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#scottishpolitics

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Poor Show Swinney

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

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John Swinney claims to support the elimination of child poverty from Scotland, but he has admitted that he also believes – without actual evidence – that social security payments discourage poor people from working.

John Swinney’s only tangible policy on which he was elected as leader of the SNP and then First Minister of Scotland was a promise to eliminate child poverty. Note that he didn’t promise to reduce poverty or even to move faster than previous reduction targets (that he is so far failing to meet). He didn’t even, as his predecessor did, celebrate that child poverty in Scotland was merely a little lower than in England. He promised to eliminate child poverty. He has yet to explain “how”.

At the weekend, Swinney appeared to close down one of the tools that the Government has been using effectively to bring down child payment. The Scottish Child Payment is offered to adults who look after one or more children (the payment is on a per child basis – without the two-child limit seen in England) and who qualify for certain social security payments such as Universal Credit (if you think you might qualify you can check here). Frankly, the payment was brought in at a time and in a manner that stretches the devolved Scottish budget to its limits without the introduction of new taxes (such as our Land Tax) to pay for it but its impact on child poverty has been significant. The Scottish Government claims that the payment has contributed – along with their other poverty reduction policies – to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.

Last weekend, Swinney announced that he was not considering further increases to the payment. Not, as might actually be reasonably defensible, on the grounds of budget constraints but because he believed that the payment was now high enough that a further increase would “reduce the incentive to actually enter the labour market.

In other words, he believes that increasing the child payment to £40 per week – something that the IPPR believes would lift another 20,000 children out of poverty – would discourage poor people from working.

This is, in short, complete crap. It is a claim that is not backed up by any data. In fact, if you have read my UBI article from the other week, you’d know that it is a claim that is completely countered by the facts. Giving people enough money to live on regardless of their life circumstances does not discourage people from working. In the most recent long-running study it was found that the total number of hours worked by UBI recipients did not change compared to their peers in the control group but that may did take the opportunity of the financial safety net to take a chance on a better paid, more worthwhile or more enjoyable job. Where studies have noticed UBI recipients dropping out of work it is almost universally not because “poor people are lazy and want to sit on the sofa” but because people use their safety net to study, to reduce hours as they run up to retirement or – pertinent to this article – to spend more time looking after their children.

With his comments, John Swinney is repeating the Conservative prejudice that the poor only work because it is marginally preferable to starvation and so any attempt to increase the number of workers in the economy can only be done by ramping up the costs of not working.

What Swinney is essentially saying is that while we shouldn’t have child poverty in Scotland, just bringing people to a penny over the poverty line would be enough for him, regardless of what that means for the people involved.

Cutting off the possibility of increases to social security because of self-imposed fiscal limits or rules (self-imposed even in this case not just because of slavish adherence to the philosophy of the 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission but due to a refusal to look at alternative mechanisms within devolution to increase revenue – see, again, our Land Tax) would be bad enough, but Swinney is making his case based on poverty being somehow the consequences of a lifestyle choice or moral failing. The poor, he apparently thinks, deserve their poverty unless they prove they are willing to not be poor.

This is a far cry from just a few years ago when there was a demonstrable majority across the Scottish Parliament for a guaranteed minimum income for all or a true Universal Basic Income (which probably explains the lack of push to bring in those policies).

The 2016 Holyrood elections are looming to the point of candidates being selected and manifestos being written. Swinney is obviously concerned enough about the rise of the far right to hold a summit about it (ineffectual as it was) but he surely must realise that the means of defeating the far right does not lie in gaming the political system to lock them out (see Germany), or in adopting their policies to try become them (see the UK) but in offering a real, credible alternative to Centrist Austerity and policy failure that leads to those populists gaining a base.

Instead of poor showmanship, Swinney could be providing leadership and actually taking action to meeting the goals he has set himself. The Scottish Government already has a poor track record of cancelling “inconvenient” government targets like climate emissions or reductions in car miles. Let’s not see the target of eliminating child poverty in one of the world’s richest nations become another one.

Common WealPoor Show Swinney — Common WealJohn Swinney believes, falsely, that increasing social security payments for poor parents will discourage them from working.

Fair Pay For All

“Employees keep the business doing what it does. It’s important to pay them accordingly.” – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

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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 Government’s approach to Fair Work Principles are laudable, but should they go further by not just mandating minimum pay standards for low paid workers, but also maximum pay standards for the CEOs who underpay them?

