Last week, North Edinburgh Arts opened up a new ‘Pennywell Pantry’. For a weekly membership of £3.50, members of the Pantry will be able to choose a selection of food with a value of £15-£20 each week. The Pantry is laid out just like a small super-market, where people go in and select items for their […]
Analysis
Tory attempts to justify opposition to free school meals over the holidays are becoming increasingly desperate, and have a shrinking audience among the public. “Not destroying the currency with excessive QE is also one of our duties,” backbench Tory MP Steve Baker barked on Twitter at Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford, who successfully led a […]
Analysis: QE, Rashford and the new Tory milk snatchers
There was a remarkable contrast this morning in two stories standing side by side on the BBC homepage. On the left, US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saying “we’re not going to control the pandemic”. On the right, one positive covid-19 case sparking the testing of all 4.7 million people in the […]
The pandemic and global politics: accelerating the train crash
“Having abandoned Bolivian democracy to the coup, the international community then stood by while repeated promises of elections were transgressed.”
Analysis: Why did the ‘international community’ turn its back on Bolivian democracy?
Common Weal head of policy & research Craig Dalzell, author of a paper last month proposing a tiered approach to covid-19 restrictions, examines the Scottish Government’s new five-level alert system. Over a month after Common Weal called for a localised, tiered response to the Covid pandemic and six months since countries like France adopted one, […]
Craig Dalzell: @ScotGov tiered Covid-19 restrictions a step forward
Nick Kempe, former head of service for Elderly People in Glasgow, examines what we know so far about the review of adult social care, and if it’s really thinking radically enough about the scale of changes required to address the deep structural problems in the sector which have been so evident during the covid-19 crisis. […]
Nick Kempe: Towards a genuine National Care Service?
Chancellor Rishi Sunak is hoping its third time lucky with his latest post-furlough scheme plans. First he argued that no replacement for the furlough scheme was needed on 1 November. Then, as pressure grew, at the end of September he proposed a “Job Support Scheme”, which was more like an unemployment creation scheme. Now, the original […]
Third time lucky? Sunak’s latest attempt to replace Furlough
As damning indictments go, the government-supported, Fife-based BiFab withdrawing its bid to build jackets for the government-licensed NnG wind farm project off the coast of Fife is right up there. If there is a more obvious example of a failing industrial policy, I can’t think of one. Let’s remind ourselves of the back-story. In December […]
The Bifab failure is a fiasco
What should the UK Government’s strategy be to stop Scottish independence? One would think this is the sort of thing Tory politicians and their staffers think about themselves. But no, in these days of neoliberal governance, Ministers seem happier to outsource all of their thinking to ridiculously expensive private consultancies. Bloomberg has now reported on a leaked 21-page memo […]
Preparing for a “velvet No”
“Whereas austerity slashed the bonds of reciprocity between the state and the citizen, the extension of debt obligations into private households with collapsing incomes creates new relations of domination.”