In his latest piece, senior statistician James Urquhart, investigates how the UK Government uses UK data to buttress policy decisions for England and asks: manipulation or malfeasance…
Longer reads
Coronavirus, conspiracies and corrosion
‘Conspiracy theorists believe that political leaders spend their time plotting, planning and pulling strings. Journalistic accounts… suggest that, far from conspiring to pull anything off, politicians miscalculated, dithered and bumbled. The lateness of the UK lockdown has cost tens of thousands of lives. What we’ve witnessed is not conspiracy but cock-up.’
A room without a view
‘Scotland has the devolved power to follow its own strategic objectives. The question is: does it have the courage and skills to start planning now for an exit strategy which wholeheartedly and comprehensively embraces contact tracing? The answer firmly rests with all our politicians and their advisors. We should be hearing from them now.’
Disruptive ideas on the road to a net-zero carbon economy
In the first of a new series on Scotland’s Economic Future: Disruptive Ideas, Robert Pollock argues for profound institutional change – drawing on (bitter) lessons from the wind industry. Part 2 follows (see below)
#Indyref2 in 2020?
‘It will simply not be sufficient for the UK Government to highlight risks with independence. The status quo itself has important policy challenges, whether that be the economic costs of leaving the EU Single Market or the economic effect of limits on immigration.’
TIAA: a global American invades Scotland
‘If subsidizing a rich US corporation amounted to an abuse of Scottish revenues, arguably it is even more serious that the government and local council forfeited their impartiality as planning authorities by buying into TIAA’s deal. They may even have breached EU State Aid rules..’
A shift in business thinking?
‘The most technologically savvy generation in history – the ‘Zoomers’ – are about to join the workforce. They have different priorities, one being better stewardship of the planet. Building a better future depends on embracing the positive.’ But there are negatives too…
Policing the gender identity debate
‘managers need to recognise that both sex and gender identity may be relevant to people’s lives, and to factor both into policy-making decisions. In this way, it should be possible to balance fairly the interests of everyone, in the least discriminatory way possible.’
Scotland’s climate emergency
‘Perhaps most of all, the importance of setting out a stable long-term environment for investment will be the most effective policy that anyone could set. It will also require international cooperation, both in terms of connectivity, R&D and investment.’
Scottish democracy: role of citizens’ assembly?
Citizens’ Assemblies are fundamentally an innovative structure for engaging with the public that are characterised by two key features that differentiate them from our more well-established ways of involving the public in the work of government: First, the participants are randomly selected to be broadly representative of the population at large (i.e. this is not […]