The Guardian: A strike against good sense

by Ruth Lea, Senior Fellow in Economy of the Adam Smith Institute (July 17, 2008)

Council workers' call for a better pay deal are understandable, but we would all pay the price

The sight of council staff striking for inflationary pay awards of around 6% is as depressing as it is predictable. I appreciate, of course, that consumer prices inflation is rising, led by higher food and fuel costs, and many people's living standards are now falling. After a period of 10 to 15 years of uninterrupted growth and rising living standards this is a nasty shock for us all. And it is a particularly nasty shock for the less well off, including pensioners, who spend proportionately more of their limited budgets on food and utility bills.

But this is not all. Some people are now losing their jobs. Every day there is more bad news – for example in the house-building sector – but few parts of the economy will be immune as the economic slowdown tightens its grip. The unemployment claimant count rose by over 15,000 in June and, bluntly, this is but the start of a protracted period of worsening employment prospects. It is worth noting that the public sector is the least vulnerable section of the economy when it comes to insecurity of employment.

The chancellor argues strongly against inflationary pay awards throughout the economy – whether in the public or the private sectors. He is quite right. He knows that if the pick-up in prices inflation leads to higher wages then there is a real risk that an inflationary "wage-price spiral" becomes embedded in the economy – as it did to devastating effect in the 1970s. And the Bank of England has made it abundantly clear that if inflationary pressures build up further, they will raise interest rates. The economy needs higher interest rates like a hole in the head.

Inflationary settlements in the public sector do not, in themselves, directly trigger off a wage-price spiral, as their goods and services are not, on the whole, sold on the open market at a "price". Instead the provision of public services deteriorates – fewer school books for example – and/or council tax bills rise. But high pay awards in the public sector can increase pressure for inflationary pay awards in the private sector. And – surely the clincher – council staff workers must realise that they will be condemned as irresponsible and unfair if they push for high pay awards when their private sector friends may be losing their jobs.

Life is not pleasant for many at the moment and it's going to get worse. We're all in this together.

Published in The Guardian here

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Telegraph.co.uk: Chapter 11-style bankruptcy protection would hurt the economy

By Eamonn Butler (July 16 2008)

Cameron's "Chapter 11" idea seems to have come from a list of weekly headline-grabbers rather than through a long think-tanking process.

Still, with the UK economy heading south, its timing is perfect.

The idea of Chapter 11, which refers to a section of the United States Bankruptcy Code, is that individuals and firms can stave off bankruptcy and keep control of their assets while they reorganise themselves out. Individuals must agree to debt counselling and a repayment schedule. Businesses have to state all their financial information and file a recovery plan.

Does it work? Well, some of the highest-profile Chapter 11 beneficiaries have been America's airlines, including Northwest and Delta (which went on to merge), ATA (which eventually failed), US Airways (limping along) and United (still in huge debt).

It might have prevented the sudden shock of bankruptcy, but what eventually happened is probably what would have happened anyway. And America's airlines still look bloated.

Compare that with the UK, where the threat of failure is much more acute, and where competitive, cost-conscious airlines like Easyjet and Ryanair are setting the pace.

But the real problem with the UK's bankruptcy regime is not this. It's the fact that HM Revenue & Customs are first in the queue to be paid when a business fails. Not surprisingly, the biggest filer of bankruptcy petitions is HM Revenue & Customs.

But the real problem with the UK's bankruptcy regime is not this. It's local authorities who willingly bankrupt people unable to pay a £1200 Council Tax bill, and HM Revenue & Customs, who have every incentive to force small traders out of business and pocket a fat bonus for the tax they recover, rather than working to help them through difficult times.

Published by telegraph.co.uk here

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Yorkshire Post: World of difference for Fairtrade as credit crunch takes its toll

By Grace Hammond (July 14 2008)

Those who say a ripple in America creates a wave in the UK looked to have been proved right.

The global credit crunch which was born out of the US sub-prime crisis has hit Britain hard and with more of us conscious about how much we spend and what we spend it on, one of the first casualties appears to be the organic and Fairtrade goods which until a few months ago filled middle-class shopping baskets.

