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…
Young, gifted and scarred…
As much as a third (32%) of the Scottish workforce isn’t working in the lockdown but it’s the young who are the hardest hit and faces the bleakest future – unless we adopt New Deal-style measures to prevent a “lost generation” being scarred for life.
Central banks stumble into MMT
‘If QE was a policy response to the idea that banks were too big to fail, the MMT response is based on the idea that an entire country cannot be left to fail. The question is: what happens if MMT doesn’t work to save a country in a crisis?’
Independence or bust
John Lloyd book review: ‘What marks the book out is Lloyd’s personal transition to virtually self-hating Scot. This is not just the regular Unionist assertion that Scotland is too wee, too weak, to cut it as an independent country but a visceral assault on “Scotland’s self-serving, self-pitying, self-obsessed keening about others, mainly the English, stealing their birthright and smashing their culture” and/or continuous “moral superiority.”‘
Pop Matters – in and out of lockdown
Craig Angus explores the lines between pop, politics and using art to both escape from, and make sense of a fractured world. Meet the makers of Pop Matters workshops: Maria Sledmere and Conner Milleken
Easing out of our lockdown bubble
The psychology world has recognised the Covid pandemic as a form of trauma. Lockdown brought added stress but how will we deal with the anxiety of easing back into the outside world?
Mixed messages on migration
Why will EU citizens find it more difficult to come to the UK to live and work after the end of the transition period? Because UK policy and laws will be designed to deter them – along with others – from coming here.
Radical challenges for the SNP
‘To say that the SNP should now revisit its economic plan for independence is therefore in keeping with the times we are in. My call for a radical rethink is not a challenge for the leadership, nor is it a challenge to the leadership. This new situation is a challenge for all of us and a challenge for our party as a whole.’
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.’
Pareto and the pandemic
Conferences, churches, weddings, Cheltenham races: clusters of cases of coronavirus may be key to the spread of the pandemic, says Prof Pennington