Scottish New Enlight PDF

THE NEW SCOTTISH
ENLIGHTENMENT
Celebrating the 250th Anniversary
of the Birth of Robert Burns 1759-2009
PUBL I S HE D BY T I ME S GROUP
Market conditions are always changing.
Barclays Commercial Bank can provide a
range of solutions to help your business
respond. From protecting against interest
and exchange rate volatility, to managing
your cash and liquidity effectively, to
simply providing a trusted place for your
funds. Call Derek Weir, Managing Director,
Scotland on 0131 470 6231 or visit
www.barclayscommercial.com
THE NEW SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT 1
The editors wish to thank the following individuals and organisations for their invaluable assistance towards producing this publication, and
the many others too numerous to mention here:
Leon Thompson, Alan Grant and Rachael Tremmel (EventScotland: www.eventscotland.org), Mike Rymaruk (Scottish Enterprise: www.scottish-enterprise.com /
Scottish Development International: www.sdi.co.uk), Lee McRonald and Sarah Durno (VisitScotland: www.visitscotland.org), Emma Shea, Ross Proctor and
Mark Hannan (Scottish Government: www.scotland.gov.uk), Alison Stoddart (City of Edinburgh Council: www.capitalcollections.org.uk), Helen Osmani and
Maggie Wilson (National Museums of Scotland: www.scotlandimages.com), Isla Robertson (National Trust for Scotland: www.nts.org.uk), Bristow Muldoon
(Royal Society of Edinburgh), Keith Hunter (photographer), Sally Barlow and Ed Bowe (Michael Laird Architects), Sanna Fisher-Payne (BDP), and
ScottishViewpoint.
(N.B. The full events programme for Homecoming Scotland 2009 is available at www.homecomingscotland.com as well as a free Events Guide:
http://www.homecomingscotland2009.com/Repository/New-Events-Programme/HomecomingScotland20009.pdf)
Whilst every attempt has been made to ensure that the information and source acknowledgements presented herein are correct, the editors proffer their
sincere apologies for any omissions or inaccuracies that may have occurred.
THE NEW SCOTTISH
ENLIGHTENMENT
THE NEW SCOTTISH
ENLIGHTENMENT
Published by
Time International Media & Events Services Ltd.
Thamesgate Business Centre, Thamesgate House, 37 Victoria Avenue
Southend on Sea, Essex SS2 6DF UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1702 32 2000 Fax: +44 (0) 1702 32 2001
Email: info@timesgroup.co.uk Website: www.timesgroup.co.uk
Publishers
Mark Brown and Kevin Sammon
Editors
Wayne Fessey and Stewart McIntosh
Publications Manager
Nicholas Hutchins
Production Department
Design Vision (UK) Ltd., Design & Production
designvision123@yahoo.co.uk
Production Coordinator
Claire Hutchings
The views expressed in The New Scottish Enlightenment are not necessarily shared by, nor should they be taken as the views of Time International Media & Events Services Ltd. (the publishers), the Editors, or
Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Development International and EventScotland. Time International Media & Events Services Ltd. has not sought to dictate the choice of contributors or the articles content, and the editors
have chosen a wide range of organisations and outside contributors. The views expressed are those of the individual contributors.
No responsibility or liability is accepted by the editors, the publishers or Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Development International and EventScotland for any loss occasioned to any person, legal or physical, acting or
refraining from action as a result of any statement, fact, figure, expression of opinion or belief contained in The New Scottish Enlightenment.
The publication of advertisements does not in any way imply endorsement by the editors, the publishers or Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Development International and EventScotland of the products or services
referred to therein.
The entire contents of this publication are protected by copyright, full details of which are available on request. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from Time International Media & Events Services Ltd. or Scottish Enterprise, Scottish
Development International and EventScotland
On behalf of and in association with:
EventScotland
5th Floor Ocean Point One, 94 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh, EH6 6JH UK
Tel: +44 (0) 131 472 2313 Fax: +44 (0) 131 472 2310
Email: information@eventscotland.org
Website: www.eventscotland.org
In association with:
Scottish Development International
Atlantic Quay, 150 Broomielaw, Glasgow, G2 8LU UK
Tel: +44 (0) 141 228 2828 Fax: +44 (0) 141 228 2089
Email: investment@scotent.co.uk
Website: www.sdi.co.uk
11 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ALEX SALMOND MP MSP
First Minister of Scotland
13 PREFACE
By Jim Mather MSP
15 FOREWORD
By Paul Bush OBE
17 INTRODUCTION
By Jack Perry
23 ROBERT BURNS: AN ENLIGHTENED NATIONAL TREASURE
By Dr. Gerard Carruthers
28 O SCOTIA!
By John Graham
33 THE FIRST SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
By Professor Thomas Devine
37 ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0: ANIMATING THE CENTRE FROM
THE EDGE
By David Robson
40 THE SCOTTISH ECONOMY
By John McLaren
47 SCOTLANDS GLOBAL COMPETITIVE POSITION
By Iain McMillan CBE
50 SCOTLAND: A PLAYER ON THE WORLD STAGE
Dr Lesley Sawers
52 REDOUBTABLE SCOTTISH ADVICE
By Anton Colella
55 INNOVATION WITHIN SCOTLANDS FINANCIAL SERVICES
INDUSTRY
By John Campbell OBE
61 THE ROLE OF THE BANKS
By Sir Tom McKillop
CONTENTS
Exceptional
capabilities
Scotland has enormous potential.
Our job at ITI Scotland is to realise
that potential in three sectors:
Energy, Life Sciences and Techmedia.
How? By identifying key enabling
technologies, managing research
programmes and licensing and
commercialising the outputs.
To-date, weve committed 134
million in R&D funding, completed
11 programmes, filed over 130
patents and signed a dozen licence
deals. And thats just the start!
Working with academia and
industry, weve instigated a further
14 groundbreaking programmes and
there are many more in the pipeline.
With the right commercial partners
and research providers, plus a good
helping of drive and enthusiasm,
ITI Scotland is proving that anything
is possible.
Which is where you come in
If youd like to be involved in,
and have access to, world-class
pre-competitive R&D, visit our
website at www.itiscotland.com
and join today.
ITI Scotland,
191 West George Street,
Glasgow G2 2LB, Scotland
T: +44 (0)141 204 8000
F: +44 (0)141 240 1190
www.itiscotland.com
Energy
Life Sciences
Techmedia
67 THE NEED FOR SAVINGS
By Susan Rice CBE
73 THE FLOURISHING OF SCOTLANDS FINANCIAL
SERVICES SECTOR
By Dr Alexander Scott
76 UPHOLDING SCOTS LAW
By Richard Henderson
79 DELIVERING SCOTLANDS TRANSPORT
FUTURE
By Dr Malcolm Reed
83 ENLIGHTENED PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT
By Dan Macdonald
90 AN ENLIGHTENED APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
By Dr. Campbell Gemmell
95 THE SCOTTISH OIL AND GAS CLUSTER: PERFORMANCE
AND PROSPECTS
By Professor Alex Kemp
100 SCOTLAND: IN THE VANGUARD OF RENEWABLE
ENERGY SOLUTIONS
By Andrew Jamieson
102 SCOTLANDS PIONEERING ROLE IN WORLD
ENGINEERING
By Dr. Peter Hughes
107 A SMALL NATION GIVES RICHES TO THE WORLD
By Professor John Roulston
110 SECURING INNOVATIVE SCOTTISH SOLUTIONS FOR
AEROSPACE & DEFENCE
By Ian Watson
115 CHEMICAL SCIENCES - SCOTLANDS BEST KEPT
SECRET?
By Dr Sandy Dobbie
CONTENTS
Glasgow. Conference City.
Let the SECC be your conference partner by choosing an
award winning venue which can host a conference for
100 - 14,000 delegates.
For further information about the SECC, please contact
Robin Miller, Head of Conference Sales on
+44(0)141 275 6211 or email robin.miller@secc.co.uk
www.secc.co.uk
121 DUNDEE: FROM JUTE, JAM AND JOURNALISM TO
BIOCHEMISTRY, BIOMEDICINE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
By Professor Sir Philip Cohen FRS FRSE
129 SCIENCE AND THE NEW SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
By Professor Anne Glover
133 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, INFORMATICS AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT TIME-TRAVELLER
By Professor Sir Timothy OShea
137 SCOTLANDS HIDDEN JEWELS
By Edward Chance
141 REINVENTING SCOTTISH MEDIA
By Atholl Duncan
145 SCOTLANDS TOURISM INDUSTRY
By Peter Lederer CBE
148 GOLF IS SCOTLANDS GIFT TO THE WORLD
By Peter Dawson
153 SCOTLANDS SPORTING TRADITION
By Louise Martin
158 SCOTTISH BUSINESS TOURISM
By Caroline Packman
163 GREAT CHIEFTAIN O THE PUDDIN-RACE
By Paul McLaughlin
169 SCOTLANDS UNIQUE SPIRIT
By Gavin Hewitt CMG
173 SCOTLANDS PLACE IN THE WORLD
By Linda Fabiani MSP
177 SCOTLAND IN A CHANGING WORLD
By Roy Cross
181 HOMECOMING SCOTLAND 2009
By Paul Bush OBE
CONTENTS
Serving our community.
Connecting Scotland to
the world.
Napier is a leading modern university, committed to the current and future
needs of people, businesses and government in Scotland and beyond.
We have an outstanding record for graduate employment and career
prospects and are a major provider of international education with
students from over 100 countries and a proud history of international
collaboration in teaching and learning.
Our Research in Timber Engineering, Environmental Biology and Energy
& Renewables, including Biofuels, is cutting edge and focussed on
real challenges affecting our economy and way of life.
For more information about our work and how we
can help you, visit www.napier.ac.uk
T
he Scottish Enlightenment was a time when almost every
aspect of human existence - philosophy, economics,
engineering, medicine, geology, archaeology, chemistry, art,
sociology - was being questioned and redefined. It was also a
time when Scotlands cities were the intellectual capitals of the
world, with great Scots such as philosopher David Hume, economist
Adam Smith, James Black the chemist and the geologist James Hutton
developing new ideas and successfully challenging the beliefs of the
past. It was an age of reason, improvement and optimism, when
Scotland left a lasting legacy for civilisation.
Part of that legacy is the work of Robert Burns, our national bard,
which has carried Scots to an audience beyond our shores and adds real
colour to the Scottish tartan. With Burns poems published in more than
24 languages and Burns suppers held annually around the globe, from
Ayrshire to Argentina, it is clear Scotlands favourite son now forms a
substantial part of the articulation of Scottish identity. His work
contained virtues that have been absorbed into our sense of self - it is
humorous, radical and articulate. These are strengths that we should be
proud of and continue to nurture.
The 2009 Year of Homecoming represents the 250th anniversary of
the birth of Burns and an opportunity to celebrate Scotlands
contribution to the world - Burns himself, golf, whisky, great Scottish
minds and innovations, and our rich culture and heritage. For everyone
touched by Scotland this is a chance to reconnect with our nations past,
to join in the New Scottish Enlightenment and play a part in the
dynamic, modern Scotland we are building.
A nationwide programme of events has been organised from Burns
Night to St Andrews Day, offering everyone a reason to come home.
Highlights include - the Opens return to Turnberry, the first ever Whisky
Galore festival, one of the largest clan gatherings in history, an expanded
Edinburgh International Festival, and the Inverness Highland Games. This
will be the biggest ever celebration of Scotland and of our ties of family
and friendship around the world.
I am determined that Scotland continues to have as much to
celebrate in the future, because with new generations of innovative,
great minds we have the makings of a New Scottish Enlightenment. For
far too long Scotland has had the best-educated airport departure
lounges in the world as our brightest and best look elsewhere for
opportunity. The Scottish Government is determined to change that by
supporting our world-class work force and those who pass through our
envied education system to make the most of their talents and turn
Scotlands potential into reality. Already our higher education research
base is among the very best, Aberdeen is the worlds second largest
energy hub, we are leading the global development of marine energy
and the reputation of our creative industries is growing. What is more,
our global economic potential was recognised earlier this year when
Scotland was awarded the title of Europes Place of the Future.
We have taken steps to capture the Scottish intellect Burns has
come to symbolise, by releasing students from the burden of graduate
endowment fees, providing universities and colleges with an additional
20m funding, and liberating small businesses from sky-high business
rates. However, our ambitions are bigger than our borders can contain.
The Year of Homecoming is a global invitation and so is our drive to
lead a new era of enlightenment. That is why we have launched the
worlds largest ever single prize for innovation in marine renewable
energy - the Saltire Prize - to galvanise world scientists and put Scotland
at the very heart of the battle against climate change.
Another example of the global outreach of Burns legacy which we
are determined to carry forward into the New Scottish Enlightenment, is
his spirit of humanitarianism and tolerance. It is a sentiment summed up
by his famous words: Man to Man the world oer, Shall brothers be for
a that. This was the inspiration behind the Robert Burns Humanitarian
Award, presented annually to a group or individual who has saved,
improved or enriched the lives of others or society as a whole. Nominees
can be from anywhere in the world, of any gender, age or creed, but
need only have shown an outstanding commitment to humanitarian
concerns. This is evidence of how Scotlands national identity translates
across national boundaries, giving everyone with shared values a reason
to travel to Scotland in 2009 and celebrate our commonality.
There are many reasons to visit Scotland, but none can beat the guid
Scottish hospitality that awaits. The Year of Homecoming will be
welcomed around the globe with Burns message of friendship Auld
Lang Syne, and it is in the same spirit of friendship that we will meet
every homecomer who travels to join our celebrations in 2009.
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
ALEX SALMOND MP MSP
First Minister of Scotland
H
owever, 2009 will be a truly special year for anyone choosing to visit.
This is because 2009 marks Scotlands first ever Homecoming
celebrations, a spectacular calendar of over 200 events and activities
taking place on the 250th anniversary of Scotlands national poet - the
international icon, Robert Burns.
Burns is the inspiration behind our year long celebration of some of
Scotlands great contributions to the world: golf, whisky, great minds and
innovations, our rich culture, wonderful heritage and of course, Robert Burns
himself.
We are extending a warm invitation to all those with a Scottish ancestry,
an admiration of the work of Burns or a love and affinity with our fantastic
country to Come Home in 2009.
The year long Homecoming celebrations will be an unforgettable
occasion.
Heralded by Scotlands internationally renowned Hogmanay celebrations,
the Homecoming Scotland 2009 programme will officially kick off on the
weekend of Burns 250th anniversary.
May is whisky month and you are invited to come to the Home of Whisky
to explore and appreciate the expertise of stillsmen and master blenders
who create one of Scotlands biggest exports and extensions of our culture.
Over the summer months, Homecoming Scotland 2009 will present some
new and enhanced major international events.
The Gathering has been specially created for the Homecoming year to
celebrate the contribution that Scottish clans have made to the history and
culture of the world, whilst international events including the Edinburgh
International Festival, The Edinburgh Military Tattoo and The Open Golf
Championship will be celebrating the year with special Homecoming activity.
Our celebrations come to a close in November around St Andrews Day with
a sensational finale to the year.
Stay in one of our world-class hotels or even a smaller Bed and
Breakfast and experience hospitality that is second to none. Play a round at
the home of golf - Scotland has over 500 golf courses including some of the
worlds greatest links and parkland courses. Sample some of the best
whiskies in the world at the Home of Whisky. Do business at one of our first
class conference venues in one of the few countries in the world where you
can experience city charms whilst being just an hour away from mountains
and glens. Eat at some of our finest restaurants against the backdrop of the
most spectacular landscape the world has to offer.
So join with us in an inspirational celebration of Scotlands culture,
heritage and the many great contributions that Scotland has given to the
world.
We all look forward to giving you a warm Scottish welcome.
Jim Mather MSP, is the Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism.
Born in March 1947, Jim Mather MSP was educated at Paisley
Grammar, Greenock High School and Glasgow University, where he
studied accountancy, law and economics.
In 1964, he became an apprentice chartered accountant, going
on to work in the computer industry - latterly running his own
business - before entering politics.
From 2000 until 2004, he was the partys National Treasurer. At
the 2003 Scottish Parliament election, Jim was elected as a Highlands
and Islands MSP. As Shadow Enterprise and Economy Minister, he was
a member of the SNPs Shadow Cabinet.
Jim became the MSP for Argyll and Bute at the 2007 Scottish
Parliament election and was appointed Minister for Enterprise,
Energy and Tourism.
He has been involved in the development and promotion of the
Economic Case for Independence and is a Director of Business for
Scotland.
He is married with two children.
Website: www.homecomingscotland2009 (for more information,
an events guide and to register for information updates).
PREFACE
PREFACE
By Jim Mather MSP
With its dramatic landscapes, compelling history, diverse culture, ancient castles,
world-class golf courses and vibrant cities, Scotland makes for a fantastic holiday
destination at any time.
Scottish Female Highland Dancers, Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
Domhnall Dods
FOREWORD
By Paul Bush OBE
Event tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Research
shows that 40% of visitors to the UK come to attend an event or a festival.
FOREWORD
A
s Scotlands lead national agency, it is EventScotlands job to ensure
the country takes full advantage of the benefits that the staging of
major events brings.
Since EventScotlands inception in 2003, the agencys securing of, and
investment in, events for Scotland has delivered an estimated 322m to the
Scottish economy. It has also helped to raise the countrys profile around the
world as a leading destination for major sporting and cultural events.
With a small, dynamic and highly specialised team, EventScotland has
helped to build Scotlands enviable reputation as the perfect stage for a
variety of spectacular events, many of which are highlighted within this
publication.
From signature events such as the Edinburgh Festivals, world
championships in mountain biking, cross country running, badminton,
rowing, adventure racing, windsurfing, through golf events like The Open, The
Ladies Scottish Open and The Scottish Challenge, to music events like Rock
Ness, Connect and the MTV Awards, EventScotlands expertise, investment
and support is helping Scotlands indigenous events and festivals to grow,
whilst securing new major sporting events in a highly competitive
international environment.
THE KEY TO OUR SUCCESS IS PARTNERSHIP
EventScotland was originally set up to ensure a level of joined up thinking
across government, public sector agencies and private companies.
EventScotlands strength lies in the ability to bring together partners
which include VisitScotland, Scottish Enterprise, sportscotland, local
authorities, sports governing bodies like Scottish Rugby and corporate
partners, and then deliver against a wide set of agendas. In this regard
EventScotland - with such an innovative approach - is almost unique in
government.
To date EventScotlands portfolio numbers around 350 events of which
approximately 200 have been funded through our international programme
for events that attract international visitors and/or significant international
media coverage.
One hundred and fifty events have been funded through our regional
programme which provides more localised support with investment to help
them grow audiences and drive domestic tourism.
HOMECOMING SCOTLAND - AN OPPORTUNITY FOR
BUSINESS TO GET INVOLVED
EventScotland has created a portfolio of world class events, ensuring
Scotland capitalises on the growing trend of event tourism and in November
2007 the Scottish Government tasked the agency with delivering
Homecoming Scotland 2009.
Funded by the Scottish Government and managed by EventScotland in
partnership with VisitScotland, Homecoming is an initiative designed to
encourage Scots, people of Scottish descent and those who simply love
Scotland, to come home in 2009.
Sitting at the heart of Homecoming is an inspirational programme of
events to engage with these audiences and celebrate Scotland and many of
the great achievements this country has given the world.
In 2009 it is the 250th anniversary of the birth of our national poet and
international cultural icon Robert Burns and the celebration of Burns
provides the inspiration for the year of Homecoming. However the year will
also celebrate some of Scotlands other great contributions, such as golf,
whisky, great Scottish minds - epitomised by Burns and other key figures of
the Scottish Enlightenment - and of course Scotland as the ancestral
homeland of millions of people around the world.
By working with the public sector and event industry partners,
EventScotland has created a tailored programme of various events across the
length and breadth of the country, designed to encourage Scots from around
the world to come home.
The core aim of Homecoming is to generate an additional 40m for the
Scottish economy through increased tourism revenue and to help promote
Scotlands identity and culture around the world.
Sports Minister Stewart Maxwell holds the Ryder Cup at the Scottish Golf Show 2008.
Courtesy of the Scottish Government
16 THE NEW SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
FOREWORD
The Homecoming programme was officially launched in June 2008 by the First Minister, featuring over a hundred events and festivals taking place
throughout Scotland during the course of 2009.
Included in the Homecoming programme is the Forbes European CEO Conference which will be held at Gleneagles, Perthshire in June 2009. The Forbes
family - who represent the true entrepreneurial spirit of the ancestral Scots - return to Scotland to host this key event in the Homecoming calendar, bringing
together senior executives from 150 of Europes top companies to hear about the innovative ideas and exciting business and investment opportunities that
Scotland has to offer.
2014 - A MASSIVE YEAR FOR SCOTLAND
In 2014 Scotland will host the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup. In the short term the economic benefits to Scotland from the Games has been
estimated at 81m with the Games generating 1,200 jobs and a volunteer force of around 15,000. There is also huge potential to raise skill levels in sectors
including construction, hospitality and event management.
The Ryder Cup - which will be staged at Gleneagles - is expected to generate in excess of 100m with visitors flying in from around the world.
DEVELOPING A SCOTTISH BUSINESS CLUB
With world-class initiatives like Homecoming, the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup on the horizon, EventScotland is keen that businesses take
advantage of the opportunities they present. EventScotland has been instrumental in bringing the idea of the Business Club to Scotland.
The Business Club - which is based on a similar scheme developed in Australia ahead of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006 - aims to further
develop and maximise the benefits from events staged in Scotland.
It is an unprecedented collaboration with private sector bodies, designed to help Scotlands SME-heavy business community squeeze every ounce of
commercial value out of these international showpiece events.
In 2014, the Edinburgh Festival follows hot on the heels of the Commonwealth Games and then Scotland will stage the Ryder Cup. The eyes of the
world will be on Scotland as never before during this period. Scotland already has the national assets that no other country in the world enjoys and it is vital
that the business community take ownership of the huge opportunities these iconic events present.
Support for the scheme comes from Chambers of Commerce, CBI Scotland, Scottish Council for Development and Industry, the Federation of Small
Businesses Scotland, the Institute of Directors Scotland, the Scottish Government and of course, event organisers.
THE FUTURE
Scotlands credentials as the perfect stage for international events are impressive and the future looks very good. EventScotland, by working with our
partners, will continue to add to these successes.
Paul Bush OBE became Chief Operating Officer of EventScotland in August 2007 having joined in March 2004 as Deputy Chief Executive. He is
responsible for the development of Scotlands major international sports and cultural events strategy. This has included work on events such
as Ryder Cup, Commonwealth Games bid, World Cross Country Championships, Edinburgh International Festivals and numerous other
international events.
Paul was appointed as General Team Manager to the Scottish Commonwealth Games Team for Manchester 2002 and again as Chef de
Mission for Melbourne 2006. The 2006 Scottish Team had their most successful Games ever winning a total of 29 medals including 11 gold.
During the 1992 Olympic Games, 1990 and 1994 Commonwealth Games and numerous World and European Championships, Paul was
appointed team manager for both the GB and England swimming teams. Paul received an OBE in the 2007 New Years Honours for services to
sport as Chef de Mission for the Scottish Commonwealth Games.
Websites: www.eventscotland.org; www.homecomingscotland2009.com
A further boost for business in Scotland will be the Forbes European CEO Conference
which will be held at Gleneagles, Perthshire in June 2009.
Gleneagles, 2nd December 2008. Steve Lindridge / Ideal Images
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
By Jack Perry
Scotlands modern and diverse economy has been forged through a rich heritage
of innovation and creativity. Having been through a few painful transitions,
Scotland has successfully adapted to changing circumstances and is now one of
the most transformed economies in Europe.
I
hope that the story of modern Scotland told through The New Scottish
Enlightenment will encourage further innovative and entrepreneurial
activity, both for those currently operating within Scotland and those
looking for an ideal place in which to expand their business or research
operations.
Scotland is, of course, greatly changed since the days of Burns and the
Scottish Enlightenment. However, I believe that if he or his contemporaries
were to visit today, one thing they would recognise is the strength and
character of its people. They would also see how this combined with their
legacy, has helped to shape a modern and successful Scotland.
Homecoming Scotland 2009 is a great celebration of our heritage and
culture. Moreover, by highlighting Scotlands diverse contribution to the
world, it is also a perfect opportunity for us to showcase our current
achievements and more importantly our continuing potential on the
international stage.
As Scotlands enterprise, innovation and investment agency, Scottish
Enterprise is delighted to play a central role in economic development
alongside other public and private sector partners. In addition, through
Scottish Development International (SDI) we continue to attract companies to
Scotland who seek to expand their operations overseas, as well as helping
indigenous companies to take full advantage of international markets.
In the past year alone for example, SDI helped secure over 2,500 high
value jobs as well as helping over 700 high potential organisations within
Scotland to do business internationally. Earlier this year Scotland was also
named European Region of the Future in 2008 by fDi Magazine (a Financial
Times publication), ahead of 38 other regions.
At the very heart of Scotlands success is close collaborative working.
Effective relationships have been forged between centres of government,
businesses and business organisations, financial leaders and public sector
bodies, and as a result we have a number of landmark projects which are
further enhancing Scotlands reputation as a world class location.
Edinburgh BioQuarter for example, will establish Scotland as one of the
worlds top ten centres for biomedical commercialisation. This 1.2bn public-
private sector project brings together, public healthcare, academic research,
extensive commercial laboratory and business headquarters space all on one
location.
In economic terms the project is expected to create 6,500 new jobs and
generate an additional 350m a year for the Scottish economy. Scottish
Enterprise will invest a further 23m in the commercial research campus over
the next 15 years, which once complete will leverage 250m of private sector
investment.
Similarly, the Translational Medicine Research Institute, or TMRI, which is
funded by Scottish Enterprise, is harnessing the power of four Scottish
medical schools and NHS Trusts together with substantial investment from
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. This groundbreaking project has joined together
dispersed resources to create a single powerful network of clinical and
scientific excellence of world significance. Ultimately this project will develop
faster ways of getting new cures from the laboratory to the patient.
Life Sciences is an excellent example of a key industry in which Scotland
can really excel on the global stage due to genuine competitive advantage.
At Scottish Enterprise we are now focused on six priority sectors. These are
Life Sciences, Energy, Financial Services, Digital Media and Enabling
Technologies, Tourism and Food and Drink. Other industries where Scotland
can be competitive in the global supply chain are also supported.
The Energy sector for example, is one area in which Scotland has long-
standing expertise. As well as experience in oil and gas technology, Scotland
is also a world leader in pioneering alternative energy sectors such as
offshore wind, hydro and fuel cell technology.
We have been working to ensure that we build an effective business
infrastructure to support this sector through the Energetica project, which
aims to create a global hub for business development covering all energy
technologies. At its heart is a technology corridor spanning 30 miles from
Aberdeen north to Peterhead, designed to attract and grow technology
companies in a high quality environment.
Bust of Robert Burns (National Poet of Scotland) inside The Burns Monument, Alloway Near Ayr,
Ayrshire. Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
Over the past two years financial services has been the largest single sector for inward investment and high value jobs coming to Scotland. Clearly
recent events in Scotlands banking sector will have an impact on this success, however it is important to emphasise that companies in financial services
remain very positive about their operating experience here. Our skills and strengths - such as a highly skilled workforce, competitive operating cost base and
the quality of life in Scotland - remain as strong as ever and provide a sound base for the future.
I have taken the opportunity here to highlight some of our success in leading industries. I believe that this, combined with a robust infrastructure, a
highly skilled workforce and a competitive cost base, means that Scotland continues to offer excellent potential as a business location for both new
investors and indigenous companies. Indeed I am confident that Scotland as a world class business location is somewhere of which Burns and his
contemporaries would be proud.
Jack Perry is Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise, Scotlands enterprise, innovation and investment agency. Prior to this, until December
2003, he was the managing partner of Ernst & Young in Glasgow. In addition he was Regional Industry Leader for Scotland and Northern
Ireland for Ernst & Youngs Technology & Communications practice.
A dual national, Jack was born in Scotland to American parents. Educated at both Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, he is a graduate
scientist. He is also a Chartered Accountant and a United States Certified Public Accountant. He has worked in both the United States and the
United Kingdom in a career covering most professional disciplines and industries.
In September 2001 Jack took office as Chairman of CBI Scotland, having been a member of the CBI Scotland Council since 1996. He also
chaired the group of 12 CBI Regional Chairmen and was a member of the Presidents Committee, the ultimate policy making body of the CBI.
Jack demitted office at the CBI at the end of his two-year term in September 2003.
His other responsibilities include Chairmanship of the Translational Medicine Research Institute. Jack is also a visiting tutor to the
Leadership Trust. He is an Ambassador for the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice and former Chairman of Craigholme School.
Jack is married with three children. He lives in Glasgow and his leisure interests include golf, skiing, reading and current affairs.
Websites: www.sdi.co.uk; www.scottish-enterprise.com
INTRODUCTION
Scottish Enterprise Headquarters, Glasgow.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of BDP
Microsoft Vice President Bob McDowell discusses www.theprimarygame.co.uk with pupils from Abbeyhill Primary School in Edinburgh, where the school is delivering business skills through teamwork and
the medium of gaming.
Students winners from all continents receive their prizes for competing in the imaginecup.com in Paris. This global challenge provides a forum to explore ways of using the power of software to help address some of
the worlds greatest challenges.
In the middle of 2008 a group of young people from Lochaber high school
scooped a top prize in the ICT Youth Challenge within the Highlands and
Islands Enterprise (HIE) zone. Their innovation? An interactive gravestone that
incorporated the latest communications technology to help provide a more
personalised and detailed experience for family members visiting lost
relatives. It is one of those inventions that, once you see it, makes you ask
yourself, why didnt anyone think of that before?
Such ingenious use of ICT is no rarity among young people today. We
are seeing more and more innovation, with such high commercial potential,
coming from Scotlands youth. I believe it is being driven by a new and
stronger emphasis on enterprise within the nations education system, from
primary through to university.
Scotland has a proud tradition of investment in skills, which for at least
the past 30 years has been higher than the rest of the UK. It is the only
nation where the percentage of people with a higher education qualification
is bigger than the percentage of those with a basic school leaving
qualification. Yet Scottish productivity is lagging behind the other nations
within the UK economy, despite its positive skills profile.
Many recognise that it is crucial young people are given more than just
basic skills to turn their education into something more tangible for the
Scottish economy. We know that by 2010 the knowledge economy will
account for 50 per cent of Britains GDP, growing faster than any other
sector, and Scotlands young need to be ready to be part of this growth.
Intangible assets such as knowledge and innovative potential, alongside ICT
skills, will be the key resources that will give Scotland competitive advantage
and mark the end of the industrial age.
Microsoft has been working with educators in Scotland for the past five
years to drive forward a more entrepreneurial approach to education and the
use of ICT. It has made close links with those at policy, local authority and
school level, as well as within the universities. But, more importantly, it has
helped create opportunities for practitioners to engage young people in ways
that fit within the new Curriculum for Excellence. At secondary level it has
supported the HIE with its Youth Challenge, providing opportunities to
develop ideas beyond the blueprint stage, showing young people how to turn
them into commercial successes. The skills learned during the competition
include financial acumen, marketing and developing prototypes.
Within higher education, Microsoft offers students the chance to
participate in the rapidly growing Imagine Cup. As the worlds premier
student technology competition, the Imagine Cup aims to encourage young
people to apply their imagination, passion and creativity to technology
innovations that could make a difference in the world.
Founded in 2003 , the cup competition attracted more than 200,000
students from more than 100 countries this year. But what makes the
Imagine Cup so exciting for students is that as part of the prize, the winners
are coached and supported as they try to convert their idea into a
commercial property.
Scotlands universities have embraced the Imagine Cup with Abertay,
Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier, Glasgow, Glasgow
Caledonian, Herriot Watt, Paisley, Robert Gordon, St Andrews, Stirling and
Strathclyde all participating in 2008, with some incorporating it into course
work. In 2008, St Andrews University gained second place in the software
design strand of the UK competition. It is a perfect example of education
meeting enterprise to guide young people to be more enterprising and
ambitious when they finally move into the world of business.
But perhaps the project of which we are most proud and which has a
greater reach is the Sport Store game. It was developed in New Zealand, and
Microsoft has helped redesign the concept so it means something to Scottish
school pupils. The game provides an opportunity for young people to run
their own sports store, from controlling stock to deciding prices to managing
their staff. It uses gaming, which most young people love, to educate. And it
works. Between May 2007 and May 2008, more than 100,000 games had
been played by more than 25,000 students. Three hundred centres have used
the game and more than 500 teachers have registered an interest.
The game has now been developed for use in primary schools, allowing
for enterprise education to combine with ICT even at this young age.
Microsoft has provided funding to make the game free to play in all schools
in the immediate future.
Microsoft is fully committed to continue supporting Scottish educators
in their drive to create confident, ambitious, and creative individuals who will
become the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. It will keep working with
practitioners at all levels so they also have the skills and confidence to
deliver education using ICT that engages and prepares young people. And it
will continue to provide opportunities for those young people to exercise
their skills and knowledge so they are ready to burst into the world, able to
turn innovation into a commercial reality.
Microsoft: ICT and
entrepreneurship in young people
Raymond OHare, Director, Microsoft Scotland
The ICT Youth Challenge finalists from schools in the Highlands and Islands. This competition,
www.youth-challenge.co.uk, provides opportunities to grow innovative business ideas whilst
promoting a teamwork ethic.
ROBERT BURNS: AN
ENLIGHTENED NATIONAL
TREASURE
By Dr. Gerard Carruthers
Robert Burns is one of the worlds great poets and song-writers, to say nothing of his considerable talent for writing prose.
As if this was not enough, for Scotland as well as the wider world, there is a kind of added value. One estimate, made by
the broadcaster David Stenhouse, puts Burns value to the Scottish economy at 157 million per annum.
U
pwards of 50 major civic statues across the globe attest to Burns status as an icon, as does a huge commemorative industry of ware in plate, pottery,
brass, glass, wood, wool, paint, print, pewter, silver, gold, chocolate and alcohol (both whisky and beer) all paying tribute to the Bard. Of the famous
Burns Supper, it has been calculated that there are more than 900,000 of these held annually worldwide - which means, at a conservative estimate,
that 90 million people celebrate his birthday every January 25th - and the celebration of the 250th anniversary of his birth may well add to that figure.
For the past 80 years, Auld Lang Syne along with Happy Birthday has been one of the two most frequently sung songs in the world (the tune to Burns
song can even be heard as part of the traffic lights system in Japan). Another part of Burns rather mysterious reach is his ability to be loved simultaneously
in both the old Soviet Union and the USA. He has also been translated into at least 30 languages (including Esperanto, Latin and Faroese).
If his popular coinages of phrases do not quite match the number of the other (English) bard, then this perhaps has something to do with the fact that
Shakespeare lived until he was 52, whereas Burns was dead by the age of 37, the former having twice the creative life of the latter. However, two of Burns
phrases, The best laid schemes (from To a Mouse) and To see oursels as others see us (from To a Louse), and Mans inhumanity to man (from Man
was Made to Mourn) have become part of the everyday English language.
All comprehensive anthologies of verse in English published since the 19th century include Burns, which is even more of an achievement when we
consider that he is the only dialect poet for whom this can be said. In the folk music canons of Britain, Ireland and other parts of the English-speaking
world, and in the repertoires of European classical music (including the work of Beethoven and Haydn) Burns has been performed for 200 years. Burns is
unique in world literature in having both a wide popular readership and an appeal for those who would be considered to have the most sophisticated
literary tastes.