According to a recent survey, paying up to 45 per cent more for fairly traded and organic goods is no longer an option for three out of five of us and concerns over food miles and climate change have resulted in a bunkering down Britain hasn't seen since the 1940s.

However, as we heed the advice of chefs like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to look local, Third World producers, whose income is entirely dependent on our demand for their fruit, tea, chocolate, flowers and cotton, are feeling the effect.

Raking in £500m in sales in 2007, Fairtrade products stand quite a lot to lose with a recession in the West – with even the free-trade focused Adam Smith Institute warning earlier this year that "farmers who have been promised long-term contracts and sustainable prices may be unprepared to cope if Fairtrade's stock suddenly falls in the public eye".

More than seven million people in 62 countries across the world rely on Fairtrade for their livelihood – either directly through employment or indirectly by profiting from the schools, hospitals and other benefits the premiums help provide and while the belt tightening continues over here, according to Barbara Crowther of the Fairtrade Foundation, short-term thinking could be devastating.

"I don't know about you, but I don't want to survive on turnips and potatoes for the rest of my life," she says

"By supporting agriculture in other parts of the world, we enable growers to provide food for themselves and protect the lands of their community so they're not bought out by huge developers.

"And if we're worried about the increasing level of food prices, we should send a positive signal to the growers of those products that we're prepared to invest in their future – as we're going to keep relying on them to grow things like coffee, pineapples and chocolate."

While Britain is unlikely to reach the situation where its shoppers completely shun imported produce, there has been suggestions the country should look towards growing everything we need on home soil. The idea has been gathering momentum with the 80-acre Thanet Earth project, which will grow 1.3 million fruits and vegetables under seven glasshouses 365 days a year, but just because something is possible doesn't necessarily mean it's right.

"Let's say we could grow bananas in greenhouses in Kent," says economist Robin Murray of TWIN, the alternative trading company that launched Cafedirect and Divine chocolate. "Does that make ecological sense in a lifecycle term? Let's say it does. Then the banana industry the whole world over would have to be restructured – so should we build houses for Ecuadorians here in the UK to help us grow the bananas they used to grow?"

This notion of responsibility lies at the very heart of Fairtrade, but opponents have argued the land that's currently used to feed the West could actually be used to feed Africa itself.

"They call this Fairtrade," says Anthony Blay of Vrel, a Fairtrade co-operative with 250 hectares of banana and pineapple plantations in Ghana. "But this isn't a fair world: there's a huge difference between the price we sell our mangoes for and the prices in the supermarkets in the UK. There is something seriously going wrong here."

While Ghana also grows crops like cassava, tomatoes, okra, peas and millet for internal trade, it has had to start importing rice from China to help feed its population of 23 million.

"If we could feed ourselves with our own food, that would be better," admits Anthony. "But the organic bananas that we export to the UK are too expensive for the average Ghanaian to buy, so it makes sense to sell – you need income to live on."

Vrel ships 5,000 boxes of bananas in five shipping containers to the UK and France every week. The bananas are put into plastic bags, which are themselves sent from the UK, to help them be differentiated from conventionally grown ones, resulting in 100,000 plastic bags being used every week.

While transport actually only accounts for about 10 per cent of food's carbon footprint, the rising fuel prices are expected to bump up shipping costs, which in turn will increase the cost of Fairtrade goods.

But forget the future of Fairtrade, says Anthony: he's not even sure the farming industry as a whole has much long-term projection.

"The toll of climate change is taking effect in a way that it didn't in my parents' time," he says. "There are so many risks associated with farming that I'd rather my children go to school. If climate change continues like this, even more people will fall below the poverty line.

"And then," he says, clasping his hands together, "then what are we going to do?"

