thoughts on the decade to come

Robin McAlpine

So there you go, ten years of Common Weal and we're still here. I guess you might argue that the last ten years has been about Scotland finding its new normal after the seismic event that was the independence referendum. If so, I don't think the new normal is as much of an improvement as it really ought to have been.

But what now? What does the next ten years mean for an organisation like Common Weal in a nation like Scotland? I don't want to go all crystal ball here. God knows what will happen. What I want to look at is what should happen – and whether it is likely to or not.

Let me start with the big challenge – working out what actually is the big challenge. At the moment we've got a load of political parties increasingly aware of what the problems look like but which are deeply unconvincing on why it is happening or what to do about it. And because there is no shortage of big challenges, how do we prioritise?

Because I can tell you already the big challenge which is simply not going to be a priority in the next decade – tackling poverty. Disinterest in poverty is now baked into politics. I don't mean people don't talk about child poverty as a bad thing, but even the narratives of our politics exclude poverty as an issue to do anything about rather than to launder your morality with.

Look at the budget; there is all but no difference in Reeves' 'workers only' mindset to George Osborne's 'strivers and skivers' mindset. He made support for those in poverty both brutally insufficient and also humiliating. Labour is maintaining that strategy but cutting its funding a bit. So where's the difference?

The flip of that is that the only thing that might make a serious dent in poverty – a major new approach to the economy – remains off the agenda. The Greens have a bit of a degrowth agenda which is markedly different, but on the fundamental question of what an economy is, how it should work and in what way it ought to benefit society and workers there is zero new political thinking in Scotland or the UK.

What we know is that both the UK Government and Scottish Government are firmly on a 'continuity economic management but with added growth' strategy and it isn't going to address poverty. We can therefore assume that every single noise about the economy and poverty will remain indistinguishable from the noise of the last 30 years. Only an external shock seems likely to change anything.

So what big challenges does that leave? Well, climate change obviously. There is quite a strong argument is that the next ten years are now the most consequential we'll ever face. Most of the data suggests that environmental tipping points are coming faster and earlier than we expected and we keep finding reasons why it may be worse than we thought and many fewer suggesting it will be better.

It isn't a reliable assumption to believe that we can reverse damage done and it is certainly not a reliable assumption that whatever happens in the next decade is easily reversible. The uncertainty is the problem – we can't prove that this is the key decade until it is too late, and inside that doubt the forces of conservatism make hay. We're going backwards on the climate, not forwards.

We should be looking at a decade ahead where major new steps on poverty eradication are taken, where we're having a serious debate about Scotland's economy that goes beyond landlords and the oil industry playing the victim and the politicians running behind them, where we finally start taking big, structural swings on decarbonisation.

The Labour budget doesn't leave any serious cash for structural swings on decarbonisation. The SNP doesn't have any credible plan for doing anything anyway. They're all operating on the latest climate-denial wheeze which is Carbon Capture and Storage. The sole purpose of CCS is to prevent real climate change action. The best measure of strategy is the ratio of money for CCS versus money for everything else. It should be 200-to-1, 300-to-1, with CCS only used for a small number of specialist applications.

So we look like we're going to spend yet another ten years in a process of what is in effect using tens of billions of public money to insulate the oil and gas industry from reality so the plutocrats stay wealthy. It is an uninspiring sight.

What should we be doing? What should be the big themes? We need a serious national debate on Scotland's economy and it needs to not be lobbyists making wild claims in the media as usual (presumably those 100,000 jobs in the oil and gas industry which are going to be lost after the slight increase in tax on oil companies will soon be verifiable...).

In fact I'd have an economic debate which did not involve business leaders, just for once. Instead I'd like a national conversation on what the future we're working towards should look like. What never shapes the economy is the public, which is why it doesn't work for them. We could start to make a change on that.

Likewise, I've not changed my mind that the best bet for climate change would be a national 'call for solutions', the results of which should be presented to a Citizens' Assembly with the promise that, whatever they conclude, it will get cross-party support. We're never going to get an ambitious climate change plan by waiting for the politicians to triangulate how little they need to do...

There are a bunch of big pieces of unfinished business that we also ought to be addressing in the next decade. I'll measure the health of our democracy based on whether we actually change the dial on a range of issues where there is nominally consensus that 'something must be done'.

