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Jan 15, 2025 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Ian Mitchell |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
IT SEEMS people like parables. Even those not familiar with the Bible can probably tell you about the parable of the Prodigal Son, or the parable of the Lost Sheep. 2000 years later it seems we still need simple stories to highlight complex ideas.
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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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Dec 5, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Ian Mitchell |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
LAST SATURDAY I had the pleasure of speaking at the Reform UK conference in Perth. It was actually Reform’s fourth Scottish Conference, but the three previous ones might have fitted in the backroom of some pub. This one was rather different. 350 attendees, an overflow room, a hugely enthusiastic audience and a dozen speakers including one of two former Tory councillors that had defected to Reform UK that very day.
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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 22, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Ewen Stewart |Hamish Gobson |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
ANYONE who has followed the development of the windfarm industry in Scotland will have been struck by the effort which the Scottish government puts into further impoverishing both underprivileged city dwellers and all rural ones. The former suffer from artificially high power costs, and the latter from that plus the desecration of their visual environment by giant white turbines and giant grey pylons.
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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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Oct 4, 2024 | 
thinkscotland.org | Hamish Gobson |Stuart Crawford |Christine Padgham |Regina Erich
AS THE POWER of the nationalist wreckers in Holyrood declines, so the prospects for a comparable programme of socialist wrecking in Westminster rise. Many’s the Todday teacup whose soggy leaves have compared Keir Starmer’s greed with that of the seagulls outside the Snorvaig chip shop. My own fronds have been even more outspoken, giving “gannet” whenever the words Reeves and Rayner are spoken in the presence of a stew of kelp and bladder-wrack.