 Pulished in Yorkshire Post here

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Telegraph.co.uk: Alexander Stoddart: talking statues

July 12 2008

The Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart, a resolute Classicist, has long been cold-shouldered by the modern art world. He did not go quietly but argued his case and, at last, his classical figures from past and present are gaining patrons and increased public exposure. By Clive Aslet

Have we got the time right, I wonder as I meet Alexander Stoddart, Scotland's great classical sculptor. I do not mean the hour of the interview. My doubts dawn on the era we are in when Stoddart opens the door of his studio - we have gone back to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, c1900, or even earlier. In the 1830s the contents of Antonio Canova's studio in Rome were turned into a museum in his home town of Possagno, in the Veneto. Crowded with different plaster casts - deities, thinkers, poets, medallions, stray limbs - Stoddart's studio, an unheated shed in Paisley University, looks very similar.

With his corduroy jacket, tortoiseshell glasses, Simon Schama-ish manner, and hair a colour that matches the name he is known by - Sandy - the sculptor could easily be mistaken for one of the professors at Paisley were it not for his clodhopping workman's boots. But even academics would find it hard to keep up with his classical and biblical references. He reads Schopenhauer for pleasure, thinks Wagner is the greatest artist who ever lived and encodes messages in his sculptures that only the most erudite of Classicists could crack.

What he insists on calling the 'contemporal', rather than contemporary, arts establishment cold-shoulders him as a mere 'maker'. At least that is better than the reception he got as a student at Glasgow School of Art in the 1970s. Graffiti in the lavatories labelled him as a fascist because he refused to veer from the figurative path. Yet it seems that the museum world is catching up with him, to judge from Tate Britain's recent Return of the Gods exhibition, its first to focus on the full range of British neoclassical sculpture.

Recently Stoddart has won a degree of success and acclaim. Two honorary doctorates and an honorary professorship have come his way. Earlier this month his statue of Adam Smith was unveiled on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, opposite the City Chambers, by the Adam Smith Institute. This is the distant pair to the seated David Hume, which has sat in front of the High Court building since 1996. Initially controversy raged over Stoddart's decision to present Hume in a toga; literal-minded critics thought it looked cold for Edinburgh.

To Stoddart it would be unthinkable to show a philosopher in anything other than drapery, a tribute to the timelessness of their thought. Smith, as a philosopher who is best known as an economist, is shown clothed, but with drapery in the form of an academic gown thrown over one shoulder. Now - to Stoddart's fury - the Hume statue has become something of an icon, since university students began rubbing his toe for good luck before exams.

In London Stoddart completed a programme of sculpture for the new Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace in 2002. It includes a 70ft bas relief, two trumpeting angels and a 'symbolic' portrait of the Queen. Because the work was made in the year of the Jubilee, Stoddart sought to combine the Queen's appearance in the year of her accession with how she looks now, in a timeless image that manages also to suggest something of her father, George VI.

Stoddart's practice of encoding classical references in his sculpture is shown in the herm of Priapus that was installed in Vincent Square, London, last summer. Priapus, the Greek fertility god, is shown in rustic mode, 'as though he was appearing on Gardeners' Question Time'. One hand carries a pair of shears, in acknowledgement of the nearby Royal Horticultural Society. There is a learned inscription about shepherds, the gist of which is that the modern world has gone to pot.

Further evidence comes from a drawer in Stoddart's study. From it he produces a phallus. This should have been attached to the herm, as it would have been in the Classical era, but Stoddart, anticipating objections by the planners, did not think he could get away with it. 'Girls go around half-naked, there is lewdness and innuendo everywhere, children dress like prostitutes to go to school,' he fulminates, 'but you can't show Priapus with a phallus.'

The herm is one of the guests at Stoddart's plastercast soirée. A giant and tempestuous head of the Celtic poet Ossian eyes John Witherspoon, the Paisley divine and president of Princeton University, who signed the Declaration of Independence; medallions hang beside portrait busts, Immanuel Kant - a commission from Lady Rothermere - loiters broodingly.

The artist has begun a pantheon of heads of 'fellow travellers' in Classicism, whose plaster likenesses look down from a high shelf on the studio wall. They include practising architects such as Robert Adam and John Simpson, the philosopher Roger Scruton and the architectural historian David Watkin.

