MAgazine
It’s time to stop lobbyists
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When banks own housebuilders, house prices go up
A repost from our In Common column in The National, Craig examines the accounts of a volume housebuilder to work out how much you are paying their shareholders to own your home.
Repowering Scotland - A missed opportunity
The Scottish Government has squandered an opportunity to nationalise our energy by not taking Scotland’s first onshore wind farm into public ownership at the best time to do so.
This Skye wind farm fight shows Scotland's national energy injustice
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This is the Scottish landscape I dream of
Scotland has a land problem - we lack ownership and we lack imagination. I have done nothing but imagine a different countryside for years - and this is what it looks like.
Why this sport's in a perilous position in Scotland
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Will your community feed your cat?
There has never been more talk about communities and yet less actual community. It is time we properly understood the science of isolation and why it is very, very bad for us and for society.
The Scottish Government wants to avoid reforming Council Tax
A briefing of the Scottish Government’s consultation on Council Tax reform, what’s missing from it and why it has been published now, just months before the next election.
Information is still not free enough
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Escaping the bonds of bonds
The world has passed a tipping point and we can no longer see bond markets as facilitating democracy. They are an active threat to democracy and we need to disempower them.
Solidarity is dangerous
The power of the efforts to break the blockade of Gaza is seen as an act of futility by some. It isn’t; it’s an act of solidarity and it is powerful because of that.
An Illusionary Convention
John Swinney is proposing a ‘constitutional convention’, but what he is proposing is no such thing. Understanding the original Constitutional Convention offers a real way forward for independence.
The one Keir Starmer policy I want to see implemented in Scotland
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If you want to end homelessness, give people a home
A new study from the Social Market Foundation presents the results of several Housing First pilot schemes, including one in Scotland, and finds that providing free housing to people suffering homelessness results in better outcomes than current services and is cheaper than not doing it.
How to recapture public land
We need to reverse the subtle incremental transfer of land from the commons to the private sector. A way to do that is through a system of land default
How the EPC system makes building eco-houses harder
A guest article from supporter Michael Breslin on how his attempt to build an eco-house was penalised by the broken Energy Performance Certificate system.
This is a warning
We take modern digital connectivity for granted - too for granted. We are woefully ill-prepared for inevitable and possibly catastrophic outages.
Three years of learning
Moral Outrage - and rightly so
How to lose friends and alienate people
Politicians can't stop convincing themselves that working for commercial interests is actually working for the public good. The contradiction between what they think and what we think is undermining democracy.