One of the most positive policies that the Scottish Government has championed in the past decade has, in my opinion, been the Fair Work Framework, launched in 2016. Lacking devolved powers over important policies affecting workers like minimum wage or a lot of legislation around workers’ rights (despite efforts in the aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum to see those powers devolved), the Scottish Government had to act a little creatively to try to encourage better pay and conditions for workers in areas where it couldn’t legislate directly.

One of those areas became the Fair Work Framework. The idea being that the Scottish Government couldn’t mandate minimum operating standards for companies above the UK’s inadequate pay and conditions floor but they could use softer powers of PR to promote companies who did go above and beyond the legal minimum and they could give preferential treatment to such companies when it came to Scottish public procurement and/or things like subsidies and tax breaks (while I wouldn’t count this as a positive example of such things, it is at least notable that the main distinguishing factor between the UK’s Freeports and Scotland’s “Green Freeports” is the inclusion of Fair Work Principles in deciding if companies can benefit from the Freeport tax breaks).

The Fair Work Principles include things like applying the Real Living Wage (which is calculated as the minimum required for a full time worker to live decently and is higher than the UK’s minimum wage) but also includes non-pay conditions like recognising trade unions, giving workers an effective voice in company decisions (for example, Common Weal has advocated for large companies to include worker representation on their Board of Directors, as is common in several European countries) as well as giving workers security and opportunity in their employment.

All good things, but I’ve seen the Fair Work Principles being applied to areas where particularly the pay issue is slightly different. Offshore engineering firms, for example, rarely pay their engineers minimum wage and there is an issue with large companies in general that might be worth addressing – the issue of maximum pay.

““The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.” ”

— Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

Most of Scotland’s political parties recognise that wealth and income inequality are inherently corrosive to the good functioning of society but we also see the Government both not using its tax powers to directly tackle the problems inherent to extremely high pay (even where it is possible due to CEOs of multinational companies not being based in Scotland) and having limited powers to do so (especially around taxing things like dividends because such taxes are reserved).

But a more creative approach to Fair Work could be applied here too. The High Pay Commission recently found that between salary, dividends, bonuses and other income, the average FTSE100 CEO earns around 120 times the median UK worker salary (£4.19 million compared to £34,963). This means that such a CEO could earn as much as that median worker’s annual salary in just three days – almost before their Hogmanay hangover has worn off. Or in other words, the company could afford to hire the CEO and another 119 workers if they were all paid exactly the same. There are very few jobs that can, if they are honest, completely justify creating more value than over a hundred workers.

This issue of executive pay is not just limited to FTSE100 Megacorporations though. Our work in care reform has found that the Scottish social work sector has suffered as a result of the withdrawal of the public sector from that work and the backfilling by the charity sector – with some charities in care and in other sectors also paying extremely high salaries to their executives while relying on low paid or even voluntary labour from folk at the front line.

So my proposal for an addition to the Fair Work Principles is simple. The Scottish Government probably can’t formally legislate for a “maximum pay” law under devolution and there are evidently limits on how far they are willing and able to push the top rates of income tax to limit income in the extremely wealthy (especially those who run companies in Scotland but who do not personally live in Scotland). So instead, we collectively decide an appropriate level of top executive pay as a multiple of the median salary paid across all workers in the organisation and we make that a mandatory inclusion for the company to be recognised as a Fair Work company.

In contrast to the Scottish Government trying to address executive pay through income or capital gains tax, this would be a relatively simple change to make. I don’t even think it would require legislation – just a stroke of a Ministerial pen – though there absolutely should be a debate in Parliament first. I’m happy to talk to any MSP who wants to bring this to the chamber for discussion. Please let me know if you’re one of them.

I’m happy to discuss whether we think 120 is an appropriate number for how high executive pay should be or whether it should be lowered to ten or even four (4x a Real Living Wage Full Time Equivalent salary would still be close to £105,000 a year). If CEOs think they deserve more than this then they are well within their power to advocate for a pay rise, but only if they increase pay for all of their other workers too. And if they don’t want to do that, then they can’t claim Fair Work adherence and lose their preferential treatment in public procurement and subsidies.

Fair Pay for All shouldn’t just be mitigating low paid workers who have to endure the outdated notion of “trickle down” economics that allows robber barons to take all of the wealth while we scrabble for the crumbs they drop. It must be about fair pay at the top as well, where executives are rewarded fairly for their labour, not the labour of others.

Common WealFair Pay For All — Common WealThe Scottish Government should add a clause to their Fair Work Framework to limit the maximum pay of executives in companies that wish to claim Fair Work accreditation.

