Tag Archives: adam smith institute

LibLink: Tim Farron – We need to capitalise on our scientific excellence

By NewsHound | Sun 16th March 2014 - 1:15 pm

Tim Farron has been writing for the Adam Smith Institute – there’s a sentence we didn’t expect ever to write – about turning the UK’s universities into entrepreneurial hubs. The Lib Dem party president is familiar with the sector, having worked in higher education at Lancaster University before entering Parliament. Here’s an excerpt:

Britain has a historically poor record of turning our scientists into entrepreneurs. Too often we have favoured the image of the mad professor or boffin, absent-mindedly beavering away in their lab, oblivious to the wider world around them. We must root out this gross caricature and start talking about the scientists of the future, like Dr Judith Spitz, who as well as not being male and grey haired, jumped at the opportunity to take her skills in speech and language therapy into the corporate world to become Chief Information Officer of Verizon.

Posted in News | Also tagged entrepreneurs and tim farron | 5 Comments

Opinion: Labour’s Living Wage really means the State taxes the poor more

By Alisdair Calder McGregor | Tue 5th November 2013 - 2:38 pm

This is – according to the Labour Party – the start of “Living Wage week”, a soundbite policy of the kind we’re now used to hearing from Labour.

Superficially, the idea of the Living Wage is simple and tempting. Figure out how much it costs to live, and force employers to pay that much.

Labour’s chosen method of doing this is to offer employers tax breaks – for a year – if they comply with the Living Wage rather than the national minimum wage. However, as pointed out by the Adam Smith Institute, what we are actually dealing with is …