There are many Burns Clubs throughout the world but nothing comparable for Shakespeare. Burns admirers number those who are themselves major
figures in world literature, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Pushkin, Dickens, Stevenson, Arnold, Melville and Steinbeck, to name
but a few. Burns glorious afterlife is one of the very few of the past 200 years in world culture, only Abraham Lincoln (whose favourite poet was Burns),
Ghandi and perhaps George Washington (to whom Burns wrote an admiring poem) being comparable in the legacy of supposedly positive moral compass
left behind.
Much is written about the bloated, falsifying myth of Robert Burns, but most mythology depends upon a bed of solid fact. One of the most important
facts of Burns life and work, underpinning his enduring appeal, is his deep and wide empathy with the human condition. If we consider one of the poetic
ROBERT BURNS
Courtesy City of Edinburgh Council
(www.capitalcollections.org.uk)
ROBERT BURNS
The Burns Supper
There are thousands of these held throughout the English speaking world
every year to commemorate the birth of Scotlands national bard, Robert
Burns.
They vary in size and content, from a very small group of about 16
gentlemen meeting in the original room of the Batchelors Club in the village
of Tarbolton in Ayrshire, close to where Burns lived, to West Sound, the local
radio station in Ayr, who every year hold a Burns supper with 1,200 guests.
Wherever Scots are gathered in the world, you can be assured there will
be a celebration on or around 25th January every year for a formal Burns
Supper. Yet the popularity is such, that many housholders now invite a few
friends round for an informal evening, with everyone agreeing to try their
hand at performing one of his songs or poems, after the meal.
The evening consists of sitting down to a traditional meal, followed by an
evenings entertainment of Burns poems, songs and with several speakers
proposing various toasts.
The supper always commences with a haggis being carried in on a silver
platter, dressed up in tartan and a sprig of heather. This is done together with
a piper playing it in. the audience stand clapping in time to the pipe tune as
the haggis is carried round the room for all to view.
Someone then recites the address to the haggis, acting out the part as
best they can by wielding a sharp knife with which the haggis is duly stabbed
to allow its steaming contents to pour out on to the platter. This done, it is
piped out again with everyone standing and clapping. Thereafter the meal
commences.
The meal usually consists of soup, haggis, neeps and tatties, and steak
pie, followed by biscuits and cheese then coffee.
Most participants will have a dram along with the haggis and various
refreshments are served for the meal, depending on individual taste.
Thereafter, a comfort break occurs to allow people to freshen up and the
evenings entertainment commences.
The contents of the entertainment vary at each event, but usually
commences with the piper playing a selection of Burns tunes.
This is followed by someone saying a poem, then someone sings. Next the
principal speaker of the evening - who is tasked with speaking for around 20
minutes - usually proposes the immortal memory of Robert Burns, followed
by a song or two by Burns, and then a toast by a gentleman to the lassies.
This should be a lighthearted review of how much we dislike women, but
cannot live without them. While telling of occasional jokes is an integral part
of this speech, it should never simply be a tirade of anti-feminist jokes. This
toast should be of 10 minutes duration. At its completion, the gentlemen all
stand and raise their glasses to the lassies.
Next could well be the performance of Burns epic poem Tam O Shanter
or Holy Willies Prayer, where the performer frequently dresses up for the part.
There is then a reply from the lassies, where a lady has the chance to
respond and get their own back at what has been said about the fairer sex.
This is always a dig at the incompetencies of men, extolling how superior
women are, but again winding up by saying they cannot live with men, but
cannot live without them.
Then will follow some more songs, which at this stage of the evening -
when participants are very relaxed - are usually popular songs with choruses
are sung so all can join in.
A vote of thanks is proposed to the performers and the evening rounds
off with everyone up on their feet singing Auld Lang Syne.
The formalities complete, people will mingle for a while, or on some rare
occasions, the floor is cleared and a dance ensues with Scottish country
dancing.
Courtesy of the Robert Burns World Federation, which aims to honour - and
advance knowledge of - the life and works of Robert Burns, whilst stimulating
study and development of Scottish art and culture, supporting conservation
relating to Burns and his contemporaries, and strengthening bonds between
Burns Clubs and Societies worldwide.
Website: www.worldburnsclub.com.
phrases already mentioned, from To a Mouse, we see Burns awareness
that life is often more random, accidental and painful, than humans can in
any way legislate for:
The best laid schemes o Mice an Men,
Gang aft agley
An leae us not but grief an pain,
For promisd joy!
Burns experience was of the world - as it always is - as an uncertain
place, particularly as he lived during a time of rapid upheaval, including the
American, Agrarian and French Revolutions. He applauded the first and
third of these as furthering freedom and democracy. Of the second,
involving the fast-paced improvement of agriculture, he was much more
doubtful. To a Mouse is best read not so much literally - as in Burns, a
practical, hard-headed farmer, actually extending sympathy to a mouse
whose home has been ruined by the plough - but allegorically, as
representing the gap in power between the ploughman and the mouse as
similar to that of the large landowner a propos the small-holding farmer
and peasant. The biographical background here is Burns observation of his
own fathers plight, brought to ill-health and the verge of bankruptcy as
improving landlords aware of increasing profits to be made from the land,
forced tenant-farmers like William Burness to take over larger and larger
farm-holdings into which more and more resources and uncertain energy
had to be poured. Burns, a good Enlightenment intellectual, was all for
progress but knew that this was something often more easily espoused
than accomplished, and something in the attempt of which that could
easily have negative consequences.
One of Burns most humorous productions, Death and Dr Hornbook is
also among his darkest. Here a drunken narrator meets Death and
threatens to kill him, but this ludicrous scenario turns out not to be as
gratuitously farcical as it might first appear. Another individual - Death
confides in the narrator whose initial aggression gives way to
companionability - is already threatening the Grim Reaper. Jock Hornbook
has set up in the area as an apothecary with all the modern - as well as
some ancient - remedies for an assortment of ailments. However, while
Jock lengthens the lives of some, he cheats death in a more profound way
by delivering it himself out of season and for his own profit. Thus he helps
a weaver poison an unwanted wife and in a botched abortion kills the
pregnant woman. The inventiveness, the progress, of human beings, Death
and Dr Hornbook tells us, can always have to it a nefarious side.
Right: A bas relief sculpture of the Robert Burns poem Tam O' Shanter at the museum located in Burns
Cottage, Alloway, South of Ayr, South Ayrshire. Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
Burns To a Louse is also one of his great works in which humanitys pride in its special achievement is undercut. An insect is seen crawling upon a
well-dressed young lady at church and she is aware - she believes - of admiring male attention. The narrator meanwhile is inwardly berating the louse for
spoiling his beautiful prospect of Jenny. Neither of course is paying any attention to God, the supposed reason for the pair being where they are at that
precise moment. The entire fabric of the poem has to do with misrecognition, including the narrators (mock) chastising of a dumb brute creature,
standing outside human laws of propriety, which quite properly pays no attention to these. Burns is saying we are confused in thinking of ourselves - as
the human race - in being separate from nature.
It is part of Burns modern sensibility - of his new scientific mentality derived from the Enlightenment - that humans are seen as part of nature. He is
saying we ought to rid ourselves of our presumption. If only we could be more Enlightened, which means also objective, taking on the perspective - as
Burns read in Adam Smith - of the impartial spectator:
O wad some Powr the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An foolish notion:
What airs in dress an gait wad leae us,
And evn Devotion!
For Burns, the self-love of humanity was misplaced when he observed society. As well as properly being part of nature, humans too often behave
unnaturally to one another, something that he counterpoints in his poem, The Twa Dogs. Here two dogs - Ceasar, an exotic, foreign breed belonging to a
wealthy gentleman and Luath, a ploughmans collie - enjoy each others company and conversation about the lords o the creation, or humanity,
oblivious to their own different origins. Ceasar even marvels at the contempt of his masters class for those below him which matches the dogs dislike for
the badger. Of course the point is that it is natural in an inter-species way for a dog to dislike a badger, but humans all too often despise their own
species. If humans do stand apart from nature as lords, then this is to show a less than admirable, imperiously unnatural side.
Burns is remarkable for being one of the two individuals, the other being Walter Scott (and Burns was his favourite writer), who do most to
broadcast and even invent Scotland to and for the modern world. There are many examples of this cultural communication, and one is Mary Queen of
Scots. Mary is today the most famous icon of Scottish femininity, but this was not so until the later 18th century. Even a little earlier among the Jacobites,
when one might have expected Mary - a deposed Stuart monarch and a Catholic - to have some coinage, she is absent from national consciousness in
the way in which she is present today. For the Scottish mindset more generally, Mary was off-limits for her religion, her supposed family-typical despotism
and her dark, treacherous female nature. However, the perception began to change in the Scottish Enlightenment as historians turned to Mary anew and
saw her as someone of talent, who had not always had the best of luck. On the back of such rehabilitation writers such as the German, Schiller, and Scott
in the early 19th century began to dramatise her life more sympathetically and over the next 200 years Mary became a Scottish icon.
Burns though was first off the mark with Mary, pointing the way for both Schiller and Scott with his song Lament of Mary Queen of Scots on the
Approach of Spring, that poignantly inhabits its subjects emotions as she thinks back upon her disappointed life. It might seem strange that Burns also
extended sympathetic treatment - as well as the opposite end of the spectrum of Scottish identity - to the Covenanters, those harsh, heroic, persecuted
Calvinists of the 17th century, who refused to accept state control over the church. Burns celebrates these individuals who, like Mary, were for a long time
marginalised and who again had recently been reappraised with a more objective eye by Scottish Enlightenment historians, as prototypes of the initial,
idealistic revolutionaries of France in 1789. Clearly then with Burns we have one of the very first examples of someone who saw that there was more
than one way of being Scottish and that Scotland was indeed plural in its history, culture and identity.
If Burns cultural expression was rather ecumenical, we can certainly say the same thing for his religious identity. As a true man of Enlightenment he
espoused in his personal creed belief in a supreme creator, though with belief always having to follow the dictates of both the heart and of reason and
he evinced a hatred of fanaticism. In The Cotters Saturday Night, the poet celebrated the simple, homely worship that he knew from his own background
in Presbyterian Ayrshire and dared anyone to despise its sincerity. At the same time, he also took great delight in touring with his favourite clergyman, the
ROBERT BURNS
Catholic Bishop, John Geddes, and one of the most cultured and pious men in late 18th century Scotland. Burns also celebrated the Catholic pretender, Charles
Edward Stuart, in many Jacobite songs that again helped bring into the mainstream from out in the cold a proscribed Scottish cultural heritage. Burns trouble with
his own Presbyterian communion is well known, as in his early days he was censured by the church in Alloway for the sin of fornication. On the first of several
occasions on which he sired an illegitimate child, Burns produced a poem, A Poets Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter, which was proud, defiant and tender
in equal measure:
Ill never rue my trouble wi thee,
The cost nor shame ot,
But be a loving Father to thee,
And brag the name ot
One of Burns greatest poems, primed by the Enlightenment interest in psychology and its condemnation of inhuman fanaticism, is Holy Willies Prayer. Here
Burns forensically takes the scalpel to the misuse of the religious sensibility. The Kirk worthy Willie is supposedly praying to God though in actual fact he is
boasting. Confessing to his sexual sinfulness, he is actually vaunting his sexual potency. Exalting in his status as one of the chosen elect, he even rationalises the
sinfulness to which he is supposedly confessing, as God installing in his life some imperfection that he might not be over proud. In other words, Willie smugly
cleans up on all fronts. However, what the reader sees is of course a hypocrite, indulging his physical life to the full, and not living - or indeed loving it - honestly.
Over 100 years before Freud, Burns gives us a portrait of the supposedly flesh-denying religious mindset as (not very well) sublimated desire. Burns inversion of
orthodox religious language in Willies mouth to become haughty sexual innuendo is masterful:
Yet I am here, a chosen sample,
To shew thy grace is great and ample:
Im here, a pillar o thy temple
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a ruler and example
To a thy flock.
Burns uses his savage satire in a different way in his Address of Beelzebub where one of Satans Prince-Demons commends the Earl of Breadalbane who has
refused to give permission to his Highland tenants to emigrate to Canada. We have then an interesting pre-Clearances moment registered in Scottish history, the
likes of Breadlabane aggressively reversing such actions, driving people from the land and overseas to make way for more profitable sheep, only a few decades
later. However in the 1780s, when Burns is writing his poem, what is to be observed is a cruel feudal overlordship in the Scottish Highlands. Burns has Beelzebub
commend the Earl for treating his Highland folk like animals, the only way they are to be treated in their dirt and indolence. Beelzebub even urges the use of their
children as labour and employing their women in Drury Lane as prostitutes. Through his ferocious irony, Burns is, of course, protesting against the fact that in
Scotland all too often the Highlander had been treated as sub-human. The great medieval maker, William Dunbar could say that there was no music in Hell except
for the bagpipes, but even in this jest we are reminded of how alien the Highlander was projected in Lowland eyes. Robert Fergusson - Burns great predecessor -
writing poetry in Scots only a decade and a half before Burns, could only ridicule those inhabitants of the Gaeltachd with whom he came into contact in
Edinburgh. Again, with Burns, we see in Address of Beelzebub and elsewhere - for instance in his great demotic musical drama Love and Liberty or The Jolly
Beggars - protest against the gratuitous maltreatment of the Highlander. If much has been written about the way the Highland identity during the 19th century - in
the hands of Walter Scott and Queen Victoria - came surprisingly and rather synthetically to stand for Scottish identity holus bolas, too little noticed is the way in
which Burns plays a large part in making Scotland aware of its Highland part in more positive, unifying human terms.
One of the great ironies of Burns career is the way in which he caters for Enlightenment tastes, consciously hamming up the role, of noble savage or heaven
taught ploughman in Henry Mackenzies notorious phrase. Burns was in fact well educated, not merely reliant on the undoubted rustic common sense of rural
Ayrshire. His book-learning - something in fact deeply valued among the Presbyterian tenant-farming stock from which he had sprung - encompassed both
ROBERT BURNS
Upwards of 50 major civic statues across the globe attest to Burns status as an icon.
The Burns monument at sunset in Aberdeen. Elnur
Right: The ruined Auld Alloway Kirk, the setting for Robert Burns' poem Tam O'
Shanter in Ayrshire , Scotland. David Woods
Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and the tradition of poetry in Scots (to say nothing of his being steeped in the canon of English Literature).
Burns was culturally ambidextrous, as well as ecumenical. Certain facts - as in all human lives - perhaps sit a bit awkwardly within his iconic legend. There
was perhaps a touch of vanity, snobbery even, as he changed from using the family name of Burness in his mid-twenties to become Burns, which he
probably took to be more genteel. More seriously, the man who fathered at least 13 children by at least five women is someone who it is difficult to entirely
set beyond moral reproach: the problem being that too often bardolaters (of all political persuasions) have sought to find Burns beyond reproach. Yet even in
the case of women, something can be said on the positive side for Burns. Aware of emerging discussions in the late Enlightenment period of gender equality,
Burns composed his song, Green Grow the Rashes, which features the following lines:
Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her prentice han she tryd on man,
An then she made the lasses, O.
So, (Mother) nature, or maybe even God, is a female, who experimented first with the construction of man and then perfected this prototype in the
creation of woman (a sequence that has biblical authority in the prior appearance of Adam to Eve). It is quite clear that Burns valued women for their minds
as well as their bodies. He was able to have correspondence on serious intellectual matters especially with a number of women of the upper class, even
nobility, in a way he was less allowed with men of this same class. As well as this, Burns makes it clear in a number of his writings that he fully expects
women as well as men to enjoy sexual pleasure. Female experience and identity, as in the case of so many others for Burns, were to be taken seriously.
Burns legacy to modern Scotland is a body of great creative writing, but it is also the view that different types of identity - historic, religious and
gendered - should all be taken seriously. If, undoubtedly, much of his outlook is to be explained in terms of a unique sensibility, we ought also to be aware of
its genesis in a time of European and Scottish Enlightenment where honest, objective, non-complacent perspective was to be renewed and refreshed. The
continued celebration of Robert Burns is deserved in the 21st century because he tells us to keep our minds open and our humanity sympathetically
engaged. There can be no more innovative, enlightened outlook than this.
Dr. Gerard Carruthers is Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow and General Editor of
the forthcoming multi-volume Oxford University Press edition of the Collected Works of Burns.
Gerard Carruthers was lecturer in the Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde (1995-2000), where he
taught American, English and Scottish literature, and from 1998, he was Deputy Director of the Centre for Scottish Cultural
Studies. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Glasgow-Strathclyde School of Scottish Studies, and as
a member of the UCAS (Scotland) English Panel. Previously he was Research Fellow at the Centre for Walter Scott Studies,
University of Aberdeen (1993-5).
Gerard Carruthers is a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde and of St Andrews College of Education, Glasgow. His
PhD thesis was on The Invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century.
He is currently supervising postgraduate dissertations on Ulster Scots Poetry of the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries, Eighteenth-
Century Literary Rhetoric, Robert Burns, & Robert Tannahill. He has supervised successful PhD theses on Robert Fergusson and Seamus
Heaney and successful MPhil theses on Robert Burns, Bunkermen & Lasses o Pairts: Contemporary Scottish Fiction and on Utopian and
Dystopian Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature. He was an external examiner on the BA in Cultural Studies at the University
of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute. During the summer of 2002 he was W. Ormiston Roy Memorial Research Fellow at the
University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA. He is a member of the steering committee of the Distributed Burns Collection, of the Abbotsford
Library Research Project committee and of the organising group for the Royal Society of Edinburgh Robert Burns Celebrations 2009. He is
also co-organiser of the Burns International Conference held annually at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow.
Email: G.Carruthers@scotlit.arts.gla.ac.uk
ROBERT BURNS
O SCOTIA!
By John Graham
Scotland has a fascinating and varied history to live up to. Across the globe our nation inspires many different reactions and
we are celebrated for many traits - our ingenuity, intelligence and romanticism.
I
n celebrating our national Bard we recognise the achievements of generations, leading and shaping world events; but it is also a very personal
celebration. We all have individual memories inspired and shaped by Robert Burns words and legacy, his verse depicting a Scotland of the people.
Through his words we see the lives of our ancestors reflected and how they fitted into wider events.
It is natural that at a time when we are inviting the world to join us all for The Year of Homecoming that Burns should play such a vital role in uniting
people and showcasing the best of Scotland from our past and present. He uses The Cotters Saturday Night to describe the pride we take in our shared
identity and it resonates today in the way we are viewed by others.
O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent!
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
And O may Heaven their simple lives prevent
From luxurys contagion, weak and vile;
Then, howeer crowns and coronets be rent,
A virtuous populace may rise the while,
And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle.
For a country our size it is remarkable how much of our history remains and is recognised to be of global importance. We have five sites on the list of
World Heritage Sites compiled by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), each chosen for the outstanding universal
values that it contributes to humankind.
The Heart of Neolithic Orkney, St Kilda, The Old and New Towns of Edinburgh, New Lanark and the Antonine Wall mark key moments in Scotlands
history and preserving and making them as accessible as possible comes with many challenges. It brings together central and local government, but also
SCOTTISH CULTURE & HERITAGE
Scotlands tourist industry offers visitors authentic glimpses into the lives of Scottish ancestors. Brian A Jackson
Below: Looking over to the impressive ruins of Dunnottar Castle dating from the late 14th century, south of
Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
. , : . ' + | . . :
. ' | : | . ' :
' + . 1 . . : .
. . | ' : . | : .
' : ' . . 1 :
| ' | ' + . 1
': '+... .::1 |.|'..|,
. .+.1:. '+1, '|...+,,
'': | ':.. ''` .,
:' +++ ,, `'` ....
m+.' :.|....:'+...|.::1.
relies very much on the understanding that the Scottish public has of the events they represent and how dearly we feel about them.
The Age of Enlightenment in Europe and further afield in the 18th century became a melting pot of new ideas and changes in thinking, which would
transform the Western world and impact on all aspects of life, including politics, philosophy, economics, architecture and art - impacts that are still felt today.
Scotlands contribution to this new thinking was significant, with the likes of David Hume, Adam Smith and James Boswell at the forefront of the movement,
and placing Edinburgh as one of the world centres of Enlightenment thinking. Burns himself was received into this atmosphere of intellectuals and literati
with open arms and respect, and took his place amongst them with ease.
Modern Scotland balances the demands of being a place of business, attractive to visitors and providing a good quality of life to the people who live
and work here and our heritage has an important part to play in all of these. Our tourist industry can offer visitors authentic glimpses into the lives of our
ancestors. Thanks to the continued hard work of a great number of bodies, millions of people visit original historic properties each year. Attractions like these
require dedication and a commitment to excellence to ensure that they
do survive the centuries.
Working in partnership with the Historic Houses Association, the
National Trust for Scotland, VisitScotland and other groups, Historic
Scotland is at the forefront of taking our conservation expertise and
using it to generate economic sustainability for our houses, castles,
palaces and historic landscapes. Sites like these reinforce local identities,
telling stories about key events in history, but they also give us
opportunities to generate employment in a range of areas.
Recognising the continued demand for traditional building skills to
preserve these buildings has lead to the creation of training schemes for
construction workers. Within that industry there remains a need for
maintenance of existing buildings which is proving more stable than the
new build market in the current economic climate. Scotlands colleges,
the Heritage Lottery Fund and the industry body ConstructionSkills have
joined with Historic Scotland to see that the training is available to those
interested in a career in conservation. These principles of partnership and
shared expertise between the private and public sectors has also
reshaped the planning process. We are already seeing the benefits of
David Hume statue, High Street, Edinburgh Duirinish Light
Below: Old Tolbooth by Jane Stewart Smith, 1866.
Courtesy City of Edinburgh Council (www.capitalcollections.org.uk)
bringing developers, architects and local authorities together at an early stage to discuss projects. Each side is able to address any concerns before finalised
plans are reached and focus on seeing important buildings continue to be used and recognise the built environment as the asset it is.
In addition to the sites of international recognition within the care of Scottish Ministers, the majority of protected heritage assets are privately owned
and listed for their historic or architectural merit, or as scheduled monuments. Those responsible for them need consent to make alterations, which is dealt
with through the planning process. In managing this, local authorities and Historic Scotland offer advice - and in some cases grant funding - to see these
structures continue to play an important part in their communities.
Each year events like Doors Open Days and Scottish Archaeology Month give people the chance to learn about the architecture and heritage that is
around them, providing them with the opportunity to discover the hidden history of landmarks in most Scottish villages, towns and cities, which largely goes
unnoticed. Our heritage plays a huge part in drawing people to our country with figures showing that over 85% of visitors to Scotland will visit some
historic attraction during their stay.
Within our own portfolio of properties that we manage on behalf of Scottish Ministers there is a wide range of sites including castles, blackhouses,
standing stones, cathedrals, churches and more. They - like the approximately 42,000 listed buildings or 8,000 scheduled monuments - each have a story to
tell. These buildings are not important just because of their bricks, mortar and construction, but because of what we can learn from them about the way our
ancestors lived and worked. In Burns case there are buildings across Scotland that claim some physical connections. Others have found everlasting fame by
being included in his verse.
The Year of Homecoming allows us to celebrate all of Scottish culture at home and abroad and reflect on how far reaching the influence our nation
continues to have. It is vital that as well as recognising the importance of our nationally recognised sites we do not neglect those that tell the stories of our
communities. A Gathering of the Clans will be a highlight of the celebrations and it is fitting that the local areas of these families are as cherished as
Edinburgh Castle, where they will congregate. In all of the events to mark this very special year, it is our shared identity that is the cornerstone.
It is particularly fitting that Burns anniversary should be part of this, as what we have gained from his legacy is an overall appreciation of our culture as
a whole. In his life there are many great achievements and anecdotes, so much so it is hard to break down into specifics just how much we owe his memory.
While people may immediately think of Burns suppers as the main occasion where the Bards words are read, his lyrics and verses remain quoted on an
almost daily basis. They have shaped our language and provided inspiration to so many others at the heart of what we hold dear about our country.
It is commonplace today for us to talk about our Scottish identity and how much it means to us on a national level, but also personally. I am confident
that each and every person reading this will have their own views on Robert Burns, the man and his writing. Yet I am also sure that we can all - almost
unconsciously - quote his work and reflect on what it means.
One can only wonder what Robert Burns himself would think of modern Scotland, but I think he would be proud of the way that the people of Scotland
today continue his love and belief in his home country and are proud to show it off to visitors from around the globe.
John Graham, Chief Executive of Historic Scotland, joined the former Scottish Office just over 30 years ago.
In the early part of his career he worked in a number of areas including electricity, planning, and industrial
development and was Private Secretary to two Secretaries of State.
He ran the local government group at the time of the restructuring of local government in Scotland and was in charge
of the Scottish Office budget and financial planning for two years. Just over six years ago he became the head of the
Environment and Rural Affairs Department.
Website: www.historic-scotland.gov.uk
Eilean Donan Castle Luks Hejtman
MS has damaged my nervous system and my symptoms can
change as quickly as the weather. Learning how to deal with the
bad days has made a big difference. Life is never the same with
MS, but theres a lot you can do to adjust.
Theres a whole range of emotional and practical support
available from the MS Society, whether you want to know about
self management courses, or just need someone to talk to who
understands what youre going through. Call the MS Society
helpline on 0808 800 8000 or visit www.mssocietyscotland.org.uk
MS Society Scotland. Putting the pieces together.
When I was told I had MS I thought it was
terminal, but theres life after diagnosis.
Self management courses taught me how
to turn negative into positive
Surinder, 39, Glasgow
THE FIRST SCOTTISH

ENLIGHTENMENT
By Professor Thomas Devine
In 1900 William Robert Scott coined the term Scottish Enlightenment, to capture the idea of a country which had
successfully escaped from a supposedly benighted past and the shackles of Calvinist orthodoxy to blossom during the 18th
century into an intellectual power-house of Europe.
S
cotland became an integral part of the general European Enlightenment, known as Lumieres in France, Illuminismo in Italy and Ilustracion in Spain.
According to Professor Alexander Broadie, the term was essentially one of self-congratulation used by those thinkers who saw themselves as
enlightened and were literally living in the light of reason rather than a world of darkness inhabited by those who relied only on faith and argument
from the authority of ancient texts to advance human understanding. Indeed, the list of Scots who made world-class contributions to the new thinking was
truly remarkable.
David Hume was the greatest philosopher in the English language. Adam Smith, through his masterpiece An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776) and other works, is recognised as the major influence in the development of economics. Adam Ferguson, William Robertson and
James Hutton were at the cutting edge of what became the disciplines respectively of sociology, history and geology. Thomas Reid developed common
sense philosophy and John Millar powerfully advanced understanding of the nature of social change over time and the interactions between law and
philosophy.
During this period William Cullen and the brothers William and John Hunter helped to make Scottish medical education the most progressive in Europe
in the later 18th century, whilst the work of William Adam and that of his sons - especially Robert - made Scottish architecture famed throughout the
Continent.
As Joseph Black discovered both carbon dioxide and latent heat, James Watt refined the separate condenser for the steam engine and so generated the
essential source of power for the first Industrial Revolution.
However, the Scottish Enlightenment was much more than a process of unparalleled creativity by a small number of great men whose work collectively
made vital contributions to the philosophical thought and scientific progress of the western world. Also pivotal to it was the fundamental belief in the
importance of reason, the rejection of authority which could not be justified by reason and the ability through the use of reason to change both the human
and natural world for the better.
In this new moral universe, intolerance, religious persecution and imposed orthodoxy of the type which were said to prevail in late 17th century
Scotland were anathema. Nor was reason confined to the lecture theatre or the scholarly textbook. It affected all aspects of human behaviour.
Thus, the classic order and symmetry of the New Town of Edinburgh and the distinguished buildings designed by the Adam family, are among the most
compelling and enduring physical monuments to the Age of Reason in Scotland. Similarly, the ethic of rational improvement, inspired planned intervention
THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT: INVENTION & INNOVATION
David Hume statue, Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Andrew J L
Ansell 2007. Courtesy City of Edinburgh Council
(www.capitalcollections.org.uk)
in the natural world which now came to be recognised as capable of amelioration by human
effort helped to stimulate the late 18th century improving movement in agriculture. It
contained all those elements of curiosity, optimism and faith in reason which are to be found in
the writings of the Enlightenment, though the improvers were more interested in the basic
practicalities of enclosures, drainage and new crops than arcane issues of philosophical debate.
Ideas were described, analysed, questioned and refuted in the contemporary press, in
pamphlets and journals, in sermons and surveys; such as Sir John Sinclairs massive Statistical
Account of Scotland - published in the 1790s - which provided an examination of the way of
life of over 900 parishes compiled by local ministers. It was this broad dissemination which
ensured the social acceptance of basic ideas which might otherwise have remained remote and
abstract.
The Scottish Enlightenment was essentially an intensely practical and social movement.
Adam Smiths reasoning in the Wealth of Nations was often grounded on his own observations
of the actual commercial and economic life of Scotland and Watts technical virtuosity was as
much part of the spirit of the age as William Robertsons renowned historical enquiries.
Lord Kames was a distinguished legal philosopher but also an influential publicist for
improved farming through his classic text, The Gentleman Farmer. This interaction between
theory and practice facilitated the transmission of enlightened ideas to the wider community. It
is impossible, for instance, to understand the onset of the Industrial Revolution in late 18th
century Scotland without noting that in this society man was now thought able to influence
and control his environment to a much greater extent than had ever been thought possible
before.
Describing the nature of the Scottish Enlightenment is much easier than accounting for it.
The Scottish experience was, of course, one variant in the general European Age of Reason but
the sheer depth and range of achievement was exceptional even by the standards of that
remarkable era. Moreover, the thinking of the great intellectuals reflected the Scottish values,
religious ethos and national institutions which had formed them as individuals. They were,
above all, Scots, and not simply the citizens of a world of the mind which had no national
frontiers.
At first glance, the soil of their native land did not seem to contain the seeds for such a
brilliant flourishing of creativity. For instance, in 1696 a young Edinburgh student, Tom
Aitkenhead, had been executed for heresy. Five witches were hanged and then burnt in Paisley
in the same decade. A rigid and intolerant Calvinism held the country in a strong and
unyielding grip. Thinking deviant thoughts was not approved.
Yet scholars now believe that the roots of the 18th century achievement were already
fixed before 1700 in that inhospitable environment. Some would even go as far back as the
Renaissance and Reformation in search of origins.
The old view - which saw the Union of 1707 as the key catalyst and civilising agent - is
now largely discounted. Indeed, despite its material poverty and phases of political and
religious oppression, early-modern Scotland was no intellectual backwater. The country had five
universities and a parish school system which was already well established before the famous
Act anent (concerning) the Settling of Schools of 1696.
The nation had also been a part of the wider intellectual circle of Europe for centuries.
Remarkably, between its foundation and the Reformation, around 18 of the rectors of the
University of Paris were Scots. Through these cultural connections the educated classes in
Scotland were able to tap into cutting-edge thinking on the continent. Perhaps the best
practical example of this was the seminal influence of Dutch medical training on the
development of world-class achievement in 18th century Scottish medicine. It was essentially
openness to new approaches which is so striking, no more so than in the employment of
Newtonian thought in university lectures long before it was adopted in Sir Isaacs own native
land of England.
Intriguingly, to see Scottish Calvinism and Enlightenment in direct and ineluctable conflict
with each other may also be too simple. There is the idea of the latent enlightenment in
Calvinism, a theology which contained a strong intellectual element appealing more to the
head than the heart or the senses. Apart from the fact that some of the literati were themselves
committed believers, Calvinist moral and social principles can be found in some of the great
works of the period and even in those of David Hume, the most famous sceptic on religious
matters. This was a Christian enlightenment.
The Calvinist concern with human morality in relation to the will of God which had
obsessed 17th century Presbyterian divines, was given a more secular orientation in the 18th
century by those thinkers who saw the study of human nature as absolutely central to general
understanding. The philosophers and historians strove to develop the science of man - Hume
regarded it as the essential basis of all other sciences - while the great portrait painters of the
age, Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn, tried to capture the visual essence of human nature on
their canvasses. This interest in the study of humanity had theological roots in Scotland.
In addition, several of the main figures of the Enlightenment were squarely within the
Calvinist tradition. William Robertson was not only a cleric but the son of a minister, Moderator
of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and leader of the Moderate party in the
Church of Scotland. Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid were ordained ministers, the former
Etchings of Scottish Enlightenment figures by John Kay: Sir John Sinclair by John Kay 1791, Joseph Black by John Kay 1787, James Hutton by John Kay 1787,
Adam Smith by John Kay 1790, William Robertson by John Kay 1785, William Cullen by John Kay 1784. Courtesy City of Edinburgh Council (www.capitalcollections.org.uk)
chaplain for a time to the Black Watch regiment and John Millar was a son of the manse. Calvinism was therefore a key element in a long established
Scottish religio-philosophical tradition which went back before the Reformation and created the context for the wide-ranging enquiries of the 18th century.
However, it is doubtful if these could have easily flourished in the climate of orthodoxy and intolerance which existed in the later 17th century, so
graphically illustrated by the execution of Aitkenhead and the repressive policies at that time of the Kirk. Some relaxation of this rigidity was a sine qua non
for an Enlightenment which above all else advocated the values of civilised tolerance and the autonomy of reason. So it was that the new Age of the
Moderates in the Church, which allowed for more critical discourse in a context of tolerance, was a basic foundation for an Age of Enlightenment.
Scottish politics were also conducive. By the 1740s, final acceptance of the Union with England and the removal of the threat of Jacobite counter-
revolution after Culloden in 1746, ushered in a few decades of political stability until the convulsion of the French Revolution after 1789. The countrys
politics became bland and devoid of conflict but ironically that made the clash of ideas easier and less threatening.
In the old, faction-ridden Scotland, the intellectuals would have been forced to take sides. Now a more civilised form of debate, with that vital element,
tolerance of opposing views, became much more likely.
Is there a lesson here for the devolved nation in the early 21st century as it strives towards a so-called Second Scottish Enlightenment?
Thomas M. Devine, OBE, BA, PhD, DLitt, HonD Univ (Strathclyde, 2006), Hon DLitt (Queens, Belfast, 2001), Hon DLitt
(Abertay, Dundee, 2001), FRHistS, FRSE, Hon MRIA, FBA is Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography,
Director of the Scottish Centre of Diaspora Studies and Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at
Edinburgh University.
He is a graduate of Strathclyde University and holds honorary doctorates from his alma mater, The Queens University,
Belfast and the University of Abertay, Dundee. At Strathclyde he rose from assistant lecturer to Professor of Scottish
History (in 1988), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and, finally, Deputy Principal of the University from 1994
to 1998. From 1999 to 2004 he was a member of staff at Aberdeen University, being successively University Research Professor in Scottish
History, Director of the AHRC Research Centre in Irish and Scottish Studies and Glucksman Research Chair of Irish and Scottish Studies. He
joined Edinburgh University in January, 2006.
In addition to these appointments in the UK, he holds Honorary Professorships at North Carolina (USA) and Guelph (Canada). Between
1992 and 1993 he was a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow.
Among his current and recent university and public appointments have been: Member and Vice-Chair, RAE Assessment Panels in History,
1992 & 1996, Trustee of the National Museums of Scotland, 1998-2002, Member of Council at the British Academy, 2000-2003, and Convenor
for the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative.