So in ten years if we still have the Council Tax, we failed. If there isn't viable evidence that land ownership is diversifying based on democratic action, we failed. If we end this decade still with the most centralised local democracy in the developed world, we failed. In my view, if we haven't at least halved the number of quangos and agencies, we failed.

I'd add in health reform. It is now clear to me that we need health reform that is in the opposite direction of what looks like it is coming. It looks like there is going to be even more focus on financialisation of the health service when the focus should be on medicalisation of the health service. It needs to be run by medics, not spreadsheet. I fear the opposite is going to happen.

What about a 'big idea', something new? Almost all of the above is best defined as 'things we should have done over the last decade but didn't'. What about some innovation? Well, the most transformative innovative idea I know of for that timescale is our plans for a second chamber of the Scottish Parliament to be created as a Citizens' Assembly. I've explained before how radical this is, what it could achieve. That would be something that looks like a nation moving forward.

Scottish independence? The 'how' I've published a book on and I remain convinced it contains the right approach. The question is, how do we move forward without leadership? We really, really don't have leadership in the independence movement. The SNP is no longer really even pretending to give leadership on independence.

At the moment the smart money would bet on next to no progress on Scotland's constitutional future over the coming decade. Unless something changes, that's where I'd put my money.

Therein lies the good news, the hope. Unless I am surrounded in both my professional and personal life with particularly complaining types, the public is sick and fed up of continuity and I believe that if someone in Scotland can offer credible change, if just a very small set of circumstances align, change could be massive and fast. I really believe that.

I really believe that politics is now holding back the public appetite for change. It can't forever, not without consequence. Something is going to give, and thankfully in Scotland there are few signs that thing is 'the absence of fascism'. That said, I really amn't sure who is yet properly prepared for the reality of what may well be double figures of Reform MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, and I don't think there is a starker judgement on the political parties we have.

So how can we give this the best chance of happening, you as activists, you as disgruntled political party members, us as Common Weal, all of us? That is the real trend I think we need to focus on over the next decade. The last was a decade of division. Lots of people gained through the polarisation of society and politics, but overall we lost.

That polarisation took all of our interests and set one agains the other where in fact it would have been easy to find common ground. The political right is an old hand at this, blaming immigrants or public sector workers or the poor or environmentalists for the outcomes of right-wing politics. Sadly the left joined in, ripping itself apart in an orgy of 'who is purest?' name-calling.

What we need to do if we are to have hope is to start to converge people's interests. The median small business owner has an income that makes them look more like a low-pay worker than a plutocrat. They are under the kind of duress a pensioner is if that pensioner don't have a generous private pension. That puts them in the same kind of financial category as a 20-something paying extortionate rent.

That also looks like everyone in the care sector. It's in the range of what a nurse would get at basic salary. Half of the full-time working population of Scotland earn less than £27,000 and if you earn £62,00 a year you are among the top ten per cent of richest people in the country.

And it is not only that this group – small business owners, pensioners, the young, low-income workers, the poor, carers, the unemployed or disabled – all have enormous interest in common, its how many others share those interests. They might not see it, but it is the same thing which is screwing them all over. It is how we manage the economy.

That is also what is at the heart of the interests of climate change activists, anti-poverty activists, those committed to strong public services, anyone left-leaning, those with grandchildren... All of these groups share an interest. But if you asked them, would they see it that way?

I suspect not. But what if they did? What if someone tried to converge their interests and unite them behind a political project? If that project forced people to face up to what the economy is doing to them, their loved ones, their hopes? What could it achieve? This is what both the centre right and the centrist liberals fear most. They therefore give it a bogey-name – economic populism.

For them, if it isn't hurting it isn't working – in perpetuity. That someone would blame those with power for creating this hurt is the one thing they fear, the one thing they demand we don't do. So if there is a single task that I think is fundamental to any chance of the next decade being better than the last, it is converging people's interests and bringing them in behind a programme of action.

That is my real hope for the next decade, that we come together – not in a post-it-on-Instagram kind of way, not a pithy-phrase-for-a-feel-good-wall-ornament kind of way, not even in a solidarity-in-our-plight kind of way. In a 'I'm mad as hell and I'm no going to take this any more!' kind of way.