Stoddart likes to have one of these personal tributes on the go as he works on the big public commissions. He does them off his own bat, without fee. Occasionally he is asked to model other heads - for example, Tony Benn: 'a great sitter, such a nice chap'. A commissioned bust costs between £15,000 and £20,000. Nearly all that Stoddart has already made can be purchased as a plaster or bronze cast, at prices ranging from £350 for a plaster relief of Aonghus Og, the Celtic god of love, in a limited edition of 200, through to £41,125 for the giant head of Ossian in bronze.

A pair of steps, wire supports, huge rolls of string, a mallet, a T-square, drills, dust, drawings for medallions, rusty iron bars, a bit of leg, rolls of yellow metal, a school guillotine, classical emblems, big green bags of clay, dust, dust, dust - this is a small flavour of the impedimenta among which Stoddart spends his day, every day. He is not one for holidays.

Plaster comes near the end of the process. The figure that Stoddart was at work on when I visited is a lifesize St Augustine, made of clay, the wire supports still poking out of his fingers. Stoddart says, 'People think that marble carving must be the most arduous part of sculpture, but it's a walkover compared to clay modelling.'

Large-scale work is still Stoddart's main focus, and it is at first a surprise that, at 48, he should say he will go on doing it for as long as he is fit. From daily manipulation of clay, his hands are as strong as a superhero's. 'There is a lot of physical lifting. Clay is a hard taskmaster. It cannot be allowed to dry out. In the winter, it must not freeze. It must remain alive, almost like a living organism, through watering and wrapping in plastic.'

St Augustine will take his place in a private chapel dedicated to St Rita, a Tuscan nun, being built 'somewhere in north Britain'. The St Augustine is being copied from a smaller model. 'What you're doing is replicating up the scale and immediacy of the small model on to a bigger scale,' Stoddart says. 'You cannot model a statue of this size freehand.' The chassis method, by which maquettes are made into larger, sometimes colossal statues, was used by the Egyptians carving the figures at Abu Simbel in the second millennium BC. Three thousand years later there is still no computer programe to replace it. Stoddart learnt it from 'dead men: nobody living could help'.

Fortunately some of the dead men, such as the Art Nouveau-ish Albert Toft and Charles Sargeant Jagger, the genius behind great First World War memorials such as the Royal Artillary Memorial in London, left their knowledge behind in books.

Stoddart's first love was music and he still plays the piano every night. Until recently he attended services at Paisley Abbey, which, as part of the Church of Scotland, is one of few Scottish churches to maintain the choral tradition. Perhaps characteristically, Stoddart has stopped going in protest against a 'dreadful glass box' that the authorities have proposed building on to the front.

That, Stoddart says, is the trouble with Scotland. 'The Reformation says smash impressive things. Scotland has become a metaphysically philistine country. That is to do with having become an abode of a people of the book.' He holds that in a word culture there is no respect for beauty and people are therefore likely to disfigure beautiful buildings with ugly glass boxes. 'Like the Jews and the Arabs, Scots worship logos. The word is on high but as everybody knows the word is a very crude instrument, because it is the handmaiden of the concept. Artists are concerned with the percept.

'That is what Felix Mendelssohn meant when he was asked, "Do you write music to represent ideas that are too vague for words?" "On the contrary," he replied, "I use music to express ideas that are too precise for words." Try to describe the Meistersingers' overture in words. It can't be done. It's a case of an axe as opposed to a crochet hook.'

The obvious thing, surely, would be to leave Scotland. But that would, in some ways, be too easy a choice. Stoddart is staying to battle it out. 'My great ambition is to do sculpture for Scotland.'

We drive to Stoddart's home, an 1860s villa in the leafy suburb of Castlehead: the 'castle' refers to the site of a Roman fort. It is crowded with statues, this time in bronze, standing on faux-marble plinths that turn out to have been made by Stoddart from plastic field drains. His wife, Catriona, used to be a nurse until their three (now teenage) girls - Clara, Sophia and Iona - arrived. Stoddart may at times, as he says, feel 'badly treated' by the arts establishment, but home-life is calm, ordered, loving and normal.