He has won several awards, fellowships and prizes in recognition of his scholarship and research achievements, including Senior Hume
Brown Prize in Scottish History (1976), Saltire Prize for Scottish Historical Research (1992), and is one of three UK-based historians appointed
Hon Member of the Royal Irish Academy (elected 2001). He also won the inaugural John Aitkenhead Award of the Institute of Contemporary
Scotland for services to Scottish education and has gained admission to the Academy of Merit (2006).
In 2001 he was presented with the Royal Gold Medal - Scotlands supreme academic accolade - by HM the Queen and appointed OBE in
the New Year Honours List 2005 for services to Scottish history, and is the only historian elected to all three national academies within the
British Isles.
While at Aberdeen and Edinburgh University, he raised 4.5m from research councils and external bodies for advanced research in
Scottish history and Irish-Scottish Studies. He has published 28 books and over 100 academic articles on such varied subjects as Scottish
transatlantic trade, urban lites, rural society - in Highlands and Lowlands, sectarianism, the Irish in Scotland, Scotland and empire, the
Anglo-Scottish Union, Irish-Scottish historical comparisons, emigration and famine.
He is married to Catherine and has five children. His hobbies include travelling in Italy, walking in the Hebrides and watching skilful
football.
Culzean Castle near Maybole, Carrick on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland,
rebuilt from a basic stately house into a castle by the architect Robert Adam.
Courtesy of the National Trust for Scotland Photo Library
ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0:
ANIMATING THE CENTRE
FROM THE EDGE
By David Robson
The death of Robert Burns in 1796 marked the high water mark of the Scottish Enlightenment - a period unparalleled in
modern history. Scotland, a small nation racked by poverty and clinging to the edge of Europe, produced such an
outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments that by the time of his death it had already launched humanity
into the modern world.
T
he new and radical ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, forged at a time of existential crisis in western civilisation, established the very
foundations for modern economics, education, medicine, philosophy, engineering, anthropology, architecture and politics.
Today there is a different but parallel set of challenges and opportunities that could ignite a second Scottish Enlightenment - Enlightenment 2.0.
Could a second Enlightenment rely on the same innate characteristics of Scottish culture and condition? Might Enlightenment 2.0 leverage 21st century
versions of the technology, globalisation and human behaviour that made possible the first Scottish Enlightenment and spread its effects across the
world?
The unique Scottish contribution to the European Enlightenment was clearly recognised at the time. Voltaire famously declared: We look to
Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation. What is equally astonishing is the relatively small number of remarkable individuals that formed the nucleus of
this intellectual revolution. Many were close friends and acquaintances, who met together in taverns, societies and clubs to vigorously debate and argue
over the fundamental relationship between humanity and the universe. A visitor to Edinburgh remarked: Here I stand at what is called the Cross of
Edinburgh, and can in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand.
This explosion of new thinking and insight was so powerful - and its impact so far reaching - that ever since Scots have yearned for a renaissance
of this Golden Age. Successive generations have sought to rediscover the elusive elixir of intellectual insight that so powerfully spread through the civil
society of 18th century Scotland.
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO REKINDLE A SECOND SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT?
We need to look beyond the individual giants of the Enlightenment and see past the brilliance of the ideas they created, now that their innovations
have become accepted tenets of modern civilisation for well over 200 years. Rather we should seek to understand and rediscover the particular Scottish
condition which nurtured such a flowering of intellectual understanding and insight.
The Scottish Enlightenment was remarkable, not just for the new ideas it created, but for the way in which Scotland - a country at the edge
economically, culturally and physically - was able to destabilise and revolutionise the orthodoxies and assumptions that shored-up otherwise vastly
more powerful neighbours and orders. This challenge to the establishment came because - not in spite of - the peripheral position Scotland held in the
political and economic world of 18th century Europe. The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were particularly inflammatory not only because they
SCOTLAND TODAY: THE NEW SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
The Scottish Enlightenment was remarkable, not just for the new
ideas it created, but for the way in which Scotland - a country at
the edge economically, culturally and physically - was able to
destabilise and revolutionise the orthodoxies and assumptions
that shored-up otherwise vastly more powerful neighbours and
orders. Glencoe, Scotland.
embraced the radical rationality of the wider European Enlightenment, but because they directed this new reasoning to address real-world challenges in
economics, politics and science. These were not just ideas about the modern world but a revolutionary call-to-arms to create it.
The Enlightenment emerged at a critical period in world history. The early decades of the 18th century saw the emergence of the first phase of
globalisation. Economic transformation was expanding in lock-step with the growth of the British Empire. It was becoming increasingly possible for ideas,
information, culture and practice to be transmitted to the furthest reaches of this global empire through colonisation, through the tools of civil
administration and cultural practices that accompanied it, and via the expanding diaspora that imperial ambition created. The printed word was
transforming the communication of information and - in Scotland - this was combined by the highest levels of literacy in the world. Mobility of goods,
people and ideas offered a small isolated society on the edge of Europe the opportunity to change the world.
European civilisation was in need of change, radical change. The crisis paralysed societies across Europe and threatened to consign them forever to the
tyranny of the dark-ages. People were exhausted as religious conflicts, famine, lack of effective governance, growing populations and increasing pressures on
land and cities, had defeated the old social orders. More of the same was not sustainable.
Today, at the dawn of the new millennium - truly global - challenges face mankind including climate change, energy scarcity and inequality. This
represents a similar opportunity for those with imagination to frame the new ideas that will sustain future human progress and ensure natural and human
survival. Might these global challenges of today give birth to a new second enlightenment in Scotland?
The political awakening of 21st century Scotland following devolution provides ripe conditions for the necessary ambition and mandate to address
global challenges. Three hundred years ago significant constitutional change was also a key factor in stimulating the Enlightenment. There is no clear
consensus of how the Act of Union in 1707 affected the Scottish Enlightenment, although the Union of Scotland and England undoubtedly changed the
relative position of Scotland. Scotland was now more conscious of its position at the edge of a more powerful neighbour. The centre of gravity had shifted
and was no longer in Scotland.
However, revolution seldom comes from the centre - but from the edge. This edginess was an important factor in stimulating the nonconformative yet
optimistic spirit of rebellion that characterised much of the Enlightenment. The Scottish Enlightenment demonstrated - maybe not for the first time - that it
takes the edge to animate the centre. Change - especially radical change - almost always occurs first at the boundaries of society. Today Scotland retains this
edge quality and revels in a zeitgeist of restless rebellion. It can be seen in examples of individual innovation, in creativity and invention, and in the fact
that individual Scots are often at the front-line of new political, scientific and social thinking.
We needed to re-invent what it takes to animate the centre from the edge. We must again recognise and nurture modern-day Humes, Burns, and Smiths
- who think on the edge. By their nature edge thinkers challenge establishment orthodoxies and assumptions. They enjoy a different perspective from those
sitting at the centre. Operating at the periphery, they have a different understanding due to their position relative to the norm. They are often more resistant
to group think and will be amongst the first to declare when the emperor hath no clothes. Edge thinkers are less likely to defend established and orthodox
beliefs or assumptions. They reach across geographic and disciplinary boundaries connecting with others similarly questioning and provoking uncertainties.
This boundary spanning enhances diversity and amplifies innovation. Edge thinkers stretch upwards like tall trees in order to reach above the canopy of
conventional thinking, and see beyond traditional boundaries.
In 18th century Scotland, the radical edge thinkers of the Enlightenment often operated from inside the established institutions of learning and society.
Consequently they were able to transform and re-new old-order institutions from within. Today we must ensure our established organs of industry,
government and society, similarly welcome and nurture edge thinkers - not in spite of the disruption they may cause - but because of it.
A striking characteristic of many 18th century Enlightenment individuals was their reach across multiple disciplines. Many were true renaissance figures
applying new thinking to several distinct areas of knowledge. Some might argue that such multi-disciplinary achievements were easier 250 years ago when
the depth of available knowledge in each subject was far less than today. They say that such holistic cross-disciplinary expertise is no longer possible? Whilst
it is undoubtedly true that the variety and depth of specialised knowledge is today greater than ever before; their ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries
was because they saw the connections between disciplines and developed holistic concepts that applied across multiple subjects. They acted as expert
outsiders, challenging and side-stepping conventional thinking.
Essential to global impact of the Enlightenment thinking were the transmission channels that spread this new understanding across Europe and the
New-World. Ideas of the European Enlightenment had reached Scotland through deep cultural links with continental Europe. Similarly the influence of the
Glasgow Science Centre. (building designed by BDP)
Scottish Enlightenment was transmitted though the expanding reaches of the British Empire and the increasing diaspora of Scottish migration. Never before
had people and their ideas travelled so far and so widely, within such a relatively short period of time.
Today we are similarly at the midst of a revolution in the generation and spread of knowledge and ideas. In the intervening period since the first
Enlightenment we have tended to believe that innovation is the responsibility of select experts. Whilst expertise is indeed essential - we are rediscovering
the notion that most innovation comes from elsewhere. Eric Hoffer famously reflected In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find
themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Enlightenment 2.0 will be a shared process engaging individuals, companies and government. This next generation of innovation will deliver new value
to consumers and citizens by leveraging their desire and capacity to create value for themselves and their peers, generating social as well as economic gain.
The opportunity is open for Scotland to redefine the relationship between producers and consumers - and between government and citizen. Supported
by a new set of enabling technologies such as social software and ubiquitous computing, Scottish society, industry and government can innovate more
imaginatively than ever before. A second Scottish Enlightenment would signal the opportunity for communities to evolve flatter, more democratic structures
involving more people in informed decision-making.
Scotlands distinct strengths in communities, in science, and with a renewed ambition for innovative government, would offer more than just first-mover
advantage. Scotland possesses a distinct innovation gene in its cultural DNA, not despite its size and relative position in the world but because of it.
Scotlands geography, history, language, pragmatism and its sense of community is a high-octane mix well placed to foster the radical thinking needed to
address tomorrows most compelling global challenges. It will need the revolution of a second Enlightenment to re-frame our strategy to climate change and
energy scarcity - threats that jeopardise the future wellbeing of humankind and of the planet.
The opportunity and potential for Scotland to re-shape the world has survived the 250 years since Robert Burns. An Enlightenment 2.0 that addresses
the existential crisis of the 21st century must again looks to those who can animate the centre from the edge.
David W. Robson is an innovation advisor working in government and for the private sector in Scotland and the US.
He is also an author and speaker on strategic innovation and cognitive bias in intelligence analysis.
Initially trained as a Product Designer at the Glasgow School of Art, he joined Town Art & Design as staff designer of
street furniture, moving to Westclox UK as head of design, and later marketing and product management. David joined the
Design Council working with industry on multidisciplinary design projects and was later appointed CEO of Scottish Design
Ltd, consulting with companies on design and product development.
After moving to the international division of Scottish Enterprise to manage secondary foreign direct investment, he
was appointed Director of Innovation Development leading a do-tank researching and developing innovation policy. Latterly, David became
Director of Policy and Practice for Industries Division in Scottish Enterprise.
He is currently on secondment to Scottish Government to head Energy and Environmental Foresight, in collaboration with US
Government Department of Energy.
Email: David.robson@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
It will need the revolution of a second Enlightenment to re-frame our strategy to climate change and
energy scarcity - threats that jeopardise the future wellbeing of humankind and of the planet.
Courtesy of the University of Glasgow
ECONOMIC PROFILE
Main image and right: Braehead Shopping Centre,
designed by BDP.
THE SCOTTISH
ECONOMY
By John McLaren
In 1776, at a time when Robert Burns was still at school, the great Scottish economist Adam Smith set out his view of
relative worldwide economic performance for the 1770s, with the ranking - Netherlands, England, France, British North
America, Scotland, Spain, Spanish North America, China, Bengal and Africa.
A
t this time in the 18th century Scotlands initial industrialisation was based on textiles. In the 19th century this industrial base was expanded out into
the inter-connected industries of coal mining, steel and shipbuilding. Scotland became the source of much of the locomotive stock and shipping that
both opened up and then powered the expanding British Empire.
As the UK moved forward at the head of the Industrial Revolution it remained at or near to the top spot in terms of economic prosperity (GDP per
capita) up until the First World War. From there on it followed a steady decline up to the end of the 1970s when it stood ranked at around 13th of the main
economies.
Scotlands prosperity profile has taken a similar path but usually a step or so behind the UK (see Table 1). As a key component in the Industrial
Revolution and of the British Empire, Scotland was vital in manufacturing and exporting, steel, ships, railways and people. As a result it prospered greatly,
probably reaching its peak around the end of the 19th century. To be sure, this wealth was not well distributed but rather lay in the hands of the few, with
the labour of the many exacting little compensation. For most Scots relative worldly prosperity meant a life of toil with little in the way of tangible assets to
pass on. For this reason - and despite such aggregate prosperity - many Scots still decided to emigrate around the world to enhance the quality of their lives.
Table 1: International Performance 1700-2001, in terms of GDP per capita
(% above/below) 1700 1820 1870 1913 1950 1980 1990 2001
UK vs European 12 +21 +37 +53 +33 +38 -8 -3 +1
UK vs 4 Western offshoots +163 +42 +32 -6 -25 -28 -26 -25
Scotland vs UK -8 -3 -2 -5
Sources: Maddison 2003, Lee 1995, ONS, Scottish Government
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th century, Scotlands apparent economic might was deceptive. Its over specialisation in heavy engineering
meant that it was highly susceptible to challenges from newly industrialising countries like Japan, the USA and Germany. Only the two world wars kept this
ECONOMIC PROFILE
competition at bay and ensured a continuing demand for this product. By the end of the 1940s Scottish industry was not in a good place. Uncompetitive in
its traditional industries it also largely lacked investment in the fast growing consumer product manufacturers that were the new industrial leaders.
This then - ever so briefly - is the story of Scotlands first great economic flowering, as well as the background that has shaped Scotlands economy for
the subsequent half a century or more and still does. The rapid industrial growth of the 19th century left not just physical scars on the land but also a legacy
of communities and neighbourhoods with poor housing and few assets. So, when the relative downturn in performance came, as it eventually did in the mid
to late 20th century, Scotland was ill prepared to make a rapid switch over to the new industries that other economically advanced nations were developing.
To give some idea of the scale of these changes it is worth
considering the rapid growth and subsequent rapid decline of
Glasgow as an industrial powerhouse.
Glasgows population rose from around 500,000 in 1871 to
over one million by 1910, then remained above this level up until
1960, before declining again to 600,000 by 1990. This massive
expansion, then contraction, took place at over +2% per annum in
the 40 years 1870-1910 then -2% per annum 1960-1990. It is hardly
surprising that this left a legacy of economic problems and some of
the effects of the decline live on for existing generations.
The fast growth left a legacy of poor housing, low skill levels
and poor health, from pollution and working conditions. In turn, the
poor skill and low wealth levels meant that workers were not well
placed to migrate to the parts of the UK where post heavy industry
manufacturing and then service sector growth occurred, generally
the south of England.
Yet Scotland has been able to turn itself around economically to
be a part of the relative international British success of the past
quarter century, as well as regaining somewhat its position and
status within the UK.
Scotlands relative low point came in the 1950s and early
1960s, when its standard of living (GDP per capita) fell below 90%
of the level for the UK as a whole, which itself was rapidly losing
ground to other western European nations. Thereafter, within the
Union of Great Britain, Scotlands lagging position was boosted by
the mixed blessing of an increase in state control and intervention in
the economy.
Internationally, the UK stopped losing ground to most other
countries around the early 1980s and has regained some lost ground
over the last quarter of a century. Within the UK, Scotlands
traditional position of having a prosperity level ranging between 93-
98% was maintained in this period, although in the mid-1990s,
buoyed by large inward investment in electronics, this rose for a few
years to be equal to - or above - that of the UK, before the
electronics industry collapsed around the turn of the millennium.
The reasons for Scotlands relatively good economic
ECONOMIC PROFILE
Table 2: Make up of the Scottish economy and sectoral growth
over the period 1998-2007
Industry 2004 Annual growth
sector share 1998-2007
Agriculture, Forestry 16 0.2
and Fishing
PRODUCTION 178 -1.2
- Mining and Quarrying 11 -3.4
- Electricity, Gas and 27 -1.5
Water Supply
- Manufacturing 139 -1.0
CONSTRUCTION 68 2.6
SERVICES 738 2.9
- Retail and Wholesale 112 2.1
- Hotels and Catering 35 -0.1
- Transport, Storage 74 5.6
& Communications
- Financial Services 83 7.4
- Real Estate and 193 4.1
Business Services
- Public Administration, 230 1.7
Education & Health
- Other Services 58 2.0
- Financial Services -47 7.4
Adjustment
TOTAL 1,000 2.05
Source: Scottish Government
performance in the 19th century and up to the mid 20th century in comparison with Europe, can be seen in terms of its being part of the cradle of the
industrial revolution and all the technical innovations which that entailed, together with the British Empire which provided a source of both abundant raw
materials and open markets.
The reasons for its subsequent decline up to the 1980 nadir, is more complicated. Like the UK as a whole, it suffered from misdirected state
interventionism, ineffective exploitation of new technologies, deteriorating labour market relations and poor management. In addition, Scotland had an over-
dependency on heavy industry and a concomitant under representation in high growth new industries, as well as continuing low asset and transferable skill
levels, making mobility more difficult.
The halting of the decline from 1980 was largely due to the resolution - at least in part - of some of these problems. For example, less market
intervention by government, reformed industrial relations, the exploitation of North Sea resources, plus the liberalisation of financial services.
Scotlands on-going transformation to regain lost ground - but on a more equitable basis than before - needs to be viewed in light of the massive
challenges facing it, self-inflicted or otherwise.
So it should be remembered that the profile of the Scottish economy that is outlined hereafter, is one that has emerged from an initially highly
successful but ultimately difficult past. Finally Scotland is emerging from the long shadow that has been cast over it from this past success.
SCOTLAND TODAY
The modern Scottish economy is on the face of it much like any other developed western European economy (see Table 2). It is dominated by services - both
public and private has been stable in comparison to previous economic eras in terms of low inflation and interest rates, shows steady but unspectacular
growth year on year and has an ageing population which is likely to pose significant demographic problems in decades to come.
In some senses there is little to differentiate it from the UK or beyond but scratch the surface and some Scottish idiosyncrasies do emerge. It has an oil
related industry that makes the North East region around Aberdeen the third richest in the UK (in GDP per capita terms). It has had a rapidly expanding
Financial Services market that helped make Edinburgh the second richest local area of the UK (again, in GDP per capita terms). However, it also has high
levels of multiple deprivation based around Glasgow, which culminate in parts of that city having male life expectancy at birth of 54 years.
In terms of basic economic statistics Scotland is currently a middling performer, with some positive aspects as well as some worrying ones (see Table 3).
Table 3: Scotlands current relative performance in comparison to OECD countries
Scotland OECD average Scotlands position
in OECD 30
GDP per capita (2006) 104 100 17th
Employment rate % (2006) 73 66 7th
School education (2006) 102 100 10th
Life expectancy (2005) 77.1 78.6 25th
Sources: OECD, Scottish Government
In terms of growth this has been relatively slow over the past quarter century. This is partly due to a flat population, so that in GDP per capita terms its
standard of living has been growing much closer to the average of other developed economies (see Table 1).
This middling growth picture needs to be tempered with the positive migration picture that has recently developed in Scotland. After over a century of
annual outward migration - often at very high levels - the last decade has for the first time seen positive net inward migration. This has occurred both in
ECONOMIC PROFILE
The cranes of a Clyde shipyard silhouetted by a Glasgow sunset. David Woods
Left: For most Scots relative worldly prosperity meant a life of toil.
The Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland
international terms and within the UK itself. International inward migration has been boosted by the accession of eastern European countries to the EU.
Within the UK, the population drift to Scotland has been seen across all age groups, contrary to the image that is often portrayed of the young leaving for
London as the old retire back to Scotland. While this picture of Scotland as a more attractive economic destination rather than one from which many wish to
depart, has not been reflected strongly in higher growth yet, it can be seen in the improving labour market situation.
In terms of the labour market Scotland has succeeded - like the UK - in improving its performance in recent times. It now lies towards the top end of
OECD countries in terms of its employment rate. However, within this favourable Scottish performance there remain stubborn pockets of low employment -
especially around greater Glasgow - related to high incapacity rates.
In terms of education, Scotland again performs relatively well. Its schools performance comes out high in the OECD PISA survey results, it has almost
50% of school leavers going on to Higher Education and it has three universities included in the worlds top 100.
In terms of life expectancy Scotland has a poor record. At 77 years, it is lower than any other western European country and closer to Mexico or Poland,
than to Norway or Japan.
Besides longevity, there are also some more directly related economic issues of on-going concern. Despite notable successes in terms of biotechnology -
like Dolly the Sheep - Scotlands record on R&D and on commercialisation of ideas is poor. Throughout history Scotland has been a source of invention but in
bringing such inventions to market it has been less successful. More work is needed in understanding exactly why this is but Scotland remains a place of
ideas, which is at least a good launching pad for future initiatives.
In terms of governments role in helping solve problematic areas and boosting already successful ones, Scotland has recently experienced a dramatic
shift in how this works. In 1999 Scotland gained a much greater degree of political autonomy through devolution of considerable powers from the London
based UK Government to an Edinburgh based Scottish Government. These powers included control over health, education, transport, law and order, plus
some enterprise and training matters. While the main macro-economic powers were retained at the UK level (including all monetary policy issues, borrowing
powers and most taxation freedoms), in an increasingly constrained world environment relating to these macro powers, the many areas of government
policy at the Scottish Parliaments disposal offer considerable scope for affecting the economic environment.
With the Scottish Parliament having only been in existence for a decade it is too early to tell how much of an impact it might have in the longer term.
However, its very existence makes it more likely that government policy will look towards the provision of Scottish solutions to Scottish (or even more
general) problems.
GDP, UTILITY AND WELLBEING
Many of the aforementioned figures tell of Scotlands relative position in financial terms, as reflected in GDP per capita, or its standard of living. People like
Robert Burns and Adam Smith would have welcomed this increase in riches over time but probably be just as interested in the advances made in the human
condition.
Where does Scotland stand in terms of its quality of life or its sense of well-being? These are notoriously difficult things to agree on, never mind
measure. However, some sense of Scotlands wider prosperity can be gained.
If education is the surest guarantee of future prosperity then - as previously outlined - Scotland retains a high standing.
If the political economist John Ruskin (who followed Adam Smith) is correct, that there is no wealth but life, then Scotland is less prosperous than it
should be, with the lowest life expectancy of any developed economy.
If environmental issues were brought to bear, the position of Scotland, as elsewhere, may look less rosy. However, beyond international concerns it is
surely the case that Scotlands varied natural beauty is a positive quality and one that attracts both people and businesses that would otherwise locate
elsewhere.
Perhaps it is time for Scotland to embrace a wider view of economic success, one where increased utility relates more to Adam Smiths notion that the
great objects of ambition and emulation are to deserve, to acquire and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind and that their attainment is
achieved through the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue rather than by the acquisition of wealth and greatness.
Smiths thoughts on this subject might be seen to increasingly chime with those of modern day citizens, whose concerns over growing prosperity are
broader than simple income related ones and where there is likely to be a growing public appetite to capturing and reflecting this.
ECONOMIC PROFILE
Aberdeen harbour skyline.
Bertrand Collet
THE FUTURE
In the past, as a small and remote country, Scotland has benefited most during times of open world trade. The current world trade scenario would therefore
seem propitious for a continued Scottish resurgence. However, if such a surge is to prove more sustainable than in earlier times, then the sharing of gains from
this trade need to be more equally shared than before. In using the term sustainable it is meant that faster growth in Scottish prosperity should not be at the
cost of the landscape or of growing income inequality, both of which have led in the past to a degradation of the natural environment and to many of its
citizens outward migration. Unlike a century ago, the attraction of physical Scotland and the people who live therein needs to act as the bedrock on which
future growth is based.
The opportunities and threats to Scotland are easy enough to identify. In financial services alone recent times have shown how Scottish based companies
can rapidly become world players, but also how such an elevated position can leave them open to the dangers associated with global problems and takeover.
However, it is the longer term issues that will prove more decisive in deciding Scotlands future. How to deal with the changing demographics of its
population? How to build secure and efficient energy sources, covering both the development of declining North Sea resources and the expansion of
renewable sources? Such questions face many other countries in the early years of the 21st century and - as elsewhere - it is how the country as a whole
responds to them that will help determine its future prosperity and its future quality of life.
Scotland may not yet be a Celtic Lion to Irelands Celtic Tiger, but then it had no need to be as it was in a more prosperous position when the Tiger started
to stalk other countries. Nevertheless, in some senses Scotlands recovery over the last quarter of a century, given the scale and depth of the problems it was
overcoming, is equally impressive. Some of these problems remain in a reduced form but Scotland is a very different country from that experienced in the
1970s and 1980s. It can now be seen to be on a more level playing field with other countries, its natural attractions more valuable and its well-educated
workforce more ready and willing to stay and see Scotland prosper further. It is still very early days in this new environment but Scotlands economy is
probably better placed now, as a potential contributor to a New Scottish Enlightenment, than it has been for many generations.
John McLaren is an Honorary Research Fellow at Glasgow University and a researcher at the Centre for Public Policy for
Regions (CPPR). He is also an economic consultant and commentator.
Earlier in his career he was a Special Adviser to the First Minister of Scotland and an Economic Adviser at both the
Scottish Office and H.M Treasury.
Footnotes:
1: Where European 12 consists of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,
Switzerland and the UK.
2: Where the 4 western offshoots consists of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA
3: In accordance with UK National Statistics methodology the North Sea is a separate region of the UK and so the figures here exclude any such contribution.
References:
ECONOMIC PROFILE
Coyle. D., Alexander. W., and Ashcroft. B., (eds) (2005), New Wealth for Old Nations,
Princeton University Press.
Crafts. N., (2002) - British Relative Economic Performance, 1870-1999, The Institute of
Economic Affairs.
Devine. T.M., et al (eds) (2005) - The Transformation of Scotland, The Economy Since 1700,
Edinburgh University Press.
Futureskills Scotland, (2005) - International Comparisons of Labour Market and Skills
Performance, Scottish Enterprise.
General Register Office for Scotland (2008), Scotlands Population 2007.
Hood. N., Peat. J., Peters.E., Young. S., (2002) - Scotland in a Global Economy, Palgrave.
Lee. C.H., (1995) - Scotland and the UK, the economy and the union in the twentieth
century, Manchester University Press.
Maddison. A., (2007) - Contours of the World Economy: 1-2030 AD, Oxford
University Press.
McLaren. J., (2003) - Scotlands real economic performance, Quarterly Economic
Commentary, Fraser of Allander Institute, University of Strathclyde.
OECD, (2007) - Science Competencies for Tomorrows World: results from PISA 2006.
(See also related - Scottish Government (2007) - PISA 2006: Highlights from
Scotlands results)
Scottish Government (2007) - The Government Economic Strategy.
Ruskin. J., Unto This Last (1860), George Allen & Sons.
Scottish Government Statistics website.
Smith. A., The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Edition 6, (1790)
Smith. A., An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
RBS, Gogarburn, Edinburgh
Hawkeye Aerial Photography /
Courtesy of Michael Laird Architects
LINC Scotland is the national association and representative body for the business
angel community in Scotland, and was a founder member of the European Business
Angels Network (EBAN).
Since our establishment in 1993 our members have made investments in hundreds of
companies.
In doing so they have provided tens of millions of their own risk capital, on average
levering three times more from other sources.
Just as importantly they have reinvested their own skills and experience in the next
generation of SMEs.
The companies supported have created thousands of high quality jobs in the Scottish
economy.
Business angels - more than just money
Millions of s, Thousands of jobs, Hundreds of deals
1 Network
www.lincscot.co.uk
SCOTLANDS GLOBAL
COMPETITIVE POSITION
By Iain McMillan CBE
One of the most inspiring aspects of the privileged position that I hold leading the countrys principle business
representative group is that, as I travel around Scotland and other parts of the world, I meet and visit many dynamic
leaders and businesses.
H
ere in Scotland, we are genuinely blessed with many innovative and successful companies, operating both domestically and abroad. One just has to
think of Memex Technology, Devro, Tullis Russel and Hydrasun, let alone household names such as First Group, Weir, Cairn Energy and Standard Life.
Scottish expertise and ingenuity is renowned the world over and greatly sought after, particularly in fields such as engineering, financial services and
energy.
This also explains the range of acquisitions of Scots-based businesses over recent years by international companies. One just has to think of Jacobs
purchase of Babtie Group, Heinekens acquisition of Scottish & Newcastle, and more recently EDFs impending takeover of East Kilbride-based British Energy.
The acquisition trail is far from being one way, with many Scots firms leading the charge abroad, with Edrington Group and Clyde Blowers notable in this
regard in the past year.
This renown for expertise and innovation, coupled with excellence in education - and a strong international outlook - continues to stand Scotland in good
stead.
Yet Scotland cannot rest on its laurels. Regardless of how successful businesses are and whether they operate domestically or internationally, all are
subject to influences over which they have little or no control, such as the quality of the labour force, the level and complexity of business taxes, the clamour
for new standards in employment and environmental practice, the state of our transport infrastructure and the availability of land for expansion.
The new politics of minority government in the Scottish Parliament, the many powers of importance to business which reside at Westminster, and the
increasing influence of the European institutions, have led to a complex and increasingly demanding policy environment for Scottish companies.
Therefore, it is crucial that business speaks to government authoritatively, coherently and - where necessary - forcefully. Thanks to the diversity of - and
contribution made by - our members, CBI Scotland is uniquely placed to bring to policy development, and to decision-makers and influencers, an informed,
credible and convincing voice of business.
Ahead of the most recent Scottish Parliament elections we were the first broadly-based representative organisation to publish a business manifesto, The
Scottish Economy - The Priority of Priorities. Many of our members recommendations and aspirations found favour across all the principal political parties.
Encouragingly, the new Scottish National Party (SNP) administration appears to have listened and made several welcome early policy announcements and
decisions, not the least of which was placing economic growth at the top of its agenda and making commitments on key road and rail projects, reductions in
business rates, and an ambition to match UK-levels of growth. Reforms to strengthen business support, regulation and skills have subsequently followed.
SCOTLAND ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE
The new Scottish National Party (SNP) administration appears to have listened and made several
welcome early policy announcements and decisions, not the least of which was placing economic
growth at the top of its agenda and making commitments on key road and rail projects, reductions
in business rates, and an ambition to match UK-levels of growth.
Bute House. Courtesy of the Scottish Government
Prioritising Scotlands economic needs in our approach to lifelong education and skills development is essential if we are to continue to succeed in an
increasingly competitive global economy. The importance of a fit-for-purpose education system of the highest international quality and an employer-led
approach to skills cannot be overstated. Otherwise, there will be fewer and poorer opportunities for future generations of Scots, leading to a decline in our
global competitive position.
Scottish education - built upon an excellent educational infrastructure developed over many centuries - can claim many achievements. However, what is
good enough now will certainly not be sufficient in 10 years time, due to the pace of global change and the priority our competitors place on skills
development.
Changes in education take time to feed through into business performance and we believe the new skills strategy heralds the right approach to
maintaining a highly educated and skilled workforce in the future.
Key to this is reversing the decline in popularity of science and mathematics in our schools. If this is reflected in a subsequent fall in graduate numbers
in these subjects, that will leave Scotland short of the engineering, science and technology skills our economy will increasingly need. Such a shortfall could
affect future success in some of Scotlands most important industries, including electronics, energy, life sciences, aerospace and defence. The proposed new
science baccalaureate is a good start, and CBI Scotland will continue to be a leading force in its development as well as pressing for the complementary
measures our members want to see implemented.
The business and economic reforms introduced so far by the new government in the Scottish Parliament are most welcome and are an encouraging
start.
Further reforms are still required and the administration has yet to see the light on weighty issues such as the need for new nuclear generation capacity,
privatisation of water and sewerage services, far stronger private sector delivery of public services, and the necessary scrapping of their plans to change the
system of local taxation. Nonetheless, progress is being made.
There is no shortage of challenges for both the business and political communities in Scotland. If the recent events in the world financial markets and
the banking sector have reminded us of anything, it is that by working together both business and governments of all levels can grow and secure the strong
Scottish economy that we all want to see, and which underpins and funds the wider social and environmental aspirations of Scotlands people.
However, the new politics of minority rule at Holyrood means that business must remain vigilant.
As in other developed nations, continued political and public support for liberal, outward looking economic policies that favour growth cannot be taken
for granted. Although great strides have been made, Scottish business must continue to lobby vigorously, and press the political leaderships in both Holyrood
and Westminster to champion innovation and entrepreneurial activity, and to make Scotland a favoured location for businesses of all kinds.
CBI Scotland will continue to be at the forefront of this debate, representing its members and arguing robustly for the maintenance of a business-
friendly legislative climate for Scottish-based companies, investors and talent, and for an economy that generates the jobs and the wealth we all rely on.
Iain M. McMillan CBE is the Director of CBI Scotland. After 23 years in the banking industry, during which he held a
number of management and senior management posts, he joined CBI Scotland as Assistant Director and Secretary of the
Scottish Manufacturing Group in 1993.
In November 1995, Iain was appointed Director of CBI Scotland with full executive responsibility for the CBIs Scottish
operations. He leads Scottish business representation and communicates Scottish business interests in Scotland, the UK,
the European Union and beyond. He is the author and co-author of a number of publications on public policy as it relates
to the business, economic and legislative environment.
Iain was a Board member of The Scottish Qualifications Authority for 10 years until December 2006. During his time on the Board, Iain
chaired the Audit, Remuneration and International & Commercial Committees. He was also Vice Chairman from 2004 to 2006. He was also a
Board member of the Scottish Ambulance Service for eight years until March 2008 and chaired the Audit Committee for over seven years.
Iain is married to Giuseppina and they have three sons. He was educated at Bearsden Academy and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute
of Bankers, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland, Fellow of the Association of International Accountants, Companion of
the Chartered Management Institute, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Fellow of the Scottish Qualifications Authority. In 2003, Iain was
awarded the CBE for services to lifelong learning in Scotland.
Website: www.cbi.org.uk/scotland
SCOTLAND ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE
Although great strides have been made, Scottish business must continue to lobby vigorously, and press the political leaderships in both Holyrood and Westminster to champion innovation and entrepreneurial
activity, and to make Scotland a favoured location for businesses of all kinds. Scottish Parliament Building:. Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of RMJM
When it comes to
business travel and
events management,
it pays to team up with
a full-service provider.
Our travel and event management
specialists excel at forward
planning, by taking care of all
your travel and meetings needs,
from f|ghts and hote|s
to transfers and car hire.
Plus, our state-of-the-art
technology and automated
quality control systems give you
peace of mind, offering online
book|ng, fnanc|a| report|ng
and traveller tracking 24 hours
a day. This ensures itineraries
are always compliant with your
travel policy and corporate
manslaughter legislation.
We prepare for the unexpected, so you dont have to.
Our dedicated meetings division
has a proven track record of
successfully managing dynamic,
creative events at stunning
venues throughout Scotland and
around the globe.
So whether youre bringing the
world to Scotland or taking
Scotland to the world, with
Colpitts taking care of every
detail, you know you are in good
hands no matter the climate.
Colpitts
50 Melville Street
Edinburgh
EH3 7HF
+44 (0)131 226 0800
colpitts.co.uk
colpittsmeetings.co.uk
SCOTLAND: A PLAYER
ON THE WORLD STAGE
Dr Lesley Sawers
For more than fifty years the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) has been promoting Scotland and
Scottish goods and services around the world. The first Western organisation to visit communist China back in 1971, the
architect of the original Foreign Direct Investment Strategy, and the bridge that brought a host of American multinationals to
Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, we have a long and successful track record of supporting Scotlands businesses to
internationalise and access overseas markets.
