WHAT'S not to like about the Council of Economic Advisers?
Some of the finest economic and business brains in the world coming together to think the unthinkable and push Scotland onto a higher plane of economic activity.
At the last election the Scottish Labour Party wanted to scrap it, or rather turn an exotic brains trust, encrusted with Nobel laureates, into a more familiar, Scottish kind of "representative" talking shop.
Last week the council's two most SNP-friendly members, chairman Crawford Beveridge and economist Andrew Hughes Hallett, presented their credentials to the Scottish Parliament's Economy, Energy and Enterprise Committee, laying out preliminary thoughts on where the council will concentrate its fire-power. The body, which has acquired Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz but lost fiercely independent Scot John Kay, intends to physically convene less frequently but make up for this with more tele-conferencing. The list of topics mentioned includes leveraging the potential of procurement to benefit Scottish firms, a hot topic in Scotland, as the row over the Forth Crossing attests. Here Prof Hallet said he had "always been of the view that we, in good British fashion take the rules from the EU far too literally. There are many things we could do to allow small contracts to go out without the pain we put people through".
Implied in some of the committee questions was the charge that the CEA has no great "point", although Beveridge said the vast majority of their findings have led to action. That may be true, but there have been very few moves by the Scottish Government that count as the kind of radical uses of existing powers that would turn the lion couchant of the Scottish economy into a lion rampant. There may be political reasons for not risking failure – or too much success – prior to the referendum, but there may also be political costs proclaiming impotence to improve things.
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