Scottish Labour pick London councillor to contest Highlands seat AGAIN

Actually it is London Labour's branch office. But no one should be surprised, even amongst Labour voters in Scotland they could not find a 'safe pair of hands' willing to bend over for Starmer's every wish.

thenational.scot/news/25126706

Archived archive.today/2025.04.30-09554

The National · Scottish Labour pick London councillor to contest Highlands seat AGAINBy Steph Brawn

Demolishing Our Future Again

“As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.” – Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy )

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

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

The demolition of the Wyndford towers in Glasgow marks a sad end for the residents and campaigners who fought for years to prevent their loss. The fall of those towers represents a lot about failings in Scotland – and particularly in Glasgow – around approaches to construction, approaches to place-making and our approach to what we think residential housing is for.

The destruction of the towers was done almost entirely on short term financial grounds and because the owners of the towers were able to pass the costs of the demolition onto others rather than paying it themselves.

There were two chief arguments used. The first was a design argument that said that the buildings couldn’t be adequately retrofitted but this case was expertly dismantled by architect (and Common Weal Director) Malcolm Fraser. The second was a financial one that said that it was cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to retrofit.

This, again, was refuted on the grounds that the demolition plan didn’t take into account of the environmental impact of the resources used to rebuild.

Many of our building materials are carbon intensive – particularly concrete and steel (alternatives to both are coming online but aren’t quite there yet) – thus whenever we have a building in place, we have to consider the “embodied carbon” involved. Once a block of concrete is cast and all of the carbon it emits during its manufacture, transport and curing has been emitted then it doesn’t emit any more. However, grinding it into dust, throwing it into landfill and replacing it with a new block of concrete will result in more carbon emissions. Wood is kind of the opposite but still worth mentioning. Wood absorbs carbon when it grows but emits it when it rots or is burned as waste. Either way, when a building material is replaced with a new one, the “embodied carbon” price has to be paid. Obviously, therefore, to avoid more emissions than necessary, building materials should be used for as long as possible, should be RE-used when possible and replaced as infrequently as possible.

The problem is that we don’t have an effective carbon or externality tax in the UK that would price in such an effect. If it’s cheaper to tear down and building and let the planet pay the cost in emissions, that’s what Capitalism doesn’t just suggest should happen but actively demands must happen.

There is another aspect to the financial case though that has nothing to do with the carbon aspect and that is VAT. Right now in the UK if you want to buy materials for a new building, you’ll pay a reduced VAT rate of 5% but if you want to buy the same materials to retrofit that building you’ll pay 20% VAT. So there is a strong incentive for buildings to be torn down and replaced if that means qualifying for what amounts to a very large tax cut.

There are solutions to this. The obvious one would be to change VAT. In an era of climate emergency and in the absence of a full externality tax, the obvious solution would be a reversal of that situation to actively encourage retrofit over rebuild but most campaigners (like Fraser) would be content with at least an equal playing field.

Unfortunately, the UK Government isn’t moving very quickly in this field (though the previous Conservative government did temporarily cut VAT on some energy efficiency products) and while the Scottish Government is just as corralled by the volume developers who represent the companies who build many of the overpriced, cold and damp blocks of appreciating capital assets that some of us call “homes” but they do have the advantage of not having to worry much about VAT given that it’s a reserved tax. There are devolved options out there though.

Back in 2022, I was working with Malcolm on an idea to write up a proposal for a devolved tax that could try to level the VAT distinction between repair and rebuild. The Scottish Government couldn’t (or couldn’t cheaply) offer a tax rebate to subsidise the VAT on retrofits and couldn’t adjust the reserved tax directly and, as with the problems they have with bringing in a national land tax, they’d find it difficult to bring in a national construction tax. But the Scottish Government DOES have the power to bring in a local levy controlled by Local Authorities. Our idea then was that Scotland could bring in a Demolition Tax to intentionally raise the price of incidents like Wyndford tower to the point that repair and retrofit would be cheaper than the alternative.

But then, we were beaten to the punch by the Chartered Institute of Building who published essentially an identical proposal and did it likely better than I would have so I’ve been more than happy to endorse their work. I’m also pleased to note that the Scottish Greens have done likewise though I think they are currently the only party in Parliament to have done so. I’d like to know the reasoning behind why the other parties haven’t, if they’d like to tell me.

