From housing and land to tax and economy to arts and education, for ten years Common Weal has been developing policy for a better Scotland. We’ve painted a picture of what the alternative to our current mess looks like, a vision of our future if we get it right. But vision is just vision if you don’t have strategies for achieving it, so we have created a whole range of strategic approaches to policy with provide solutions. In turn, strategies are just talk if they’re not backed by action, so we have an extensive to do list of actions. You can easily browse all our ideas below, from our general hopes all the way down to our detailed policies.
*There is an enormous amount of content in this section and we’re still updating it. Some sections have been populated with content from our book Sorted. Bear with us over any formatting errors while we bring this whole section up to date.
The Alternatives
The Scotland in which we live is not the outcome of the fates but of a whole host of human decisions. The big secret is that we could have a different Scotland if only we made different decisions. When you paint a picture of what the alternative looks like, you have to ask yourself why we made these decisions in the first place.
The Solution
But you cannot wish yourself into a better world, you need to act. The solutions to our problems are, for the most part, not doing more of the same or setting out an action plan for how to do the same thing but a little bit better. The solution is to sit down, work out what is wrong, work out why it is going wrong and come up for a plan for how you can make it right. Serious problems need serious solutions - analysis, vision, detail, policy and action.
The To-do list
In the end, visions and strategies are only as strong as the action you take. We can’t talk our way out of our problems so we need a proper task list of change and transformation and it is these which drive forward our visions and strategies.