In the car on the way back to the airport, there is just time for a final rant. We are talking about the inability of the modern art world to understand the nuances of Classicism. 'The range is absolutely vast,' Stoddart declares. Too vast in fact for him to be cribbed within what he regards as the narrow limits of Britart and its successors.

He evokes an epic struggle against what he sees as suffocating little-mindedness and convention. 'I could not be confined to their stagnant pond when there was a raging Atlantic just over the shore. It's called the West, the Occident, culture. I had to be a dolphin sporting in that sea rather than an amoeba in their pond.'

Published in Telegraph.co.uk here

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Guardian.co.uk: Outsource till you drop

By John Harris (July 10 2008)

What exactly is the point of John Hutton? Every week seems to bring news of Labour's dread political predicament: the loss of support not just in the supposedly affluent marginals, but also at the heart of Labour's core constituency, as demonstrated by government shivers about the looming Glasgow East byelection.

For the business secretary, however, this is evidently no time to be moving away from the old Blairite behavioural tic of defining yourself against your own side. Having already counselled his party against any move on the mega-paid new olympians who are making Gordon Brown's call for pay restraint all the more difficult ("Rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country," he said back in March), today found him enthusiastically launching a report from his department's public services industry review, a funny old document that amounts to a brazen call for New Labour's privatisation drive to be accelerated.

Despite protests from such union leaders as Mark Serwotka, the old "ideological battle" over the relentless extension of the private sector is, Hutton claims, long over. In the report, the multitude of "service companies" who have sprung up to make the most of 30-ish years of outsourcing are grouped into a "public services industry" that now accounts for 6% of GDP, and is in the midst of what Hutton sees as an admirable export drive, advising foreign governments about how to break up and sell off their public services, and then reaping the benefits. In the UK, says the report, handing these firms all manner of contracts has led to cost savings of between 10% and 30%. It acknowledges that evidence on what outsourcing does to the actual quality of services is "weaker and more limited" than the financial stuff, but that doesn't get in the way of the essential point: that "Government authorities need to reinforce and demonstrate their long-term commitment to open up public service markets" – whatever "public service markets" actually are.

On the ground, of course, it does not take much effort to discover how those miraculous savings come about, and what such cost-slashing causes. One thinks, for example, of the burgeoning private prison industry, in which average pay rates are a third lower than in the public sector, and staff turnover runs 10 times as high. In my home turf of Cheshire, there was a flurry of outrage a few years back about the grim reality of one of privatisation's most mind-boggling aspects: its extension into police custody, and the replacement of scores of local holding cells with outsourced "custody suites", often several miles from where people might be arrested.

You might also cite the experience of hospital caterers like the woman I once met at private finance initiative hospital in Carlisle, told by her new private sector employers that preparing food in the traditional way was now prohibitively expensive, and it was time for the staff to get with the "cook-chill" method: that reassuring cheap culinary technique whereby hospital patients are now served up a grim version of airplane food.

Under duress, the government has occasionally - and belatedly - tried to smooth over the worst effects of its privatising zeal, which has often only served to point up the near-lunacy of what's been done: in 2005, for example, the Department of Health finally made moves to ensure that outsourced hospital staff would be employed on the same wages as their NHS counterparts, which involved local health trusts paying subsidies of £75m a year to the private companies who had taken over so-called "ancillary" services. Even with that wheeze, however, the essential problems remained. The best example, as demonstrated by loud noises from the Royal College of Nursing, is that of hospital cleaning, and a story that comes up time and again: that when you outsource, you fragment the workforce, standards tend to drop, and the wards get dirty and diseased.

Against an unbeatable combination of New Labour zeal and corporate lobbying, unfortunately, all that counts for precious little, and we continue our passage into a grim future - in which schools, hospitals and jobcentres are adorned with the flash logos of the aforementioned service companies (Serco, Capita, Sodexho, Interserve), accountability counts for very little at all, and the public service ethos is superseded by a dried-up combination of output-specified contracts and the profit motive.

