How Common is your manifesto?
Looking through some of the party manifestos to see where parties have adopted or are aligned with Common Weal’s policies as well as where they are working against them.
The elections are now just a week away and pretty soon we’ll all be scrambling into action to hold the parties in Parliament (particularly those who end up in Government) to get them to fulfil the promises they’ve made to you.
In this, my last Magazine column before the vote, I want to have a very brief look through some of the main manifestos to pull out the most and least ‘Common Weal’ policy in each them. Parties – even those constantly at loggerheads over the slightest ideological deviation and even those who appear to have almost no ideological overlap at all often agree with each other on a surprising number of policies (even if they get to them from wildly different positions and motivations – for example, a party might want a Universal Basic Income because it would allow them to eradicate poverty while another might want it because it would allow them to privatise public services and hand out vouchers for you to spend to buy those services instead).
None of this should be in any way construed as an endorsement of any of the parties mentioned though. Common Weal is party neutral and we lobby all parties to adopt our ideals (obviously this is an easier task with some than with others though).
I also can’t cover every party standing in this election. I’m sticking to the largest ones which, according to current polling, have a reasonable chance of winning seats after the election. I have a library of many of the manifestos for this election collected over at my personal blog which includes some of the smaller parties, though even this is non-exhaustive. Apologies if the party you personally support isn’t covered here due to those caveats (though if your party’s manifesto isn’t yet in my library, please let me know and I’ll get it added!).
As a final caveat, do please go and read Nick Kempe’s article looking at mentions of care and care reform in the manifestos as this is also an area that Common Weal are heavily involved in. To avoid doubling our work, I’m steering a little away from care here and looking at Common Weal policies in other areas instead.
SNP
The SNP are almost certainly going to be the largest party in Parliament after next week and will have a good chance of being returned as the principle party of Government. The question in this election really seems to be more whether they’ll have an outright majority, will form another minority government and try to pass budgets etc with ad hoc alliances (likely with the Lib Dems and/or Greens) or whether they’ll form a more formal coalition or cooperation agreement with one or more other parties.
The difference from a lobbying standpoint for us is that minority governments may need to negotiate with other partners to get votes passed and therefore are more open to compromise or outside ideas whereas majority governments can just whip things through on party loyalty.
Most Common Policy
It’s only a single half-sentence in the manifesto but the announcement of a National Housing Agency isn’t just in alignment with Common Weal ideals but is an idea that comes directly from us. We’ve been campaigning for a decade now for such an agency to coordinate housebuilding in Scotland, strategically plan it, ensure adequate building standards and to help to train builders in the latest techniques (something that will be essential if we want to build houses to PassivHaus equivalent standards). None of that is in the half-sentence of course but we have been in contact with the Government and one of our projects for this year is to design the Agency that we think Scotland deserves.
Least Common Policy
The least Common Weal idea in the SNP manifesto as far as I can see is the continuation, and in fact doubling down, of adherence to conventional economic orthodoxy around the only measure of economic “success” being GDP growth and the only means by which Scotland could and should achieve that growth is by “foreign direct investment”. Gone from this manifesto compared to 2021 is any mention of Circular Economy, 15 minute neighbourhoods, Repair hubs (other than a fund for repairing bicycles) or other policies that promote sustainability through deconsumerism.
Reform UK
It goes without saying that Reform are almost entirely ideologically unaligned with Common Weal. Our very mantra “All of Us First” runs directly against their core belief that only some people matter and some matter more than others.
Most Common Policy
Reform are fighting this election based on flipping over the table of governance and pulling power away from the nationalists in Edinburgh and one of the results of that is that they are surprisingly supportive of plans for local government that wouldn’t look too far out of place coming from us with a demand to devolve more power to local authorities. They don’t end up in quite the same place though, as they also support merging Scotland’s already too-large Local Authorities and concentrating power into the hands of “city mayors”.
Least Common Policy
Pretty much everything they have to say about immigration, immigrants and people reliant on social security.
Labour
Labour are the pro-union party that Common Weal has the closest relationship with. We find a lot of common ground on many issues even where we quite happily and openly disagree on others. In the previous Parliament, for example, we collaborated constructively on substantial aspects of care reform (again, see Nick’s article) as well as Members’ Bills on Freedom of Information, Land Reform, what became the PassivHaus Bill and others.
Most Common Policy
Labour are the only party in this list to explicitly mention the National Care Service as an endeavour that they want to bring back in the next Parliament and have explicitly adopted our phrasing that the NCS must be an institution “worthy of the name”. There aren’t a lot of details about what they want to do or what they’ll be able to do if they aren’t in Government, but this is an area that is high on our priority list for the next Parliament and so one that we will be pushing on for more information.
Least Common Policy
Labour’s energy policy doesn’t mention public ownership of energy (at community, Local Authority or Scotland level) beyond a bare mention of the existence of UK controlled GB Energy – which still doesn’t appear to have a clearly defined purpose or stated ambition of how much of Scotland’s energy it would bring into public ownership.
