Ahead of the Scottish Government launching its 2021 Programme for Government, SMF Chief Economist Aveek Bhattacharya puts the usual constraints on decisionmaking to one side and imagines what the next year of policy could look like in Scotland.

This blog reflects on the Minister for School Standards' recent speech to the Social Market Foundation on reforms to implement a 'knowledge-rich curriculum' in England. You can watch the full speech below.

Commentators are forever searching for neat ways to carve up the political universe. Towns vs cities; Remainers vs Leavers; North vs South. Such binary narratives should always come with a health warning: our society is rarely so straightforward.

Contemporary labour markets are characterised by rapid and accelerating automation. This has led to growing interest in the idea of taxing automation in order to soften the blow on those who lose out. While governments should certainly mitigate the damaging effects of new technologies, a tax on automation to fund these interventions is a price not worth paying.

In one sense, not much has changed in terms of Government FE and adult education policy as a result of the Queen’s speech.

A year on from COVID-19 being declared a worldwide pandemic, the UK has consistently placed high up in the global league tables of declared cases and deaths. But why has the health impact of the pandemic been so severe? What role have pre-existing health inequalities played? Our most recent Ask the Expert event, held in partnership with UK Research and Innovation sought to answer these questions, with our panel of experts Professor Vittal Katikireddi, the Health Foundation’s Dr Jennifer Dixon and the NHS Confederation’s Joan Saddler OBE.

Retail banks have been at the heart of the UK’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic: supporting the nation to manage its money through the terrible personal and financial costs the disease has wreaked – from payment holidays through to bounce back loans. Now, banks have a new role to play. Not only in supporting economic recovery, but in ‘building back better’: resetting the balance between generating investor returns and serving community interests.