A new start for Common Weal

Last summer the team got together to ask ourselves a simple question; what on earth does a left wing think tank do in an era where the national debate is between small-c and big-c conservatives? We've reached the point where the only debate in politics is whether to slash social security and the aid budget to spend more on guns and bombs or whether we should raise taxes to spend more on guns and bombs. Saying 'there is an alternative...' has never felt like such a marginalised position. But there is always an alternative. We have spent a decade since we were founded creating detailed plans for the alternative.

Yet it doesn't matter how popular that agenda is with people who are familiar with it, for the most part the Common Weal policy agenda remains a long way away from what is being implemented in either Holyrood or Westminster. We have become increasingly frustrated at the scared-of-its-own-shadow agenda up here and the appalling immigrant-hating-aid-cutting agenda down there. So what do we do?

Our conclusion was that we must show, relentlessly, every day, that there are better options. We will continue to develop substantial new policy papers as we always have, but we have done so much work in so many areas now that we are enhancing or building on what are already substantial answers. Instead we want to look at the real issues every day and use our body of work to explain that this is very much not the only Scotland in which we could live.

This new site has a daily briefing section. Every morning we will look at what national problem is being picked over in the morning news and we will produce a short, sharp briefing note explaining how Common Weal would solve it, linked to materials and resources on our website and elsewhere which provide hope and inspiration. The site is based around a more magazine-like format so we can produce more short, shareable content to illustrate Common Weal ideas – short videos, infographics, quizzes, briefings, image galleries or anything else which helps people understand our ideas.

Once we get this working we will expand our podcast work. We have a tight, weekly news review podcast planned to explore the big issues in Scotland from a Common Weal perspective, and we have lots of thoughts about what other podcasts people will find interesting, inspiring or just plain fun. The goal is to create the maximum number of ways to get our ideas to a new audience.

So that's what we've got planned next. There will be no let-up in the depth and intellectual content of what we do, but we will spend more time breaking it up into bite-sized chunks which, every day, make it easy for new people to understand our ideas and how they work. Perhaps above all we want to show people that this grim, dismal era we're living through is a choice, a choice Scotland can make differently.

We hope you like what you see and an enormous thanks for all the help from our friends at the Tangent design agency who designed and built this site for us. We hope it provides you even more materials that can help you inspire your friends, family and colleagues. We hope you'll stay in touch and give us ideas and feedback on what we're doing. From our end we very much hope that the site transition works and that we're not all staring at a blank screen tomorrow...

And from there, our determination to fight back against this lethargy and despair will grow and flourish in our new era.