T
his role has never been more important than it is today, with the collapse in value of our major banks, the loss of business confidence and the
likelihood of a recession. Indeed, the performance of Scottish exporters has been one of the few bright spots on this years economic performance.
SCDIs export survey has shown that Scottish manufactured exports grew by 1.2% to 15bn in 2006 - building on a 0.5% increase in 2005 - but is still
significantly down on the figure of almost 20bn recorded in 2000.
Whilst the value of electronics sales continues to decline, there has been an impressive 8% increase in the rest of the manufacturing sector which has
countered the overall decline and resulted in two successive years of growth after five consecutive years of decline in annual output from 1999 to 2004.
However, with increasing globalisation and the move to a service sector dominated economy, promoting international trade is now much more complex
than it was back in the 1950s. No longer is it simply a case of manufacturing goods to ship and sell abroad, or of attracting large overseas investors to
locate in Scotland. Many of Scotlands best known international companies now have global supply chains, international franchises and service centres
around the world. Companies like RBS and Clyde Blowers have acquired holdings all over the globe and firms such as Wood Group and Indigo Vision have
grown an international sales and service network from their headquarters in Scotland.
This means that we now need a new approach to promoting Scotland overseas. Just as SCDIs early work to promote Scotland overseas was a ground-
breaking and innovative development, so we are poised to begin a new chapter in our work to help Scotlands businesses internationalise and develop a
global presence, with the creation of Business Club Scotland. The Business Club model has proved to be a successful platform in achieving these objectives
in other parts of the world including Australia, the Caribbean, Utah and Manchester. Austrades Business Club Australia (BCA) uses sporting events as a
platform to showcase Australian skills and expertise and generate significant business opportunities, and was the Australian Governments official
international business programme for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Business Club Australia delivered more than 50 events and hosted over 4,000 Australian and Chinese business people during the Olympic Games, giving
companies a chance to make contacts, showcase their capabilities, find out more about future demand, and to finalise deals with Chinese customers. To date
the Club has 8,500 members and the programme has facilitated over A$1.7bn in business deals. We aim to recreate this success in Scotland.
It is clear that the Scottish Government has begun to realign its own overseas promotion and begun to capitalise on opportunities such as the 2008
Ryder Cup and by utilising this experience we can ensure that the development of the Club concept within Scotland adds an extra dimension to our work to
TRADE & INVESTMENT
The Royal Bank of Scotland Headquarters, Gogarburn.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of Michael Laird Architects.
promote Scottish goods and services to overseas markets. It is widely agreed that there is significant potential to further maximise the economic return of
major events in Scotland and abroad, and to build a coordinated approach to these business opportunities. Indeed initial research and workshops
undertaken across Scotland in support of the 2014 Commonwealth Games Bid have identified widespread cross-business support for the development of a
Business Club concept in Scotland.
The reason is that Scotland currently invests approximately 10m every year in supporting major international, sporting and cultural events, and quite
simply we are not doing enough to capitalise on the business opportunities that these events present.
The Clubs aims and objectives would be to capitalise on major events in Scotland as international and business development and networking
opportunities whilst - perhaps more importantly - using major overseas events as an opportunity for senior politicians and business figures to raise the
profile of Scotland as a global nation and a great place to do business. This would also be the beginnings of demonstrating a measurable economic return
on the investment from the hosting of events in Scotland. A significant level of this programme work is already underway, supported by the Scottish
Government, to ensure that major events such as the 2014 Commonwealth Games and 2014 Ryder Cup generate a significant social, cultural, health and
sporting legacy as well as international profile and tourism benefits to Scotland. Business Club Scotland will be a first point of contact and engagement for
Scottish business in terms of networking, procurement and business development opportunities.
The opportunity for international promotion of Scotland is increased significantly in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games. A fully coordinated
programme of opportunities, for example in outward and inward business delegations, could be developed as part of this process. For example, the
emergence of the Indian market as a key business partner for Scotland and as the host of the Commonwealth Games 2010 could provide a focus for
business engagement with Commonwealth nations, just as the Australian Business Club has done in Beijing in the run up to the 2008 Olympics.
The successful bid to attract the Commonwealth Games to Glasgow in 2014 provides a major opportunity to enhance the international prospects of
Scottish businesses, as part of the sustainable economic legacy of staging this major international event. Allied to Scotlands hosting of the Ryder Cup in the
same year, this highlights the scale of opportunity for Scotland to capitalise on world-class sporting and cultural events for economic benefit.
The figures show that Scotlands businesses can succeed on the world stage, but we need to give them every opportunity to do so. We need to support
them with securing access to new markets, to make new contacts and showcase their services, and Business Club Scotland is designed to achieve just that.
Dr Lesley Sawers became Chief Executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) in March 2008.
Lesley previously held a number of senior posts in the public and private sectors. She joined SCDI from Glasgow Chamber
of Commerce where she was Chief Executive. Previously she was Strategic Communications Advisor to the Board of
VisitScotland, Scotlands national tourism agency joining them from Royal Mail Group where she was Director of Scottish
Affairs and Chairman of the Royal Mail Group Advisory Board (Scotland). She also spent nine years at ScottishPower in a
number of senior management roles and has worked in strategic management consultancy in both London and Edinburgh.
She has a degree in economics from Glasgow University, a PhD from Stirling University and a Diploma in Marketing.
She currently holds a number of external directorships including non executive appointments on the Board of VisitScotland and
EventScotland. She is a Trustee of Action for Children, the UKs largest childrens charity and also chairs the Business Panel established to
drive forward business engagement in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. She was also awarded the Glasgow Lord Provost Award
for Enterprise and won Evening Times Business Woman of the year in 2007.
Website: www.scdi.org.uk.
TRADE & INVESTMENT
Stewart Cink - 2004 Ryder Cup. James M Phelps, Jr
REDOUBTABLE
SCOTTISH ADVICE
By Anton Colella
What do Robert Burns and Scottish Chartered Accountants have in common? Burns, of course, dabbled in the world of
finance during his time as an exciseman, but the enduring similarities are less prosaic.
B
urns was a trailblazer in so many ways. His promotion of his native tongue through his written work did more for the acceptance of the Scots dialect
than anything since. He also enjoyed enormous international recognition at a time without the communication and transport links that today make
the world a smaller place and spread familiarity amongst nations and peoples. He spread the message of brotherhood and humanity well beyond his
own borders.
In a much quieter way, Scottish Chartered Accountants have also made and continue to make a vital contribution internationally.
It is said that on January 25th, Burns Suppers are held in around 200 countries around the world. Chartered Accountants have not reached that level of
global penetration yet. Nonetheless, in 100 countries Chartered Accountants can be found working in business or professional practice. Why has the Scottish
Chartered Accountant been so successful?
I think it is because, like Burns, they have a very clear set of values that are recognised beyond Scotlands boundaries, valuing integrity, ethics,
judgement and bravery. Chartered Accountants, as with many other Scots working in the field of finance, are regarded as trusted and canny advisers. They
have also been doing the job longer than anyone else and The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) is the worlds first professional body of
accountants, tracing its roots back to 1854.
Being the first brings with it a sense of responsibility, a requirement to show leadership on behalf of the accounting profession. ICAS continues to rise to
this challenge and makes a significant contribution to promoting stability in financial markets around the world.
For several decades now, ICAS has been one of the main accounting bodies to lead the development of the profession worldwide. The core aim is - and
always has been - the strengthening of the local profession in countries where we have strong working relationships and where we believe there is
opportunity for improvement. Our development work is delivered by CA International Services (CAIS), who have worked in the following countries in recent
years: Albania, Armenia, Belarus, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lao PDR, Malawi, Moldova, Poland,
Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and Vietnam.
The types of projects undertaken vary, but ICAS expertise is predominantly sought after in creating education and examination structures for
professional accountants, technical training for the accounting and auditing professions, and Institute Building - helping to develop strong national
Institutes in developing nations - which is a crucial focus for the profession in order to produce high quality training and regulate the conduct and standards
of members of the profession.
BUSINESS SERVICES
Dunnottar Castle, Stonehaven. Rafa Irusta
The work is carried out for donor agencies such as the World Bank, the European Union, USAid and the UKs DFID. Project work has also been funded by
partner countries themselves and by ICAS on a pro-bono basis as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mission.
ICAS believes that all countries have the potential to achieve the standards of true and fair corporate financial reporting demanded by the international
business community. Meeting these standards is seen as a vital step in order for nations to attract and retain external investment. After all, a country can
have superb natural resources and a strong workforce but if robust financial structures are not in place to protect foreign investment, economic potential
will remain untapped. Strong accounting regimes are one of the main building blocks in creating economic stability and releasing that potential.
In order for this potential to be achieved it is vital that countries develop their own strong professional accountancy bodies with proud and active
memberships. Countries may pass laws and adopt international standards in order to modernise their corporate financial infrastructure but without well
trained, ethical professional accountants, implementation of the now technically demanding standards is nigh on impossible. Creating a real profession is the
most difficult element of any long term programme designed to enable a country to produce high quality financial reports.
Many of our partner countries have risen to the challenge and established professional bodies of which they can be proud. The development of a high
quality profession has enabled high quality financial reporting which in turn has encouraged investment, stability and economic growth in countries where
we have worked, such as Kazakhstan.
This year ICAS, together with the Eurasian Council of Certified Accountants and Auditors and the International Accounting Standards Board, hosted a
major workshop in Almaty, the capital city of Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan September 1st is known as the Day of Knowledge (Burns himself would have
approved of the timing), which is a day when ordinary Kazakhs dedicate themselves to learning. The focus of the event was to examine how to teach and
apply International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the Russian speaking nations. More than 400 senior accountants from across the region attended
to learn more about IFRS, which are the most widely used and important accounting standards worldwide. ICAS is proud of the role it has played in helping
to develop the capacity of the profession in the central Asia region. The progress made by the Kazakh professionals since ICAS first worked in the region in
1992 has been formidable.
Significantly, ICAS has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CICPA) - the main
body of accountants in the Peoples Republic of China. We have a strong relationship with the CICPA and many Chinese delegations have visited the ICAS
Head Office - CA House in Edinburgh - to exchange expertise on training professional accountants and teaching business ethics. In fact, the leader of a
delegation from the CICPA recently remarked that being in CA House was a thrill as it was the holy place of accountancy: high praise indeed. I expect that
our links with China will develop in the coming years, which will benefit both China and Scotland, as both bodies learn more about business and the
profession in each others countries.
So, just as Burns was a great internationalist, so too is the Scottish Chartered Accountant and ICAS. The well-earned reputation of the Scot as a trusted
and wise adviser has meant Scottish Chartered Accountants are in great demand as respected business professionals around the world. It has also meant
that ICAS itself has an unrivalled track record of helping developing nations create their own sustainable professional infrastructure to allow accounting and
auditing to flourish.
Anton Colella is Chief Executive of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) (since 2006).
He was appointed in 2006 having previously been the Chief Executive of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA)
from December 2003 to October 2006, following a period as Acting Chief Executive and Director of Qualifications.
Antons career began as a teacher of Religious Education in Glasgow. Before joining the SQA he was Deputy Head
Teacher in St Margaret Marys Secondary School in Castlemilk, Glasgow.
Anton is a Council member of the Confederation of British Industry Scotland, a member of the Scottish Committee of
the Quality Assurance Agency and a Trustee of Columba 1400, a social enterprise devoted to releasing the potential of
young people who have weathered tough times. He has represented SQA as a development partner of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications
Framework, and was a member of the Ministry of Defence Skills Advisory Board.
Anton lives in Glasgow with his wife, two daughters and two sons. His main interests are his family, music, rugby and eating out.
Website: www.icas.org.uk
BUSINESS SERVICES
EU commission building
in Brussels. jorisvo
INNOVATION WITHIN
SCOTLANDS FINANCIAL
SERVICES INDUSTRY
By John Campbell OBE
By any measure we care to use, financial services has become a dominant part of the Scottish economy. Our companies
operate around the globe, and Scotland consistently features highly on international industry league tables.
F
or example, in the City of Londons global financial centres index, Edinburgh is currently ninth in the world for asset management and eighteenth as
an overall financial services centre. For a relatively small city in a country of five million people, this is impressive.
In employment terms, in Edinburgh alone around 36,000 people are employed in the industry, with around 90,000 Scots working in our institutions
overall and an estimated 100,000 employed in related support businesses.
The industry has been hit by a serious downturn, which I will return to, but first I will look back at how we came to have such a strong reputation
for financial services. This publication is the right place to do it, because the roots of our industry date back even before the time of Burns.
DIVERSITY
When we think about financial services it is often the banking sector that comes immediately to mind, but one of the strengths of the industry in
Scotland is our diversity. Other key sectors include pensions and insurance, asset management, corporate finance, asset servicing and professional
advisory services.
Also, while we operate within an increasingly fast-moving and global environment - where competition is fierce and new financial centres emerge
regularly - I believe that our history, and the related experience we have in developing skills and networks, is an important and key strength.
This longstanding expertise across a number of sectors is incredibly important, particularly at a time like the present. It makes us better placed to
adapt to changing fortunes in different areas of business, and gives us more resilience.
A 300 YEAR HISTORY
Scotland has long been renowned as a centre of excellence in investment management, with its origins dating back to the 19th century. The sector
encompasses a broad mix of large institutional, and smaller employee-owned businesses that deliver a wide variety of innovative investment services to
institutional and personal clients around the world. I believe there is a characteristically Scottish approach to investment - longterm, canny, prudent - an
ethos which survives today.
It was a Scotsman, William Paterson, who founded the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of Scotland (founded by an Englishman) followed a year
later, and the Royal Bank of Scotland came into being in 1727.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
A view over the financial district of Edinburgh, Scotland. Bill McKelvie
Throughout the Age of the Enlightenment, Scotland took readily to the business of managing money, linking investment with widening economic
opportunity. Success and innovation followed.
A number of worldwide firsts were seen in Scotland, including the Royal Bank of Scotlands inventions of the first overdraft and the first double-sided
bank notes. An early Edinburgh bank, the British Linen Bank, developed the first retail bank branch network in 1750 and the first mutual savings bank was
invented by Scotsman Reverend Henry Duncan in 1810. Duncans innovation effectively created the Trustee Savings Bank movement, which flourished
around the world.
Innovation continued through the centuries and as international mergers and takeovers became more common, the last decade saw more of our
indigenous banks expand their operations globally and become worldwide names. Some, such as Royal Bank of Scotland, leading on takeover, and others
such as Clydesdale Bank joining larger groups (in its case the National Bank of Australia).
In addition to the banks, expertise was being created in general insurance, life assurance and the pensions sector. In the early 1700s the increase in
international trade led to a need for marine insurance for many Scottish export and import companies.
Today the significance of Scotland as a centre for insurance is clear. Scotland is the UK headquarters location of four major insurance companies, namely
Standard Life, Scottish Widows, Aegon UK and Bright Grey. It is also the operating base for several other major insurance institutions, such as Norwich Union
and Prudential.
The sector has a diverse business profile including general insurance, life assurance, pensions and long term savings products, annuities, health
insurance, investment products and mutual funds.
Scotlands financial services industry also includes corporate finance broking, a specialist niche. Scottish-based brokers and dealers access all
international capital markets, maintaining a commitment to smaller, growing companies and private investors, as well as to major corporate and institutional
clients.
GROWTH IN THE INDUSTRY
In recent years Scotland experienced a significant
growth in its overall financial services industry - a 60%
growth over the five years from 1997. This was partly
due to Scottish companies expanding overseas and
partly due to overseas companies setting up operations
in Scotland.
Over recent years we have seen Royal Bank of
Scotland expand to become the fifth largest bank in the
world. The Bank of Scotland merged with Halifax to
become HBOS, which then moved in to new markets in
Australia and Canada.
We also saw companies such as State Street,
Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan set up operations in
Scotland, and more recently Barclays, HSBC and the
French bank BNP Paribas increasing their presence in
Scotland.
In the insurance sector, Scottish Widows became
part of Lloyds TSB and Scottish Equitable became part
of Aegon UK. Both retain a strong presence in
Edinburgh, thriving in the city, and recognising the
benefits of using a Scottish workforce.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Scottish Widows (building designed by BDP).
In addition to this, the significant number of mergers and acquisitions within the global fund management industry also had an impact. It reduced the
overall number of Scotlands investment management institutions but provided strong foundations for the future. The quality of investment management
expertise available in Scotland led to a robust growth of this sector including boutique firms and business start-ups in the sector. Companies such as
Aberdeen Asset Management, Martin Currie, Baillie Gifford and Artemis have all expanded their business significantly.
All of this led to Edinburgh becoming a major international centre, while Glasgow too built a substantial level of expertise in the industry.
In recognition of the importance of the industry, this was the period when the Financial Services Advisory Board (FISAB) was constituted. FISAB is a
partnership of government, industry, union and university representatives who oversee a combined financial services strategy for Scotland.
THE FUTURE
The current economic downturn is, as I write, not yet at a point of stability. We have recently seen an unprecedented impact around the globe and of course
Scotland is not immune to that. We are a global financial centre and therefore should not be surprised to see that some of the big names in Scotlands
industry taking hard decisions in order to secure their business as best they can for the future.
I would not predict when and how the downturn will end, but I will say this. Change is difficult, it brings uncertainty and concern for companies, for
staff and for customers, yet it is necessary.
The current crisis is deeper that those that have gone before it and part of that is related to the speed at which events happen worldwide. However, we
have adapted in the past and we must focus on getting through this downturn to remain strong for the future. My focus is in promoting the skills and
experience we have developed in Scotland.
As the representative body for Scotlands financial services industry, Scottish Financial Enterprise (SFE) will work with the providers of financial services,
with government and other partners, to do all we can to retain - and ultimately enhance - Scotlands position as a global financial centre.
John Campbell OBE is Chairman of Scottish Financial Enterprise (SFE).
He is also Chairman of the Advisory Board of the University of Edinburgh Management School and is a member of the
Corporation of Londons EU Advisory Group.
John is a Senior Managing Director at State Street Corporation, having joined State Street in 2000 and is responsible
for its European investment operations outsourcing business.
Prior to joining State Street, he was Chief Executive of Latchly Management, an outsourcing provider. He has also held
senior positions with Alliance Bernstein, Cursitor Management and Framlington Plc. Prior to training as a fund manager
with Ivory and Sime PLC, he was a commissioned officer in the British Army.
Website: www.sfe.org.uk.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Issued and approved by Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited, 10 Queens Terrace, Aberdeen AB10 1YG. Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.
Telephone calls may be recorded.
Many nancial institutions have to
balance different interests.
EQUITIES | FIXED INCOME | PROPERTY
But at Aberdeen, we just do asset management.
At Aberdeen, asset management is all we do. Whereas many other asset
managers are part of investment banking or life assurance groups, we have
the freedom to focus on asset management alone.
We believe this allows our investment teams to work at what they do best,
across the world, rather than being distracted by a myriad of conicting
business interests.
In fact, its our single-minded approach to asset management, and our
dedicated investment processes, that have helped us to become one of the
UKs leading independent asset managers.
Do remember the value of investments can go down as well as up and
investors may not get back what they originally invested. Past performance
is not a guide to future performance.
aberdeen-asset.com
Asset management. Nothing else. Thats us.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS
FOR GLASGOWS IFSD
Seven years ago, Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise
launched a plan to create the IFSD, one of the largest partnerships
between the public and private sectors in the UK. So far, this
partnership has harnessed over one billion pounds of investment,
more than 90% from the private sector which, in turn, has brought
almost 16,000 jobs into the area.
Despite recent global economic difficulties, the IFSD in Glasgow
has continued to make progress on a number of important fronts.
BLUE CHIP INWARD INVESTORS
In October 2008, global banking giant HSBC confirmed it is moving in
to the IFSD, having agreed a pre-let at a new record rental level for
Glasgow at 141 Bothwell Street, destined to become one of the citys
most prestigious business addresses.
The 176,000 sq ft building is currently scheduled to complete by
the end of 2008 and, by moving there, HSBC joins a whos who list of
major financial institutions that have already discovered the benefits
of locating in the IFSD.
The impressive list includes JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays
Wealth, BNP Paribas, First Data International, Direct Line, esure,
Churchill Insurance, Aon, ACE Insurance, Clydesdale Bank, AXA and
many, many more.
GLASGOW A GREAT PLACE TO DO BUSINESS
These blue chip names investing in Glasgow underline the citys status
as a world class business location; a claim backed recently by real
The International Financial Services District (IFSD) in Glasgow is a ten year project to create a highly attractive inward
investment location for leading international financial services companies.
This article discusses the progress made to date and heralds the partnership between public and private sectors that is
transforming this corner of Glasgow city centre.
estate adviser, Cushman & Wakefield, which concluded Glasgow is one
of the best cities in the UK to locate a business,
The companys UK Cities Monitor surveys senior company
executives on their perceptions of doing business in the countrys
largest cities.
Glasgow performed well in a wide range of business categories
including staff costs, ease of recruiting staff, availability of financial
incentives, internal transport, easy access to markets, availability and
cost of car parking facilities, international transport links and retailing
and leisure amenities.
Andy Cunningham, Head of Office Agency in Glasgow, said: For
Glasgow to retain its position once again as the sixth best city in the
UK to locate a business is a major boost, particularly when there was
such strong competition. The IFSD has played an important role in
promoting the citys rich seam of graduates, staff availability and
financial incentives.
PROPERTY PIPELINE
The completion to date of well over one million sq ft of grade A office
space in the IFSD underlines the transformation and regeneration of
what was previously a run down city centre area.
And, the pace of Grade A office development in the district
continues to impress.
There is currently almost 800,000 sq ft of speculative Grade A
development started and on site in the IFSD, all of it anticipated to
complete by the third quarter of 2009.
(Main Image) Glasgows strong heritage in the financial sector
blends with the latest high tech grade A office buildings such as
Aurora, home to BNP Paribas and Barclays Wealth.
(Top Right) Occupied by ACE Insurance, 200 Broomielaw is one of the landmark buildings within Glasgows International Financial Services District.
(Bottom Right) George IV Bridge, one of the many bridges spanning the River Clyde, offers great views and easy access to Glasgows International Financial Services District.
Alongside the development of new offices, there is also the
creation of a 24/7 community which, with growing levels of residential
and leisure development, makes the IFSD much more than a business
district.
TOP TEN DESTINATION
Glasgows success as a business location is matched by its growing
reputation as a first class destination for visitors. The city was recently
named as one of the top 10 cities in the world by Lonely Planet, the
leading travel guide.
Tom Hall who is Lonely Planets travel editor said, The time has
come for Lonely Planet to let one of its worst kept secrets out:
Glasgows got everything. When we put together Best in Travel 2009,
we were looking for the best places to go and things to do in the
world right now. Were delighted to highlight such a fun, stylish city.
JUMEIRAH CHECKS IN TO GLASGOW
Glasgows credentials as a top class destination will be enhanced even
further following the recent announcement of plans by Jumeirah, the
Dubai-based luxury hotel group to operate a new five-star super
deluxe hotel in the IFSD.
Scheduled to open in 2011, the striking 25-storey development
will be the companys fifth hotel to be signed in Europe and one of the
UKs most luxurious.
Councillor Steven Purcell, Leader, Glasgow City Council said: This
announcement is a resounding vote of confidence in Glasgow and its
future ambitions, made all the sweeter by the fact that Jumeirah does
not operate anywhere else in the UK, outside London.
GLASGOWS A WINNER!
Over the past five years, the success of Glasgows IFSD has been
recognised with a series of national and international awards.
In September 2008, the IFSD was recognised by the Association
for Public Service Excellence (APSE). One of more than 350 entries
submitted from across the UK, the IFSD won the Best Public/Private
Partnership Award, reflecting the achievements of Glasgow City
Council and Scottish Enterprise in working with the private sector to
create and develop the district.
Jim Watson, Director, Company Growth West, Scottish Enterprise,
said, Glasgow will not remain immune to the worldwide difficulties
in the financial services sector but equally, it is our strong belief that
the city is comparatively well placed to withstand the rigours of the
current economic circumstances.
In the current climate, some major financial institutions are
taking the opportunity to review their operations in the UK and the
outcome is often consolidation of operating centres or outsourcing.
With its skilled labour pool and competitively priced operating costs,
Glasgow is well placed to compete effectively with other locations and
benefit from this trend.
Furthermore, by continuing to invest in the IFSD, the city is well
placed to benefit from any upturn in the financial sectors fortunes. The
IFSD is a long term project with a ten year life cycle and the
commitment is there to see it through.
For more information, visit www.ifsdglasgow.co.uk
> Think Scotland, Think Brodies
Scotland Law Firm of the Year
Whos Who Legal Awards 2008
The firm offers a full-service banking & financial services practice, with particular
areas of strength including property finance, retail banking,
regulatory work and asset finance.
Chambers & Partners 2008/9
Brodies LLP has achieved ambitious growth...the firms
expertise reaches across all areas.
The Legal 500 2007/8
Brodies is a top-quality, client-focused, leading UK commercial law practice delivering the highest level of legal services
to a strong UK public and private sector client base, with an international perspective and delivery capability. With 62
partners and over 470 staff across its offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the firm is a major presence in the Scottish
market and celebrates rated expertise in its core business areas of real estate, corporate, banking and financial services,
IT, employment, litigation and private client law. A market-leader in Scotland, the firm works closely with and through
its international networks of leading independent legal firms to ensure premium service wherever our clients wish to operate.
Concentrating resources on the sectors important to the well-being of the Scottish economy, Brodies places expertise
exactly where it is needed and focused around client requirements - cementing its position as the largest law firm
headquartered and solely based in Scotland and the outstanding firm in its region in terms of leading lawyer numbers,
focus on core markets, sustained profitable growth and quality client service.
The firm has one of the largest full-service banking and financial services practices in Scotland, with over 50 years
in-house experience with large financial institutions and cutting edge deal-making across the full spectrum of banking
work, including acquisition, project and property finance and niche areas of securitisation / collateralisation.
15 Atholl Crescent, Edinburgh EH3 8HA 2 Blythswood Square, Glasgow G2 4AD
T 0131 228 3777 F 0131 228 3878 T 0141 248 4672 F 0141 221 9270 www.brodies.co.uk
THE ROLE OF THE
BANKS
By Sir Tom McKillop
Despite the pre-eminent role of the service sector, and financial services in particular, in our modern economy, the
contribution made by banks is not well understood. Most people readily appreciate wealth creation in relation to physical
goods when value is added by digging materials from the ground or manufacturing them in some way. However, they often
fail to realise that the taking and bearing of risk lies at the heart of wealth creation and that the channelling of capital
resources from savers to borrowers is at the centre of risk taking. Banks are therefore, in effect, the oil in the engine and the
fuel in the tank of the economy.
W
hile the 2007/8 global credit markets crisis highlighted that some parts of financial markets had become complex in the extreme, at its heart the
core business of banking has not really changed since its birth. Banks intermediate between the people and institutions with savings to connect
them with those in need of borrowing. In doing so they channel investment capital from where it is available to where it is needed. They also allow
people and businesses to manage their consumption through time and to fund the investments they desire to make. It is a simple task, but if not done
efficiently and effectively, the economy could not advance and with it the living standards of us all.
The importance of banks to economic growth is nowhere better exemplified than in Scotland. A century before the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland was -
relatively speaking - underperforming in economic terms. After the Union of the Crowns it had become poorer than ever and political unrest, as well as a
succession of poor harvests, deepened its hardships. Dragged unwillingly into Englands wars, its trade languished under the weight of the Navigation Acts.
Yet by 1850, some 50 years after Burns death, Scotland was leading the world in the first industrial revolution and its political, economic and social outlook
was uncompromisingly modern.
The creation and development of a stable, innovative and efficient banking system contributed in no small measure to this transformation. Indeed, the
Scotch system of banking became the envy of other nations and was much imitated. Scottish bankers were admired and sought after around the world.
In the 17th century Londons goldsmiths had developed as a proto-banking system. In Edinburgh the merchant community was tiny, gold and silver
stocks were scant and the government borrowing and international financial dealings which London enjoyed were quite absent. Consequently the business
of the Edinburgh goldsmiths remained relatively primitive.
So it was that when Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695 by Act of Parliament - just a year after the establishment of Bank of England in London
(founded, of course, by another notable Scotsman William Paterson) - it marked the birth of Scottish banking. The Bank of Scotland was granted a monopoly,
banning all other companies from acting as banks for a period of 21 years from its foundation - a far cry from the super competitive market we have today.
This monopoly lapsed in 1716, and was not renewed. Perhaps Bank of Scotland simply did not believe that competition was possible.
If so it was mistaken, for in 1727 The Royal Bank of Scotland was founded by royal charter. It had its origins in the Equivalent Company, which had been
established to administer the payment of compensation due to Scots under the terms of the Act of Union of 1707 and following the disaster of the losses of
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Reception of the The Royal Bank of Scotland Headquarters at Gogarburn.
the Darien Adventure (William Paterson again). A third chartered bank - British Linen Bank - was established in 1746. By 1815 there were 72 other banks in
Scotland, most of them set up on a joint stock basis.
It was this that set Scottish banking upon a path which differed markedly from that followed in England, where the terms of the Bank of Englands
monopoly and the partnership-status of provincial banks severely limited their potential and scope. This in turn forced them to remain local, unstable, and
often short-lived enterprises. Indeed, following a rash of bank failures in England and Wales during the financial crisis of 1825 it was to Scotland that
Parliament turned for a model, passing legislation that introduced joint stock banking south of the border.
The stability of Scotlands banking system was exemplified by the trust placed in its banknotes and their consistent acceptance even in times of crisis.
Scottish banks continue to issue their own notes today despite a regular attempt by some policy makers to diminish this tradition. Happily, in the year before
Burns 250th Anniversary the Chancellor of the Exchequer threw out another such attempt.
The formative years of Scottish banking were played out against a backdrop of great cultural change as Scotland became one of the hotspots of the
Age of Enlightenment. Many of the key figures of this movement were Scots, and Edinburgh was one of its most important centres. Not surprisingly the
three public banks based in the city counted many of the leading figures of the Enlightenment among their customers and friends.
Looking back on The Royal Bank of Scotlands own history, we find a gallery of extraordinary characters, each of whom made a lasting contribution to
building the Bank, and the Nation, we recognise today. The courage and pragmatism of John Campbell, for example, cashier of the Royal Bank in Edinburgh,
safely guided the Bank through the turbulent times of the 45. His own political sympathies remain an intriguing mystery to this day.
The ethical convictions of David Dale, cashier of our Glasgow branch from its opening in 1783, led him to strive to make life better for his employees,
and for his countrymen. Dale was a self-made man who became one of that citys leading businessmen, involved in various textiles mills as well as banking
and a range of charitable enterprises. His cotton mills at New Lanark became known around the world for their progressive working conditions, and in the
1790s he became heavily involved in projects to save Highlanders from having to emigrate as a result of the Clearances. He invested in opening up new
employment opportunities in the North of Scotland and - where jobs were still not available - he pledged to create them at his mills in the Lowlands. This
was a man who understood that business could be used to make more than just money; it could make - and maintain - communities.
Adam Smith, to so many the father of Economics, also had a long-standing connection with The Royal Bank of Scotland. As a child in Kirkcaldy in the
1730s, Smith was a debenture-holder in the Equivalent Company, the organisation that had founded the Royal Bank. Smiths interest in the bank did not end
there. In 1764 Smith gave up his post at Glasgow University to become tutor to Henry, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, later to serve as governor of The Royal Bank
of Scotland. Together, they travelled to continental Europe on a Grand Tour which lasted more than two years, providing Smith with the opportunity to
witness different economic systems and meet many of the thinkers whose ideas were to influence his own theories.
Upon their return Buccleuch offered Smith enough money to stop teaching and write his next book. This turned out to be his classic work An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. In it Smith writes at length about the economic conditions and experiences of his
native Scotland, including the significance of its uniquely stable banking system: I have heard it asserted . . . that the trade of Scotland has more than
quadrupled since the first erection of the two public banks at Edinburgh . . . Whether the trade, either of Scotland in general, or the city of Glasgow in
particular, has really increased in so great a proportion, during so short a period, I do not pretend to know. . . . That the trade and industry of Scotland,
however, have increased very considerably during this period, and that the banks have contributed a good deal to this increase, cannot be doubted.
Certainly, when The Royal Bank of Scotland opened its first branch office in Glasgow in 1783, its business there was very soon larger than that it
enjoyed in Edinburgh. The banks were undoubtedly a key part of the infrastructure which turned Glasgow into the powerhouse of the West of Scotlands
great industrial development. Key indicators suggest that the Scottish banking system was better able to mobilise capital and more responsive to the needs
of industrialisation than that south of the border. It channelled money efficiently from areas of surplus in the economy to areas of need, providing both long
term capital and short-term funding.
Robert Burns himself took an interest in the development of the banking system in Glasgow. In correspondence with Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop in 1793
Burns enquired if she could help a close friend, John Drummond, gain employment in the Royal Banks Glasgow branch.
Indeed some five years earlier Burns may have visited 36 St Andrew Square - the building that served as the headquarters of the Royal Bank for more
than 170 years, and remains the Groups Registered Office today. Correspondence shows that he was lodged round the corner in St James Square after
sustaining injuries in a coach accident in December 1787. At the time 36 St Andrew square was the principal office for the Scottish excise with whom Burns
FINANCIAL SERVICES
The ethical convictions of David Dale, cashier of the Glasgow branch of RBS from its opening in 1783, led him to strive to make life better for his
employees, and for his countrymen. In the 1790s he became heavily involved in projects to save Highlanders from having to emigrate as a result of the
Clearances. He invested in opening up new employment opportunities in the North of Scotland and - where jobs were still not available - he pledged to
create them at his mills in the Lowlands. Red Deer Stags, Scotland. Gail Johnson
was in negotiations for his certificate to practice as an excise officer. We know that Burns received his certificate during his stay at St James Square and -
although there is no evidence to prove absolutely - I will believe that he negotiated successfully at 36 the square until I am told otherwise.
The banking sector was firmly founded on the same principles as the Scottish Enlightenment and it is interesting to see typical Scottish characteristics
brought vividly to life in early banking innovations. In 1810 the thrift for which the Scots have traditionally been both praised and derided became a
hallmark of the industry, when the worlds first savings account was opened in Ruthwell near Dumfries. The pragmatism that permeated the Scottish
Enlightenment was present from the outset of Rev. Henry Duncans scheme, which allowed savers to open an account with just sixpence rather than the 10
required by a bank at the time, and which aimed to help people lift themselves out of poverty with pride and dignity. Within five years of the bank opening
in Ruthwell, savings banks could be found throughout the UK, and a year later in Europe and the United States.
The integrity and honesty we Scots have always held so dear also underpinned the success of Scottish banking. Scotland was one of the first countries
in the world to use paper currency from choice, a system that relies on confidence and trust in the banks ability to redeem the notes for gold. Also, unlike
English banks at the time, Scottish banks would redeem notes issued by their competitors, creating unrivalled stability in the industry.
To me it is clear that these innovations went hand in hand with traditional Scottish principles, as they formed the bedrock for services and products that
might otherwise have failed. One such innovation was the overdraft facility. David Hume, a customer of The Royal Bank of Scotland, described the cash
credit, pioneered by the Royal Bank in 1728 and subsequently much imitated, as one of the most ingenious ideas that has been executed in commerce. He
believed that cash credits and small notes were critical in a specie-hungry economy and had made it possible for Scottish banks to provide means of
payment which truly met the needs of local industrialists and merchants.
