Commentary & Podcasts

“I never make predictions, especially about the future”, the American sage Yogi Berra is reported to have said. If only the rest of us had such a luxury.

The Chancellor was right to declare an “economic emergency” at the House of Commons dispatch box yesterday. If he believes this is an emergency driven by an escalating employment crisis, it is one which can be remedied through Government-created jobs and much more ambitious skills provision.

In the latest instalment of the SMF’s Ask the Expert series, we were joined by Oxford University’s Professor Barbara Petrongolo who gave an insight into new data on gender and the labour market during the Coronavirus crisis drawn from Understanding Society’s COVID-19 supplement.

Vote blue for green jobs in the red wall. That’s the message we’re supposed to take from Boris Johnson’s ten-point plan for Net Zero today.

The UK video games industry directly contributes £1.3bn to the UK economy (as measured by gross value added, “GVA”). Years of industry growth – often unrecognised in SW1 - has been catalysed by life in lockdown. But success has brought scrutiny and with it, questions of how this growing sector should be regulated.

By Kate Forbes MSP MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, and Cabinet Secretary for Finance.