Policy Institute
The Policy Institute's (PI) foundation co-incided with the first election to the Scottish Parliament in 1999. It is institutionally independent from any political party. Bill Jamieson, senior journalist at the right-leaning The Scotsman broadsheet (owned by the Barclay Brothers, is the Director of the PI, which has no office, ‘only a desk at the Scotsman’, as its Executive Director Tom Miers phrased it. He is the only salaried member of the PI, joined the PI in May 2003 ‘to run the institute on a more full-time basis’. He formerly worked for the IEA in an administrative role. He described The Scotsman as very generous in allocating logistic re-sources to the PI and allowing a senior member of its staff to re-dedicate some of his time to the institute. Jamieson has been a frequent guest at the IEA and at the Bruges Group – a Thatcherite committed to a fight against deeper UK integration into the EU. The PI’s board of trustees is less impressive than that of other more established Scottish think-tanks such as the David Hume Institute and the Scottish Council Foundation. It is composed of The Scotsman pundit Katie Grant, a top manager of Scottish Friendly Assurance Colin McLean, and Allan Massie, a journalist-turned-writer. In the Scottish think-tank world, the David Hume Institute and the PI share a similar ideological background, but differ in their style. The DHI is more academic and more restrained than the polemic pro-market philosophy of the PI, which has likened the NHS to Soviet-style bureaucracy and generally demands that the forces of the free market are let loose on the public sector. This goal is fuelled by the PI’s "mission and [its] purpose, which is broadly to research how the classical liberal ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment [...] can be applied to modern Scotland". The PI is a multi-issue think-tank that concentrates exclusively on Scotland’s economy, public services, environmental and agricultural policies, and modernisation of governance. As it has no in-house expertise, scholars from the relevant fields are commissioned to write papers and newspaper contributions, so that the PI faciliates policy learning processes. The PI belonges to the neo-liberal privatisation advocacy community. The PI also has some features of a vanity think-tank, as it is the brainchild and hobbyhorse of a conservative journalist at odds with the perceived leftist Scottish consensus. It certainly serves the Scotsman as a reliable source for neo-liberal leaders and opinion pieces and, in a reciprocal process, as a further outlet of broadsheet’s political views.
Funding
The PI has had about 30 different sponsors over the last two years, of which about half were trusts, such as the Tay Charitable Trust and the Binks Trust. Companies, e.g. Scottish Equitable, Holyrood Holdings (Barclay Bros holding company for Telegraph Media Group, The Scotsman, the Spectator Magazine, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News), and Stagecoach, the trade association Federation of Small Business and individuals make up the other half.
Contact details
Website Policy Institute: [[1]] 65 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 4NA Tel: 07725 813 123