Of course not all Scots were so satisfied with the banks financial instruments. Robert Burns himself came to Edinburgh in late 1786 and would have
had first-hand experience of the intellectual tumult in the city. That year he had seriously considered emigration as a means to resolve his financial problems,
famously writing a poem on the back of a Bank of Scotland banknote which began Wae worth thy power, thou cursed leaf! Fell source o a my woe and
grief! . . .
While the Age of Enlightenment itself is said to have ended at the close of the 18th century, it would be mistaken to assume that the influence of
Scotland around the world slowed. Quite the contrary: the strength and inventiveness of the Enlightenment spirit continued propelling the influence of
Scottish banking around the globe.
By the 19th century, Scotlands banking system was famous throughout the world for its strength and stability. It was in Scotland that the very first
professional association of bankers was founded in 1875. Scottish-trained bankers were in demand in English-speaking countries everywhere, not only
because of their background in a much-admired system, but because of their reputation as particularly frugal and industrious workers.
Many boys entered apprenticeships in Scottish banks with the intention of emigrating as soon as their training was complete, knowing that a training in
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Scotland is a nation that punches way above its weight in the financial services sector.
Atlantic Quay, Glasgow, Scotland. Iain McGillivray
Scottish banking would guarantee them good careers overseas. It is estimated that of all the boys who entered Scottish bank apprenticeships in the early
1900s, more than a third ended up working in banks in the Americas, the Asia Pacific region and Africa. Scottish banking ideas were spread across the globe
and Scots bankers reached senior posts in banks in the US, Canada, South Africa and Japan. Today, HSBC, Europes largest bank, proclaims to be founded on
sound Scottish banking principles.
By the 20th century banking in England and Wales, like that in Scotland, had also come to be dominated by a small number of large public banks
boasting nationwide branch networks. During the years after the First World War a series of major amalgamations in the banking industry brought
consolidation in the sector and the first moves to affiliate Scottish and English banks.
In the 1930s the Royal Bank acquired two old-established banks - Williams Deacons Bank of Manchester and Glyn, Mills & Co of London - which in
time led to Britains first truly national high street bank with branded branches across the length and breadth of Britain. In those days great banking mergers
could be engineered without looking further than Edinburghs New Town.
The Royal Banks directors had only to cross St Andrew Square to negotiate the merger with National Commercial Bank of Scotland in 1969 that was to
create an invigorated Royal Bank of Scotland enjoying over 40% of Scotlands banking business. Two years later Bank of Scotland looked to St Andrew
Square from The Mound when it bought Edinburghs British Linen Bank from Barclays. Forty years on, the dynamics of banking amalgamations have changed
markedly!
Indeed the recent history of Scottish banking has been punctuated by substantial mergers and acquisitions. The Royal Banks acquisition of NatWest in
2000, the largest of its kind in the UK, and the merger of Bank of Scotland and Halifax to form HBOS in 2002, transformed UK banking. At the time of
writing, we await the outcome of Lloyds TSBs bid to acquire HBOS, in what would mark a further significant change for the sector. Also recently, the RBS led
consortium acquisition of Dutch Bank ABN AMRO has brought the influence of Scottish banking directly to more than 50 countries across six continents.
This unprecedented growth over the last decade has meant that today Scotland is a nation that punches way above its weight in the financial services
sector. Edinburgh is now one of Europes leading financial centres despite being one of the continents smallest cities. Financial services have played an
increasingly dominant role in Scottish economic growth with the banking sectors contribution doubling between 1998 and 2007.
As Chairman of what is now a truly global organisation, I have been able to see first hand the incredible impact of the Scottish banking sector on the
worlds major financial markets. The ideas, products and spirit of Scottish banking, have been much imitated and spread around the world, yet even today
Scotland is still playing a significant role in shaping the future of banking, and why not?
Globalisation brings many benefits and opportunities and we must work to ensure they are realised on everyones behalf. However, globalisation need
not mean loss of identity. Building on our distinctive character can provide competitive advantage to the benefit of customers and investors alike.
We have no need to apologise for being Scots. In this Homecoming Celebration of the birth of Robert Burns, we have much to thank that son of
Ayrshire, and many others like him, for reminding us to respect ourselves. If we dont others wont. The story of our banks is just one strand of our tartan
tapestry, but one all of us should recognise and take pride in.
Sir Tom McKillop FRS, FRSE, FRSC, FMedSci, FIChemE is Chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Advisor on the
Scottish Enterprise International Advisory Board.
He was born in Scotland in 1943 and educated at Irvine Royal Academy and Glasgow University (BSc Hons and PhD in
Chemistry). He joined ICI in 1969 after post-doctoral research work in Paris, his early research interests ranging from
synthetic chemistry to quantum mechanics and molecular biology. Tom held a number of positions within ICI and, in 1994,
he was appointed CEO of Zeneca Pharmaceuticals - Zeneca having demerged from ICI in 1993 - becoming CEO of
AstraZeneca PLC in 1999, a position he held until retiring in December 2005.
His wider industry activities included periods as Chairman of the British Pharma Group, President of the European Federation of
Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Industry Task Force.
In September 2005 Tom was appointed Deputy Chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group and in April 2006 he succeeded to the
chairmanship.
Currently Sir Tom is a non-executive director of BP plc and Almirall, a Trustee of the Council for Industry and Higher Education and a
Trustee of The Darwin Trust of Edinburgh. In January 2007 he was appointed President of The Science Council.
During his career Sir Tom has received many scholarly awards and fellowships.
Sir Tom is married with three children and several grandchildren. His interests include sport, reading and music.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
The Royal Bank of Scotland Headquarters, Gogarburn.
THE NEED FOR
SAVINGS
By Susan Rice CBE
The subject of savings rarely gains much prominence other than during a downturn or recession. The racier subject of
investment tends to receive more attention, yet traditional savings have been fundamental to the development of society
over several centuries. For society to advance, it has long been recognised that banking the unbanked and encouraging and
enabling non-savers to adopt the savings habit are significant factors in reducing the poverty gap.
W
e may think we have made bold progress with the success of the building society movement in the 20th century, but to what degree have
circumstances really changed?
The old building societies still hold the vast bulk of savings today in the UK, even though several have since become banks. Of course, part of my
own bank, Lloyds TSB, started life as a savings institution - in fact, the very first commercial savings bank in the world. That part of our history began in a
small town in rural Dumfriesshire in south-west Scotland, where, in 1810, the Reverend Henry Duncan opened the UKs first self-supporting savings bank in
his parish of Ruthwell with quite a unique operating model.
It opened from 1-2pm one day a week, did not allow customers to deposit more than 20 a year, and those who did not deposit regularly were fined.
Reverend Duncan started his savings bank out of a charitable belief that the poor should be given the opportunity to help themselves - by saving for
times of ill health, old age, unemployment or hardship.
He may also have been interested in saving his parishioners from themselves as this quote from our archive suggests: It is distressing to think how
much money is thrown away by young women on dress unsuitable to their station, and by young men on the debauchery of the ale house and in other
extravagant and demoralising practices, for no other reason than no safe place is open to them for laying up their superfluous earnings.
We might think a case of plus a change with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight. Yet because it perhaps touched the right nerve, the Ruthwell
example quickly expanded around Scotland and south of the border into England and Wales as well.
A nationwide movement developed with the lofty aims of banishing poverty and wretchedness in society by encouraging industry, economy and
sobriety among the poor and labouring population.
By the end of 1817, around 100 savings banks had been set up in the UK, supported by an Act of Parliament to protect and encourage savings. This
reflected, in part, a political motivation for the growth of the savings bank movement - which was viewed as a means of stifling demands for reform.
It was thought that personal savings, and particularly deposits protected by government legislation, would make the population less likely to support
political change though, over time, political change came regardless.
In contrast to the commercial banks at that time, the savings banks attracted deposits from women and children. They also encouraged tradesmen,
artisans, shopworkers and domestic servants to put money into savings bank accounts.
While the number of savings banks continued to grow throughout the first half of the 19th century, this expansion slowed significantly in the second
FINANCIAL SERVICES
half. This was due in part to increased competition from friendly societies and commercial banks, as well as from Post Office Savings Banks - a competitor
set up by the government that is still in existence today.
So, although competitive models developed, expansion was slowed by a crisis of confidence in the savings banks themselves following the collapse of
two of them in the 1860s. In a remarkable echo of current turmoil in the financial sector, a banking crisis in 1866 greatly undermined trust in the system for
a spell.
However, Victorian Britain overall saw a period of unprecendented growth in prosperity and opportunities to save and this helped establish a national
habit for saving in the UK.
Until the mid-19th century, each savings bank in Britain was very much an independent entity.
However, from 1887, with the establishment of the Trustee Savings Bank Association, a period of cooperation and consolidation ensued which carried
through until the late 20th century.
For the Trustee Savings Bank movement, the biggest consolidation came in 1995, when Lloyds TSB was formed with the merger of the Trustee Savings
Bank and Lloyds Bank. The combination of Lloyds strengths in mortgages and small business banking, and TSBs strengths in savings and insurance, made
Lloyds TSB one of the largest banking forces in the UK. Although operating globally today, we trace our roots, in part, to that tiny village in the south of
Scotland.
The Trustee Savings Bank heritage is important, particularly in Scotland. So many people here grew up with the TSB, remember the savings campaigns
and value the idea that TSB is a savings bank.
In 2010, we will be celebrating Henry Duncans achievements. In the run-up to the bicentenary, we will be focusing - as we have done for nearly 200
years - on the importance of saving.
Savings, after all, act as a financial cushion for the fluctuations in income and outgoings that we all face throughout life. Savings enable major
purchases or the repayment of debt; they smooth consumption over time.
Given the important events people save for - education, a house, old age - one might assume that savings would be high on peoples agendas at all
times, that people are putting money aside for that proverbial rainy day. However that is not what we see in the UK today. In fact as a nation, we are saving
less than we used to.
The Henley Centre tells us that - until quite recently - if people were asked what they wanted for Christmas, they said something tangible, such as
jewellery, a camera or perhaps books.
Nowadays though people most often say they want a holiday, peace and quiet, a good nights sleep, an escape - all experiences instead of things.
To understand this, I would like to set out how savings - and attitudes towards saving - have changed in the UK, looking back over the last 50 years or
so. During this period, we have seen unprecedented growth in household wealth which has doubled over just the last 20 years. However, this has been
accompanied by a downward trend overall in the savings ratio, which measures the proportion of take-home pay that is saved. People are wealthier but
saving proportionately less.
Personal savings actually peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the mid-1990s, saving levels began to decline again from around 12% of
disposable income down to 5% in 2005 and to an historic low of 1.1% in the first part of 2008.
Movements in the savings ratio in the UK are strongly associated with the economic cycle. Indeed the savings ratio turns out to be a good barometer
for the overall state of the economy. When the economy is strong people spend more and save less, and typically during recession the savings ratio goes up.
Looking back, strong consumer spending and a declining personal savings ratio helped fuel a boom in the late 1980s. The correction which followed in
the early 1990s helped to tip the economy into recession.
We also see a link between savings behaviour and borrowing patterns, as well as with the accumulation of financial assets. Indeed when we look
behind these changes in the UK savings ratio, we see that shifts in borrowing have been a very significant factor.
The explanation for this is credit. While savers cannot save more than they earn, borrowers can spend more than they earn. So it is not surprising that
the overall fall in the personal savings ratio over the last 15 years has been associated with strong growth in consumption.
Until very recently, rising house prices created a wealth effect making homeowners less worried about saving for the future because they felt they had
substantial assets behind them in their property.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Until very recently, rising house prices created a wealth effect making homeowners
less worried about saving for the future because they felt they had substantial assets
behind them in their property. Bill McKelvie
Right: Christmas shoppers. Courtesy of EventScotland
Far right: The Futures Company (formerly Henley Centre HeadlightVision) tells us that -
until quite recently - if people were asked what they wanted for Christmas, they said
something tangible, such as jewellery, a camera or perhaps books.
Courtesy of The Futures Company (formerly Henley Centre HeadlightVision)
For a lot of people, the housing market has become a key driver of consumption as well as personal savings decisions, so much so that many analysts
point to the accumulation of wealth in housing as the dominant factor behind the depressed savings ratio.
A similar trend occurred during the 1980s housing boom, but with the good times in the housing market and the wider economy apparently over - at
least for now - we are facing a very different environment.
The UK Government agency, National Savings and Investment, produces a Savings Tracker which explores current saving patterns. If we look at the
spring 2008 data, we see the first drop in monthly savings rates since the Tracker began five years ago - this on the back of positive savings trends up to
2007, all supported by rising wages.
The Tracker also reported growing pessimism within the UK population about its ability to save, so there has been a change in sentiment as well. Early
signals no doubt of the impact of the changing economic situation on households, many of which will need to adjust to the new environment. This transition
may also take some time as credit leveraged during economic buoyancy is still repayable even when the good times have ended.
However, while this appears a gloomy outlook, we do need to be careful not to draw premature conclusions from the latest data as they offer a
complex picture. Take for instance savings aspirations.
In spring 2008, the average ideal amount the UK population said it wanted to set aside each month - their aspiration - had risen to the highest level
since the Tracker began. Of those who do save regularly, it appears that these savings aspirations are translating into action, with year-on-year growth in
savings.
Indeed, the most recent year-on-year increase - at 6.91% - is the highest ever, suggesting that regular savers think about the amount they save and may
well have been motivated by recent economic events to increase their financial cushion. However, this trend is not reflected across the whole population.
I have suggested that savers and borrowers are different people or people at different stages in their lives. There is a similar differentiation between
savers and non-savers.
While regular savers are saving more, by spring 2008 less than half the population was saving on a regular basis, a drop from 52% in winter 2007 to
47% in 2008. The main reason given for the majority of the population not reaching their savings aspirations is that they cannot afford to save. Rising
inflation and the associated increase in the cost of living may well be a contributory factor to people saving less than they say they want to. Perhaps a more
worrying statistic is the 22% thinking they do not need to save more.
Yet aside from the economic factors - the prevailing environment, rising house prices and the availability of credit - what else is driving the behaviour of
UK savers? Because the savings ratio does not exist in isolation and is linked to the wider socio-economic context in the UK, we need to understand that
context to understand changes in saving behaviour.
Most analysts - regardless of their politics - point to 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher as a turning point. Thatcher introduced privatisation in
the UK and transformed both the economy and society in the process. Publicly owned assets such as transport, telecoms, gas and electricity were sold off
during the 1980s. The Trustee Savings Bank was also demutualised.
The decade saw the start of wide-scale working class home ownership with right-to-buy which allowed tenants to buy their council homes which then
shot up in value. In total, the proportion of owner-occupied homes across the UK rose from 55% in 1979 to 67% a decade later. In 2008 that figure was
nearer 80%.
Combine this with the growth in house prices we have witnessed in the UK and the result is that in the last 25 years Britain has become a nation
fixated on the rising value of property creating the wealth effect.
The Thatcher era also saw change in the number of opportunities open to savers - some prompted by the UK Government, others taking shape within
the financial services industry. Inflation has also had an impact as people realised that the value of money can erode over time.
All these influences contributed to a shift in the concept of saving, moving away from the more traditional reliance on deposits held in a bank towards
a perhaps more sophisticated mix of savings in the bank, alongside long and short-term investments, including investment in property.
The endowment mortgage, prompted by the UK Government and developed by the life and pensions industry (keen to establish a foothold in the
lucrative mortgage market), accelerated this momentum.
Introduced in the late 1970s, it combines life insurance, investment and a lump sum to pay off a mortgage at the end - assuming a rising market, of
course. It became a lower cost option for home-buyers. These mortgages not only encouraged home-ownership but also influenced the new view of saving
FINANCIAL SERVICES
in which people came to see a rise in their property value as a form of saving (which it is in a way, though it can be volatile and it is certainly not very
liquid).
Further UK Government incentives came in the form of tax exempt savings vehicles, first Personal Equity Plans (PEPs) and Tax Exempt Special Savings
Accounts (TESSAs), replaced later by Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs).
However all of these - with the exception of the cash ISA - are investment vehicles rather than savings, and like property (but perhaps more so), there is
volatility in investments, as money invested can decrease as well as increase. In the UK we talk about long-term savings when we actually mean
investments. I have found that curious as an American, where savings and investments are more clearly differentiated.
Now, these prompts - endowment mortgages, tax-exempt savings vehicles - were designed to encourage saving but, as the depressed savings ratio
shows, the anticipated savings boom has not happened, we have consumed instead.
Over the years, the UK Government has looked at ways to encourage saving - at times, their approach has been as zealous as Henry Duncans was
nearly 200 years ago. The challenge is that government - and indeed banks - can no longer compel people to save as Henry Duncan did.
However, banks do have a significant role to play in encouraging individuals to save. For banks that trace their heritage to the savings bank movement,
the role is greater still, although what worked in the 19th and early 20th centuries does not fit today.
Society has changed and today it is about choice and incentives. At Lloyds TSB we continue to encourage banking amongst the unbanked. Our latest
venture is a partnership with Grand Central Savings, a unique bank dedicated to helping the homeless, refugees and other groups traditionally excluded
from mainstream financial services.
We are providing advice and expertise to help grow the capacity of Grand Central Savings and the results have been outstanding. We also offer basic
bank and cash accounts to help encourage wider participation in financial services and were the first bank to enable our customers to bank at the Post
Office.
Whilst reflecting our heritage, such activities illustrate our overall approach to business today, as savings patterns have changed and we have grown
from a tiny village bank to one which operates globally.
The things that people want change over time. The ways people save have changed with time too. Yet, in spite of all the advances in society since the
early 1800s, are we not still addressing the same fundamental issues?
Like Henry Duncan almost 200 years ago - who focused on those who were excluded from mainstream banks in his time - we must remain committed
to helping ordinary people.
Susan Rice CBE was the Chair of the Steering Group of the Financial Services Strategy Group (FSSG) in 2003/04 which set
out the framework for the financial services industry in Scotland.
Chartered Banker Susan Rice, became Chief Executive of Lloyds TSB Scotland in August 2000, the first woman to head
a UK clearing bank. She became Chairman as well in 2008. In previous roles at Bank of Scotland and NatWest Bancorp in
New York, her briefs covered retail products and services, corporate securities, structured finance, retail channels and the
life, pensions and investment business. In her earlier career, she was a dean at Yale and Colgate universities in America.
Susan is Senior Independent Director of Scottish and Southern Energy, chairs the Edinburgh International Book
Festival and Edinburghs Festivals Forum, and sits on the Advisory Board of Oxford Universitys Said Business School.
She was a founding director of Charity Bank, sits on HMT Financial Inclusion Taskforce and is active in addressing issues of social and
financial exclusion. A director of Scottish Business in the Community, she was the Prince of Wales Ambassador for Corporate Responsibility in
2006 and is honorary President of the Community Development Finance Association (CDFA).
Susan is also a director of Scotlands Futures Forum which is guiding the future Parliamentary agenda for the country and sits on the
Climate Change Business Delivery Group.
Born and brought up in the United States, Susan now has dual nationality. She has degrees from Wellesley and Aberdeen University, and
honorary doctorates from Robert Gordon, Heriot-Watt, Paisley, Queen Margaret, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities. She is also a
Fellow of the RSA, the CIOBS and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was appointed to the Court of the Bank of England in 2007.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
In 1861 the Palmerston Government set up the Post Office Savings Bank - a simple savings scheme aiming to encourage ordinary wage earners "to provide for themselves against adversity and ill health". Prior
to 1969, the Post Office had responsibility for Savings Accounts, Savings Certificates and Premium Bonds (ERNIE). On 1st October 1969, when the Post Office became a Corporation, the Savings Bank functions
remained as part of the Exchequer and became National Savings. From this time, local and main Post Offices became simply a distribution outlet for the products of National Savings. Clara
ISAF CENTENARY PUBLICATION
The Centenary of the International Sailing Federation is a historic anniversary in
the world of sailing. With the expertise of the Times Group, the ISAF Centenary
magazine has not only been the perfect tribute to our past, but captured the
essence of the incredible organization ISAF is today and our aspirations for the
future. This publication has been distributed across the world and will be a lasting
testimonial for many years to come; for this we thank the Times Group and the
dedication of their professional team.
Arve Sundheim, Secretary General of the
International Sailing Federation
USAF FOUNDING CENTENNIAL & 60TH ANNIVERSARY PUBLICATION
A heartfelt thank you to the Times Group for the AF 60th Anniversary book. To
say it is spectacular is an understatement! I have already given copies to the
President and members of our Board and your work has made me a hero.
Support like this for a charity is hard to come by, so please know that we are very
grateful for the outstanding work of the Times Group.
John D. Hopper Jr., Lt. Gen. USAF (Ret), Chief Executive
Officer, Air Force Aid Society
BERMUDA - IN BUSINESS FOR 500 YEARS PUBLICATION
I wish to thank the Times Group for their vision and foresight with respect to this
publication. Their tireless efforts have produced a timeless creation that will be
shared for generations to come.
The Hon W. Alexander Scott JP, MP,
Premier of Bermuda
GCC 25TH ANNIVERSARY PUBLICATION
The publication of this book is part of the multi-faceted initiatives that we have
undertaken to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the
Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC). I hope that this book,
which contains articles by distinguished experts, will foster a better
understanding of the GCC.
His Excellency Abdul Rahman Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, Secretary
General, Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf
If you would like to know more about our bespoke publishing services, please contact Kevin Sammon, Chief
Executive, on +44 (0) 1702 32 2000 or kevin.sammon@timesgroup.co.uk.
Time International Media & Events Services Ltd (TIMES Group) is a UK-based niche publishing company,
specialising in producing official publications for various governments, multilateral institutions and
supervisory/regulatory bodies, serving a variety of sectors.
publishing exhibitions conferences
thamesgate business centre, thamesgate house, 37 victoria avenue, southend-on-sea, essex ss2 6df
t: +44-(0)1702-32-2000 f: +44-(0)1702-32-2001 e: info@timesgroup.co.uk w: www.timesgroup.co.uk
THE FLOURISHING OF
SCOTLANDS FINANCIAL
SERVICES SECTOR
By Dr Alexander Scott
As we come to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns it would be interesting to reflect what he would have
thought of the current turbulent time for the economy not least the impact on the Scottish financial services community.
Writing an overview of Scottish financial services over the past few months is fraught with difficulty, as events have ebbed
and flowed with great rapidity.
A
s a good internationalist Robert Burns would probably have appreciated the dynamic of international economies if a little surprised by the speed of
modern finance and technology. Though I suspect he would be comforted by a continuing public antipathy to the exciseman - a regular bane of his
life which is regularly featured in his poetry. His poem To a Mouse captures well the current concern about future prospects:
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o mice an men
Gang aft a-gley,
An leae us nought but grief and pain,
For promisd joy.
Still thou art blest, compard wi me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, och! I backward cast my ee,
On prospects drear!
An forward, tho I canna see,
I guess an fear.
As Chief Executive of the Chartered Insurance Institute -
an organisation with over 93,000 members worldwide - and
the largest professional body in the world; and as a member
of the Scottish diaspora (even if I am only exiled as far as
London) it is with considerable pride and respect that I view
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Main image and below: Scottish Widows (building designed by BDP)
the achievements of the Scottish financial community, both in terms of individuals as well as corporate activity, over recent decades. I am confident that
recent squalls in global markets will only be a brief respite to the remarkable growth of Scottish financial services globally.
This gilded achievement, which has accelerated in recent years, with a strong domestic performance, as well as considerable growth in international
reach, is built on the rock of centuries of solid achievement. The general insurance, life assurance and pensions sector in Scotland dates back to the early
18th century.
At that time the increase in international trade led to a requirement for marine insurance for many Scottish export and import companies. Scotland has
a hard-won reputation for financial innovation and expertise which has given the sector an international reach and capability. Scots have a deserved
reputation for a having disproportionate hand and influence in the development of international trade and the development of financial services hubs
throughout the world.
Scotland has always been seen as a major insurance stronghold with the insurance cluster traditionally based around George Street in Edinburgh as
Scotlands very own square mile. Scotland plays a leading and growing role in this sector with four major UK insurance companies headquartered in
Scotland: Standard Life, Scottish Widows, AEGON UK and Bright Grey (a division of Royal London). Scotland is the operating base for several other major
insurance institutions with diverse business profiles, such as Norwich Union, Prudential and Resolution. Scotland has a diverse and extensive general
insurance, life assurance and pensions expertise. Pensions remain a considerable strength although there is increasing expertise in specific sectors like
annuities, health insurance and investment products as well as unit trust and open-ended investment products.
The insurance sector accounts for 23% of financial services employment in Scotland. And the scale of this sector is made clear in the Scottish Financial
Enterprises statistics that its insurance member companies manage a total of over 726 billion between them internationally. Scotland accounts for 19% of
all life and pensions employment across the UK. The CII itself has around 7,000 members in Scotland with, in addition, a considerable number of Scots
members working internationally.
As I travel around the globe on behalf of the CII, the fact that I am a Scot in finance is an instant passport to opening many important doors worldwide
in the financial community. Scotland and Scots have built a reputation for trust and straight talking, a key, if not the key component in financial services. As
we have found out only too readily in recent months, without this trust public confidence in institutions can crumble at a rapid and extraordinary speed.
Therefore, the Scottish tradition for dependability and trust becomes an even more valuable business commodity - even a certain dourness can have a value
in times like this!
As the leader of a professional body that has been campaigning to professionalise and raise standards for knowledge and behaviour in financial
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Scotland as a country is also well endowed with a strong educational infrastructure as well as an
aspirational can-do mentality which has meant that Scots have been natural globetrotters.
Students on campus. Courtesy of the University of Glasgow
services in order to re-engender public trust and confidence in financial institutions, as well as products and services, I am only too aware how fragile a
flower public confidence is and why the Scottish financial sector - and indeed the Scottish character - carries such respect and admiration worldwide as a
calling card for trust and reliability. It is something we all need to nurture and protect.
As an expatriate Scot - albeit in London - I have watched with interest the gradual build up of a quality financial services environment to support the
domestic financial services industry in Scotland, and the welcome development of the rise of a whole new generation of industry leaders - an impressive
conveyor belt of talent. It is impossible to attend an international financial services function without hearing Scottish accents at every turn. This bodes well
for the future as international competiveness means that competition for top talent becomes ever fiercer and Scotland will be well placed to develop
competitive advantage as long as it keeps a focus on investing in its most important natural resource - its people.
Scotland as a country is also well endowed with a strong educational infrastructure as well as an aspirational can-do mentality which has meant that
Scots have been natural globetrotters. No more so is this demonstrated in the capacity of Scots to travel the world in support of national sporting contests
but usually more in expectation than fulfilment and success - although the likes of Andrew Murray prove to be a refreshing change to this at least.
And the long term prospects for Scottish financial services, both at home and globally, look good if you are prepared to look beyond the current
economic malaise. Domestic growth rates over the last decade have quietly but steadily supported a renaissance in Scotlands economic record. Long may
this continue.
But to return to the great poet Robert Burns and his musings to a Mouse:
But, och! I backward cast my ee,
On prospects drear!
I guess an fear.
I am confident that despite the current economic climate that point to prospects drear Scottish financial services will ride the current storm and
continue to prosper and grow both domestically and internationally for a long time to come. I am sure Burns would happily have toasted such a thought and
would have been pleasantly surprised what has taken place since first he wrote those lines while contemplating the actions of a mouse in an Ayrshire field
all those years ago.
Dr Alexander Sandy Scott is the Chief Executive of the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII).
Sandy graduated in medicine and surgery from Aberdeen University and spent his first ten years in the Royal Army
Medical Corps achieving the rank of Major. He then joined the Department of Health where his responsibilities included
regulating the pharmaceutical industry in the United Kingdom. In 1989 he joined the medical insurer PPP and in 1995
became Deputy Managing Director. During this period he was also Chairman of the ABIs Medical Insurance Committee.
In 1997 he joined Ingram Micro, a US based technology distribution company, as its Managing Director.
Sandy is a member of the QAAs Board Committee on University Degree Awarding Powers, and also the Advisory Board
of CASS Business School as well as being on the External Advisory Committee of the Faculty of Actuarial Science & Statistics. He is on the
Editorial Advisory Board of Insurance Times and served on the FSAs Consumer Financial Capability Working Group. In 2006 he joined The
Princes Trust Insurance Leadership Group.
He is a Past Chairman of the Institute for Global Insurance Education (IGIE), a Director of the Personal Finance Society, an Honorary
Secretary of the Insurance Charities, a former International Governor of the American Institute for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters
(AICPCU) and Immediate Past President of the London Phoenix Orchestra. He is a Past Chairman of the European Financial Planning
Association (EFPA).
Much of his leisure time is spent hill climbing or fishing in Scottish rivers.
Website: www.cii.co.uk.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Scotland plays a leading and growing role in the insurance sector with four major UK insurance companies
headquartered in Scotland: Standard Life, Scottish Widows, AEGON UK and Bright Grey (a division of Royal
London). Bright Grey building Courtesy of Bright Grey
UPHOLDING
SCOTS LAW
By Richard Henderson
Robert Burns was born during a time of great change in Scotland, just as we are experiencing today. In 1759, the Scots
Parliament had not long closed its doors. After almost 300 years, it has only just reconvened.
Y
et throughout that period, key institutions have remained distinctly Scottish, not least the independent legal system preserved by the Treaty of Union
1707. In many ways, the preservation of a strong system of law has helped to ensure successful devolution three centuries later. Now - as then - the
legal profession remains a dynamic force at the heart of civic Scotland.
One of the reasons Scotland developed its own distinctive system of law was the dominant influence of European legal systems during its formative
period. In Scots laws medieval formative years, Scotland and England were often at war, inhibiting the cross-border exchange of cultural phenomena. For
instance, during the Wars of Independence in the 13th and 14th centuries, there were no universities in Scotland and the only ones in England - at Oxford
and Cambridge - were closed to Scottish students. As a result, Scots travelled elsewhere in Europe to gain an education - to Paris, Orleans, Bologna, Pavia
and Poland - and they brought back the latest developments in civil law, effectively the form of Roman law that dominated continental Europe. Then, after
the Reformation in the 16th century - driven by Haddington notary John Knox - many Scottish students studied at Leyden and Utrecht in the Netherlands,
rather than the Catholic universities. This European influence had an enduring effect even after union with England in 1707 which created one law making
body, the Parliament of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Crucially, the Treaty of Union preserved the Scottish legal system - with separate articles protecting Scots law and the court system - even though new
legislation would be passed by the united parliament. Despite that, the Scottish system did not thrive in the immediate post-Union period, not least because
of the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council. Also, while Scots law continued to be taught at Scottish universities, which now numbered four, it did not have
a particularly distinguished reputation. It was the arrival of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century that secured law as a university-taught discipline
- with new professorships created at Edinburgh and Glasgow - and allowed the profession to truly flourish. In turn, the legal profession produced key figures
of the Enlightenment, including philosopher David Hume, law professor John Millar, radical reformer Thomas Muir and writers James Boswell, Walter Scott,
John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The law continued to develop through the 18th and 19th centuries, assisted by the contribution of legal writers such as Baron David Hume (the nephew
of the philosopher) and George Joseph Bell, both professors of Scots law at Edinburgh University. The legal profession expanded in line with the volume of
legislation introduced in the 20th century and it became clear that a representative body for solicitors was needed as well as the long-established Faculty of
Advocates. The informal system of lawyers voluntarily providing legal services to those who could not afford representation - which had existed since 1424 -
was also in need of reform. So it was that the Legal Aid and Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1949 established the Law Society of Scotland as the governing body for
solicitors, at the same time as it laid the foundation of the modern legal aid and assistance scheme. The guiding principle of the Society was to promote the
interests of the solicitors profession and the interests of the public in relation to the profession.
Much has changed since the formation of the Society 60 years ago, including the size of the profession itself. Just over 3,200 solicitors held a Practising
Certificate at the beginning of the 1970s. In 2007, the numbers practising broke the 10,000 mark for the first time. Historically, solicitors operated as sole
practitioners or set up small firms with two or three partners. With increasing globalisation and specialisation in the latter part of the 20th century, more
large firms began to form, particularly in Edinburgh and often through the merger or takeover of medium-sized practices. For instance, the number of firms
with 10 or more partners almost doubled from 32 in 1981 to 61 in 2008, while the figure for medium-sized practices fell by nearly a third during the same
period. Over the years, the big firms have also employed an increasing proportion of all the solicitors working in Scotland. Across the whole profession, the
number of legal assistants and associates has risen tenfold in the past 40 years, much faster than the rate for partners. Solicitors working in-house - for
LEGAL SYSTEM
The Legal Services Act, which facilitated reforms in England and Wales, received royal assent in October 2007 but the process of
liberalisation was also well under way in Scotland, with the Scottish Government backing the need for change.
Scottish Parliament Building. Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of RMJM
instance in the prosecution service, government bodies and commercial
organisations - have more than trebled since 1970. The number of
Scottish solicitors operating in England almost doubled in the 1990s, with
a sizeable presence in countries such as Hong Kong, the USA, Australia,
Canada and France and smaller numbers practising throughout the
world. The profile of the profession has also altered in line with changes
in Scottish society. Increasing numbers of those studying law are drawn
from state schools and by 2011 it is estimated there will be more female
than male solicitors.
The evolution of the profession has been driven by political events as
much as global economic conditions. Scottish solicitors responded with
trademark adaptability when the UK acceded to the European Economic
Community in 1973, increasing the volume and complexity of legislation.
A generation later in 1999, the pace of legislative change accelerated
again with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood,
opened and led by former Glasgow solicitors Winnie Ewing and Donald
Dewar respectively. A total of 73 Bills were introduced in the Scottish
Parliaments first session (1999-2003), with 62 passed. Those figures
increased for the second session (2003-2007) to 81 and 65 respectively.
The justice sector was particularly overwhelmed, leading to the
establishment of two Justice Committees (1 and 2) to replace the Justice
and Home Affairs Committee. Clearly, that legislative output has had a
profound impact on the work of solicitors, who must keep up to date
with changes to the law in their day-to-day business. However the reform process has also focused directly on the justice system and legal profession in
several notable instances.
Two years into the parliaments first session, the Justice 1 Committee began its Regulation of the Legal Profession Inquiry to examine the system for
making complaints against lawyers. In 2002, the Committee reported its findings, which supported a continuation of the system of co-regulation, with the
Society at the centre. The Committees recommendations included increasing lay involvement in the complaints decision making process and that decisions
should not be made by the governing Council. Also, during the first parliamentary session, the Council of the Law Society of Scotland Bill was introduced to
remove some doubts about the delegation of statutory functions and the appointment and membership of committees. The Bill was passed in March 2003.
The process of reforming the legal profession gathered momentum during the second session of the Scottish Parliament. The Legal Profession and Legal
Aid (Scotland) Bill was introduced in March 2006, principally to establish a new Scottish Legal Complaints Commission to deal with service complaints
against lawyers. Initially flawed in a number of respects - not least a possible incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights - the
proposals were criticised by the Society and others, with concerns that the Act could become the first to be struck down as incompetent in the Scottish
Parliament. However, amendments were brought forward to safeguard the Commissions independence from government and in a number of other
important ways before the legislation was passed in December 2006, receiving royal assent the following month.
