“The government likes to talk about safe and legal routes to reach the United Kingdom. The reality is that unless you are Ukrainian or from Hong Kong there are no such routes to speak of. There is no queue to jump” freemovement.org.uk/briefing-the...

I will leave Parliament as I entered it: with landlord monopoly and class inequality remaining as Scotland's hereditary curse fb.watch/DhIuhkSXYz/

A detailed examination of how weak the new Land Reform Bill is likely to be in practice. The only thing I'd add is that if Scotland had implemented @thecommonweal.bsky.social's Property Tax, this is estate could owe a little under £159,000 per year for its land. www.commonweal.scot/policies/tax...

I'm quoted in The Guardian today, commenting on the passing of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I take it that from now on, the BBC shall cover Trump's speeches either by a) airing his entire rambling messes unedited and unfiltered with full text transcripts but then not reporting on them afterwards because that would be to make an editing choice or b) ignoring them completely.

CW Magazine Repost A briefing of the Scottish Government’s consultation on Council Tax reform, what’s missing from it and why it has been published now, just months before the next election.

The immediate follow-up question to "we will only support this oil project if it meets our climate compatibility tests" should always be "does this project meet those tests and what would a project that could meet those tests look like?"

My article in The National this evening on my encounter with an AI chatbot quoting false information about a Scottish political party and what that might mean for our democracy. www.thenational.scot/politics/255...

Today's Common Weal Daily Briefing The Scottish Government isn't taking digital security seriously. www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefi...

If the UK Government truly believed that the SNP are a threat to national security then they'd move to make them a proscribed organisation. Since they're not, they're evidently lying.

I'm quoted here, talking about the impact of foreign investors on Glasgow and Edinburgh and how they'll lead to profits being extracted from those cities rather than reinvested in its people. www.thenational.scot/news/2559264...

Today's Common Weal Daily Briefing Zohran Mamdani has shown that the rising tide of the Right can be turned back by a campaign of exciting progressive policies. Many of his policies are ones that Common Weal has already campaigned for. www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefi...

And thus destroying any hope of fixing either climate concerns or energy security.

Today's Common Weal Daily Briefing The revolving door of those doing the lobbying and those being lobbied has to end. www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefi...

Was doing a search yesterday of Scottish party policy platforms to look for a policy that I thought one Scottish political party had supported. The unwanted sidebar chatbot confidently stated that, yes, that party DID support this policy and linked me to the manifesto of a different political party

Whenever politicians talk about "efficiency" in public services, they almost always mean "cuts" and not "an investment here will cut failure demand there". For example, a Universal Basic Income is more efficient than the cost of the poverty it'd eliminate. thecommongreen.scot/2024/03/01/a...

CW Magazine Repost An extended version of my article in this week’s In Common column in The National, he looks at the Freedom of Information Reform (Scotland) Bill, how it improves your right to Freedom of Information and where it could go further.

Any politician who supports cutting minimum wage and/or social security for the poor should live on their proposed rate for at least a few months to demonstrate its viability.

Today's Common Weal Daily Briefing. Every public building must be great. The case for a Scottish National Infrastructure Company extends beyond just avoiding PFI. www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefi...

"We are almost exactly as wealthy as the eurozone countries but we’re exporting wealth at twice the rate of even the most indebted poor countries ...Scotland is rich like Europe but leaks wealth much, much worse than sub-Saharan Africa." And SNP policy plays into that. We should be angry.

"It turned out that carbon capture didn't capture enough carbon so rather than intensify efforts to decarbonise we're going to slacken climate targets until we don't miss them."

Yesterday, I spoke at Scottish CND's annual conference on the economics of nuclear weapons. See from 1h52m in the linked video. Please also watch the testimony of Sid Khan at 42m, talking about his experiences as part of the recent Palestine aid flotilla. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUHX...

The graph that explains so much about the Scottish economy. Robin McAlpine in The National. www.thenational.scot/politics/255...

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

'The Council Tax is outdated, unfair and needs to change. The argument of that fact was won more than a quarter of a century ago.' @thecommongreen.scot, via Common Weal

The graph that explains so much about the Scottish economy. Robin McAlpine in The National. www.thenational.scot/politics/255...

