Dr Craig Dalzell, Head of Research at Commonweal, spoke to Edinburgh & Lothians Group about a set of recent policy papers with the umbrella title of “A Resilient Scotland”.
Why Resilient?
Because we need to emerge successfully from Covid. And we will have to deal with the fall out of Brexit. Scotland will need a great deal of resilience. And if – in the not too distant future – we are setting up as an independent country then our resilience will be put to good use!
Craig’s talk is 25 minutes long and followed by a lively Q&A session. You can listen to it here:
Here are some of our questions to Craig:
- How does Commonweal get access to MSPs and Scottish Government to persuade them about your policy papers? Craig suggested that a more important questions might be how do constituents get access to their MSPs, because that’s where the power lies.
- Can we close Ineos Grangemouth, the major plastic producer, and replace those 10,000 jobs by green jobs?
- We need a younger generation well informed about civic politics, basic economics, Scottish history and philosophy
- How will numbers of jobs lost in pandemic compare to jobs gained in green jobs in future?
- Will Commonweal ever become a political party?
- Do you think we will ever get a proper set of fiscal accounts for Scotland?
- What about a national care service? Turns out Commonweal are actively researching this and will follow up with an implementation plan
- How do we share Commonweal ideas with the wider population since MSM aren’t doing that? Craig, how about you doing short videos talking straight camera to put over your ideas?
- Commonweal weekly podcasts
- Does Commonweal have a view on what a Scottish Defence system should look like?