10 Years of Common Weal
Ten years ago today (well, yesterday, but we held off because of the funeral of Alex Salmond), a group of us sat in a meeting room in Glasgow and formally created Common Weal. Since it's our tenth birthday I thought I'd share some of my recollections of that decade with you.
But first, for a left wing organisation dedicated to the building of big ideas to have managed to keep going and keep staff employed for ten years is in itself a minor miracle. There is no big money for the likes of us – it is ten years of our small, regular donors making their contribution which has kept us going. To all of you, I'm more grateful than you probably know.
Yet it is inevitably true that over time you lose donors, and this has been made worse because of a technical problem with our donate function. The cost of living crisis was rough for us. If we are to continue to make the kinds of change I'm reflecting on below for the next ten year we need your help. We really do. We keep bumping into people who tell us 'thank god you do what you do' but I always feel too polite to say 'and are you helping'. But I'll get over that for our birthday. Are you helping? If not, can you help? And if you can, please click one of the three donate buttons below to create a monthly Direct Debit which will help to secure our future.
Anyway, it's not in our nature to be happy with just surviving. What did we achieve? I'm going to put this into four quick categories for you; groundbreaking ideas, policy change we made happen, national debates we fundamentally altered, and wonderful experiments we learned from.
We've published exactly 111 major policy papers (though I think it's actually now 112 since Craig went and counted them). There are too many even to begin to highlight but there are a number of project that stand out for me. Actually, there are three – How To Start a New Country, the Common Home Plan and Caring for All. Each of these was what the youngsters call a 'game changer'. These are ideas that genuinely moved thinking on considerably – many people have built on the How to Start a New Country work, the Common Home Plan has been very influential among environmental policy-makers and Caring for All is as radical and inspiring a vision as anything we've published. I am personally very close to these three because they were such an enormous learning experience for me. Honestly, all three was like doing another degree.
But what did we, change? We've certainly had an effect on the policies of political parties. The SNP has formally adopted half a dozen of our proposals as party policy and the Greens probably more than we can remember. We've also influenced Labour policy in a number of areas from Freedom of Information to housing to public infrastructure and PFI. In fact we've also worked with the Lib Dems and the Tories too, on issues such as local democracy and public procurement. We are genuinely respected across party divides.
Less was enacted by government than we'd have liked, and less was done well than we'd have liked. On the positives, the RMT commissioned us to do a paper on how to nationalise ScotRail and that was the model used by the Scottish Government when it did it. The Scottish National Investment Bank is a bit of a mess but it remains a really powerful tool for Scotland if it was used right and it is probably our biggest single achievement. Our impact on care policy has also been enormous, but perhaps not in the way we'd have liked. We were desperately keen to take a bad proposal and make it good and instead we've been stuck trying to make a bad policy less bad. But Common Weal's work has been highly influential on many of the key care stakeholders.
And this all underplays the continual small changes we win. Our Energy Team has worked tirelessly with the Scottish Government to help shape policy and we've done the same on childcare, housing, local democracy, land reform, tax and so much more. We can't count the consultation responses we've produced.
But that isn't even necessarily out biggest impact. We were realistic about change when we were set up, knowing that there is always a relentless resistance to doing things differently, especially if it challenges vested interests. A lot of what we tried to do was to change the conversation – and I really think we did, in lots of ways. It might not always be obvious because it takes time and no-one says 'I change my mind because of…'. But I chuckle to think how at the start of all of this, talking about excessive centralisation in Scotland wasn't part of the national conversation, decarbonisation had a depressingly small available policy tool bag, land reform was not seen as a driver of economic potential so much as a social justice issue… No we didn't change all these conversations on our own, but we did change them, and in the long term that matters.
Then again, much as I love the big ideas, much as I get a buzz thinking about things we've changed, much as I am glad to see the national conversation adapt and move on, I do have a special affection for all Common Weal's mad experiments. They didn't all work, but that's not what experiments are for…
We ran a 27-date Political Cabaret at the Edinburgh Festival. It was based on a book of poetry and art we commissioned to celebrate the legacy of the independence movement. It was a wild and exciting experience which cost us a fortune and I will never do again. But it was brilliant. So was our exhibition. This one frustrated me; we curated the biggest exhibition of Scottish political art in decades and it was packed with amazing work by very serious artists. My frustration is that more people didn't get to see it, again because these things are resource-intensive and we could't run it for long. This was also true of Common Social. Hands up, this one was mine and it didn't work, but I still think it was a great idea. Social media was always going to be a saturated mess that got worse and worse for activists and we thought that we could create a small, curated and useful social media network where people could specifically politically organise. I still think this was a good idea, but we were too early and it really does take quite a bit resource to maintain.
That was also true of the most frustrating experiment of all – Common Market. That was all about the idea of promoting sustainable Scottish producers and buying local. It was an online marketplace and we had hundreds of Scottish producers selling through it as a pre-Christmas pilot. They were very happy, we were very happy, customers were very happy, the model was great. But we only had the cash for a pilot and just didn't have the ability to go and do the kind of fundraising that would make it permanent. I was always sad about that.
And of course our biggest experiment was CommonSpace, which became Source. It was a simple idea; be the media. We employed five journalists to create a full daily news service coming from a left perspective and it did amazing things for the seven years it survived. But eventually we had to face the reality that there is no public funding for alternative media in Scotland and no-one pays for news any more. When our funding declined during Covid, we had no option but to close it. Still, it was a wonderful experiment.
I can feel I've gone on too long for an email and yet my head is also spinning with things I've not mentioned. CommonPrint and the 20-odd books we've published, the Red Lines campaign, all our coalitions and all the events we've run, Sorted, the culmination of so much of our work, all ur amazing contributors and collaborators. And perhaps above all our Local Groups, our motley gangs of local activists trying to make a Common-Weal difference in their communities, most of which struggled to keep going through Covid.
It's been really stressful at times – we do set ourselves some big challenges with some brutal deadlines and I hate the juggling of money it takes to keep a small NGO going. It has been intensely frustrating at times. But the teams of people we've been able to employ, the wins we've had, the many, many people I've got to meet, the ideas we got to share and have shared with us, all of my interactions with you all over the years – mostly it's been exhilarating and mostly I think I may be the luckiest boy in the world to have got to do all this.
So thank you, thank you for all your support. We exist because of you and we've got soooo many plans for the coming decade. Stay with us - help us - there is so much still to do.