During this period, considerable work was also taking place to consider the possibility of liberalising the legal services market throughout the UK, with a
Scottish working group publishing research findings in May 2006 and the Legal Services Bill introduced at Westminster six months later. As so-called
Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) would enable other organisations to provide legal services, one of the most controversial proposals is to allow non-
lawyers to own, operate and invest in law firms for the first time. The Legal Services Act, which facilitated reforms in England and Wales, received royal
assent in October 2007 but the process of liberalisation was also well under way in Scotland, with the Scottish Government backing the need for change.
The Society has been a leader in the debate about the best way forward, staging a major conference and publishing its own consultation paper which
drew responses from across the entire solicitors profession, from small rural and high street firms, professional bodies, consumer and other stakeholder
groups, to large commercial firms. A clear appetite for modernisation was apparent and solicitors voted to allow ABSs at the Societys Annual General
Meeting in May 2008, where it was agreed that Solicitors firms should be allowed to choose the business model to enable them to achieve their ambitions,
while the Society would focus on developing a robust regulatory system.
In many ways, recognition of the demand for an independent complaints body and the vote in favour of ABSs, reflect the approach taken by Scottish
solicitors over hundreds of years. From responding to the challenges and opportunities of political union with England during Burns life, to embracing the
rule changes that allowed them to advertise their services from 1985 onwards and endorsing new business structures in the 21st century, the legal
profession has shown a willingness to innovate and adapt to given circumstances.
Sixty years after its formation, the Society is continuing to innovate and adapt. It is to publish revised standards of professional service and conduct for
solicitors in December 2008 which will define what those using legal services can expect from their solicitor. The Society has also conducted a full review of
how solicitors are educated and trained in Scotland. Everyone with an interest in the subject - from students to partners, clients to legal academics - has had
an opportunity to shape the future training and education of solicitors, with the process attracting considerable interest from around the world as the first
such comprehensive cradle to grave approach to legal education in any jurisdiction. A policy paper on this will be published in November 2008 for
consultation, with new regulations for legal education providers set to be in place before the Societys next AGM in May 2009.
As it enters its sixtieth year, the Society is now examining its own governance arrangements to ensure it is a modern, business-like and respected
membership body and statutory regulator which promotes the interests of the public in relation to the profession, and supports Scottish solicitors in
providing excellence now and in the future.
Richard Henderson is President of the Law Society of Scotland. He recently retired as Solicitor to the Scottish Executive
and was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the New Year Honours List.
Richard joined the then Scottish Office Solicitors Office in 1972 on qualifying as a solicitor. During his career there he
dealt variously with agriculture, education, public local inquiries and employment law, and undertook a three-year
secondment to the Scottish Law Commission.
He was appointed a divisional solicitor in 1987, Deputy Solicitor in 1996 and Solicitor to the Secretary of State for
Scotland in 1998 before becoming Solicitor to the Scottish Executive on devolution in 1999. He has also served for the
past eight years as a co-opted member of the Council of the Law Society of Scotland.
Website: www.lawscot.org.uk
LEGAL SYSTEM
Dundee Sheriff Court, Scotland. Stephen Finn
DELIVERING SCOTLANDS
TRANSPORT FUTURE
By Dr Malcolm Reed
The key aim of the Scottish Government is to create a more successful, prosperous country, with opportunities for all of
Scotland to flourish through increased sustainable economic growth.
A
safe and efficient transport network is vital to maintaining and growing the Scottish economy, which is why Scottish Ministers are already well on
their way to investing over 2.5bn in Scotlands strategic transport networks over the three years to 2012.
A good transport system opens up employment and business opportunities, as well as connecting communities.
Where appropriate, good public transport can also provide a genuine travel choice but of course for our many rural communities and for business, a safe
and efficient roads network is also vital to keeping Scotland moving.
Transport Scotland was established in 2006 as a new government agency to deliver Scottish Ministers commitments to major investment in the rail and
trunk road networks. We also have responsibility for delivering the national concessionary travel schemes. We have developed Transport Scotland as a
strongly-focused transport planning and delivery organisation with the ability to attract the range of professional staff needed for these tasks.
As the funder and specifier of Scotlands railways and trunk road network, we see it as essential for Transport Scotland to provide active leadership and
set the agenda for how Scotlands road and rail transport infrastructure is delivered now and into the future.
Transport Scotland also plays a key role in sustaining Scotlands construction industry. Our investment across road and rail - either in longer term
maintenance or specific infrastructure construction - has supported nearly 13,000 jobs.
We are investing directly in roads and railway infrastructure and equipment in order to meet Scotlands existing and projected transport needs. For rail,
we are currently about half way through our current enhancement programme - worth almost 1bn - which has already seen the completion of the
Edinburgh Waverley upgrade and the Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine route reopening. Work on the Airdrie-Bathgate reopening and the Glasgow Airport rail link is
well under way. We have also recently announced our plans for taking forward the reopening of the Borders rail link.
In September 2007, the Scottish Government announced a commitment to electrification of the main Edinburgh-Glasgow line and associated routes,
including a new west Edinburgh station to link with the citys airport. This is an ambitious, exciting programme of works which will make a real difference to
the economic opportunities available to communities and businesses across central Scotland.
The Scottish High Level Output Specification (HLOS) sets out our 3.6bn blueprint for railways in Scotland from 2009 to 2014, focused on reducing
journey times, increasing capacity and meeting rising passenger and freight demand and expectations. Our planning assumption is for 23% passenger
growth by 2014 and our strategy for meeting this growth includes the major infrastructure I have already mentioned, together with rolling stock
improvements and incremental enhancements such as planned capacity improvements on the Highland main line and the Glasgow to Kilmarnock route.
INFRASTRUCTURE & TRANSPORT
Jacobite Steam Train moving over the 21 arch viaduct near Glenfinnan, Scotland - built by Sir Thomas McAlpine
between 1897 and 1901 - which has been used as a location for several films and television programmes, most
famously when the Jacobite Steam Train was transformed into the Hogwarts Express and crosses the viaduct in
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (and subsequently The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire).
Angelina Dimitrova
This significant investment means that - as our building work across Scotland progresses - many of the gaps in the Scottish railway map will be filled.
We will continue to focus on what we can do to make improvements to existing networks to ensure an efficient and valued service. This includes looking at
interventions which could offer significant capacity or journey-time benefits.
For example, just as capacity at Edinburgh Waverley was a major spur to the recently completed enhancements, we expect to have to address emerging
capacity issues at both of Glasgows terminal stations over the next decade. Rail plays a vital role across the country but particularly so in the west of
Scotland which has the largest suburban rail network outside London. It is therefore vital we work now with the rest of the industry to deliver a long term
solution to cater for a growing passenger market.
We have always recognised the potential of electrification in our strategy, especially because key routes - most of the Glasgow network and both of the
main cross-border lines - are already wired, creating major opportunities for synergy and for better fleet utilisation by building on this base.
I am personally confident that the electrification of the Edinburgh & Glasgow route will be just a starting point and that it will provide the basis for a
rolling programme that will see more of the Scottish network electrified over the coming decade and the majority of rail passenger journeys in Scotland
made in electric rolling stock.
Through making improvements to the rail services and providing a concessionary travel scheme for the older generation and those with disabilities, we
hope that using public transport becomes more and more of an attractive option for the travelling public.
However, this does not mean that we can overlook the trunk road network, which is fundamental in linking Scotlands cities and rural communities.
Construction of the long-awaited completion of the M74 has recently begun. This eight kilometre project will complete a vital part of the west of
Scotlands motorway network and will link the M74
motorway from Fullarton Road Junction near Carmyle to
the M8 motorway west of the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow.
We are also progressing the design, development and
procurement strategy for the Forth Replacement Crossing.
This strategic crossing is a vital economic link for Fife,
Edinburgh and the Lothians and crucial in maintaining the
capacity and capability of the national and regional road
network.
While work on the replacement Forth Crossing is just
beginning, the new Upper Forth Crossing - the
Clackmannanshire Bridge - aimed at reducing traffic
congestion in Kincardine and opening the wider area to
economic benefits has just been officially opened by First
Minister Alex Salmond. The new 26-span, 1.2 km bridge,
which weighs over 32,000 tonnes, is the second-longest
incrementally launched concrete bridge in the world.
In September 2008 the public local inquiry
commenced for the new Aberdeen Western Peripheral
Route, which will help improve road safety and
accessibility, reduce congestion and grow the economies of
Aberdeen and the North-east of Scotland.
Besides delivering new projects, Transport Scotland is
working to ensure the pinch points in Scotlands trunk road
infrastructure are dealt with. We are now investing heavily
in the upgrade of the A80, which will see the construction
The Forth Road and Rail Bridges Scotland. Andrew West
Ship in the lock of the Caledonian canal. TTphoto
of a new offline dual two-lane carriageway with hard shoulders between Stepps to Mollinsburn, with the existing A80 between Mollinsburn and Auchenkilns
upgraded to a dual three-lane carriageway and the Auchenkilns to Haggs section of the A80 upgraded to include hard shoulders.
In addition, we are working to deliver completion of central Scotlands key motorway artery by providing a new section of the M8 between the M73 at
Baillieston and the A73 at Newhouse.
Scottish Ministers will shortly announce the outcome of the Strategic Transport Projects Review (STPR), a future programme of nationally significant
measures and initiatives which support the Governments aim of achieving sustainable economic growth. The STPR identifies nationally significant road and
rail interventions that best contribute to achieving this from 2012 and beyond.
The programme of activities outlined in the STPR will return significant benefits to Scotland, delivering substantial, direct economic savings to
businesses and individuals from improved transport links, as well as significant benefits from improved road safety and wider social gains such as better
accessibility and reduced environmental impact.
Transport Scotland will continue to play an active part in driving forward Scotlands economy. Our existing projects represent approximately 25% of the
Scottish construction market and approximately 95% of our budget is invested back into the private sector.
Clearly, there is much work to be done to keep Scotland moving. This is an exciting time for Scottish transport and it is a privilege to be part of the team
helping meet the challenge of delivering a world class transport network for Scotland.
Dr Malcolm Reed is the Chief Executive of Transport Scotland. Prior to taking up his post as Chief Executive of Transport
Scotland, Dr Reed was Director General of Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive, a position he held since 1997. Before
that, he spent 17 years with Strathclyde Regional Council as Chief Policy Planner, Senior Executive Officer in the Chief
Executives office, and then Assistant Chief Executive.
He has lectured at the University of Glasgow and was a research officer at the planning exchange, Glasgow, before
becoming Senior Planner at Greater Glasgow Passenger Transport Executive (GGPTE). He then held the post of Chief Public
Transport Coordinator with GGPTE for three years prior to his move to Strathclyde Regional Council in 1980.
Dr Reed is a graduate and post graduate of Oxford University and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. From
July 2002 to December 2005, he undertook a part-time secondment to the Scottish Executive as rail adviser, leading the joint SE/SPTE
refranchising team and advising on other rail transport issues.
Website: www.transportscotland.gov.uk.
Waverley station in Edinburgh. Jean Morrison
ENLIGHTENED
PROPERTY
DEVELOPMENT
By Dan Macdonald
At the time of Burns, great Scottish thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton and James Black helped to
invent our modern world. Scotland became a world centre for medical and scientific advancement and discovery. This hotbed
of genius
I
inspired new investment in the built environment of the time and brought new people, ideas and dynamism to
Scotlands major cities, whilst William Adam and his sons John, Robert and James, transformed Scottish architecture.
T
he architects and painters added prestige and demand for new development. The concept of public buildings for enjoyment was established and what
have become the great universities of Scotland were expanded. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Scotlands capital city, Edinburgh, where the
achievements of this period are still seen and enjoyed today.
Why is this relevant to the modern property industry in Scotland and what are the links to this era for todays new economic enlightenment? The key is
that the great thinkers inspired and led the transformation of Scotland from what was a post-medieval society to a country that became synonymous with
the Age of Reason. In place of traditional stoicism Scottish society found a vision of a dynamic, outward looking and modern Scotland and this helped the
country to benefit from greater international connections and business. In a short period of time Scotland became a knowledge economy and while the
great estates rapidly transformed their local economies to take advantage of modern farming techniques,
II
the cities began an unrivalled period of growth,
prosperity and cultural enrichment.
Just as 18th century science, medicine, culture and knowledge needed to be accommodated in a new built environment, the modern Scottish economy
needs the development industry to deliver the right built environment if Scotland is to progress from its heavy industrial heritage to a new and outward
looking economic enlightenment.
Of course there are differences between the late 18th and early 21st centuries. Todays relative ease of mobility ensures that businesses, politicians,
academics, scientists and writers, can move around the globe in a matter of hours and this makes location a more competitive concept. The world is more
interconnected economically than ever and this is not confined to transport. Decisions taken in Australia for example may - allowing for time differences - be
communicated to Edinburgh immediately.
Modern property businesses therefore operate against a world in many ways more fragile, as commerce and finance are both interdependent and
closely linked to the developers supplying new offices, shops, hotels and homes. Also, while property companies are feeling the force of the current
international recession it is important not to forget the successes of the industry in recent years. So we must look ahead and identify the opportunities of the
next five to 25 years and what will be required from the property industry if it is to drive Scotlands goal of sustainable economic growth.
Perhaps the first achievement of the Scottish property industry is one that is often overlooked - yet it is a vital step forward if we are to enjoy the full
benefits of economic recovery. In the last decade or so, commercial (and residential) property development became an identifiable industry, bringing new
skills, expertise and innovation to the development industry in Scotland. New house building companies found a growing demand for better quality modern
CONSTRUCTION & PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT
Mellerstain House is the stately home of the 13th Earl of Haddington, north of Kelso in the Borders, Scotland. Built between
1725 and 1778, William Adam initially designed the east and west wings, then 45 years later his son Robert Adam was
commissioned to design and build the main mansion house. The mansion house is possibly the only remaining complete
building designed by Robert Adam. Courtesy of the National Trust for Scotland Photo Library
homes. The burgeoning commercial development industry began to transform the town centres and outskirts of Scotlands major cities: the Exchange in
Edinburgh and Edinburgh Park being early examples. Glasgows Buchanan Galleries (soon to be doubled in size) and the St Enoch Centre (again being
expanded currently) are just two of many shopping centres in Glasgow, reinforcing the citys position as one of the UKs top five retail destinations.
Grosvenors Eastgate in Inverness, Stirlings Thistle Centre and the Bon Accord in Aberdeen also emerged as regional city shopping centres, vastly boosting
their local retail economies.
By late 2007 research by GVA Grimley - commissioned by the Scottish Property Federation (SPF) - found that the Scottish property industry directly
employs 72,000 professionals and contributed 8.5% of Scottish GVA.
III
It has become a major part of modern Scottish society and employment,
encompassing development, property management, agents, architects, lawyers, planners, landlords, fund managers and investment analysts.
BUILDING FOR A KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
In place of coal, shipbuilding and steel, in Scotland today you are more likely to find retail and professional or business services. This is a paradigm shift that
has shaped the mature and modern Scottish property industry.
Instead of bespoke factories and shipyards mostly built by their managing owners, the new commercial property industry specialises in the supply of
property in its own right. It has become an income producing product supply industry.
IV
Offices are built to high specifications and kitted out with the latest
information communications technology. High accommodation requirements are demanded and delivered to modern, highly educated and professional
workforces. If business occupiers requirements are not met, they simply go elsewhere.
To meet this demand, the Scottish property industry has had to adapt and innovate in order to build bigger, better and smarter business premises. For
example, in place of Glasgows once predominant cranes, the riverside is now home to the offices of the international financial services district. Elsewhere in
Glasgow older buildings have been adapted, such as the Category B (grade 2) listed building the City Park office suite developed by the Elphinstone Group,
which has attracted the Dell Corporation among other occupiers.
Yet it is not always possible (or affordable) to adapt and create new workplaces - for professional, corporate and financial services - within Scotlands
major urban centres. The Maxim development on the edge of Glasgow is aimed squarely at this out of town market.
The 21st centurys growth in financial services in Scotland has undoubtedly driven new development, with HBOS and RBS among others becoming
international businesses. With this growth has come demand for huge investment in corporate headquarters. RBSs Gogarburn world HQ covers some 100
acres and is modelled on a covered high street, complete with bookstore, newsagent, Tesco Metro store and restaurants. These standards are far removed
from the professional and public service sectors of yesteryear and represent the new demands the property industry must meet to compete for modern
globalised workforces.
Recent economic headlines, of course, are dominated by the troubles of the financial services sector. The demise of some large US investment banks and
the knock-on consequences for the Scottish financial services sector, demonstrate how a crisis of confidence in one sector can have global consequences.
Also, as major international investment funds have written (or are writing) down their previously booming fund values, there are consequences for the
property industry. Yields are impacted and property demand is reduced. The result is that commercial developers are currently reducing their exposure to
projects and house builders are producing fewer homes.
If the modern economy is in a period of readjustment, with financial power moving to the Far and Middle East, scientific and technological progress
continues apace with Scotland well placed to benefit. Edinburgh, Napier, Heriott Watt and St Andrews have long established reputations. A new wave of
higher education institutions has added modern gloss. Dundee and Tayside Universities are acknowledged centres of world research, Aberdeen has an
enviable lead in energy sciences while Stirling, Glasgow and Paisley excel in social, economic and business qualifications. Universities are now active
Caltongate. Courtesy Mountgrange (Caltongate) Ltd.: www.caltongate.com
Scotlands biggest regeneration plan
Clyde Waterfront is a strategic partnership of the
Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise,
Glasgow City Council, Renfrewshire Council and
West Dunbartonshire Council.
Clyde Waterfront, Atrium Court
50 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 6HQ
+44 (0) 141 229 5423
www.clydewaterfront.com A river of opportunity

200developments
- planned, under construction or completed

15-20year plan
- 13 miles of the Clyde from Glasgow to
Dumbarton

5.6billion
- public & private investment planned

1vision
- to develop a thriving, vibrant River Clyde
with people and communities at its heart
economic drivers, exemplified by Edinburghs and Aberdeens science parks and the proposed Energetica hub at Peterhead. Universities need world class
facilities to compete in a global league and win the best brains and research in the business, whilst producing a modern professional workforce.
PLANNING POLICY AND PUBLIC PRIVATE DEVELOPMENT
The planning system in Scotland has been a constant source of controversy with a prevailing public and private sector view that it was not fit for purpose.
Beginning in 2005, two different Scottish administrations decided reform was needed to achieve cultural change in the use and processes of Scottish
planning, towards more local decision taking, a postponement of the controversial reform of developer contributions, plus a change in coordination of the
various public sector authorities involved in Scotlands development plan making. A common statement of intentions published in late October 2008 has
attempted to chart a new course for the planning system based on a desire to have a planning system intended to facilitate good development.
Even if systemic problems with the planning service are successfully tackled, there are concerns where planning resources are limited and local
development plans out of date. It is vital for future prosperity that these issues are overcome and are not allowed to hinder progress. John Swinney MSP,
speaking for the Scottish Government, has stated that planning reform is not about development at any price but in Delivering Planning Reform
V
he
explicitly calls for culture change in the planning process. Investment in the planning resource of Scotlands local authorities will be vital and, in the midst of
an economic slowdown, we must plan and sow the seeds of future economic growth. Development brings jobs and can drive local economies, as illustrated
by the 1,500 jobs created through the opening of the Almondvale Centre extension in Livingston in October 2008.
Closer relationships have been forged between private and public sector development interests in Scotland, with the public sector now investing directly
in development. Edinburgh has perhaps led the way with its EDI Company. Edinburgh is also part of a joint venture with Scottish Enterprise, the Waterfront
Edinburgh partnership, which is intended to redevelop the Granton harbour area of the city. New urban regeneration companies (URCs) are also being
established across Scotland. Clydebank Rebuilt is one of the largest regeneration projects in Europe, promising 1.6bn of investment into one of Britains
most depressed urban areas.
The Falkirk Gateway project - where the developer Macdonald Estates is in partnership with Falkirk Council - is another example of a medium sized
town being redeveloped through the investment of the private sector.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE PROPERTY INDUSTRY
Connections are vital to a modern economy. In Scotland there is a growing emphasis upon the need for infrastructure - especially transport - which is closely
linked to a number of successful modern developments.
For modern corporate businesses, a citys connections to major destinations and its airport capacity is a vital part of an attractive location package. The
expansion of Edinburgh airport and its surrounding district is of vital strategic importance if global businesses are to be retained in the capital. Glasgows
airport has more capacity, and plans are progressing to improve its rail-air links and provide better direct connections to Edinburgh. If businesses are to
remain attracted to Scotland there is no doubt that airport infrastructure must be substantially improved.
Planning authorities often see the possibilities of improving infrastructure via development, although the current credit environment may make this
more difficult in the foreseeable future. Recently the Scottish Government shelved plans to introduce reform to the planning contributions system because of
the changing financial climate in 2008. This ability to respond quickly to changing economic developments and provide and invest in infrastructure will be
vital. While uncertainty remains over the ability of the public sector to invest in infrastructure, and alternative innovative funding systems are unproven,
economic progress could be delayed.
PROPERTY, HERITAGE AND PLACE MAKING
Burns lived at a time when Edinburghs New Town was significantly redeveloped, producing the foundations of its current setting. In the early 19th century
this building investment was extended to Glasgow where fine Victorian edifices arose to reflect the citys industrial might and leadership of the industrial
revolution. The challenge today is to build on the best of the old to develop modern business space.
Edinburghs St James shopping centre redevelopment is perhaps one of the most prominent (and welcome) initiatives for a number of years, reclaiming
Edinburgh as a core retail destination and widening its retail offering. Mountgranges Caltongate development - highly controversial as it connects with the
Caltongate Arches. Courtesy Mountgrange (Caltongate) Ltd.: www.caltongate.com
Royal Mile - aims to transform a disused bus depot into a mix of retail, leisure and office properties to revitalise the citys core. Likewise, proposals to
overhaul the outdated Haymarket Station at the west end (and redevelop neighbouring land), will radically improve the view of Edinburgh held by long
suffering tourists, commuters to Glasgow and airport travellers.
Developers and protectionists would agree on many of the challenges facing the city. Edinburgh would indeed be mad to abandon the historic
environment within which it is set but neither can the city afford to be overlooked as a viable business location.
PROPERTY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The environment is now a core concern for the development industry and there are now a substantial number of energy efficiency policy initiatives that
impact on the industry directly. From January 2009, a further roll-out of energy performance certificates for commercial properties is intended to better
inform investors and purchasers of Scottish properties. The Scottish Government wishes to build on this policy to reduce emissions from existing commercial
property stock whether or not it is being sold or let. The British Property Federation (BPF) has developed a tool to support better information on a buildings
environmental performance, for the benefit of landlords and tenants.
VI
Also, further European legislation is expected to enhance the energy efficiency policy
framework.
The drive for more energy efficient commercial properties is a chance for developers to make a case for new and better development, and there are
signs that modern Scottish developments are rising to this challenge. The Cube office development by Kilmartin Property Group is one example. The
developer has set out with a design mandate to achieve a BREEAM excellent rating (the highest industry environmental standard) and will maximise the
capture of sunlight, minimise heat loss and incorporate energy efficient lighting systems.
With green factors increasingly prevalent, it is expected that unless a top environmental rating is achieved, modern developments may struggle to find
the best tenants and investors.
ASPIRING TO THE FUTURE
So what role has the commercial property industry in building Scotlands sustainable economic growth and what will influence its future mode of business?
At the risk of over simplifying, we can identify three main challenges for our industry.
The industrys first challenge will be to keep up with the demands of modern businesses. Drivers Jonas (DJ) reports an unsatisfied demand for offices
approaching 700,000ft
2
in Edinburgh alone. DJ note that 72% of this demand is for floorplates of less than 10,000ft
2
.
Beyond predominantly UK or Scottish based businesses, the industry will need to continue to attract and accommodate international companies seeking
to locate in Scotland. The end of the era of debt fuelled economic growth will make it harder to compete for major corporate occupiers but - with the right
mixture of political will, labour force and built environment - it can be done.
The property industrys second challenge will be to re-fit the existing commercial property stock. The Scottish Government is currently consulting on
proposals to enforce mandatory carbon emissions assessments upon existing commercial properties. This will pose major funding challenges, and
Government incentives - as well as regulations - will surely be required if there is to be comprehensive improvement in the energy performance of existing
commercial buildings. Yet the drive for new and efficient energy technologies must be seen as an economic opportunity as well as a regulatory challenge.
Our industrys final challenge is more immediate. Culture change in the planning system will not only be confined to the public sector. Pre-application
engagement with the community is now a statutory part of the development process and the industry needs to be seen to be playing a leading role.
Recent economic shockwaves mean the Scottish development industry of late 2008 and 2009 is facing a much more challenging climate than it did in
2005-08. With finance probably restricted for some time, the property industry will keenly watch the progress of Government policies. Planning reform to
achieve a faster system with better coordinated and up-front engagement with the public sector will be vital. Ensuring an attractive fiscal environment will
also be crucial and even relatively small scale advantages, such as the retention of long term empty property business rate relief in Scotland, can be
important for those who wish to develop or re-develop existing stock. More fundamentally, the return of lending and confidence in the financial sector must
be achieved if economic growth is to be restored.
The speed of change in the economy in recent weeks is phenomenal and unprecedented. The UK Governments compact with major British banks now
means that RBS is 60% owned by the British taxpayer. We do not know the future of Scotlands oldest bank - a pre-Burns Scottish institution - the Bank of
Dell offices Glasgow.
Courtesy of Dell Inc
Scotland. The speed of its proposed acquisition by the Lloyds Group is a timely reminder that Scotland is not immune from the global economy and that we
must compete and be outward looking if we wish to retain and improve our position in a newly interconnected global economy.
Dan Macdonald is Chairman of the Scottish Property Federation.
Dan launched the Scottish Property Development Forum in 2006 - a body representing the interests of the real estate
industry in Scotland - which subsequently became the Scottish Property Federation (SPF). Incorporated within the British
Property Federation (BPF), it is recognised as the voice of the Scottish property industry. The SPF and BPF are helping to
mould policy with regard to new legislation affecting the industry, including the new Planning Act, the National Planning
Framework for Scotland, sustainability issues and other matters.
Dan is also Chief Executive of Macdonald Estates Group, having previously been the founder and Managing Director of
Morrison Developments (1972-1997).
He started his career in the Architects Department of Sutherland County Council and is passionate about seeking vast improvement in
the Scottish built environment and moving planning up the national agenda.
Website: www.scottishpropertyfederation.org.uk.
N.B.: The author would like to thank Andrew Panting, Director of Communications at the British Property Federation and David Melhuish,
Director of the Scottish Property Federation, for their comments on this article.
Footnotes:
I. ED. Daiches, Jones & Jones A Hotbed of Genius : The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730-1790
II. Robert McGeachy, Argyll & Bute 1730
III. GVA Grimley Autumn 2007: The contribution of the Scottish commercial property industry to the Scottish economy (commissioned by the Scottish
Property Federation)
IV. Authors speech to Scottish Government-SPF Planning Summit 28th October, 2008
V. John Swinney MSP. Address to Planning Summit, 28th October 2008
VI. British Property Federation, LES-TER - the landlord energy statement and the tenant energy review (2008) - see www.bpf.org.uk
Medical Research Institute, University of Edinburgh.
Keith Hunter (T:07831 117 980) / Courtesy of BMJ Architects.
AN ENLIGHTENED
APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
By Dr. Campbell Gemmell
The Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century was characterised by enormous strides in science, economics and intellectual
accomplishments. That period was dominated by social change - including the French Revolution and American
independence.
I
am something of a fan of Arthur Herman whose excellent book How the Scots Invented the Modern World first met my eyes in the library of the retreat
of the Johnson Foundation - Frank Lloyd Wrights masterpiece Wingspread - in October 2002. It appeared an overblown claim but it captured my heart
and mind from that moment.
Indeed social democracy, inventiveness and environmentally-based wisdom lie deep in two Scots ploughmen who put Scotland on the world stage -
Robert Burns and John Muir. Playfair, Hume, Smith, Hutton, Hutcheson, Black - great men all and more besides but these two could and rightly do fill many
pages. Taking just the first for now, I feel a strong affinity. My mother was born in Newton-on-Ayr, a short stretch from Alloway. Had I arrived as due I was to
be Robert, arriving 200 years to the day after his birth. I was a day early and I am still unsure as to any regret but his views on education, society, the
establishment, the Scots tongue and the land shaped my parents as well as my own. The love of nature, romanticism and potent observation, bring great
depth to appreciating the environment, plus being well-read (and a host of 2,000 year old issues around religious sects and freemasonry), all come together
towards understanding Scotland and its environment.
Literacy in Scotland in the late 18th century was greater than anywhere else in Europe which made the Scots a ready audience for attitudinal change.
The Kirk had been the root of the literacy but did not mark its bounds. By 1796, the year of Burns death
I
, out of a population of 1.5 million it was surveyed
that nearly 20,000 Scots depended for their livelihood in writing and publishing - and 10,500 on teaching. It was in this climate that Robert Burns delivered
some of his most potent messages, one of which resonates in this new age of Scottish Enlightenment. That message is contained in his poem, To A Mouse:
Im truly sorry mans dominion
Has broken Natures social union,
An justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An fellow mortal! . . .
In this New Enlightenment we need not guess the consequences of Mans dominion over Natures social union. The effects on climate and the
NATURAL RESOURCES & COMMODITIES
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o mice an men
Gang aft agley,
An leae us nought but grief an pain,
For promisd joy!
Still thou are blest, compard wi me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my ee,
On prospects drear!
I guess an fear!
Renewable resources such as Scotlands forestry, act not only as a carbon sink but also as a valuable component in future
reduced-carbon and heat production. Elnur
consequences are well known and heartfelt by the global scientific and environmental community and will be more and more felt by citizens worldwide. Our
foresight demands a call to arms which is heeded by many Scottish institutions and individuals, as we focus our attention on mitigating and adapting to
climate change.
This, of course, includes the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)
II
, the Scottish Environmental Regulator and the non-departmental public
body responsible for controlling - through licensing and monitoring - pollution to air, water and soil. We therefore work closely with most industrial,
development, power, water, waste and land management communities and have strategic links to other agencies, planning authorities and, of course,
government.
Scotlands beautiful environment is our greatest asset and it has, in the main, survived both the 18th century agrarian revolution and subsequent 18th
century industrial revolution, so we are determined that it can be safeguarded and continually improved in the 21st century. However that takes a real New
Enlightenment in the way we work, how regulated industry operates and even how individuals behave. In part of course, it also depends on the global
citizenry, the greatest scale of the common weal.
The Zeitgeist is for proactive initiatives on climate change. We owe that not only to our own environment that is steadily getting warmer and wetter -
with the attendant problems of flooding and flood control, habitat loss and ecosystem migration - but also to the world community because there are places
that are suffering greater drought, crop failure and famine due to industrialised nations activities. So will it be with industrialising nations if they follow any
part of our path, with consequences for us all irrespective of our more local awakenings.
The Scottish Government has thrown down the gauntlet of achieving sustainable economic growth
III
and dramatically improved energy and resource use
which means adopting an enlightened approach to consumption, production, pollution and waste by businesses and individuals alike.
On waste, SEPA is working closely with Government, local authorities and waste management companies to help industries and individuals to reduce
waste, sort it, minimise landfill (and therefore greenhouse gases) and ultimately (through our new Thermal Treatment Guidelines), to use the residual waste
to generate heat and power recovering the inherent value of the material. We must also close all available gaps in the production and consumption loops
where - for example - we currently squander low grade heat from our homes, offices and our factories, something we simply can no longer afford to do.
Something the thrifty Robert Burns would have appreciated alongside his views of the exciseman.
This captures and enhances the public desire to make a real difference to climate change through reduction of greenhouse gases. Recently, SEPA has
been working closely with companies such as Tullis Russell, Diageo and William Grant & Sons, to enable them to deploy deceptively simple yet cutting-edge
Scottish energy solutions for combined heat and power using co-products and for anaerobic digestion of wastes. Given paper and whisky in the fecund roots
and soil of the Scottish enlightenment, this seems wholly appropriate.
Pollution comes from many sources and SEPA has a wide range of mechanisms to monitor and control emissions from industry and agriculture. SEPAs
enlightened approach is increasingly to streamline regulation and improve guidance and support to enable industry and rural economies alike to comply
more readily. We have not only effectively and efficiently introduced a modern system of Controlled Activity Regulations
IV
fit for the 21st century for the
water environment but we are also striving towards a simplified approach generally.
In the salons of Edinburgh and Glasgow and beyond, the nature of the role of government and the unseen guiding hand of the market might have led
to some interesting comparisons with today, where the light touch of regulation on financial markets seems to have been discredited. Moderating the
excesses of unfettered markets especially on such externalities as the air we breathe and the water we drink is perhaps too crucial to be taken lightly.
Scotlands beautiful environment is its greatest asset and must be maintained if
it is to continue hosting its impressive range of indigenous wildlife.
Scottish Wild Cat Graham Taylor
However, there are many ways to regulate in the public interest and consensual partnership and persuasion employing sticks, carrots and other implements
must surely be central to achieving environmental and public health protection, as well as economic development.
SEPA has worked closely with other agencies, through the Scottish Environmental and Rural Services initiative (SEARS)
V
which is both an enlightened
and welcome reduction of the bureaucratic burden on rural business whilst still maintaining vigilance on complex rural pollution issues. It remains important
for Ayrshire and elsewhere in Scotland to prevent agricultural pollution damaging our beaches and coastal waters where its impact combines with sewage
transported in sewers sometimes closer to Burns than to the current day.
Consumption of resources is a key component for sustainable economic growth and SEPA is both encouraging and enabling recycling and recovery
which reduces the need to consume raw materials.
Renewable resources such as Scotlands forestry, act not only as a carbon sink but also as a valuable component in future reduced-carbon and heat
production. However, both individuals and industry can tackle their own consumption and SEPAs policy of internal greening is a valuable exemplar of how
to achieve reductions in consumption
VI
. SEPA plans to replace its Aberdeen facility with a new building which will have the highest BREEAM
VII
environmental
standard and should set standards, alongside best practice elsewhere in the public sector, for environmental efficiency of public buildings.
SEPAs State of the Environment Report in 2006
VIII
set out the need for mitigating and adapting to climate change for global protection and protection of
Scottish communities. The Kyoto Protocol
IX
calls for reduction in greenhouse gases and Scotlands government has an increased commitment to reducing
Scotlands emissions by 80% by 2050 and is incorporating this in a Climate Change Bill
X
. Key elements of this will be the European Union Emissions Trading
Scheme
XI
and the Carbon Reduction Commitment
XII
which are both administered and monitored by SEPA. In addition, SEPA has a keen interest in Carbon
Capture and Storage (CCS)
XIII XIV
which could, when the technology and systems are tested and their long-term viability safeguarded, substantially reduce net
carbon dioxide emissions.
In protecting the Scottish public from the future effects of flooding, SEPA
has contributed to the Draft Flood Management Bill
XV
and advocates an
holistic catchment area approach - which will consider local and wider
consequences of development activity. SEPA is also developing a partnership
approach to planning which - combined with flood risk assessment, urban
flooding and flood warning systems - seeks to allow us all to adapt to and
mitigate flooding impact. We also agree strongly with government that reform
of the planning system - not least to give certainty to developers much more
quickly as well as to achieve good development in the right place - has to be
a priority for public and private effort.
As SEPA has only been in existence for 12 years, it is continually
developing and has conducted research both externally and internally to focus
its services on not only delivering the best environmental protection but also
doing so in a proactive, approachable and collaborative way with its
customers. This enlightened Customer Focus ethos underpins SEPAs enabling
approach to business generally. We must also continue to protect Scotlands
communities, be they cotters or lairds, as well as the land itself.
