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Jan 18, 2025 | 
thinkscotland.org | Linda Holt |Jill Stephenson |Ian Mitchell |Ewen Stewart
TWO STRIKING – and related – news stories have hit Scottish headlines this week. A Survation poll for Holyrood Sources on the 2026 Holyrood election put the SNP on 53 seats, Labour on 25, and the Conservatives and Reform on 15 each. Meanwhile, the Conservative Group Leader on Glasgow Council, Thomas Kerr, has defected from the Scottish Conservatives to Reform. Reform overshadowed Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay’s keynote New Year speech earlier in the week.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
thinkscotland.org | Jill Stephenson |Ewen Stewart |Ian Mitchell |Christine Padgham
MANY WILL REMEMBER Michael Gove, as a cabinet minister, saying, in relation to Brexit, ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts’. While this was provocative and extravagant, there was some sense in it. After all, trust in experts had been eroded by prominent cases of experts getting it wrong or even doing wrong. This has included cases of damaging surgery carried out on blameless patients, and the crashing of financial institutions by their directors.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
thinkscotland.org | Linda Holt |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
CHANGE, the title of its manifesto, was the stand-out slogan of Labour’s campaign earlier this year against a lost fourteen years of Conservative rule. But when didn’t a political party or candidate promise change? Voters’ thirst for political change seems to have accelerated in the last year as, in democratic elections across the world, incumbency has ceased to confer an automatic advantage. So what of the change promised by Keir Starmer?
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Hamish Gobson |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
THE NEXT President of the United States is 78, and has already been shot at once while under secret service protection. He happened to turn his head as the bullet flew past him, which almost certainly saved his life. What if the next assassination attempt is successful? The chances are small but, given American history, not that small. Seven of the 46 presidents to date (15 per cent) have been shot and 4 of those killed, which is just under 10 per cent.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
WE HAVE SEEN how Britain is failing. Its growth rate per head has collapsed to the worst in 200 years and the country is in relative global structural decline. We have seen how the State has, over the last twenty years, come to dominate the UK growing from a third of the economy to almost half and how this underestimates the state’s reach given the exponential increase in regulation.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
THE SHORT ANSWER is your guess is as good as mine, save for raising yet more tax. Rachel Reeves has claimed there is a £22bn black hole (around £750 for every family) but while she is correct the current position is, unsustainable in the longer term, the additional £22bn – if you believe it and I don’t – is largely of her own doing. Labour’s early decisions have made matters somewhat worse.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
THE UK’s relative and material economic decline can be pinpointed almost exactly to the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) starting in 2008. As demonstrated earlier that’s when the long term 2.3%pa per capita growth trend severely broke down. Proving exact cause and effect is of course complex with a number of factors at play, but since the GFC the UK has been stuck in a near death loop with negligible growth, as you will recall, the worst since records began 200 years ago.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
THIS WILL BE the first in a short series of essays leading up to the budget exploring the current state of the UK economy. The first paper deals with the staggering economic decline of the UK and indeed the entire European continent not just globally but relative to other advanced nations be it the US, Australia, G7 or even Canada. The charts which are sourced from the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS), World Bank, or International Monetary Fund (IMF) need little explanation.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Linda Holt |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
WHEN I wrote for ThinkScotland after Sturgeon’s resignation and Yousaf’s accession, I argued the SNP was a basket case with no prospect of a second independence referendum. Fourteen months have passed since then and we have observed a never-ending slow-motion train crash as the SNP has carried on regardless, blaming Westminster whenever criticised and trotting out the same old tired mantras about independence. All the while, public services have continued their inexorable decline.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich |Jill Stephenson
WE ALL SUFFER selective amnesia, ‘rose tinted glasses’ if you like. For instance, the past may be a foreign land and I recall it sort of worked. Britain was a genuine envy of the world. If we go back to the year 2000 most would say things broadly were OK.
