MAgazine
Decarceration without transformation
Scotland’s prison overcrowding crisis has prompted renewed calls to reduce short custodial sentences. But focusing on sentencing alone risks mistaking capacity management for structural reform. This piece examines why decarceration without social reinvestment cannot deliver lasting population change.
How to make people non-disposable
There is a tacit understanding right across politics that some people just count for less than others, and everyone knows it. Only a rethink of our democracy can resolve this.
The House of Lords can’t be reformed because Lords are the Problem
As the UK Government will fail to adequately reform the House of Lords because the Lords themselves are the problem. We should have a House of Citizens instead.
The UK Grid is changing - how it will affect Scotland?
Gordon Morgan of the Common Weal Energy Working Group looks at upcoming changes to the way the UK is managing the electrical grid and how the UK Government’s choices will affect Scotland.
The end state of capitalism is monopoly and then failure
Even as the AI Bubble threatens to pop, it appears to have already caused a completely different tech crisis amongst IT companies that relied on your inability to switch to a competitor to avoid having invest in their own products.
We are all responsible for industrial scale child abuse
Our generation has betrayed our children and chosen our greed over their best interests. There is no ‘dealing with’ a childhood in crisis - we need to remove the cancer.
The politics of legislative ownership
The New National Housing Agency must serve people, not profit
Common Weal celebrates the Scottish Government’s support for our policy of creating a National Housing Agency. We will now campaign to make sure that it is done properly.
The economic case for renewable energy is now unstoppable
While the environmental case for renewable energy has been clear for decades, the economic case for investing in renewables to the exclusion of fossil fuels has now been decisively made.
What does ‘The Traitors’ tell us about ourselves?
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Politicians need to stop being 'mid'
There is a perceived political orthodoxy about the role of government - don’t waste time in small things, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Except life is mostly small things and very big things…
Coming of age in an unserious time
Transparency is not unworkable – it’s welcome
New security environment is a boost for independence, not a threat
The rapidly collapsing global order is now regularly cited as an argument against Scottish independence. Given that what is collapsing is a gross error by the British establishment, the truth is the other way round.
Labour, Blair, and the Return of the Panopticon
Scotland’s future is now clear; ambition or subordination
Over the devolution years Scotland’s leaders have become more and more cautious and have internalised more and more doubt about Scotland’s ability to try big things. In a world in turmoil, we either shake this affliction or we suffer.
Transparency means keeping politicians where we can see them
Democracy only works if we can see everything that a Government does at all times.
Happy to be an embarrassment
Common Weal has been regularly mocked for making arguments which are now mainstream. It is a reflection of Scotland’s stultifying problem of political orthodoxy and the failure to support and promote voices brave enough to ask difficult questions.
Cities for people first, tourists second
Rory Hamilton says his non-New Year’s resolution to carry something forward from 2025 into 2026 and to leave something behind in 2025 is no better embodied than in his moving from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