Thinking about all this, my mind goes back to a trip I made in 2006 to the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), the free-market think tank where the ongoing privatisation drive of the last 30 years partly originated ("We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy", its president, Madsen Pirie, once boasted. "The next thing you know, they're on the edge of policy."). While I was there, I spent a couple of hours talking to Dr Eamonn Butler, ASI's co-founder and director, who exhibited the unflappable confidence of a man who reckoned that history was on his side.

"For many years," he told me, "people have said to us, 'Well, where does it all end? Would you privatise the army, or the police?' And I say this. Mrs Thatcher did the easy ones first. It took her a long time to get on to health and education, which were difficult. There's no such thing as an easy, simple privatisation. Every one has been a very complicated political process. And if you look at things like the police, Post Office, health, education, welfare services, all of those things – in theory, all of them could be outsourced. But how should it actually be delivered?"

His conclusion crisply proved what John Hutton will never tell us: that all this has less to do with anything "evidenced based", than the most hare-brained kind of dogma. "All you can do is try," he said, "and see what happens."

Pulished in guardian.co.uk here

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Guido Fawkes: New Labour Guilty as Charged

July 9 2008

Propeller-Head Wonk Watch: Maurice Saatchi's "Enemy of the People" published today by the re-energised Centre for Policy Studies (IEA trustees take note) is brilliant. Written in the form of an indictment it succinctly lists the chief charges of which New Labour is guilty as their era closes.

The core of the criminal conspiracy was “The Four-Stage Plan":

... the defendants concocted and put into execution a four-stage plan to secure power over the people:

Step 1 The victims pay more tax
Step 2 They receive “benefits" to pay the tax
Step 3 They are grateful for the “benefits"
Step 4 They vote for the defendants

This is the central charge against the left universally, whether social democrat or socialist, humanist or Stalinist, they always end up taxing to give back benefits to the people they took the money from in the first place. An astonishing 22,400,000 people in this country claim benefits, 39% of households, the number has doubled under New Labour. If we lifted the threshold at which taxes were paid to say £12,000 (as advocated by Adam Smith Institute) millions would be able to get off the tax-bureaucracy-benefit merry-go-round. Gordon has built a client class of state bureacrats and those dependent on the state. The only reason Gordon deliberately pays child benefit to millionaires is because he thinks it will shore up support for the welfare state.

It is a shame that Saatchi is out of favour with the Cameroons, mainly because he sings from the old Thatcherite hymn sheet. Well, he did after all write some of the best hit tunes...

Published on Guido Fawkes' Blog here

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Blaney's Blarney: Adam Smith unveiled in Edinburgh

By Donal Blaney (July 7 2008)

Dr Madsen Pirie and Eamonn Butler are giants of the British conservative movement. Their work, particularly with young people, has given thousands an exposure to free-market philosophy that will have stood them in good stead over the past 30 years. I myself attended an ASI event back in 1991 and I know that Eamonn and Madsen's monthly drinks receptions remain a focal point of the movement even to this day (and rightly so).

I was therefore delighted to see that the Adam Smith Institute's hard work has paid off in Edinburgh this weekend with the unveiling of a statue to Adam Smith. The ASI raised the funds for this statue single-handedly. This was a truly visionary project that one wishes other think-tanks would consider following (a statue of Ronald Reagan planned for Grosvenor Square by one organisation is still at the pre-planning stage).

 Published in Blaney's Blarney Blog here

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The Courier: Statue of pioneering economist unveiled

July 5 2008

THE WORLD’S first public monument to Kirkcaldy-born economist Adam Smith was unveiled in Edinburgh yesterday.

The Adam Smith Institute was behind the project to erect the statue to the great Scottish economist, philosopher, and author of The Wealth of Nations.

The monument, which takes the form of a 10-foot bronze statue on a massive stone plinth, lies in the shadow of St Giles Cathedral on Edinburgh’s High Street, right in the heart of the capital city where Smith worked and died in 1790.

The spot chosen for the new monument, created by Paisley sculptor Sandy Stoddart, is seen as appropriate to Smith’s life and work.

Not only is it within view of the recent statue of Smith’s friend David Hume but it also looks downhill to the Canongate, where Smith lived and is buried.

