airtScotland is being asked to carry a wave of data-centre load on terms it never set. The gain is private, the cost arrives on your bill, and the meter that should sit between the two is switched off.
Essays
Essays on Scottish public policy, most recent first. Each links to the full text and a typeset PDF.
The National Entitlement Card is Scotland’s bus pass, and the largest collection of faces any Scottish public body holds that no biometric regulator watches.
The Lanarkshire AI growth zone, and the gap between the purpose a system advertises and the one it performs.
How Britain built the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world almost by accident, spent thirty-five years patching the symptoms, and called the latest patch a strategy.
The affordable homes were promised at consent, in the same act that made the land valuable. What was never built was the consequence for not delivering them. A right to buy the land back at close to its old value, when the deadline passes and the homes have not come, is that missing consequence.
A man reported a crime: a company in Guernsey that owns a Highland estate had broken Scotland’s land-transparency law. Police passed the matter to an officer in Dalwhinnie and let it drop. The register he reported a breach of was built with no one to enforce it, and the gap was in the design from the start.
Planning consent multiplies the value of a field overnight and hands the gain to whoever owns the ground. Holding that gain costs the owner nothing, so holding it is the rational thing to do. Until delay carries a price, the land waits, and the homes wait with it.
Scotland declared a housing emergency, then met it with a tenancy law and financing schemes. The machinery that would change how many homes actually get built was never in the Bill, never in the manifestos, and still is not in Scots law.
The machines under Scotland’s health records, digital identity and government post answer to US jurisdiction. The Scottish Government’s own FOI files show no record of assessing the risk, and no costed plan to leave.
Common Weal published Scotland’s energy problem and the most obvious use for its surplus on consecutive days, and recommended against both.
A dead calm powers no compute. On firm power, long-duration storage, and the concrete nobody will pour.