MAgazine
Process over policy was never a route to Indy
The recent inquiry by the Scottish Parliament’s Constitution Committee into the lack of a legislative roadmap to independence told us little that Common Weal hadn’t already predicted. The real question is what to do about it.
Why you should learn the Iron Law of Oligarchy
All bureaucratic systems tend further and further towards centralised control, and there are no exceptions. The only protection against this are checks and balances, and the only protection for those comes from our determination to keep officials honest.
It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform
The Scottish Government’s failure to reform Council Tax has gone on far too long. It must be a defining mission of the next Parliament to reform it in the only fair way possible.
How Scotland could start investing in ourselves
Economist Jim Osborne discusses how Local Government Pension Funds could be a key anchor of Community Wealth Building in Scotland
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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