If you’re in, for example, Germany and order a glass bottle of beer or water in a restaurant, look closely at the shoulder of the bottle. You’ll almost certainly see the scuff marks that herald its passage – multiple times – through the machinery of the DRS system. Bottles can be used and reused this way dozens or maybe hundreds of times before accident or attrition takes its toll and the bottle goes into recycling. Indeed, I don’t even know why I have to explain this concept to politicians. If you ordered a pint glass of the same beer, would you expect the glass to be put in the recycling bin after you’re done?

Of course, there is something else that happens in Germany. While there are still single use containers (typically things like soft drink cans but also smaller plastic bottles), they pushed the idea of multi-use containers as a priority (both plastic and glass). These bottles are designed to a standard shape and size as well as other constraints like the thickness of the material, type of glass used etc. This industry-wide standardisation allows a bottle that contained, for example, one kind of beer to be refilled with another kind without issue. All it took was the Government to regulate the industry to make it so. The regulations are offset with a lower deposit (Pfand, in German) on the more reuseable containers than the single-use ones – encouraging manufacturers to get on board with more sustainable options. This advantage is lost if everything just goes into the same recycling bin.

Yes, that kind of regulation is probably also a breach of the Internal Markets Act, but the Scottish Government simply haven’t been pushing for that kind of exemption and the UK Government isn’t going to deliver it of their own accord either. So what we’re going to end up getting is a Conservative recycling scheme, born from public pressure but watered down as far as possible by lobbyists for multinational corporations who already do things better elsewhere, copied and pasted by UK Labour and meekly followed by the Scottish National Party.

It’s almost like the policy is more reuseable than the bottles will be.