Someone should introduce them to a book about Capital's subjugative effect on Labour: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Kap...

I would add PEOPLE WHO PRETEND THE COMPUTER WAS ACCOUNTABLE SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHATEVER THEY PRETEND IT WAS ACCOUNTABLE FOR.

And the moral argument: if the economy requires approximately 4% unemployment to function properly, those of us doing okay are doing so directly at the expense of those people making up that 4%.

@ariane-burgess.bsky.social and Mercedes Villalba speak to their amendments which introduce a public interest test on buyers as originally advised by @scottishlandcom.bsky.social Such a measure would dramatically strengthen the LR Bill but it won't pass....

In my book All of Our Futures, we argued that the state pension should be replaced by a Universal Basic Income - removing the arbitrary "retirement age" in favour of giving people the freedom to work for however long they wanted and were able to. www.commonweal.scot/shop/p/all-o...

Overshooting 1.5°C wasn't 'inevitable.' We've been pushed by fossil fuel giants & governments that pander to them. Every delay, every oil field, every broken promise made this crisis worse. Keir Starmer, will you promise to leave Rosebank undeveloped? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Good news. But we should not forget this vile policy idea of Lam’s would have produced the largest deportation of legal migrants by any democracy since at least the Second World War. All to benefit a couple of MPs in a struggling party.

'The big supermarket chains sit between you and groceries and manipulate you as to what products you buy, therefore what you eat and how much you end up spending - a form of social control of which the Chinese Communist Party must be jealous.' Robin McAlpine, via Common Weal

The problem is not the migrants but the appalling mismanagement of the system by successive governments www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

I've prepared a Stage 3 briefing for MSPs on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill questioning whether the complex administrative processes in the Bill can really be justified if there is no meaningful impact on the pattern of landownership in Scotland. andywightman.scot/2025/10/stag...

Downside to coming up with new inclusions for coverage is then forgetting to, y'know, include them. I'm supposed to be highlighting how much the SNP are warping proportionality! AMS ideal (vs projection): SNP ~ 42 (-20) RUK ~ 27 (+6) Lab ~ 22 (+5) Con ~ 15 (+5) LD ~ 12 (+3) Grn ~ 11 (+1)

CW Magazine Repost The 2025 SNP Conference has backed a motion on public ownership of energy and a Just Transition for energy workers that deeply embeds several key policies advocated for by Common Weal, including a Scottish Public Energy Company.

I know this is obvious. And I know we all know this. But if the President can raise taxes because an advert annoyed him, without even consulting Congress, then the US constitution is simply not functioning as intended.

He’s designing the ballroom with AI isn’t he www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

CW Magazine Repost A UN Commission has found that Scotland remains in breach of your right to environmental justice. Here is why having adequate means of upholding your rights is as important as the rights themselves.

I'm very pleased to see that my work on the ScotWind scandal has been getting some traction again after being quoted recently by Future Economy Scotland. I do encourage folk to read their report as it ties my work in with the work of others like the STUC.

Two articles from me for you this Friday. First: I'm asking you to contact your MSPs to ask them to support the Freedom of Information (Reform) Bill and to push for it to go even further. www.commonweal.scot/articles/mag...

Absolutely stonking Plaid win in Caerphilly: as I understand what by-elections mean, Labour will now have to back Welsh Independence and a bunch of left wing policies in order to win back support, right? Or is it only when they lose narrowly to the fash they take up their policies?

This is chilling. The President is asserting authority to kill completely outside of the law. And plans to keep at it. We are not at war, and he is ignoring the criminal laws that actually apply (eg, murder). No limiting principle stops him from doing this to others he labels "terrorists." 1/3

The bleakly funny thing about this story is that visibly *this morning* the Conservative leadership had not absorbed just how crackers the policy they had signed up to was.

Hadn’t, in truth, really absorbed the scale of what the Conservatives are proposing on ILR and immigration more broadly until this week’s Sunday Times interviews. Some thoughts on that in today’s note:

Great stuff Orkney Every Local Authority in Scotland should be setting up its own local electricity company and pushing projects like this. www.commonweal.scot/policies/how...