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 Buckingham [1]. 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’([2] Accessed 3 February 2005). 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 London (Peacock, Alan. in Kuenssberg, Nick and Lomas, Gillian, The David Hume Institute. The First Decade Norwich : Page Bros Ltd., 1995). 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.

Staff

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 Scotland ([3] Accessed 12 February 2005). 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 Foundation.

Board of Trustees

Among them are:

• Robert Bertram, currently a member of the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body's Audit and Advisory Board ([4] Accessed 17 November 2004).
• Andrew Ferguson worked briefly for the Conservative Party research unit before joining The Economist and the Sunday Times. Now he works at the Scotsman newspaper as Editor-in-Chief ([5] Accessed 17 November 2004).
• Isabelle Low, formerly a Scottish Executive civil servant, is now Deputy Chair of the Accounts Commission for Scotland ([6] Accessed 17 November 2004).
• Susan Rice, chief executive of Lloyds TSB Scotland plc, was a member of HM Treasury’s Policy Action Team on access to financial services. She is also a member of the Foresight Sub-Committee on Retail Finance, on the board of Scottish Business in the Community, and a member of the Scottish Advisory Task Force on the New Deal ([7] Accessed 17 November

2004).

• Professor Duncan MacLennan worked for the Rowntree Foundation and has provided advice to the World Bank, the European Commission and the European Parliament ([8] Accessed 17 November 2004).

Trustees at February 2006

• Mr. Robert Bertram WS
• Mr Jo Elliot
• Mr. Andrew Ferguson
• Professor Gavin Kennedy
• Mr. Nick Kuenssberg
• Dr Isabelle Low
• Dr Ken Lyall
• Miss Eileen Mackay CB (Chairman)
• Professor Hector MacQueen FRSE
• Professor Donald MacRae
• Professor John Murray QC
• Professor David Simpson
• Professor Joan Stringer CBE FRSE

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 contributors (Source:[9] )

Activities

'The DHI hardly pursues any local, national or international cooperation with other think-tanks or research institutions. The only ongoing cooperation is to be found with the Europa Institute of the University of Edinburgh. Though Stone describes the DHI as an advocacy institute which is part of a wider epistemic community of privatisation and as the Adam Smith Institute’s Scottish counterpart, today it has neither the interest nor the ability in a wider cooperation with other like-minded institutions.' (Source: Stone, Diane. Think-tanks and the Privatisation Band-Wagon in: Lovenduski,J. and Stanyer, J. (eds). Contemporary Political Studies Belfast: Political Studies Association, Vol. 1, 1995, p 22; Stone, Diane 2003 op.cit., p. 335)

The DHI claims it is struggling to get press attention, because of the media’s commercial structure: the ‘press generally want you to say something quite sensational, political, and we […] are generally not talking in those terms’. Such media relations are left to institutes which ‘are more politically oriented. [..] to be pejorative, some of them are for people who actually want to be MPs or politicians’(Interview with Tom Miers, cited in Pautz.