From Claes de Vreese
And now something positive:
Solar and wind energy production in the EU surpasses fossil energy for the first time.
Source: https://dr.dk
Despite big oil, despite Trump, despite the Right's betrayal of ordinary people: we are doing it. Too slowly, certainly, but the trend is in the right direction, on renewables, on EVs, and on heat pumps.
Victory is possible.
Three charts showing some time series from the US economy.
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| A low quit rate suggests workers have little confidence that they'll get a new job. Low vacancies show they're right. |
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| Jobs "hard to fill" from the NFIB small business survey "Jobs plentiful" from the Conference Board consumer confidence survey |
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| Consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan Consumer confidence from the Conference Board |
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| The capital of Scotland, Edinburgh |
Scotland's elections are conducted using a very clever combination of first past the post and proportional representation.
From Bylines Scotland
Ultimately, the outcome of any democratic election depends on how voters decide to cast their ballot. However, the impact of their choice also depends on how their votes are treated by the electoral system. That is likely to prove particularly the case in the Scottish Parliament election in May.
As at previous devolved [Scotland only] elections, the battle for Holyrood [the Scottish Parliament] will be conducted using a variant of the ‘Additional Member System’. It comes in two parts. Of the 129 MSPs to be elected, well over half will be chosen using first-past-the-post. In 73 separate constituencies, voters will be able to cast a vote for their local MSP. Whichever candidate secures most votes in each seat is elected. At previous Holyrood contests, the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNP have put up a candidate in every constituency, whereas the Greens have only contested a handful. It remains to be seen how many constituencies Reform will decide to fight.
The remaining 56 seats are elected using a system of proportional representation. For this purpose, Scotland is divided into eight regions, each of which elects seven ‘additional’ members. Each party puts forward a list of candidates in rank order. Voters are invited to vote for one of these regional party lists – they can vote for the party whose candidate they have backed as their local constituency MSP or for a different party. Crucially, the seven additional members are allocated to the parties such that the overall tally of seats in a region – both constituency and list – is as proportional as possible to the share of the list vote cast for each party in that region.
The constituency race
Polls taken towards the end of 2025 put the SNP, on average, at 34% on the constituency ballot, well down from the 48% the party secured at the last Holyrood election in 2021. Nevertheless, the SNP were still well ahead of its nearest rivals, that is, Reform on 20% and Labour on 16%. Trailing further behind were the Conservatives with 10% and the Liberal Democrats with 9%, while the Greens (who again may not contest many constituencies) were on 8%.
Support for the SNP does not vary a great deal from one part of Scotland to another. Given the size of its Scotland-wide lead, on these figures the party is therefore likely to be ahead in most constituencies. Consequently, despite the fall in its support, the SNP might well retain all but a handful of the 62 constituency seats the party won in 2021. In that event, the outcome of the constituency contests would be highly disproportional. The party will likely have won three-quarters to four-fifths of the constituency seats on little more than a third of the vote.
A barrier for Reform and the Greens?
On the evidence of last year’s Westminster election, support for Reform could also be quite evenly spread across Scotland. But whereas first-past-the-post is generous to a party with an evenly spread vote that is well in the lead (because it comes first in most constituencies), it punishes a second (or third) placed party whose share of the vote is much the same everywhere (because it comes second or third almost everywhere). As a result, Reform might fail to win a single constituency seat – along with the Greens. In contrast, the other opposition parties – the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats – all have local fiefdoms that should ensure they all at least win some constituency seats.
Reform is thus likely to be especially dependent on winning regional party list seats. At 19%, their level of support on the list vote in recent polls has been similar to their 20% support on the constituency ballot. Much the same is true of Labour (16%), the Conservatives (12%), and the Liberal Democrats (9%). But, at 29%, support for the SNP on the list vote has been markedly lower, not least because those who say they would back the SNP on the constituency vote are especially likely to say they would support the Greens on the list vote. Indeed, at 12%, support for the Greens has been both four points higher than on the constituency ballot and four points up on what the party won in 2021.
Compensation on the list?
Consequently, as at previous Holyrood elections, the Greens will be dependent on the allocation of list seats. But this time around, the single biggest beneficiary could prove to be Nigel Farage’s party. Indeed, if Reform does emerge as the second most popular in list votes, it could win sufficient list seats to become the second largest party and thus the official opposition at Holyrood.
However, under these circumstances the allocation of list seats will not correct fully the over-representation secured by the SNP in the constituency contests. The party’s likely success in those would mean that, despite not being awarded a single list seat, the nationalists will have 45% or so of the seats in the chamber, well above the party’s 29% share of the list vote. There are simply too few party list seats to reverse the SNP’s likely over-representation on the constituency ballot.
One election in two different parts
Between them, then, the two parts of Holyrood’s electoral system are likely to have a significant impact on the shape of the next Holyrood chamber. The outcome of the first-past-the-post contests could well ensure that, despite being far less popular than five years ago, the SNP remain the dominant force in the parliament. Yet at the same time, by ensuring both the Greens and Reform secure representation they might otherwise lack, the allocation of party list seats could still prove crucial. The Greens could do well enough to ensure that, together with the SNP, there is once again a pro-independence majority at Holyrood.
