Approaching 2026 With Hope
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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My last Common Weal Magazine article was my sum up of Common Weal’s year in policy for 2025. If you haven’t read that, go and recharge your beverage of choice (it’s a long article) and give it a read. I’m sure there were a couple of our successes this year that you’ve missed.
Next year will be one that starts off running. The Scottish elections are scheduled for May and that means for think tanks like us, a lot has to get done – thought perhaps not quite in the way that you might think.
The first couple of months will be busy as the Parliament rapidly runs through its “wash up” period. A feature of our democracy is that if any legislation hasn’t been finished and fully voted on by the time that Parliament shuts down for the election in March then it doesn’t roll over into the next Parliament. It “falls” and has to be started again from scratch. This goes just the same for a relatively inconsequential Member’s Bill as it does for a flagship manifesto promise from the Government, so there’s a lot of pressure from a lot of parties to get things done.
We’ve already seen a couple of bits of legislation that we’re interested in fall by the wayside (the attempt from Mercedes Vilalba to impose a maximum cap on land ownership is still technically a Member’s Bill but when the Government voted down an amendment to the Land Reform Bill that would have incorporated it, that pretty much ended hope of them supporting it as standalone legislation). We’re also still waiting to find out if Katy Clark’s Bill to extend Freedom of Information rights in Scotland will get time to finish its process and we’ll be applying pressure to try to make that happen.
We also see Bills pass and fail in somewhat strange ways. The Bill to specifically criminalise the theft of dogs passed this week – despite existing legislation covering the theft of property more generally both already covering dogs and imposing potentially harsher punishments for doing so, meaning that you could interpret the new legislation as posturing at best and the part-decriminalisation of theft at worst. Even as a cat-lover myself, I can’t help but wonder if this was the best use of limited Parliamentary time.
Meanwhile other Bills with arguably much larger social impacts have been dropped such as plans to accelerate the decarbonisation of home heating (albeit not in the way we’d prefer to see) or plans to cut speed limits on roads which absolutely would have saved lives.
All this is to say that the first couple of months trying to sort out what we can help get done (or help to avoid happening) is going to take up a fair bit of time in the first part of the year.
During the election period itself though, think tanks like ours can be remarkably quiet. Sure, you might see some of us as talking heads and pundits on various commentary outlets or perhaps even on election night itself (not that I’ve been invited yet – though I have done the 10pm-5am stint in a previous election) but in terms of policy and lobbying, all of the manifestos have been written and we have no idea who will and will not have a seat until the count happens.
After that, depending on how shaken up Parliament is, we’ll have our work cut out of us to introduce ourselves to the various new (and returning) Ministers and party spokespeople and to start laying out what we can do given the balance of parties. Who knows. We might well get a progressive alliance of parties looking for fresh ideas. We might get a collection of conservative (small-c) “old guard” who need to be strongly nudged along the way. We might well get a Parliament that is openly hostile to our views and needs to be opposed to prevent them from doing damage to the fabric of Scotland. Whichever way, there’ll certainly be a role for Common Weal and I hope you’ll continue to follow and support us on that journey.
Beyond that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. Our policy pipeline remains a long one and we have some major work upcoming on inequality, on education, on healthcare reform and on digital security as well as ongoing work from folk like our Care Reform Group and Energy Working Group who have been making real strides in changing legislation and regulation in Scotland and in the UK (for just the latest example, see our mention in the Committee evidence report on the Children’s Care Bill published this week where we’ve been advocating for the Scottish Government to keep its promise to remove profit from such care).
“But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were.”
This year has been a dark one. I’m personally extremely worried about the rise of militarism and the pulling away from the only things that will ever actually prevent wars before they start – the world appears to be collectively abandoning climate action, foreign aid, help for displaced peoples and peaceful diplomacy.
But there’s hope too. It’s hard to see the work that went into preventing a war that was never fought. Or to prevent the famine in which no-one starved. But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were. There’s hope that what is happening can therefore be undone and reversed – perhaps with the appreciation now of what could be.
For the smallest glimmer of that, this week I finished work that I’ve spend the last two years working on alongside SCIAF and Friends of the Earth Scotland in which we drew together a dozen people from across four continents for a consultation on how Scotland can make its Circular Economy strategy more powerful.
We’ll be reporting on that next year too but it was an empowering thing to see Scotland actively reach out to others beyond our borders to ask them how our policies on trade, manufacturing and waste management was affecting them and how we could improve ourselves. One of the attendees openly said that this might be the first time that a Global North Government has done consultation on domestic policy in this way and they hoped that it might become the inspiration for others to follow. I’m thankful to the Scottish Government for taking to our pitch with the enthusiasm that they did and for their support in making it happen.
And I’m grateful to all of our readers and supporters who keep us doing what we’re doing. Common Weal is an unusual think tank. We’re not beholden to a particular political party, or to government funding (while the Scottish Government funded the project I’ve just mentioned, neither I nor Common Weal took a fee or compensation from that pot – not even expenses), and our policy programme isn’t dictated to us by the demands of advertisers or funding bodies.
We’re supported by you and people like you. While this means that our funding is a fraction of what it could be (seriously, the First Minister earns more in a year than Common Weal as a whole does), it gives us the freedom to live our principles. If you’re not already a donor or if you know someone who might like to sign up and start supporting us, then please visit our donate page.
Other than that, my final message of the year is my hope that you all have a peaceful and happy winter break – however you may mark it – and that I’ll be back in the New Year rested, full of cheese and raring to go. I’ll see you there.