Scottish Greens
The Greens are another party that we’ve worked closely with over the course of the previous Parliament (My own political inclination leans environmentalist, and I was a member of the party for several years though I think my skills and services are much better applied in a cross-party sense these days) and they are in an interesting position in the upcoming election. A potential substantial increase in votes and seats beckons, though the shadow of the uncomfortable coalition with the SNP and its acrimonious collapse looms overhead too which may well limit their influence more than their number of seats suggests.
Most Common Policy
The Scottish Greens have campaigned for a replacement to Council Tax for almost as long as they’ve existed as a party so this isn’t exactly a policy they’ve taken from us in general, but the details of how to implement a proportional Property Tax are now pretty well defined as a result of our work and their policy here closely aligns with our own vision including in terms of its allocation of discounts and surcharges (particularly on ensuring that landlords can’t keep profiting from rent hikes).
Least Common Policy
While the Greens have included a carbon emission tax on land in their manifesto, they have dropped mention of an outright property tax on land. This is an error. Taxing the pollution created by the use of land is important but so is taxing the concept of ownership of excessive land ownership in principle – even managed appropriately, the accumulation of wealth via land ownership must have its limits. This said, the Greens have formally adopted the former Labour position (now missing from the latter’s manifesto) to place a cap on the maximum amount of Scotland that any person can own.
Conservatives
Like Reform, there is little cross-over between Conservative policy and Common Weal’s, though it has happened. We’ve worked constructively particularly at a local level on local democracy reform and it was Conservative voices that proved critical to campaigns we’ve supported in areas like rent controls and Covid policies. With that party looking like it’ll be largely devoured by Reform though, their influence in the next Parliament may be limited. On the other hand, that may force a reevaluation of their political positions and possibly lead to hands reaching out to unlikely allies.
Most Common Policy
If anything, there’s even less in the Conservative manifesto for Common Weal fans than in Reform’s. One of the few policies I’ve found where we’d be pointing in the same direction is in our opposition to the Building Safety Levy but we do so on very different grounds. We oppose it because it has effectively dumped the cost of cleaning up the mess of companies installing unsafe cladding onto house buyers where we believe that more should be done to recover the costs from the companies and their former owners if those companies have been wound up to avoid paying compensation, whereas the Conservatives merely want to make houses a fraction cheaper (they also want to scrap the PassivHaus legislation on up front cost grounds despite the fact that passive houses are cheaper to run and would eliminate fuel poverty).
Least Common Policy
Tax cuts. The Conservatives are quite simply mathematically wrong on their assertions that every devolved tax is on the far side of the peak of the Laffer Curve and that everything will get better if we just cut taxes in ways that benefit the already rich more than those too poor to pay tax as it is. If 40 years of trickle-down economics was going to work, we would have seen it by now.
Liberal Democrats
Along with the Greens, the Lib Dems may be the ones to watch in this election as they will also be vying to become Kingmakers if the SNP don’t win a majority. Indeed, wariness of the former from the SNP after the coalition collapsed along with a less environment and more business leaning FM Swinney may mean they’d prefer a partner wearing orange rather than green. For their own part, the Lib Dems have ruled out any formal coalition but would consider voting for SNP budgets – as they have done the last two times – if the price is right.
Most Common Policy
Although the Lib Dems are still ideologically against independence, they have quite a lot to say about other aspects of constitutional reform that Common Weal has advocated for. They are one of the few parties in Scotland still advocating for a fully Federal United Kingdom (though we caution that this must be framed as true democratic reform, not merely an alternative to independence or a barrier against it) and they have adopted our policies that Citizens Assemblies should be embedded at all levels of government from local to national and that Freedom of Information should apply to private companies that provide government services.
Least Common Policy
Energy policy again. While the Lib Dems are anti-fracking, they are solidly pro-nuclear (despite it being the most expensive form of low-carbon energy generation) and they are pro-carbon capture (despite the inconvenient fact that it doesn’t work). This said, while the Lib Dems aren’t generally the first choice party when it comes to supporting public ownership of things like energy, their manifesto this year does discuss the government taking equity stakes, reforming ScotWind (adopting our own recommendations) and given Local Authorities the power to bring energy into public ownership if they choose.
Conclusion
As I say, none of this is an endorsement of any party nor are we going to state which part is the most Common Weal of them all – all of them have taken on policies that we could support but all of them have also made promises that we’re going to have to fight against. This is fine. It gives us plenty of scope to stay busy in the next Parliament. We’re certainly going to be stuck right in there to try and get as much as we can done and we’ll work with alliances where we can make and join them. If you’d like to support us as we try to pull all of the parties in a more Common Weal direction then please do so here. And I’ll be back on the topic in the next couple of weeks to break down what the results mean once we see what they actually are.