So to sum up, the new enlightened approach for SEPA overall means that
it is driving forward better and simpler regulation. We strive to understand our
customers better and help and advise them to make the most environmentally
beneficial decisions and comply with the highest standards of environmental
protection.
SEPA is encouraging and driving a more streamlined approach to land
use planning to make the best decisions as expeditiously as possible, and
Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)
works closely with the Scottish Government.
Wind turbine, Scotland. Michael Fuery
therefore making a real contribution to sustainable economic growth for Scotland. In our own estate and by continually improving internal green
performance, SEPA is leading by example.
SEPAs expertise and growing responsibilities in climate change and flood warning and protection, will lead to a much more enlightened approach to
development and planning, safeguarding both human health and property. SEPA is pushing forward to a Scotland closed to environmental abuse but open to
enlightened sustainable economic growth.
We recognise that Natures broken union under Mans dominion can be fixed and we are helping Scotland to adapt and avoid a prospect drear
because we no longer need to guess and fear what the future holds. We have the foresight now to address global climate change and acting in an
enlightened way locally, will contribute to avoiding global grief an pain.
Dr Campbell Gemmell is Chief Executive of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (since 2003).
He joined SEPA in 2001 as Director of Strategic Planning and prior to that was Chief Executive of the Central Scotland
Countryside Trust.
In his earlier career he worked in the fields of economic development and environmental consultancy. During the
1980s he held a post-doc research lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford and was involved in a range of scientific
expeditions and field studies in Alaska, Iceland, Kenya, Norway and Switzerland. Campbell was Chairman of Landwise, part
of the WISE Group, the organisation which broke new ground in getting the unemployed back into work, was a member of
the Scottish Ministerial Forestry for People Panel (promoting improved participation, public access and community forestry generally) and
was also a member of the Scottish Office Ministers Rural Focus Group from 1992-6 and the Ministers Sustainable Development Group
1992/3. Campbell was Chairman of the Dounreay Particles Advisory Group from June 2001 to April 2003 and led the group as it made
significant improvements to knowledge of site history and the future provenance, transport and distribution of particles.
Campbell has a first class honours degree in Geography and a PhD in Glaciology from Aberdeen University.
Website: www.sepa.org.uk.
Footnotes:
I. Herman A (2001) How the Scots Invented the World, 3 Issues Press,
New York
II. http://www.sepa.org.uk/
III. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/SustainableDevelopment
IV. http://www.sepa.org.uk/pdf/wfd/regimes/ car_practical_guide.pdf
V. http://www.sears.scotland.gov.uk/
VI. http://www.sepa.org.uk/green/index.htm
VII. http://www.breeam.org/page_1col.jsp?id=54
VIII. http://www.sepa.org.uk/pdf/publications/state_of/2006/soe_2006.pdf
IX. http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php
X. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Environment/Climate-
Change/16327/Climate-Change-Bill
XI. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/emission/index_en.htm
XII. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/business
/crc/index.htm
XIII. http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/sccs
XIV. http://www.co2storage.org.uk/
XV. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/bills/15-FloodRisk/index.htm
Below: In protecting the Scottish public from the future effects of flooding, SEPA has contributed to the Draft Flood Management Bill and advocates an holistic catchment area approach - which will consider local
and wider consequences of development activity.
THE SCOTTISH OIL AND GAS
CLUSTER: PERFORMANCE
AND PROSPECTS
By Professor Alex Kemp
The Scottish oil and gas cluster is flourishing and making a substantial contribution to the growth of the Scottish economy.
P
rior to 1970, which saw the take-off of North Sea oil related activities in the Central and Northern waters of the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS)
there had been only some limited oil-related activities in Scotland. In particular several drilling platforms had been built on the Clyde at John
Browns shipyard for deployment in the Southern North Sea gas fields. These were relatively small as the waters in the Southern basin were
quite shallow, and the technologies involved were not particularly demanding. Scottish shipyards were also to a limited extent involved in the
building of supply boats from the early days of North Sea oil and gas.
The discovery of several huge oil fields in the first half of the 1970s in the Central and Northern North Seas, including Forties, Brent, Piper, Ninian
and Beryl, transformed the whole offshore market situation which grew at a stupendous pace for some years. In fact total capital investment in the
UKCS on new field developments reached an all-time peak in real terms at this time.
The response of Scottish industry like that of British industry as a whole was mixed. Where there was a clear and direct synergy with existing
activities, and barriers to entry were relatively low, Scottish companies quickly entered the market. Examples were supply boats, supply bases, and
offshore catering. Where the required technologies were unfamiliar the response was more muted. Technological know-how already in the hands of
foreign (often US) companies gave the latter a competitive advantage and in effect constituted a barrier to entry. A further factor was the tendency
for the North Sea operators to keep with tried and trusted suppliers.
At this time the top priority (shared with the UK Government) was to bring the fields on stream as fast as possible. Cost was sometimes
secondary to the achievement of first oil. In these circumstances the less risky option was to contract with established suppliers that had a record of
reliable quality and delivery times. Some unfortunate experiences with delivery dates of production platforms and other equipment with new entrants
confirmed some operators in this viewpoint.
Designing, constructing and installing the large steel and concrete platforms for the giant Forties, Brent, Piper, Ninian and Beryl fields, represented
an enormous achievement. Unlike the developments in the shallow waters of the Southern Basin, the deeper waters with large waves and high winds
in Central and Northern waters involved the development of new technologies.
While foreign contractors played a key role, partnerships were forged with British/Scottish companies which resulted in a very substantial UK
content and paved the way for the longer term involvement of Scottish-based companies. There was, of course, a locational advantage in Scotland
with respect to the construction yards, especially where concrete platforms were required. In other areas involving higher level technologies the
ENERGY
Offshore platform off the coast of Scotland. Yvan
locational factor was not so important, and Scottish companies found it more difficult to enter the market and compete effectively.
The Offshore Supplies Office (OSO) - established in 1973 to ensure that British companies had full and fair opportunity to compete in the offshore
market - was very active with respect to not only the North Sea opportunities but also to overseas offshore oil markets. Its endeavours helped to raise the
British share of the North Sea market and sometimes facilitated the overcoming of the perceived barriers to entry faced by Scottish companies. The
introduction of research and development plans in Britain as an assessment criterion for applicants for new petroleum licences, helped to an extent in
developing indigenous R&D capabilities.
In any case the Scottish oil and gas cluster grew substantially with investment and production in the UKCS into the 1980s. Gradually the penetration of
Scottish companies increased into the segments of the market involving more sophisticated technologies in offshore engineering and reservoir-related work.
The oil price collapse to US$10 a barrel in 1986 was a traumatic event for the Scottish oil cluster. New field development activities and exploration were
enormously curtailed. By world standards the North Sea is a high cost region resulting from the difficult operating environment, and it was very difficult for
new projects to remain viable and competitive with other lower cost regions of the world.
Many companies in the cluster drew lessons from the downturn in the North Sea. Diversification was pursued, both geographically and industrially. For
some time the more far-sighted companies had ventured into overseas oil-related markets, but, understandably, the more cautious had felt that the risks and
entry costs were too high. Others diversified into non-oil-related activities to reduce their reliance on what was viewed as a volatile market.
The recovery of the industry after the oil price collapse was greatly complicated by the Piper Alpha disaster in July 1988 which necessitated large
priority expenditures on safety enhancement. In the early 1990s with oil prices still relatively low, the industrys net cash flows became negative.
However, the number of new field developments grew rapidly thereafter, providing major opportunities for the oil cluster. Many of the new
developments involved subsea systems, and the growing expertise in this sector - nurtured by agencies such as Scottish Enterprise - became increasingly
important. In fact the whole subsea technology segment can be regarded as a major success story of the whole Scottish oil and gas cluster.
The year 1998 saw another collapse in the oil price to around US$10 a barrel but on this occasion the industry was much better prepared. In the early
1990s the cost-reducing initiative - termed CRINE (Cost Reducing Initiative for the new Era) - had not only reduced costs substantially but had resulted in
the oil cluster becoming more internationally competitive. So when the North Sea market declined in 1998-1999 many more oil-related companies (including
a considerable number of SMEs) ventured into overseas markets. Because of the expertise developed in the North Sea, many succeeded in overcoming the
barriers to entry in markets which could be regarded as risky and difficult. These have included West Africa, Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
The peaking of production in the UKCS in 1999 and the subsequent decline in North Sea output has not held back the development of the cluster. In
recent years the large increase in oil prices has stimulated substantial extra investment in both exploration and field developments. Total investment
increased from 4bn in 2004 to around 6.6bn in 2007 (at 2007 prices). A considerable part of this reflected dramatic cost inflation which in turn has meant
that the oil and gas-related cluster of companies has received major benefits. In this period the hiring rates for key services (such as drilling rigs) and the
prices of key commodities (such as steel) have soared, reflecting the worldwide increase in demand.
It can safely be claimed that the size of the Scottish oil and gas cluster has now attained critical mass and is internationally competitive. The
availability of a wide range of relevant services (external economies) means that the cluster is an attraction to investors beyond the proximity of the UKCS
market. This has been manifested in recent years by the decisions of several large companies (including foreign-owned ones) to establish offices to cater for
export-related activities. Thus Chevron has established a technology company to provide R&D services to its sister companies in the Eastern hemisphere.
Similarly Halliburton, Weatherford, and Subsea 7 have developed new facilities geared to export markets. The fears that the cluster would suffer as a
consequence of declining physical production and the branch economy syndrome have not materialised.
Meanwhile there is increasing evidence of the international competitiveness of the cluster. Accordingly, since 2000 the value of exports from the Scottish
cluster has more than doubled. Exports as a proportion of total turnover are now 37% compared to only 20% in 1999. Subsea UK the trade association for
the subsea sector, reports that exports now constitute well over 50% of the turnover of its members.
In terms of employment the current total contribution of the cluster in Scotland is now around 150,000. This includes direct, indirect and induced
employment. It should be noted that wage and salary levels in the sector are relatively high in this sector and that advanced technologies are employed.
Both add to the impact of the cluster on the economy.
ENERGY
Oil industry ship in Aberdeen harbour. Bertrand Collet
Safety.
Efficiency.
Cost Reduction.
Environment.
Interested?
www.surfaceactive.com
NON DESTRUCTIVE
TESTING AND INSPECTION
Oil, gas and petrochemical exploration, manufacture
and distribution facilities
Steel construction for buildings, bridges, tunnels,
cranes, dams, locks
Overland Pipelines
Storage tanks, LNG plants, refineries
Pipe lay barges and reeled flow lines
Spool bases
Offshore production platforms
Pressure vessels
Oil & Nuclear Decommissioning
Renewable energies, wind, tidal and wave power
Scotia Automated Inspection
Services Limited
7 Fyrish Way, Alness, IV17 0PJ.
Tel:+44 1349 884000
www.sais-ltd.co.uk
A fresh approach to inspection
Helping local, national and international structural, nuclear, renewable energy and pipeline
construction companies to achieve the highest quality standards.
The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of low cost has been forgotten.
In partnership with to provide quality services
Some of the technologies developed for the oil and gas industry are now also being deployed in other activities including renewable energy. An
interesting example relates to the construction of facilities for windfarms. For instance the development of the two large windmills for deployment in the
Moray Firth in the vicinity of the Beatrice field involved work for Burntisland Fabricators in Fife (construction of the jackets) and other work at the yards near
Stornoway as well as at Nigg in Easter Ross. All these yards were formerly used for constructing jackets and modules for use in oil and gas production. The
further growth of the offshore wind industry offers further opportunities to transfer and deploy technologies from the oil and gas cluster.
Looking ahead the challenge for the oil and gas sector is to find ways to economically develop the large number of small fields which will increasingly
be a dominant feature of the industry. The average size of new developments in the UKCS is now around 20 million barrels of oil equivalent with the most
likely being less than this. Where a small field is close to existing infrastructure a development may well be viable, especially if there is a coincidence of
ownership, but if the field is distant from infrastructure a viable development is more problematic, even in an era of relatively high prices.
The other main area of increasing activity relates to incremental investments in mature fields. The recovery factor in the mature fields now averages
around 50% for oil fields and 75% for gas fields. There is therefore scope for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) schemes of various types which in principle can
add very substantial volumes to ultimate recovery. However sophisticated EOR schemes are expensive to deploy in offshore situations, so they will require a
sustained period of high oil prices and/or tax incentives to render them viable. Yet the overall remaining potential is very substantial, involving over 20
billion barrels of oil equivalent compared to the 38 billion produced to date.
The development of large numbers of small fields and the successful execution of EOR schemes will depend on the skills, hard work, and imagination of
project teams incorporating multiple skills. The industry is currently experiencing skill shortages at various levels which is holding back the execution of
projects and adding to the cost inflation. Various initiatives are currently being taken to solve the problem with OPITO (the Oil and Gas Academy) playing a
prominent facilitating role. Spreading recognition of the exciting work opportunities in what is still an industry with a long term future, should go some way
to enticing talent into the industry at levels of technician, new graduate and experienced graduate. The Scottish Government can also play a useful
promotional role in helping to solve the skills problem.
As fields come to the end of their lives other opportunities for the cluster will emerge in relation to the decommissioning of the installations. The
expenditures relating to this will in due course become very large. Estimates recently made by the present author suggest that by 2035 the accumulated
total could exceed 26bn at 2008 prices. Competition with Norwegian sites and with engineering contractors from several countries is substantial but the
longer term rewards will be substantial for the successful.
In sum, the oil and gas sector - both in the UKCS and worldwide - offers ample opportunities to the Scottish oil cluster but turning the potential into
achievement will involve much imaginative use of the multiple skills required.
Alexander G. Kemp is currently Professor of Petroleum Economics at the University of Aberdeen. He was formerly Lecturer,
Senior Lecturer and Reader. He previously worked for Shell, the University of Strathclyde and the University of Nairobi. For
many years he has specialised in his research in petroleum economics with special reference to licensing and taxation
issues. He has published over 200 papers and books on this field, including Petroleum Rent Collection Around the World,
Institute for Research on Public Policy, (Canada), 1988. For many years he has been a consultant on petroleum contracts
and legislation to a large number of Governments, the World Bank, the United Nations, various oil companies, the
European Commission, the UK Know-How Fund and the Commonwealth Secretariat. He was a specialist adviser to the UK
House of Commons Select Committee on Energy from 1980 to 1992.
He is an editorial adviser to a number of energy and other academic/professional journals. In 1993 he was appointed by the Minister of
Energy to the UK Government Energy Advisory Panel. Professor Kemp has been appointed Official Historian by the Prime Minister to write
the Official History of North Sea Oil and Gas. In May 1999, Professor Kemp was awarded the Alick Buchanan-Smith Memorial Award for
personal achievement and contribution to the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry.
He is Director of Aberdeen University Petroleum and Economic Consultants (AUPEC) which provides consultancy services in petroleum
economics. Professor Kemp is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded the OBE
in 2006 for services to the oil and gas industries and is a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers to the First Minister.
ENERGY
Aberdeen harbour. Bertrand Collet
SCOTLAND: IN THE
VANGUARD OF RENEWABLE
ENERGY SOLUTIONS
By Andrew Jamieson
Energy is becoming the most talked about issue impacting on life, work and home in Scotland. Whether it is the debate on
how to tackle climate change, how to cope with the fluctuating price of fuel to power and heat homes and workplaces, or
how to replace large-scale power stations, the move to a sustainable solution through renewable energy is central.
T
he widening of the debate to include sustainable travel and heating alongside electricity generation is long overdue and provides new challenges and
opportunities for the renewable energy industry to overcome and capture in the years ahead.
Scotland is ideally placed in the vanguard of Europes goal for a cleaner, greener energy supply by 2020. With its windswept coastline, mountains and
high precipitation, Scotland is blessed with abundant natural resources and wind, wave and tide account for over 80% of its renewable energy potential. As
the world looks to address climate change and reduce the use of fossil fuels, Scotlands renewable energy sector is taking a lead in the future provision of
sustainable energy. It is focusing on developing the potential offered by windfarms, hydroelectricity plant, biomass, solar technology, landfill gas, wave and
tidal, alongside ground and air sources of heat to deliver a range of economic and environmental benefits.
The European Union, the UK and Scottish Governments have all articulated clear targets for what needs to be achieved by 2020 and beyond. As each
day passes and more government thinking is revealed through consultation, action and achievement, the detail of the routes to a low carbon economy is
helping businesses establish their own direction. The Scottish Governments target is to provide 31% of Scottish electricity demand from renewables by 2011
- equivalent to approximately 5,000MW of installed capacity - and subsequently to achieve 50% by 2020. Scotland has the potential to provide 25% of
Europes wind power, 25% of tidal power and 10% of its wave power.
There have been stumbling blocks in Scotlands renewable progress however, the 1980s saw the testing and development of wind power but other
European countries took the lead in providing the right incentives for new technology and captured global markets. The lessons from this era are crucial in
considering exciting new technologies in the wave and tidal energy sectors that could see Scotland leading the research, development and commercial
application that will deliver progress well beyond 2020.
The Scottish Government has created a 10m (US$20m) Saltire challenge prize for advances in clean energy, the worlds largest ever single prize for
innovation in marine renewables. Announced by First Minister Alex Salmond in Washington DC in April 2008 and launched in December 2008, this global
initiative reflects the importance of these technologies and the important position of Scotland in their progress.
One thing that Scotland certainly has plenty of is wind, with around a quarter of Europes wind resource. It is only natural that Scotland seeks to tap
this potential in an environmentally acceptable manner. Wind energy does - and will increasingly in the future - make a significant contribution to electricity
generation in Scotland, with a substantial role to play in meeting the Scottish Governments renewable electricity targets for 2020. This will involve the
continued development of onshore windfarms and new progress on offshore wind farms. Recently The Crown Estate - which owns the sea bed - has received
ENERGY
Crystal Rig windfarm, Dunbar, East Lothian.
expressions of interest from 14 companies or consortia to build 23 offshore wind farms in Scottish waters out to a distance of 12 nautical miles. Crucial to
these offshore ambitions for both marine and wind energy will be the transfer of skills and knowledge gained from the decades of pioneering work in the
North Sea oil and gas industry to the offshore environment for renewables.
Water power has long been used as a natural energy resource in Scotland and was the location for one of the worlds first applications of hydro
electricity in the 19th century. Hydro power now continues to underpin renewable power generation in Scotland, remaining integral to future electricity
generation. The great UK state hydro power developments of the 1950s and 1960s heralded the modern age of renewable energy in Scotland and now, half
a century later, schemes such as the 100MW Glen Doe Hydro Scheme show once again that there is a strong future for the technology. A recent assessment
has shown that a 50% increase in hydro power capacity could be added in the years leading up to 2020, providing a new chapter in the story of Scottish
hydro.
There is a wealth too of organic materials in Scotland that provide the essential biomass feedstock to produce bioenergy (heat, electricity or biofuels).
These include forestry materials, wood chips and sawdust from sawmills, crops such as oilseed rape, barley and willow, plus untreated wood from industry
and biodegradable residues from the agricultural, municipal, commercial and industrial sectors.
Over 50% of Scotlands energy usage is in heating our homes and businesses and with over a third of Scotland off the mains gas supply network, a big
challenge for Scotland in meeting our energy needs lies in reducing our consumption and moving to renewable sources of heat. The biomass industry is
making good progress from fuel supply to the installation of technology and has the potential to be worth over 500m in Scotland, if even modest targets
for renewable heating can be met.
Scotlands role in an interdependent European family of nations facing major global challenges requires a new focus in the years ahead. Our ability to
connect directly with our neighbours by trading electricity will become an important form of interdependence as we increase the delivery of renewable
energy right across Europe. Right now our industry is catching up fast with our European neighbours on the development and roll out of technologies such
as biomass while gearing up to maximise our strengths in emerging technologies such as marine.
We can look to our past for inspiration on the development of hydro, we can learn too from our oil and gas industries and ensure that Scotlands
renewable industry is at the heart of the debate and the action to tackle climate change and deliver energy security.
Andrew Jamieson is Chairman of Scottish Renewables. He is also the Head of Renewables for ScottishPower
Renewables, having held key roles in engineering, marketing and financial planning since joining ScottishPower
in 1988.
From 1997 to 2004 Andrew led ScottishPowers Investor Relations department, communicating with institutional
shareholders and analysts around the globe.
In 2004 he took up the post of Renewables Business Development Director at ScottishPower and is responsible for
the companys policy for - and pipeline of - renewable energy projects as Head of Renewables, ScottishPower Renewables.
Andrew has been a Board Member of the Scottish Renewables Forum (SRF) since 2004 was and appointed Chairman in April 2007.
Websites: www.scottishrenewables.com
www.spreg.co.uk.
ENERGY
Working mill in the Scottish countryside
near East Linton. Susan Mackenzie
ENGINEERING
Forth Rail Bridge.
Susan Mackenzie
SCOTLANDS
PIONEERING ROLE IN
WORLD ENGINEERING
By Dr. Peter Hughes
Scotland has a history of engineering stretching back to before the industrial revolution, at which time the early
industrialists began to flourish in the early part of the 19th century.
I
nitially there was a preponderance of heavy industries which included shipbuilding, locomotive construction and general engineering. Abundant
supplies of iron ore and coal across the central belt of the country meant that the furnaces and forges were in constant use, ensuring a continuous
output of products destined for the growing world markets and high levels of employment.
Between 1870 and the start of the First World War, the Clyde shipyards produced almost a fifth of the worlds ships and by the 1930s John Browns
yard in Clydebank had built two of the great Cunard liners, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth.
At the start of the 20th century Scotland was also one of Europes leading car production centres which included three names Argyll, Albion and
Arrol-Johnston. Only the Albion name remains at Scotstoun.
Among the pioneers of Scottish engineering I have to mention James Watt, whose development of the mainly inefficient early steam engine is the
stuff of legend. His decision to have a separate condensing vessel resulted in a faster, safer and more fuel-efficient version of the engine.
His engines were initially used to pump water for Cornish tin and copper mines but later made their mark in the numerous cotton mills in the north
west of England. Eventually the power was extended from these static structures and used to power steam trains.
A 19th century engineer whose work is still in daily use today is Sir William Arrol who designed and built the Forth Bridge. He was also responsible
for the Replacement Tay Bridge and Londons Tower Bridge, all of which were completed before the turn of the 20th century.
Arrol was knighted in 1890 for his extensive and ingenious work within the engineering industry.
Two other giants of the engineering world were Lord Kelvin who is recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern physics and John Logie Baird
who at the age of 34 began his quest to develop television, giving the first public demonstration of his machine in 1926.
He developed a system of colour television in 1928 which formed the basis of the technique used by NASA to bring live colour pictures from the
moon.
THE PRESENT DAY
The current economic situation in Scotland is just as buoyant as it was last century - though demonstrating a more extensive range of skills and product
range.
One of the current shipyards on the Clyde is BVT Surface Fleet Limited. Some of the high profile successes of these Clyde yards include the launch of
ENGINEERING
The giant Finniston crane and the bridges over the
River Clyde, Glasgow. Iain Frazer
the Destroyer HMS Dauntless a Type45 Destroyer and its sister ship HMS Daring. They are also currently developing and manufacturing the new range of
UK Aircraft Carriers in conjunction with Babcock Marine and Thales.
BVT delivers across the whole lifecycle of these ships from design and manufacture to in-service support and disposal. A recent study by the Fraser of
Allander Institute revealed that the Clyde based yard contributed more than 238 million to the Scottish economy and supports 4,500 jobs, demonstrating
just how important the shipbuilding industry continues to be for Scotland.
The byword for excellence, Rolls-Royce, first started production of aero engines at their giant Hillington plant in the 1930s, specifically the Merlin engine
which powered the famous World War Two Spitfire fighter aircraft.
In 1965 Hillington became a compressor factory and in 2002 the company relocated to a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility at Inchinnan. It is the
global centre of excellence for compression system components where more than 1,000 skilled workers produce compressor blades and seals for Rolls-Royce
aero engines.
Another internationally renowned Scottish company which started life at Cathcart in Glasgow is The Weir Group whose name has been synonymous
with engineering throughout the world for more than 150 years.
The company provides a wide range of products and services covering mining and power, including oil and gas. It offers solutions in mining and mineral
processing across various industrial sectors. In other fields it provides pumping solutions for power generation, water and hydrocarbon processing projects
and up-to-the-minute support on a global basis.
In the defence sector Thales Optronics maintains its position at the forefront of developing surveillance systems. This company was originally Barr and
Stroud which was formed in 1888 by two eminent professors Archibald Barr and William Stroud whose first major product was a range finder which was
used by armies and navies throughout the world.
They then went on to produce a wide range of highly sophisticated optical and mechanical systems used for - among other things - submarine
periscopes. The company is a world-class designer and manufacturer of electro-optical equipment providing innovative optical solutions for the next
generation of defence requirements on land, at sea and in the air. The Glasgow operation continues to specialise in range finders, submarine periscopes and
optical masks for the worlds defence forces.
A relative newcomer on the manufacturing scene is Allied Vehicles which has a turnover of 44 million meeting the motoring needs of private and
business users by offering vehicles for able bodied and disabled customers.
It is a privately owned company specialising in adapting vehicles for wheelchair access, as taxis and providing after-sales service. The company employs
more than 300 people and works with a wide range of manufacturing partners including Peugeot, Mercedes-Benz, Renault and Ford.
Looking to improve the environment, Clyde Blowers design and manufacture devices that remove the deposits that accumulate on the heat transfer
surfaces of coal and oil fired boilers. In the 1920s the company produced blowers for use on marine and land boilers in steam ships and railways. Later they
established relations with marine boiler designers including Yarrows and John Browns whose famous ships were fitted with water tube boilers fitted with
Clyde soot blowers.
Since being taken over in the early 1990s by Jim McColl, the company has grown organically and through a number of acquisitions including
Bergemann GMBH and the Gattegno Soot Blower Company which between them held 28% of the global soot blowing market. Their recent US$1 billion
acquisition in the USA dramatically grew the company such that it now employs 5,000 people worldwide and has an annual turnover of 1.2 billion.
THE FUTURE
As Burns himself wrote, And forward though I canna see, I hope and fear. The Scottish engineering manufacturing has undergone what can only be
described as dramatic change in the last half century. It certainly looks forward with a lot of hope and very few fears.
The former domination of the so called heavy engineering sector has been replaced by a significant number of high tech organisations making use of
the highly skilled graduates produced by our universities.
Engineering advances have allowed the sector to expand into many areas which would previously not have been considered as old-style engineering.
Typical examples are in the medical and bio-science field with companies like Lifescan, SAFC Biosciences, Andersen Caledonia, Grannus Bioscience, Bioforce
UK and Bausch & Lomb.
ENGINEERING
Falkirk Wheel, Scotland.
Terry Kettlewell
Even our traditional shipbuilding has
undergone radical change and dockyards on the
Clyde and at Rosyth now work together using
new modular construction techniques to
produce the best naval vessels in the world.
A worker transported from the 1950s into
a modern factory would find his workplace
virtually unrecognisable. The introduction of
lean programmes coupled with numerous other
systems aimed at improving production,
throughput and quality, have resulted in
streamlined operations which are cleaner, tidier
and safer than ever before.
Currently our Scottish universities punch
well above their weight in terms of UK research
incomes and this augurs well for the future,
providing Scottish companies with access to the
very latest developments. The adoption of the
Knowledge Transfer Partnership schemes has
brought academics closer to business
organisations with the result that company
executives have come to realise universities are
not just populated by eggheads living in their
ivory towers.
Despite the loss of areas such as bulk steel production, cars, vacuum cleaners and sewing machines, we are still producing the best buses in the world
at Alexander Dennis, excellent taxis at Allied Vehicles and amazing earth moving equipment at Terex Equipment Ltd, and outstanding electronic components
at National Semiconductor.
The predicted demise of the North Sea oil and gas sector has been shown to be somewhat premature and as techniques are constantly improving for
extracting oil and gas, the North Sea will continue to have a significant impact for several decades to come even if there is a reduction in overall volume
produced.
Against that background it can be seen that Scottish engineering manufacturing remains optimistic and continues to work hard to overcome the
inevitable pressures emanating from global competition.
I have often heard members of the old school bemoan the fact that Scotland no longer does the things for which it was famous throughout the 20th
century. My response to that has been, we are no longer in the 20th century we are now in the 21st century. Thank goodness we have risen to the challenge.
Dr. Peter T. Hughes OBE FREng FIMMM is Chief Executive of Scottish Engineering.
Peter was educated at Wishaw High School, Coatbridge Technical College, University of Strathclyde and Dundee
University.
He was Chairman and Managing Director of Glencast Ltd, Leven (winners of Queens Award for Technological
Achievement 1990).
He is Chief Executive of Scottish Engineering and is also a Member of Strathclyde University Court. He has a passion
for engineering which he has shared with over 60,000 pupils over the past 10 years.
ENGINEERING
The byword for excellence, Rolls-Royce first started production of aero engines at their giant Hillington plant in the 1930s
specifically the Merlin engine which powered the WWII Spitfire fighter aircraft. The Rolls-Royce strategy for technology today is to
invest once and use many times, a strategy that is proving beneficial across the whole range of aero industrial and marine gas
turbines. Rolls-Royce plc 2006
I
t quickly established itself as one of
the rst global centres of excellence
to deliver technology transfer between
the academic and commercial worlds and
to provide research and education services
to the microelectronics community. As
a collaboration between four leading
UK universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow,
Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde), iSLI is an
intermediary for the commercial sector to
reach academia and vice versa, enabling
the free ow of information between
academics and industry. The Institute
provides masters (MSc) and doctoral (EngD)
level post-graduate education, continuing
professional development, leading edge
research access and design consultation
to the commercial sector. With its own
design team specialising in development
of wireless sensor networks and optical
MEMS research, iSLI is about making
technology relevant and attractive to the
commercial sector to enable the success
of new companies and next generation
products.
iSLI is at the heart of MEMS and
integrated microsystems development
in the UK following a successful bid to
establish a publicly accessible design
centre called iDesign. As part of the
UK Department of Trade and Industry
MNT network, iDesign provides the
commercial sector with access to expertise
and knowledge transfer for the rapid
development of product prototypes. iSLI is
also working within SCIMPS, the Scottish
Consortium in Integrated Micro-Photonic
Systems, to address the challenges in
combining MEMS, microuidics, optics and
electronics to enable a new generation of
integrated technology solutions. Linking
both of these with the Semefab silicon
foundry provides advanced integrated
MEMS prototyping solutions, suitable for
high volume production so companies
are now provided with the opportunity not
only to have their product researched,
developed and designed but also taken
through to manufacture.
Working with Ultra-BCF Electronics and
other leaders in UK aerospace, to improve
the maintenance of aircraft by enabling in-
ight monitoring, iSLI is developing MEMS
sensors and methods for transmitting
data robustly and wirelessly to a central
hub for transfer to the avionics systems.
Existing technology monitors systems on
the ground, requiring the plane to be out
of service. Achieving a new monitoring
capability could eliminate this problem and
make aircraft much easier and cheaper to
operate and maintain.
To help smaller rms move up the
electronics value chain and incorporate
leading edge technologies into their
products, iSLI delivers commercial support
through the Electronics Design Support
Service (EDSS) programme, co-application
for development grants and directly
contracted R&D support. The Institute also
offers a software hub with free access to
advanced industry design tools, facilitated
by partnerships with leading EDA vendors.
Such an approach with start-up Ewgeco
took its utility monitoring unit from concept
to a fully functional demonstrator system,
forming the basis of a product launch held
at iSLI and placement in the Carbon Neutral
Home.
Scotland has a strong presence in
microelectronics and systems design.
Companies such as EPSON, National
Semiconductor, Wolfson and Xilinx are all
testimony to this. By working in partnership
with leading multinational companies and
universities to provide cutting edge support
to businesses from start-ups and spin-
outs to large international corporations,
iSLI is endorsing Scotlands reputation
for strength in electronics technologies.
Investment in collaborative projects with
iSLI can not only open opportunities to the
best science and engineering graduates
and research outcomes, but also facilitate
the path for future business innovation
and success.
www.sli-institute.ac.uk
iSLI is endorsing Scotlands
reputation for strength in
Electronics technologies
With a remit to support the
research and development of
electronics systems design
in Scotland and across the
world, the Institute for System
Level Integration (iSLI) was
established in 1998 at the
Alba Campus in Livingston.
Excellence in Systems
Research and Knowledge
Transfer
MAIN PICTURE: Dynamic
Analysis of a Novel MEMS
Sensor
BELOW: Integrated 3-Axis
Accelerometer with Sensing
Electronics on Board
BELOW: Wireless
Sensor Platform
Prototype
A SMALL NATION GIVES
RICHES TO THE WORLD
By Professor John Roulston
Some of the great thoughts that shaped the modern world stirred first in the minds of Scotsmen. When Rabbie Burns said
The Mans the gowd for a that, little did he see the inspiration of the phrase in the socialist world or how it would
endear his sentiments to so many people, in so many distant places and over such a span of time.
H
is counterpart in science, in the sense of universal acclaim, has to be James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). A Christian gentleman of enquiring mind and
caring nature, Maxwell contributed to the world, a gift of unimaginable proportion.
It was the age of maturing classical science. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) had spoken and put the planets in order, with his monumental theory of
gravitation. Not that Newton, or anyone even to the present day, could explain why such things work, but merely how they work and how to anticipate and
harness their workings. Focusing on the how question has led us to tremendous value in the sense of moving society into a technological framework, which
sustains life more abundant, more imaginative, creative and fulfilling for more of the planet than could ever have been the case without it.
We must embrace technology. Only 7% of our planet is capable of supporting human life without it. We have no choice but to adhere to the dictum of
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), speaking of the ascent of man, when he proclaimed that technology may bring us problems by its misuse, but it brings us
solutions too and we must always be confident of its power to bring solutions.
If I say that all of the modern age is based on technology that springs from Maxwell, I would be in the good company of Albert Einstein and Richard
Feynman, household names, Nobel laureates, sculptors of the post classical scientific age, successors of Newton and admirers of Maxwell.
What did Maxwell do? Well, first he lived at an important time, in Scotland, post- Enlightenment, in the glow of its intellectual influence. Michael
Faraday (1791-1867) in London, Carl Fredrich Gauss (1777-1855) and Wilhelm Weber (1804-1891) in Germany and Andr-Marie Ampre (1775-1836) in
Paris, had separately attacked the problem of understanding electrical phenomena, all in the wake of Newton.
Newton gave the formulae for gravitational force. He described it as action at a distance. So successful were the predictions based on Newtons theory
that no-one could argue with it. It coloured the understanding of electrical phenomena that also concerned forces, the attraction and repulsion of electrically
activated bodies. That magnetism and electricity were somehow closely related had been amply demonstrated. Ampre saw that an electric current flowing
in a conductor caused a force to act on a magnet. Faraday saw that moving a magnet near an electrical conductor caused a current to flow while the
magnet was moving and - excellent experimenter that he was - he knew that the current depended on the rapidity of movement.
Faraday first used the term field to describe the mechanism of influence of the magnet on the conductor. It was not a popular thought; it flew in the
face of Newton; it was not action at a distance in the Newtonian sense. Faraday, self-taught, of humble origin and lacking the mathematical equipment to
put his ideas into the language of scholars, might well have been ignored had it not been for Maxwell.
