This is the first edition of the new In Common newsletter from the pro-independence think tank Common Weal. To get it sent direct to your inbox every week, click here.
This week's edition comes from Amanda Burgauer, director at Common Weal.
Hello and welcome to In Common, a weekly slot in which Common Weal will bring you the writing of some of our wide range of policy experts. I want to use this first article to let you know what we're going to try to do in this space.
I'm sure you know who Common Weal is, but just in case, let me tell you all about us. We started as a project - to ask what exciting, visionary, and hopeful things we could do with the power of independence. We launched a short paper in May 2013, which got an enormous response and played an important part in the shift from the early, cautious independence campaign to the "carnival of hope" that it became.
After the referendum we set up as our own independent organisation, which means next year is our 10th birthday. It has been the incredible support of independence activists making small regular donations that has allowed our success?.
We did that by bringing in a great team and working with some of the very best experts in Scotland on what "better" looks like. It is their vision that we want to share with you. What we'll do is take a live issue each week, and we'll explain how it is going, why it isn't working as well as it could, and set out what the hope-filled version of it could be.
READ MORE: The story of Common Weal's fight for a Scottish public energy company
What kind of subjects will we be looking at?
Common Weal works across a wide range of policy areas, and we'll try and bring you lots of different ideas and perspectives.
We have been doing work on "wellbeing economics" since long before they were called wellbeing economics – and we want to make sure that no-one believes that a wellbeing economy is just this economy but nicer. It is no such thing, rather it's a radical plan for changing how we run our society.
We will keep looking at Scotland's energy resources and its urgent energy needs. We will look at how Scotland can start to get some actual benefit from its own energy resources and how to stop handing that benefit over to foreign multinationals – by owning our own energy.
We will discuss how to heat our homes (heat pumps are not the best bet for clean heat), but first we must get our houses up to a proper insulation standard through retrofitting. That is a massive task and Scotland isn't being serious about it yet.
Our housing problems are not just about warm homes though. How can people be confident of getting a home of their own? We'll look at how to increase the amount of high-quality public rental housing, to make vacant homes available and control house price inflation so people aren't priced out of their own communities.
We'll discuss visions for the kind of communities we want to live in, which resources they need, what infrastructure, what services, bearing in mind that Scotland is probably the most centralised democracy in the western world and that we need to reverse that and put communities back in control of their own futures.
We will keep up the fight on land reform and explain how we can reform land ownership in Scotland and what a massive difference that would make to communities, to wildlife and to the economy.
We will explain why the National Care Service legislation has gone wrong and what a massive difference it would make to us all if we could fix it. We are at the final stages of producing a very substantial plan for how to rescue the NHS and we'll tell you all about that when it's ready.
We will look again at the way we build schools and hospitals, how crime and drugs are affecting communities and what to do about it, the impact of loneliness on the elderly in particular, the failure of our prison system, the need to reform council tax and much, much more.
READ MORE: Business for Scotland and Common Weal hailed in openDemocracy report
And independence?
Not, of course, to forget independence for one second. We just launched a major strategy paper on how to achieve Scottish independence and we’re coming to the first anniversary of the publication of Sorted, the book where we summarised the past 10 years of work, to remind people why we want independence in the first place.
Above all we want to be useful. We want to bring you not just opinion and most certainly not self-promotion but information, analysis and ideas which can spark your own imagination and trigger that sense of hope that has often been in short supply in recent times. And if there is an issue you'd like us to look at, or a problem you'd like to hear a solution for, fire us over an email and we'll get on it.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
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So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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