The In Tray

Economy and Gaelic – Kate Forbes

For Kate Forbes, perhaps the best Common Weal policy paper to put in your tray is the one you wrote yourself. Giving Substance to the Wellbeing Economy was a solid step away from the Government’s position of talking about Wellbeing without actually taking any of the actions to move Scotland away from a profit-driven, extractive economy and so made for an extremely valuable discussion paper for us. It didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked as it still linked the concept of a wellbeing economy to one that made the GDP line go up and thus still left us open to Wellwashing, but now that you’re in Government again there’s an opportunity to do the radical thing and take us not just a step forward, but to the conclusion of that journey and to a true Wellbeing Economy.On your new Gaelic brief, may I genuinely say that this news is mìorbhaileach but we shouldn’t let our eye slip off the ball of Scotland’s other threatened yet still extant indigenous language of Scots nor should we forget the dozens of other languages spoken in Scotland or spoken internationally by Scottish folk. Please do petition for a Minister for Languages as a whole or choose to interpret your brief a little more broadly than the title might suggest. A multi-lingual Scotland is not a zero-sum game of tongues competing against each other, ach am fear a chailleas a chànain caillidh e a shaoghal.

Finance and Local Government – Shona Robison

The single most important policy paper that covers both of your briefs is our paper on reforming Council Tax. There are no more excuses. There never were. The meagre tweaks of this broken tax despite a clear Parliamentary majority in favour of actual change is simply unacceptable. As part of that, we also need a clear promise from you and from your government to not repeat the dreadful mistake of the previous administration to threaten, bully and bribe Local Authorities into giving up their autonomy over their own taxes. Had Scotland been a normal European country, adhering to European norms of local democracy, constitutional politics and the principles of subsidiarity, any politician who tried that would have been hauled in front of the Constitutional Court for a very stern talking to. And on that point, if Scotland does truly aspire to be the equal of our European peers then we’re going to need an equally local level of democracy. I have grave reservations about John Swinney’s lack of trust in local government – especially given that he last used the position you now occupy to imply that he had already devolved power to Local Authorities “to the maximum extent that is responsible” – implying that it would be irresponsible of him to devolve more. I would like to believe that this is no longer the attitude held by the Scottish Government and await actions to confirm that belief. One major sign would be to tell us if the promise made in 2021 to hold a Citizens’ Assembly on local government finance before the end of this Parliament is still going to be met.

Education and Skills – Jenny Gilruth

The Just Transition and the Education chapter of our Green New Deal blueprint should be at the top of your In Tray. There has been a massive blindspot in the Scottish Government’s plans for a green transition in that it seems to fail to capture how people will need to be trained and re-trained to carry out the tasks we need to do not just now but in the later years of the transition plan. As a case in point, Consider an 18 year old apprentice, retrofitting houses to GND standards, or installing solar panels on roofs, or laying the pipework for district heat networks. If we want that person’s feet in the boots on the ground in five years, then that person is in High School right now. Where is the education plan to help find the people who want to do that job and get them moving into it?Consider that same person, except they are retrofitting the last house in Scotland in 2045 as the Scottish Government is gearing up to celebrate successfully meeting its Net Zero climate target. That person is not born yet. Is there a plan in place to get them educated and skilled for that job then?

Justice and Home Affairs – Angela Constance

Justice is something that Common Weal hasn’t done a lot of explicit work on so I don’t have a distinct policy paper for you but the Justice chapter of our book Sorted is certainly worth a mention. Scotland must start a conversation about what “justice” actually means because many of our peer countries are moving away from the very socially conservative “lock em up and throw away the key” model that both the Conservatives and the SNP are far too wedded to. Might I suggest the enlightening and eye-opening discussion Darren McGarvey had recently about Scottish vs Norwegian prisons. In the early 1990s, Norway’s prisons were much like ours. Overcrowded, under-resourced and did little to rehabilitat those who passed through it. This was until they made a conscious political choice to change, leading that with the principle that as anyone may be caught up in the justice system (either by their mistake or the State’s) any former inmate may be your neighbour – don’t you want to have the best neighbours? As it turned out, while Norway spends about twice as much per prisoner now as we do, they spend far less overall incarcerating people and get far better outcomes from it. It’s time for Scotland to make the same choice.

