MAgazine
Immunity without accountability
Who gets to design our children’s minds?
The public and politics are at right angles; this missing concept explains it
Politics used to focus on people’s quality of life - and then it started counting up numbers instead. This more than anything explains the disconnect between people and politics.
Why regulating social media is now a public health imperative
Managing the numbers, not the causes
What is the point of a party manifesto these days?
Party political manifestos may seem like an old fashioned method of electoral campaigning in the era of targeted digital adverts, but that might well be why they are still important.
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.