Meanwhile, the list part of the system opens up the possibility that Reform could become the second largest party in seats should they manage to emerge as the second largest party in votes. All of which could leave the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats at risk of all looking a little bit like ‘also rans’.
There is one political problem from which all others follow. It is the major cause of Donald Trump, of Nigel Farage, of the shocking weakness of their opponents, of the polarisation tearing societies apart, of the devastation of the living world. It is simply stated: the extreme wealth of a small number of people.
It can also be quantified. The World Inequality Report (WIR) 2026 shows that about 56,000 people – 0.001% of the global population – corral three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. They afflict almost every country. In the UK, for example, 50 families hold more wealth than 50% of the population combined.
You can watch their fortunes grow. In 2024, Oxfam’s figures show, the wealth of the world’s 2,769 billionaires grew by $2tn, or $2,000bn. The total global spending on international aid last year was projected to be, at most, $186bn, less than a tenth of the increment in their wealth. Governments tell us they “can’t afford” more. In the UK, billionaires, on average, have become more than 1,000% richer since 1990. Most of their wealth derives from property, inheritance and finance. They have become so rich, in other words, at our expense.
The issue affects every aspect of policy. Trump is not seizing Venezuela’s oil wealth for the sake of the US poor. He couldn’t give a damn about them, as his “big, beautiful bill” – robbing the poor to give to the rich – revealed. He covets Greenland on behalf of the same elite interests, of which he is the avatar.
When the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, helped destroy the lives of the world’s poorest by tearing down USAID, he did so on behalf of his class. The same goes for Trump’s assaults on democracy, and his war on the living world. It is the ultra-rich who benefit most from destruction, in making money and in spending it. The WIR shows that the richest 1% of the world’s population account for 41% of greenhouse gas emissions arising from private capital ownership: almost twice that of the bottom 90%. And through their consumption, another study shows, the 1% produce as many greenhouse gases as the poorest two-thirds.
Inequality damages every aspect of our lives. Decades of research by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson shows that higher inequality, regardless of absolute levels of wealth, is associated with higher crime, worse public health, higher addiction, lower educational attainment, worse status anxiety (leading to higher consumption of positional goods), worse pollution and destruction, and a host of other ills.
Extreme inequality creates an “Epstein class” of global predators, exploiting the rest financially – and in other ways. It creates an ethos that no longer recognises our common humanity, that sees other people, as Musk puts it, as “non-player characters”, and believes that, “the fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy”.
This is the metric by which you can tell who in politics are your allies and who are your enemies: whether they support or oppose the extreme concentration of wealth. In fact, the matter should be definitional. Those who support it (let’s call them Group 1) are the right. Those who oppose it (Group 2) are the left.
As soon as you understand politics in this light, you notice something extraordinary. Almost the entire population is in Group 2. Polling across 36 nations by the Pew Research Center found that 84% see economic inequality as a big problem, and 86% see the political influence of the rich as a major cause of it. In 33 of these nations, a majority believe their country’s economic system needs either “major changes” or “complete reform”. In the UK, a YouGov poll revealed, 75% support a wealth tax on fortunes above £10m, while only 13% oppose it. But – and here’s the astonishing thing – almost the entire political class is in Group 1. You can search the manifestos of major parties that once belonged to the left, and find no call to make billionaires history.
Quite the opposite in fact. Even when politicians are forced to respond to calls for a wealth tax, they dismiss it, as UK ministers have done, with two excuses. The first is that it won’t raise much revenue. Maybe, maybe not: there’s a wide range of evidence on this matter. But revenue-raising is the least of its benefits. Far more important are two other issues. One is fairness. As the WIR reports, “Effective income tax rates climb steadily for most of the population but fall sharply for billionaires and centi-millionaires.” This undermines trust in the tax system and politics in general. The other is reducing the power of the ultra-rich over our lives. To restore democracy and create a fairer, safer, greener world, we must bring the ultra-rich to heel, cutting their fortunes until they can no longer bludgeon us.
The second excuse is that the uber-rich will flee the country. There are three possible responses to this claim. The first is that there’s no evidence to support it. The second is, if true, good riddance: they do us more harm than good. The third is to say: then the obvious solution is a global tax-avoidance measure. So guess what? While 125 nations supported this approach, Keir Starmer’s government was one of nine that opposed it. Our government doesn’t tax the ultra-rich enough not because it can’t, but because it doesn’t want to.
It’s not just politicians. Almost all the media belongs to Group 1. As the wealth and power of the proprietor class becomes ever greater and harder to justify, the views expressed in their outlets become ever crazier. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, women, transgender people, disabled people, students, protesters: anyone and everyone must be blamed for our dysfunctions, except those causing them. Ever more extreme “culture wars” (a euphemism for divide-and-rule) must be waged.
It’s also why imaginary threats (Venezuela, “cultural Marxists”, “domestic terrorists”) must constantly be drummed up. You cannot have both a free market in media ownership and a free market in information and ideas. The oligarchs who dominate the sector stifle inconvenient thoughts and promote the policies that protect their fortunes.
No one would claim that taking on extreme wealth is easy. But the battle begins with political parties spelling out this aim, clearly and unequivocally. Either they represent the great majority, or they represent the tiny minority: they cannot do both. So where, we might ask, are our representatives?