Net Zero and Energy – Màiri McAllan

For Màiri McAllan, the entire Common Weal Common Home Plan should be essentially the only thing in your In Tray. The cancelling of Scotland’s climate targets that precipitated this new government is a mark of shame that can only be expunged by real, tangible change. We absolutely cannot allow the Scottish Government to continue as if nothing happened or, worse, to follow the UK Government into the climate denialism of rolling back actions to buy votes. We need to see, urgently, the Scottish Government’s revised climate strategy and action plan. We need to see the first steps of that action plan carried out. And we need to see the commitment to see it through.This goes as much for the local scale as much as for the national scale. “Business as usual” may mean the largest solar farm in Scotland currently proposed to be built in your constituency being 100% private owned by a Spanish company. Real change, would mean local, public and community ownership of renewable energy done in a way that doesn’t lock away some of South Lanarkshire’s best farmland for almost half a century.

Transport – Fiona Hyslop

The Transport section of our Common Home Plan is for your deep study. Scottish politics really doesn’t seem to be able to talk about transport beyond “should we dual the A9” and hasn’t for the entire decade that I’ve been involved in politics. But there are lessons out there for how things can change and change rapidly. I’d look at Paris as an example of a city that has in just a few years made radical transformations from a city of car parks and traffic jams to one of green parks and cycle lanes. Don’t forget the rural areas though. We need to see much more in the way of 15 minute neighbourhood plans that include smaller communities like mine as well as active travel transport strategies that would allow me to cycle for my shopping without asking me to travel on unlit trunk roads that ask cars to merge into the cycle lane.

Social Justice – Shirley-Anne Somerville

One of the major announcements of the Sturgeon administration was the call for Scotland to bring in a Universal Basic Income. It has been quite remarkable that in the time between me writing about that policy in 2017 and that announcement, the idea of a UBI went from “radical, fringe and hypothetical” to having majority support in Parliament. Even though the UK Government blocked the pilot schemes – something that might be worth asking Scottish Labour to bring up with Keir Starmer since they support it despite his opposition – Scotland should continue scoping out how to introduce it, especially as it will be an essential tool to meeting John Swinney’s goal of eliminating child poverty. Even if the more modest approach of a Minimum Income Guarantee is the only thing that is possible under the current devolution settlement, then that should be brought in as soon as possible. Every day without it, is another day of people suffering in poverty. They can’t wait any longer.

Constitution, External Affairs and Culture – Angus Robertson

Angus, you probably have the longest reading list of everyone mentioned here simply because your brief is so large. On Constitution, please read our book Direction on how to actually achieve independence – that’s on you now that the Minister for Independence has been dropped - as well as our paper on how to go about writing a Constitution fit for an independent Scotland as a 21st century nation-state (your predecessor Mike Russell never did publish his own work updating that project on how to write a transitional Constitution to guide Scotland through the early days of independence - publishing that would be useful too).On External Affairs, could you please clarify the new Scottish Government’s commitment to signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We know you’ve tried to unilaterally change Government policy to allow NATO nuclear weapons to be berthed in or launched from Scottish territory, but that really isn’t within your gift to do so. While you’re at it, we’d like to see you adjust your external affairs stance with regard to attracting “foreign direct investment” to Scotland. We now know that more than a quarter of a trillion pounds has been extracted from Scotland as a result of those investments. What are you going to do to help develop the Scottish owned economy instead? Finally, on Culture, I’m going to ask you to be patient as we’re still in the process of writing a paper on sustainable development of the arts in Scotland though the relevant chapters in Sorted can show you some of it if you manage to get through everything else before then.

Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands – Mairi Gougeon

Assuming Shona Robison has sorted out local democracy and Council Tax reform, your job, Mairi, gets a lot easier. The first step would be to extend the new Property Tax from houses to include Land and allow local rural communities to reinvest in themselves in the way that our neighbours in Denmark can. We also need to massively improve the current Land Reform Bill – it doesn’t go nearly far enough and almost none of the asks made by land reform campaigners during the initial consultation were taken up by the Government. Scotland deserves to be more than a managed wasteland for the rich. Let’s bring it back to life.

Conclusion

With so little changing at the top of the Scottish Government I don’t have a huge amount of hope that the Scottish Government actually plans to do anything other than persist with the same plans as got it into the place it’s currently in but if it does want to change and if members of the SNP want it to change then know that there are folk out there who have already done the work to make that change possible. Common Weal have a decade of work under our belts now and continue to campaign for a better, fairer, independent Scotland that puts All of Us First. If the Scottish Government want that too, our work is theirs for the taking.