It also looks out towards the harbour of Leith, with its connotations of trade and commerce, and over the Forth to Fife, where Smith was born in 1723.

Dr Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, said, “This honour is long overdue.

“As author of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was the pioneer of what today we call economics.

“He championed the benefits of specialisation and free trade, creating the very idea of the modern market economy that dominates the free world today."

Unveiling the statue, Nobel Laureate economist Vernon Smith added it was also an appropriate date, American Independence Day, as it was a day of tradition and of ideas.

And this year is also the eve of the 150th anniversary year of the publication of Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Publish by The Courier here

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The Scotsman: Enlightening sight as Adam Smith statue finally arrives

By Duncan Bick (July 5 2008)

IT was a long time coming, but the world's first public monument to pioneering Scots economist Adam Smith has gone on show in the Capital – more than 200 years after his death.

Hundreds attended yesterday's official unveiling of the statue, which pays tribute to the man credited with being one of the leading thinkers of the eighteenth century before he died in the Capital in 1790.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon L Smith removed the statue's grey cloth cover in front of the crowd gathered on the High Street.

Among those watching was former Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie.

The Edinburgh Pentlands MSP said: "It's a most impressive piece of work and a fine addition to the Royal Mile. Adam Smith was the most influential Scotsman that has ever lived and his work has now got the recognition of our city.

"It shows how much the political debate has moved on, as a few years ago a statue of Adam Smith being put up would have been seen as highly political."

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, Smith studied in Glasgow and Oxford before moving to Edinburgh.

He began lecturing in the Capital before completing his hugely influential work, The Wealth of Nations.

Credited with being at the forefront of the outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments known as the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith's statue stands in Parliament Square across from his contemporary David Hume.

Created by Edinburgh-born artist Alexander Stoddart, who also sculpted the Hume statue, the monument looks down the Royal Mile to Smith's Fife birthplace. Former Lord Provost Eric Milligan said: "It is a very, very impressive statue and it is a very impressive location for it."

The statue, which was financed entirely by private donations, shows Smith dressed in 18th century clothes with a lecturer's gown draped over his shoulder. Smith's right hand is hidden to signify his belief in the "invisible hand" that guides the economy.

Eamon Butler, director of the London-based Adam Smith Institute, said: "It has taken a long time for Scotland to honour the most influential person that it has ever produced."

Not everyone was impressed by the latest addition to the Royal Mile, however.

One onlooker joked: "I think it presents an excellent task for the people of Edinburgh – to get a traffic cone on top of it."

Published by The Scotsman here

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The Press and Journal: Tribute to ‘father of economics’

Juy 5 2008

Royal Mile honour for pioneering Adam smith

THE world’s first public monument to economist Adam Smith, often referred to as the father of modern economics, was unveiled yesterday.

The monument, which takes the form of a 10ft bronze statue on a massive stone plinth, stands on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile — right in the heart of Scotland’s capital, where Adam Smith worked and died.

The statue was created by Alexander Stoddart, Scotland’s leading monumental sculptor.

Its position is in view of the recent statue of Smith’s friend, the philosopher David Hume, looking downhill to the Canongate where Smith lived and is buried.

It also looks towards the harbour of Leith and over the Firth of Forth to the county of Fife, where Smith was born.

Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute, said: “This honour is long overdue. As author of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith was the pioneer of what today we call economics.

“He championed the benefits of specialisation and free trade, creating the very idea of the modern market economy that dominates the free world today."

The statue was unveiled by Nobel Laureate economist Professor Vernon L. Smith.

He said: “This lasting tribute to Adam Smith comes at a time when there is a new awakening and recognition of his two immense contributions to understanding the human career."

The professor said of Adam Smith’s works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations: “Together, these works undergird freedom and the rule of law so essential everywhere to this human development process.

“I am honoured to have played a part in ensuring that this great economist, philosopher and humanitarian continues to be known and revered the world over.

“This monument in the capital city of his homeland will attract people to Edinburgh from all over the world to see the new statue and pay their respects."

Published by Press and Journal here

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