The devil in such a tax is in the detail though. If it’s set too low then it won’t discourage demolitions. If it’s set based on tax arguments like the infamous “Laffer Curve” so beloved by politicians who want to use it as a misguided excuse to cut taxes then it it’ll end up being “optimised” to maximise tax revenue. A properly set Demolition Tax should, in theory, eliminate all but the most essential of demolitions (demolitions on safety and disaster grounds should probably be exempt) and thus shouldn’t actually raise any tax revenue at all. Of course, this also raises the prospect of an owner letting their property simply decay rather either repair OR replace it – something that can be fixed by enforcing already extant regulations around maintaining buildings in good order along with early use of Local Authority powers to compulsory purchase property from landlords who fail in their responsibilities.

There’s an important point in this story that goes beyond the material and the engineering and that’s the lack of social planning and protection of communities. The Wyndford tower has taken 600 homes and will turn them into just 400 homes. Even if every former resident was offered a guaranteed place in one of the new homes (they weren’t) at a price they could afford there wouldn’t be enough houses for all of them. This demolition represents yet another dispersal of a community in a city that has basically defined itself by dispersal of communities for several generations now. Each one, even when they’ve created objectively better living conditions than what was there before (the New Towns project was a decidedly mixed bag in that regard – a subject for another time), that loss of community, of dislocation from friends and family, was often profound and itself generational in its impact. This is why one of our Big Ideas isn’t “Housing” but “Place”, because while four walls and a roof are a necessary component of living well in the modern world, it’s not a sufficient one and where it is and what it is connected to is important. Decidedly unmodern gendered language aside, John Donne was correct to say:

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse…”

— John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

But if the continent of community is diminished when but a single part is torn away, what happens when every part is blown down and scattered to the winds?

Every decision that led to those towers coming down last week was made either uncaring of the community who called them home or despite those cares. Where the people were considered, it was done on an individualistic basis, as if each island would be fine if it was picked up and placed anywhere else.

I fear that lesson will be missed again. I see little evidence that the replacement buildings will endure for centuries longer than the less than four score and ten that their predecessor will. They’re certainly not being built with the kind of resource-preserving Circular Economy principles that we MUST be using in our constructions during a climate emergency. Otherwise, likely within the lifetime of some of those new residents, I fear that someone will be writing another eulogy similar to this one.

Image Credit: Ian Dick

Common WealDemolishing Our Future Again — Common WealWhat the demolition of the Wyndford towers tells us about our approach to construction, community and the climate.

#Sarwar has come down from the fence - that spike was hurting his ar*e.

So as we have come to expect, 'Scotch' (as I prefer to call them) #Labour will go along with anything #Westminster says. Those Scottish MPs who have voted for punitive welfare 'reforms' are still refusing to talk to the media - even the EBC. I hope their constituents are paying attention - by Labour in #Scotland.

thenational.scot/news/25024108

archive.today/2025.03.20-15243 (archived)

‘Scotch’ Labour fail as Sarwar feels For his job

I would say ‘cross the benches’ but of course Holyrood doesn’t use that archaic Westminster for of separation.

Come on Labour, you know Independence is the only way.

PRESSURE is piling on Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar as his MSPs call out the UK Government's cuts to disability benefits, with one branding it the "wrong decision".

thenational.scot/news/25020817

archive.today/2025.03.19-13195 (archive)

The National · Anas Sarwar silent as Labour MSPs push UK ministers to block DWP cutsBy Laura Pollock

Former Scottish Labour MSP quits with furious attack on Keir Starmer

So one ‘Scottish’ MSP, just one has the balls to do something. How About the rest of you feart weans? Of course I will not expect a word from the mass of the London appointed cattle who will do what Starmer wishes.

archive.today/2025.03.19-08334 (archived)

thenational.scot/news/25019131

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

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

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

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.

Common WealPlatform Socialism — Common WealScotland has some powerful tools we could use to defend ourselves against a Trump trade tantrum. Ones we should be using anyway to break the power of the billionaires who enable him.

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

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.

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.

The National · My idea for how Scotland can set up a House of Citizens nowBy Common Weal

Alba leadership contender on Reform UK

I think this tells you all you need to know about Alba and their priorities. And any of the deluded who think that the English Nationalist Reform will have truck with independence or even benefit to Scotland are truly off the wall. Ash is off towards the right - again.

thenational.scot/news/24972516
(The National)
archive.today/2025.02.28-16091
(archived)

Scotland: We Have Rockets Too

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

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

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

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.

Common Weal · Scotland: We Have Rockets TooCraig Dalzell 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.…