Edinburgh-born economist Angus Deaton has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on consumption, poverty and welfare: a fellow economist pays tribute to a remarkable scholar.
Archives for October 2015
Holyrood misses boat on democratic renewal
As the ruling SNP uses its parliamentary majority to limit scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s activities, Holyrood’s presiding officer is stepping down before her reform proposals have been put into effect. What next?
When public is personal
Light shines through the banner so that you have to stand back and take time to read the words printed in white. Big words. Spiral, by Elizabeth Burns, is “perhaps the UK’s largest printed poem”, and here it hangs, stirring slightly in the breeze on a building site in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.
Taking a share in Scotland’s solar future
Solar firms are under severe pressure with two solar panel firms going out of business in as many days with hundreds of job losses because of UK Government subsidy cuts. A new Edinburgh-based not-for-profit community project is bucking the trend, its chairman reports.
Don’t shoot the messenger: violence and language
“If you want peace then you have to be prepared to step into the line of fire and fight for it”: Loki the Rapper on his (controversial for him) new role in helping Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit to combat domestic violence, gang culture and knife crime – for starters…
That £350m Anglian Water contract: what lies behind it
The Scottish Government has finally (see Lucy Hunter Blackburn here) decided to award a £350m contract to run aspects of the provision of water to public bodies/non-domestic customers to Anglian Water, a controversial privately-owned firm based in Huntingdon. The decision has unleashed a storm of protest – not least because ministers are NOT bound b y EU rules as they claim.
Scottish Government’s greatest financial asset is… student loans
When student loans have become the Scottish government’s biggest financial asset and one in six Scots of working age owes outstanding loan money to Holyrood it’s time to have a serious look – especially when the SG pledged in 2007 to eliminate student debt. Scotland’s leading expert on student finance investigates.
EVEL: a cure worse than the disease
Trucking to English nationalism via EVEL is Anglo-centric small-mindedness – and threatens the sustainable, long-term future of the UK, argues a leading British federalist.