David Hume Institute

The David Hume Institute was founded in Edinburgh in 1985 by Professor Sir Alan Peacock (also the first Executive Director), to consider a free market account of legal and economic aspects of public policy questions, and to promote the results widely.

Peacock was formerly the Professor of Economics at York University and Vice Chancellor of the private University of Buckingham46. Also involved in setting up DHI was the industrialist Gerald Elliot, then Chairman of Christian Control Salvesen, an international logistics business. Peacock was Chairman of the Home Office Committee on Financing the BBC 1985-1986, where he proposed making subscription to the BBC voluntary and to bring more market pressure to bear on it. The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), where Peacock is a Fellow, gave an address on the same topic in 2004, boasting that these ideas are now being ‘discussed by several commentators, including experts from the BBC and Ofcom’47. Peacock was member of various other UK Government and international Commissions and served as Chief Economic Adviser in the UK Department of Trade and Industry (1973-76). According to Peacock, his motivation to set up the DHI was to establish an institute independent of government funding in order to avoid constraints on research and publication and to counter the ‘metropolitan perspective of economic events’ coming from the overwhelming number of research institutes based in London48. Obviously, Peacock’s desire to influence policy making had not been quenched by his work within governmental agencies; perhaps he felt that the IEA’s influence on the Thatcher governments was more impressive than the power of governmental commissions. In 1995 Professor Brian Main, who in 2002 was official advisor of the Scottish Parliament Justice Committees One and Two, joined the institute and has been its director since 1999. In June 2005 he will be replaced by Jeremy Peat, former Group Chief Economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland and former economist at the HM Treasury and the Scottish Office. He is also on the Board of Governors of the BBC for Scotland49. It is an interesting move to fill the position formerly held by an academic with a professional economist who has ‘extensive connections with business and areas of government in Scotland and further afield’ – Peat’s appointment probably will push the DHI into a more business-oriented direction and will certainly open new sources of sponsorship. The DHI employs one full-time secretary and one part-time fundraiser and uses offices rented from the University of Edinburgh. Its board of trustees unites the who’s who of the Scottish policy community: senior journalists, members of the Scottish Parliament’s Corporate Body Audit and Advisory Board, the CEO of TSB Scotland and a high official of the Rowntree Foundation50.

Funding

Between 2000 and 2004, the DHI received financial sponsorship from blue chip corporations including the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB Scotland and Standard Life. The academic background of the DHI is reflected in the sponsorship by the ESRC and Edinburgh University’s Europa Institute. Some individuals, including a member of the board of the SCDI and a Scotsman journalist, were also among the financial contributors81