Bias and intolerance in scientific discovery

WHILE MANY people pay lip service to objectivity and provide evidence in support of their assertions, true objectivity is very rare. Science is supposedly a body of knowledge assembled dispassionately by researchers looking at all ...

Enforcing Electric-only cars – using a sledgehammer to crack a nut

ELECTRIC CARS may well be the future of personal transport, but only if consumers choose to buy them in preference to the cars of today or if governments effectively ban the internal combustion engine. In ...

Scotland’s squeezed middle: a decade under the SNP

THIS NATIONALIST government has an unhealthy habit of overtaxing the Scottish middle class. Our country’s economic performance shows the damage being done.

When is a tax hike not a tax hike? Political ...

How to see through the smoke and mirrors of Brexit negotiations

WHITEHALL'S ENERGY is a welcome surprise: five position papers last week, bringing the tally to eight in August including a joint note with Brussels. It is not clear if we have a full set, but we have ...

The care home sector is close to a tipping point

IT IS SIMPLY not right that you can be paid more for stacking supermarket shelves than for looking after our vulnerable elderly. So I fully welcome and support the Scottish Government's introduction of the Scottish Carers ...

Global trade is a force for good

WITH NEWS last week that Saudi Arabia favours New York over London for the listing of oil giant Saudi Aramco, there is growing cause for concern that Britain is losing grip on post-Brexit opportunities in the ...

Why I’m still not excited about Tidal Power

THE TIDAL POWER company Atlantis has announced that the four 1.5MW turbines they installed in the Pentland Firth have generated 1GWh of electricity. When the company started installation of the first turbine last September I ...

Brexit is a chance to rebalance our economy

THE LEFT has long insisted that Margaret Thatcher destroyed our manufacturing base and created an economy almost wholly reliant on services, in particular the inherent vice of economic production: finance.

Like most ...

Crown cash king again - Let's have a one thousand pound note

PLAY IT COOL Rodney, play it cool, know what I mean? That scene where David Jason as Del Boy falls through the bar is a British classic. Comedy gold, and so very 1980s. The carnations, ...

Driverless cars and the future

WHEN I was a teenager, I made sure I had a driver’s license as soon as I was old enough. It gave me freedom. It got me to school easily. It got me a part-time ...

Do industrial strategies work?

THE ESSENTIALLY COMMUNIST NOTION of centrally planned innovation appears to have taken firm root in our body politic.  Britain appears once again to have “an industrial strategy”.  We should all be cautious.

The UK paradox – never have so many worked for so little wage growth…

ECONOMISTS of a certain age may well remember when the Phillips Curve was all the rage. Some believed back then there was a crude trade-off between inflation and unemployment.  Indeed the current Governor of the ...