MAgazine
A nation that can't take care of itself is a fool
If the economics of precarious supply chains and globalised risk is stuttering, what is the responsible thing for a nation state to do? The same as always – make sure it's people have what they need.
The economics which created our crisis can’t fix it
The latest war-driven global price panic is not an aberration but a constant state of being in the contemporary global economic. It is all so unstable that unless we take a new course, it will fall down sooner or later.
It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform
The Scottish Government’s failure to reform Council Tax has gone on far too long. It must be a defining mission of the next Parliament to reform it in the only fair way possible.
How Scotland could start investing in ourselves
Economist Jim Osborne discusses how Local Government Pension Funds could be a key anchor of Community Wealth Building in Scotland
The public and politics are at right angles; this missing concept explains it
Politics used to focus on people’s quality of life - and then it started counting up numbers instead. This more than anything explains the disconnect between people and politics.
The end state of capitalism is monopoly and then failure
Even as the AI Bubble threatens to pop, it appears to have already caused a completely different tech crisis amongst IT companies that relied on your inability to switch to a competitor to avoid having invest in their own products.
What does ‘The Traitors’ tell us about ourselves?
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Politicians need to stop being 'mid'
There is a perceived political orthodoxy about the role of government - don’t waste time in small things, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Except life is mostly small things and very big things…
Cities for people first, tourists second
Rory Hamilton says his non-New Year’s resolution to carry something forward from 2025 into 2026 and to leave something behind in 2025 is no better embodied than in his moving from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
The failure of politics? You can't fix what you can't see
Policymakers are far too stuck in their own bubble to properly understand how their policies impact on people. Unless they learn to count what matters to real people rather than corporations, the fraying of democracy will continue.
Farewell Auld Reekie, onwards the dear green place
Rory Hamilton says his non-New Year’s resolution to carry something forward from 2025 into 2026 and to leave something behind in 2025 is no better embodied than in his moving from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
2025 - Common Weal’s Year in Policy
Craig runs through Common Weal’s policy library to show off everything we’ve published this year, just in case you’ve missed a paper or two and would like to see them.
The Scottish Government wants to remove profit from children’s care – here’s how to do it.
A repost from our In Common column in The National, Craig summarises our latest policy paper on how and why the Scottish Government must remove profit from children’s care.
Private profit doesn't make government more efficient
For 50 years we've lived as if private profit is good for public services and it has led to the mass extraction of public wealth by corporate insiders. We will never fix public services until we admit this problem.
How to profit from not-for-profit care
Common Weal’s latest policy paper discovers that the Scottish Government’s commitment to limit profit in children’s care is likely to face obstacles as there are many more ways to extract money from “not-for-profit” work than the narrow definition of “profit”.
I want to choose a different modernity
Modern life truly is rubbish, and it is a state of affairs none of us chose. It is time to believe that we can chose a different modernity, one that works for us.
How can you wash your hands when this happens to us?
Temoka Melindo (Moka) is a student at Glasgow Caledonian University and now lives in Scotland as a climate refugee. She tells her story and asks how we can sit around and watch this happen to families like hers and still do nothing.
It’s time to stop lobbyists
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When banks own housebuilders, house prices go up
A repost from our In Common column in The National, Craig examines the accounts of a volume housebuilder to work out how much you are paying their shareholders to own your home.
Repowering Scotland - A missed opportunity
The Scottish Government has squandered an opportunity to nationalise our energy by not taking Scotland’s first onshore wind farm into public ownership at the best time to do so.