Maxwell, educated at Edinburgh Academy, a brilliant scholar - for a time lecturer at Aberdeen - made his mark in London and Cambridge. He did his
ELECTRONICS
Alex Fergusson MSP at the unveiling of the James Clerk Maxwell statue outside of the Royal Society, Edinburgh, on
25th November 2008. Photographer Gary Doak. Courtesy of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
ELECTRONICS
most profound thinking at his family estate in Glenlair, Galloway,
bordering the territory of the Bard. It is said of Maxwell, in his youth,
that his sense of enquiry knew no bounds. He experimented, he
investigated, he wrestled with nature, he often said but whats the go
o that, whats the particular go of it? He meant, of course, how does
it really work, deep down, what is its nature, what laws govern it?
Maxwells science touched many fields, from the theory of colour
(he made the first colour projection) to analytic methods for civil
engineering structures, to thermodynamics and the laws that govern the
motion of gas molecules. He should be celebrated even without his
greatest contribution to the world which was the theory of
electrodynamics (1864), unifying electricity and magnetism. In an age of
confusion, he was to pull together what was understood from the work
of others, to recognise the superiority of Faradays field, and to cast
that in a mathematical framework, inventing - by dint of brilliant,
inexplicable mathematical insight - the missing factor, the unperceived,
unmeasured, yet unknown missing factor that completed the riddle of
electricity and magnetism. For engineers and physicists, Maxwells
equations became the most beautiful and symmetric set of equations
that have ever emblazoned a students T-shirt.
They gave us all of electrical science. Without their wisdom, we are
in the dark ages; no telephony, no radio, no electronics, no photonics, no
internet, no computers, no air travel, no space-craft, no radar, no MRI
scanners, a lot less industry and really no technology as we know it.
More than that, he saw - as a mathematical consequence of his
formulation of the equations - that magnetic and electric phenomena could propagate as waves and that their speed of propagation was in fact the speed
of light. He saw that light is an electro-magnetic wave. Some quarter of a century elapsed before Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) in Germany provided the
experimental proof of Maxwells prediction.
It is immensely pleasing to see, after such a long time, the public tribute paid to Maxwell in the city of Edinburgh by the statue recently erected in
George Street.
What of the present? The electrical science legacy in Scotland, epitomised by Maxwell, but including such giants as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)
(1824-1907), physicist and engineer, and latterly Sir Robert Watson-Watt (1892-1973) of war-time radar fame, led to a culture of science-based education
and socio-economic value flowing from it.
The strength comes from the breadth of the technical knowledge base that stems from our universities. Scotland still teaches the world in electrical
science, from microwaves and lasers, to photonics and signal processing. The result is myriad companies at the forefront of their chosen niche, be it
exploitation of optics for medical instrumentation, microwaves in surgery, lasers in defence, signal processing in communications. We have given the world
the ubiquitous CMOS camera. Diverse chips designed in Edinburgh are in pockets in Tokyo, Seoul, Los Angeles and Beijing and major American defence
companies purchase our high value airborne radars and lasers.
We are also surrounded by industry based loosely on electronics, but more accurately based on electrical science, for which electronics has long been a
convenient pseudonym. More and more opportunities for innovation come from the ability to put together complementary strands of knowledge from
diverse disciplines. We see this in evidence in bio-informatics at Edinburgh and in genetics and molecular biology in Dundee, disciplines growing on the
engineering concepts of information, entropy and coding theory familiar in the science of electronic communications.
The spin-in value to modern medicine, public security, genetics and emerging biology from the science of electronics, far belies the commodity image of
electronics as cheap, versatile, convenient and produced in China with an American or Japanese brand name.
There is a real threat to the knowledge base on which future innovation relies unless the importance of electrical science is recognised strategically as
an engine of emerging technologies. This is why for instance, the thrust today in Electronics Scotland (the industry trade association), is to make the
knowledge picture clear for decision makers in Scotland. It is the thrust of the Electronics Knowledge Transfer network across the UK. It is a policy goal of
the powerful Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) with 10,000 members in Scotland alone and more than 10 times that worldwide.
We have a vibrant, export-led economy based on small innovative companies that attract international investment. Most of these embed electronics in
the commodity sense, but they also innovate on the basis of electrical science which electronics has for so long fostered and protected.
The inevitable migration of the centre of gravity of commodity electronics supply to Asia and beyond must not be allowed - through neglect - to destroy
the intrinsic knowledge base on which we have grown socially and economically. Our universities are educating many foreign students in electrical
engineering. Some work in Scotland for a few years and will go home to make their world richer with what they have learned from us. All this is excellent,
provided that when (in mid-career) they turn back to us - their teachers - for cooperation and partnerships, we have retained the scientific excellence to
contribute to the expanding opportunities that hosting them has brought.
We may have pride in having given the world electrodynamics, but retaining our superiority in electrical science will be a discriminant that will rank us
in the harsh economics of the world of tomorrow. Our challenge is to maintain our own stock of indigenous engineers and scientists to carry forward the
tradition of innovation and to support them with a culture that rewards their innovation. We need to believe the lesson of our own history, that where ideas
matter, we can lead the world.
John Roulston is Industrial Professor of Electronics at Edinburgh University. He was Technical Director of Ferranti (Scotland)
Ltd and in later ownership BAE SYSTEMS (Avionics). This company remains an important science-based employer and
exporter in Edinburgh under the name of Selex Galileo Airborne Systems. Today John Roulston owns and runs an
international knowledge-based science consultancy, Scimus Solutions Ltd.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, The Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Royal
Society of Edinburgh. He is a Director of the trade association Electronics Scotland, the UK Electronics Knowledge Transfer
Network and a member of the Board of Trustees of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. He chairs the Engineering Policy
Group for Scotland for the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
Websites: www.electronics-scotland.com; www.theiet.org; www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org; www.watsonwatt.org
Tartan Ribbon. The first permanent
colour photograph, taken by James
Clerk Maxwell in 1861.
Were focused on Scotland
Dialog is focused on creating the worlds most
energy-efcient, highly integrated, mixed-signal
integrated circuits optimised for power and audio,
display, and automotive applications.
As an early pioneer and industry leader in system
power management, Dialog brings decades of
experience to the rapid development of integrated
circuits. Dialogs processor companion chips are
essential for enhancing both the performance of
hand-held products and the consumers multimedia
experience. Over one billion parts have been
shipped to date.
Our new design centre in Edinburgh will become
a centre of excellence for audio technology and
the work carried out there will become key to
us focusing on the next generation of audio
processing products
Our future success involves collaboration with local
universities to help develop a steady ow of good
ideas, knowledge and resources to create world-
class innovative semiconductor solutions for next
generation products.
Dialog Semiconductor plc is headquartered near
Stuttgart, Germany with operations in Austria,
China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, UK, and the
USA. The company employs 250 worldwide.
Take a look at our new web site
www.dialog-semiconductor.com
AEROSPACE
The famous Red Arrows display team use BAE Systems Hawk trainers powered by Rolls-Royce Adour engines.
Graham Taylor
SECURING INNOVATIVE
SCOTTISH SOLUTIONS FOR
AEROSPACE & DEFENCE
By Ian Watson
The modern world arguably began with the innovations of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The contribution
of Scotsman James Watt - inventor, mechanical engineer and key player in the Scottish Enlightenment - is indisputable and
the importance of his legacy of increasing the power of man is inestimable.
I
n addition to James Watt there are many equally and less well celebrated
innovators from the Enlightenment and on whose work we still build upon to
this day. Robert William Thomson; John Boyd Dunlop; Kirkpatrick MacMillan; Sir
William Fairburn; Robert Stirling Newall to name but five. The names may fade in
the mind but the innovations live on: the pneumatic tyre, the pedal bicycle, the first
iron hulled steamship and the wire rope.
Scotland has an engineering heritage and a history of innovation to be proud
of. Most encouragingly it still has a vibrant engineering, science and innovative
industry right here that it can and should be equally proud of.
As the Director of the Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC)
Scotland, I am able to say with some confidence that our sector - the Scottish
aerospace, defence and naval sector - is one of Scotlands most innovative, most
globally successful industries, employing and rewarding some of Scotlands most
talented people. Furthermore, it is one of Scotlands sectors with the potential to
achieve significantly greater growth. Growth built upon innovation.
For example, SELEX Galileo is developing the next generation of Directional
Infra Red Counter Measure (DIRCM) systems. DIRCM systems can detect when
missiles have been launched and whether they pose a threat to aircraft, before
warning the crew of any plane which may be under attack and activating a high-
power countermeasure system to track and defeat the threat.
This project alone sees Scottish engineers developing new technology in a
10m project creating and sustaining 60 high value jobs and consolidating a
Scottish based companys reputation as one of the worlds leaders for developing
AEROSPACE
A colossal statue by Chantrey - originally in Westminster
Abbey and now in St. Pauls Cathedral - bears on the
cenotaph an inscription by Lord Brougham:
NOT TO PERPETUATE A NAME
WHICH MUST ENDURE WHILE THE PEACEFUL ARTS FLOURISH
BUT TO SHEW
THAT MANKIND HAVE LEARNT TO HONOUR THOSE
WHO BEST DESERVE THEIR GRATITUDE
THE KING
HIS MlNISTERS, AND MANY OF THE NOBLES
AND COMMONERS OF THE REALM
RAISED THIS MONUMENT TO
JAMES WATT
WHO DIRECTING THE FORCE OF AN ORIGINAL GENIUS
EARLY EXERCISED IN PHILOSOPHIC RESEARCH
TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF
THE STEAM-ENGINE
ENLARGED THE RESOURCES OF HIS COUNTRY
INCREASED THE POWER OF MAN
AND ROSE TO AN EMINENT PLACE
AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FOLLOWERS OF SCIENCE
AND THE REAL BENEFACTORS OF THE WORLD
BORN AT GREENOCK MDCCXXXVI
DIED AT HEATHFIELD IN STAFFORDSHIRE MDCCCXIX
Statue of James Watt.
Courtesy of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
new technology surveillance, protection, tracking and imaging systems. The
project is also expected to have spin-off benefits for other Scottish companies
who work with SELEX Galileo, potentially generating an additional 160m for
the Scottish economy over the next seven years.
Edinburgh has played a vital role in this success and the new project
reinforces Scotlands reputation as a world-class location for the development
of new technology.
A further example is BAE Systems Surface Fleet Solutions (now BVT)
production of Type 45 Frigates - some of the most advanced warships in the
world - delivered on time, on budget and exceeding customers specification
to the delight of the UK MOD. These frigates each have more than 20,000
power and data cables, stretching some 620kms. Laid end-to-end they would
stretch from Glasgow to Bristol. The ships are 44 metres from keel to the top
of the Sampson radar dome, as high as the Nelson Monument at Glasgow
Green. The Type 45 flight deck is large enough to park 20 London buses, large
enough to land a Chinook helicopter. External communications include
Internet and Video Conferencing while deployed anywhere in the world. These
are the first front-line warships to use more efficient and flexible all-electric
propulsion with a range of around 7,000 nautical miles - that is New York and
back without refuelling. Compare this to a Type 42 with a range of around 4,000 nautical miles. Finally, the design incorporates stealth technology to reduce
the chances of it being identified, including the cooling of exhaust gases to reduce the infra-red signature and avoiding the use of right angles helping to
reduce the radar signature.
By any stretch of the imagination this is an engineering challenge and triumph to rival any. Yet this magnificent effort is to be dwarfed by the future
aircraft carriers soon to be built in Scotland.
The new UK CVF Royal Navy aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are planned to enter service in 2014 and 2016. The
carriers will displace 65,000t, over three times the displacement of the current Invincible class; with a maximum speed of 25kt. At 15kt the range is
10,000nm and the ship carries food, fuel and stores for an endurance of seven days between replenishments. Each ship will have a complement of typically
1,200, including 600 aircrew. An impressive aircraft launch rate of 24 aircraft in 15 minutes. This 4bn project will significantly involve Scottish engineering
with final assembly taking place at the Babcock facility in Rosyth. To quote key Scottish Enlightenment figure Adam Smith: This is one of those cases in
which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
This incredibly complex project is just the latest in a long line of engineering feats which have Scottish ingenuity, expertise and innovation at their heart.
Working as Director of SBAC Scotland I know this is a strong and ambitious sector. Our survey has already established just what an important
AEROSPACE
The Trent 900, the lead engine for the Airbus A380.
Rolls-Royce plc 2006
Above: SELEX Radar on test.
Courtesy of SELEX Galileo
contribution the Scottish aerospace, defence and naval sector makes. With approximately 170 companies in Scotland involved in the aerospace, defence and
naval sector, total sales for the sector were 2.28bn in 2006 and this years survey looks like this will be significantly bettered. The sector employs nearly
16,000 people earning 34% above the Scottish average wage with significantly more indirectly employed. The Scottish sector is also investing significantly
for the future with over 500 apprentices or 3% of the workforce. This represents around one fifth of the apprentices being trained in the sector nationally,
with the national workforce being 2% apprentices, whilst our sector has invested 91 million R&D or 5% of sales.
Manufacturing in Scotland is in the top two Scottish sectors for employment, turnover and gross value added, and continues to evolve. Our
manufacturing sector is a very innovative, technologically advanced, efficient and - crucially - a growing sector. Beyond the examples already mentioned,
look at Spirit Aerosystems, a new entrant to Scotland through their purchase of BAE Systems Aerostructures at Prestwick. Recognising both the capability
and the potential of Scottish aerospace, Spirit has invested and demonstrated confidence in a bright future for Scottish manufacturing. Spirit Aerosystems
President & Chief Executive Jeff Turner has emphasised their ambition: Acquiring the aerostructures unit fits our long-range strategy of growing our
business and becoming the top tier one supplier/partner of aircraft components in the aerospace industry.
From creating a more sustainable aviation sector, making our supply chains more efficient and securing more research and development funding to -
most importantly - increasing the appeal and status of professional engineering as a career with a future, the sector is not without its challenges. We must
therefore support the development of the sector and on each of our challenges we look forward to turning our excellent relationship and dialogue with
Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government and other stakeholders into action. It may be a clich but nevertheless there is truth in saying where there are
challenges there are opportunities and taking just sustainable aviation - whether in composite technology or in reducing emissions - the business
opportunity following the environmental imperative is huge.
With Spirit Aerosystems, Goodrich and BAE Systems Regional Aircraft at Prestwick, Thales and BVT in Glasgow, SELEX Galileo in Edinburgh, Teledyne,
Raytheon, Rolls-Royce and Babcock, we have major aerospace and defence companies taking on the challenges, investing in and supporting Scotland.
Alongside these, we also have significant SMEs innovating and developing the products and skills for tomorrows markets, such as Inter-tec (again at
Prestwick) or EKES in East Kilbride, Think Tank Mathematics, Clydespace and Virtual Interconnect, to name but a few.
Long standing companies with decades of experience, foreign owned but with Scottish based hi tech facilities, are complemented by small innovative
indigenous companies, university spin outs encompassing wing technology, shipbuilding, optronics, stress analysis, MRO, avionics, electromagnetic remote
sensing, mathematical modelling, and so much more. This is a vibrant, exciting, modern, innovative Scottish sector.
Scottish innovation is alive and well, and if James Watt were alive today he may not recognise the modern facilities but he would immediately recognise
the creative spark that still drives Scottish industry to look for more efficient systems and new ways of increasing the power and knowledge of man.
To quote Adam Smith again: The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn
monster.
Adam Smith could here be said to be recognising that the creative spark that drives innovation is critical. Scottish industry is built upon this innovative
spark, is proud to be part of its illustrious lineage and looks forward to continuing the story.
Ian Watson is Director of SBAC Scotland. Ian joined SBAC in June 2005 to establish an SBAC regional office to serve the
interests of members in Scotland.
Supported by Warrick Malcolm and Liz Lambert, SBAC Scotland is now a vibrant organisation covering the aerospace,
defence and naval sector. Having worked diligently to gain priority industry status for the sector from the Scottish
Government and Scottish Enterprise, SBAC Scotland is increasingly seen as the authoritative voice for the Scottish sector.
Ian brought to SBAC a wealth of professional experience of the aerospace and defence industry and cultural
awareness gained over 30 years whilst working for Roll-Royce in engineering and customer support in UK, Romania, South
America and India followed by senior international sales and marketing roles with BAE systems in India, China, the Far East, USA and Mexico.
As Vice Chairman of the Scottish Borders branch of the Princes Scottish Youth Business Trust, Ian works on a voluntary basis helping
young entrepreneurs in Scotland.
Website: www.sbac.co.uk/pages/53838437.asp
AEROSPACE
Type 45 HMS Diamond on berth at Govan the
night before her launch in November 2007
2005 BAE Systems
State of the Art manufacturing technology
nestled in South-West Scotland.
Product and process development centre for
polyester film and polymer.
Winner of the Carbon Trusts 2008 Outstanding
Achievement Award for Energy Efficiency.
Winner of 2008 Queens Award for
Enterprise: Innovation.
For further information about DuPont Teijin Films please contact: +44 (0) 1387 247222
Email: europe.films@gbr.dupont.com or please visit our web site at www.dupontteijinfilms.com
DUPONT TEIJIN FILMS THE WORLDS
NO.1 POLYESTER FILM SUPPLIER
DELIVERING INNOVATION TO MARKET
CHEMICAL SCIENCES -
SCOTLANDS BEST KEPT
SECRET?
By Dr Sandy Dobbie
That period in the second half of the 18th century, popularly known today as The Scottish Enlightenment, has had a
profound influence on the society we live in, particularly in Europe and North America. The philosophy, science and cultural
ideas developed in that short spell of history affect us all and, even today, key figures like Adam Smith (the father of
modern economics
1
), David Hume (the philosopher and empiricist) and, of course, Robert Burns (Scotlands national bard)
are celebrated and revered not only in Scotland but across the world.
T
his extraordinary period was also a golden age for science and foremost amongst the scientists of the day was Joseph Black. In todays terminology, he
would be called both a chemist and a physicist - and probably a medic, too - but in the late 18th century, such labels were irrelevant. Remarkably,
Black is commemorated in both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities with each of their chemistry departments named after him, a feat bridging
Scotlands central belt that is surely unique.
Not only was Black a contemporary, collaborator (and frequent poker partner) of the other leading figures of the Enlightenment, he was also sponsor,
mentor and friend to one of the most famous Scots (celebrated on tea towels throughout the world!) James Watt, whose improvement of the steam engine
heralded the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
What would Black make of the chemical sciences in Scotland today? Would he be astounded by the scale and complexity of the Ineos
refinery/petrochemical complex at Grangemouth, which uses the thermochemistry principles he established all that time ago? Would he revel in the place
that Scotlands academic chemists have carved on the world stage, continuing the leadership position that he and his colleagues established so long ago? I
think he would be pleased. Todays Scotland is very different to the country those illustrious figures of the Enlightenment knew and the chemical sciences
have played a key role in creating it, even although we may not always realise it. The drugs that keep us alive, the electronics that control our lives, the
packaging for the food we eat, the fuel that allows us to travel the globe and even the very clothes we wear, all are examples of the application of the
chemical sciences to life as we know it now, and - just as in the Enlightenment - Scotland still plays a leading role in the chemical sciences today.
Many of our key industries - life sciences, electronics, chemicals, food and drink - are underpinned by the chemical sciences, depending on the
innovative application of chemistry to create new products and market opportunities. In fact, some would not exist at all without this so its contribution to
Scotlands economic past, present and future is truly immense.
SCOTLANDS CHEMICAL INDUSTRY IN A GLOBAL AND UK CONTEXT
THE GLOBAL CHEMICALS INDUSTRY: SIZE, TRADE AND GROWTH
The global chemicals industry has revenues of US$2.3 trillion
2
. To put this in perspective if the chemical industry was a country, it would be the fifth biggest
in the world, the same size as the entire economy of the UK or France.
CHEMICALS
Remarkably, Joseph Black is commemorated in both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities with
each of their chemistry departments named after him, a feat bridging Scotland s central belt
that is surely unique. Courtesy of the University of Glasgow
Despite intense focus on China and India in recent years, the developed markets of the European Union (EU), USA and Japan still account for almost
two thirds
3
of global chemicals demand. Although the growth rate in the developing markets is higher, they still have a long way to go to reach the total size
of their more mature counterparts and there are some surprises in the trade numbers.
4
SURELY ITS ALL GONE TO CHINA NOW?
The past decade has seen marked changes in trade but there are surprises for people not familiar with the sector.
The US chemicals/pharmaceuticals trade balance has swung from a surplus of US$14bn in 1996 to a US$4bn deficit in 2006 owing to increased
imports from Asia.
Most people assume that the EU will be similar but, in fact, it doubled its exports over that period and, by 2006, it had a trade surplus of 75bn
in chemicals and pharmaceuticals; this sector alone accounts for 52% of the EU trade surplus in manufactured goods.
Another surprise to people outside the industry is that the EUs chemicals surplus, at 41bn, is bigger than its 34bn pharmaceuticals surplus.
Most of the chemicals surplus is in the speciality segment, accounting for 70% of the total.
The global chemicals industry has grown at an average rate of over 3% per annum over the past decade. While this has slowed temporarily as a result
of the 2008 financial crash, demand for chemicals will return to this long-term trend growth.
THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF THE CHEMICALS INDUSTRY: CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY
The chemicals industry was one of the first to globalise but, compared to many other industries, it is still very fragmented, with the top 25 companies
accounting for less than 30% of the market. The biggest company, BASF, still has less than 3% global market share.
THE BREAK-UP OF ICI - ONE EXAMPLE OF THE CHANGING STRUCTURE OF THE SECTOR
The worlds first life sciences company was created in 1993 when Zeneca was spun out of ICI following shareholder pressure. Zeneca comprised
ICIs pharmaceutical, speciality chemicals and agrochemicals businesses and the name life sciences was coined to try to explain what it did. Others
- including Monsanto, Novartis and Aventis - followed but the life sciences tag was soon abandoned when the expected synergy between these
disparate businesses was revealed to be an illusion. Zeneca was then split up itself, becoming Astra-Zeneca (pharmaceuticals), Avecia (speciality
chemicals) and Syngenta (agrochemicals). Avecia has since been broken up and several of Scotlands chemical companies today are its descendants,
including Kemfine and FujiFilm at Grangemouth.
Today ICI itself, the one time bellwether of the UK stock market, no longer exists, having been bought by Akzo Nobel in 2008. However, most
of ICI's traditional businesses had already been sold and now form the backbone of INEOS, Huntsman and several other companies.
Unprecedented levels of mergers and acquisition (M&A) activity have been driven by a consequent desire to be bigger, to have more equal power with
customers in consumer-facing industries like automotive, food, electronics and energy. M&A has also been driven by the relocation of customer industries
(e.g. textiles, electronics) to Asia, by changes in the investment preferences of owners and by the continual search for innovation, for the next big thing.
Several macro-trends will continue to drive M&A activity for years to come, including:
The gradual exit of western oil companies from petrochemicals to concentrate on upstream oil exploration and production.
Asian companies desire to gain western technology and market access.
Strategic moves into downstream operations - refining and petrochemicals - by Middle Eastern oil producers anxious to diversify their oil-based
economies and add value by exporting petrochemicals rather than oil.
Growth in private ownership of chemical companies.
In the next few years, the effect of the aforementioned Middle East factor will be profound. New world scale petrochemical plants in the Gulf will come
on stream (in 2009/2010) just as the world is likely to experience a downturn in demand. Western producers of basic chemicals will be sorely challenged but,
in contrast, downstream users - speciality and pharmaceutical/fine chemical companies - are likely to benefit from the ensuing price war as this new capacity
tries to gain market share using low price as leverage.
CHEMICALS
Images courtesy of Chemical
Sciences Scotland
The ongoing ownership revolution and the seismic shifts in petrochemicals pricing will affect the global chemicals industry significantly. Its impact on
Scotland will depend on how we respond, as change on this scale will certainly create challenges but also create opportunities.
THE UK CHEMICAL INDUSTRY: STILL STRONG DESPITE LOSS OF LOCAL CONTROL
As the most open environment for M&A activity in the EU, the UK has been a major player in this industry realignment (mainly on the sell side) but, in spite
of major ownership changes, it is still the sixth largest
5
chemical industry in the world.
Importantly, it has a much higher proportion of its business in the speciality chemicals segment (60%) than the USA (44%) or Germany (40%). As
almost all new investment in the basic chemicals segment is in locations with feedstock advantages (Middle East) or fast growing markets (Asia), the UKs
higher emphasis on specialities will provide some advantage during the likely battle for basic chemicals share described earlier.
The chemicals industry is one of the UKs best performers. Its trend growth has averaged 2.9% since 1994, significantly higher than the average for UK
manufacturing industry overall. It employs over 200,000 people in high-skilled, high-wage jobs and generates 34bn in revenue
6
. Critically, it is the UKs top
export earner, contributing a 5bn trade surplus to the national economy.
SCOTLANDS CHEMICAL SCIENCES SECTOR
Scotlands share of the UK chemicals industry is roughly in line with its population ratio, amounting to 3.5bn.
7
It is Scotlands second biggest export earner,
responsible for 1.8bn
8
of manufacturing exports. It is also one of our highest value industries, employing 14,000 skilled people directly with an estimated
70,000 jobs dependent upon it in total. Simplistically, the chemical industry can be split into three segments and each is well represented in Scotland. There
are over 100 companies spread from Caithness to the Borders, from Argyll to Fife and significant clusters exist in the Forth Valley and Ayrshire.
BASIC CHEMICALS
These building blocks - mainly derived from oil - are the starting point for much of the industry in Scotland. Crude oil is transformed into the range of basic
chemical products, including gasoline, diesel, naphtha, ethylene, propylene (the building blocks for the chemicals and plastics industries) and many more.
These capital-intensive businesses must be globally competitive, as asset efficiency, quality and productivity are key to their success.
INEOS: THE WORLDS THIRD LARGEST CHEMICAL COMPANY
INEOS has sales of over US$45bn. It is the largest privately owned business in the UK and has been built from scratch in only 11 years. INEOS
bought basic chemical businesses from global majors BP, ICI, Dow, BASF and many others and now operates 70 sites all over the world. It is critical
to the Scottish economy and its refinery/petrochemical complex at Grangemouth is Ineos biggest site anywhere in the world. This giant plant
produces a staggering three million tonnes of fuel a year - nine million litres a day - and two million tonnes of chemicals, and is the largest single
player in the Scottish chemicals industry.
SPECIALITY CHEMICALS
Speciality companies in Scotland tend to be either:
Scottish-origin businesses that are now owned by foreign parents.
Manufacturing sites established in Scotland by global players.
Local start-ups, often based on university-derived technology.
FUJIFILM IMAGING COLORANTS (JAPAN)
This was originally part of ICI and went through the transition to Zeneca then Avecia before being bought by Japanese company FujiFilm in 2006.
Its Scottish site is the world leader in R&D and production of colour technology for digital printing processes.
They focus on market niches/specialised products and many are SMEs. Their main driver is innovation in product or service and they tend to have higher
levels of applications R&D.
SURFACE ACTIVE SOLUTIONS (UK)
This is a classic example of a university spinout in the speciality chemicals field. It uses its specialised surfactant chemistry to develop
product/service solutions to many of the environmental problems encountered in oil exploration and production and, like almost all of Scotlands
chemical sector, it sells globally.
This segment is critically important to Scotlands future because it operates at the high end of the value chain, with higher growth potential and barriers
to entry than other segments. Its customers are, typically, consumer-facing industries.
PHARMACEUTICAL/FINE CHEMICALS
This segment is a mix of production sites operated by global pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies like GSK and Syngenta, along with smaller
businesses focused on early stage drug development and contract manufacture. University spinouts often target this sector.
KEMFINE (FINLAND)
One of the descendants of ICI, Kemfine occupies a site first established 90 years ago to make dyes. Today, in a modern plant, it produces chemicals
for crop protection and pharmaceuticals and is the hub of a technology park, providing utilities, waste disposal and other critical scientific services
to its neighbours. Kemfines 90 year journey is a perfect demonstration of the ingenuity of the Scottish chemical sector as it adapts to new markets
and opportunities, never standing still.
CHEMICALS
CHEMICALS
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES: TEACHING AND RESEARCH
Scotlands teaching of chemical sciences in its universities and colleges is recognised internationally. Courses in chemistry, chemical engineering and other
chemical sciences based subjects attract students from around the globe; and, unlike other parts of the UK, student numbers in Scotlands chemical sciences
courses have remained very healthy with many departments oversubscribed.
THE SCOTTISH CHEMICAL SCIENCES DIASPORA
The international reach of Scottish education in the chemical sciences has been experienced many times by the author all around the world. On one
memorable occasion, he was signing a collaboration agreement between an American chemicals business and Malaysia's national oil company at
the top of the Petronas Towers, the scene of many movies. At the end of the elaborate signing ceremony, he was pleased - but not surprised - to
discover that the key Malaysian executives signing the deal were chemical engineering graduates from Strathclyde University.
Many well-known global businesses in the consumer products, oil, pharmaceutical and chemical industries recruit Scotlands chemistry and chemical
engineering graduates to join their management development programmes because history has demonstrated their value. The disproportionate number of
Scottish-educated leaders in these global businesses illustrates this clearly.
Scotlands universities are also renowned for the quality of their chemical sciences research, punching well above their weight globally. The
development of research pooling in the sector - led by the creation of EastChem and WestChem then ScotCHEM - provided a substantial boost to research
capacity in Scotland and several universities have very high UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for their chemical sciences research activities.
ScotCHEM INDUSTRY PHDS BOOST R&D
A new collaboration between the Scottish Funding Council, the ScotCHEM universities and Chemical Sciences Scotland has added yet more
firepower to Scotlands research capability with 31 PhD students being appointed to work on projects specifically for Scotlands chemical industry.
This initiative has boosted overall R&D capacity and is building stronger ties between Scotlands universities and industry, particularly SMEs. It is
also exposing top students to real life industrial opportunities and challenges across a wide range of chemical sciences segments.
THE ROLE OF CHEMICAL SCIENCES SCOTLAND
In October 2007, Jim Mather, Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism, launched Chemical Sciences Scotland with a simple objective, to ensure that a
vibrant and competitive chemicals industry exists in Scotland in 20 years time.
This event was the outcome of a process begun some time before by Scottish Enterprises chemicals team with key people from the chemical sector and
it marked the beginning of a 20-year plan to make Scotlands chemical industry an even more important part of the national economy.
The 20-year timescale was chosen deliberately. Scotland has already had a thriving chemical industry for much more than 20 years (in spite of all the
changes in ownership described earlier). By focusing on the long-term strategic development of the sector, rather than being distracted by short-term issues,
CSS will ensure that we still have a thriving industry in another 20 years.
CHEMICAL SCIENCES SCOTLAND STRATEGIC PLAN
CSS has 10 key strategies whose underlying theme is that the sector must punch above its weight to create competitive advantage for Scotland
over other countries as a location of choice for the exploitation of the chemical sciences.
In the simplest terms, Scotland needs to:
Keep and improve what it already has in this sector.
Develop new chemistry-based businesses faster than before.
Attract more mobile investments into Scotland.
Each strategy is deliberately broad. The initiative is owned and led by the industry and other stakeholders. It is strongly supported, financially
and operationally, by the Scottish Government and its agencies, particularly Scottish Enterprise, whose chemicals team manages its day-to-day
implementation.
Five Topic Groups - Sustainability, Innovation, Reputation, Skills and Investment - drive the strategy. These groups involve over 100 leaders
from industry, academia and other stakeholder organisations, including several people from outside Scotland. Their activities are coordinated and
resourced by a leadership team that includes the Chairs of each Topic Group.
10 point strategic plan:
Ensure unit cost of Scottish output is globally competitive.
Build greater interdependence to create cluster benefits.
Develop a regulatory climate that is a competitive advantage.
Increase the proportion of speciality/pharma businesses.
Increase applications/product R&D conducted here.
Increase innovation/start-up rate
Develop world-class skills as a competitive advantage.
Increase the attractiveness of the industry as a career choice.
Improve public perception of the industry and its impact.
Encourage new investments by existing and new players.
Unlike other industries that were implanted into Scotland as part of UK dispersal programmes or built around transient markets involving simple (and
easily relocated) assembly skills, the chemical sciences sector is deeply rooted in Scotland throughout our education and industrial base. Surprisingly to
many, it is not dependent on local raw material sources (even North Sea oil) just water and energy. Nor is it dependent on local markets, as the vast majority
of Scotlands chemicals output has always been exported.
C
o
u
r
t
e
s
y

o
f

C
h
e
m
i
c
a
l

S
c
i
e
n
c
e
s

S
c
o
t
l
a
n
d
So why should Scotland become a preferred location for future investments in the chemical sciences sector, both from companies already here and from
those who have not yet considered Scotland as a location?
Quite simply, its key advantage is the ingenuity of its people. Scotlands scientific research community is world-class: a much misused claim but, in this
case, a claim justified by analysis demonstrating that Scottish research has one of the highest citation rates in the world
9
. That excellence in research is
matched by the adaptability of its chemical industry, which is constantly reinventing itself as markets change and product life cycles shorten.
The availability of highly skilled, scientifically literate people - operators, technicians, engineers, scientists and managers - is a key competitive
advantage for Scotland and, when its natural advantages in renewable energy sources, water and North Sea oil are added to the mix, Scotlands preferred
location status is further enhanced. A favourable regulatory environment - pragmatic, sensible and non-bureaucratic (compared to others) will also help
Scotlands industry to develop in a responsible and sustainable way while avoiding the policeman approach to regulation that stifles activity in many other
locations.
Its position within the European Union and its export-orientated culture add to Scotlands attraction as a Gateway to Europe for the chemical sciences
sector. True, being at the edge, rather than the centre of Europe does create some minor logistics cost disadvantages but in the chemical industry -
particularly at the speciality end of the spectrum - these are very small compared to the major cost advantages conferred by an affordable skilled workforce,
reliable, advantaged sources of raw materials, energy and water and a sensible regulatory regime.
The value of this Gateway to Europe advantage is clearly demonstrated by the ownership of significant parts of our chemical industry by non-EU
companies, particularly from the USA, Japan and India.
The future of the chemical sciences sector in Scotland - just as it did in the Enlightenment - will indeed depend on the ingenuity and imagination of its
people, on their innate skills and ability to adapt to the changing circumstances that the next 20 years will bring. It is notable that few of the more than 100
chemical businesses in Scotland today still depend on products they were making 20 years ago, so it would seem reasonable to assume that they will not
depend on many of todays products 20 years from now.
The mission of Chemical Sciences Scotland is to encourage the entire chemical sciences sector to work together to build an even bigger role for
Scotland in the future of the global chemical industry than it has achieved so far. This mission is ambitious and is totally aligned with the Scottish
Governments Purpose - to create a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic
growth - and Chemical Sciences Scotland will play its part in achieving that Purpose.
It is over 200 years since Joseph Black and his colleagues shaped the first Scottish Enlightenment. The people involved in Chemical Sciences Scotland
now hope to play their part in creating the second.
Dr. Sandy Dobbie is Chairman of Chemical Sciences Scotland. He is also Chairman of Evolva SA, a Swiss biotech drug
discovery company, and Warwick International Group, a private equity backed global chemical business.
He is a non-executive Director of Yule Catto plc, a UK-listed global chemical company and of NiTech Solutions, a VC
backed process technology company.
He is co-owner of Cogency Chemical Consultants, a specialist advisor on global chemical sector mergers and
acquisitions. Prior to setting up Cogency, he spent 25 years in the chemicals industry, including board positions at Kelco
(Merck & Co. Inc) and UK-listed Brent International plc. He is on the Executive Committee of SCDI and the Steering Group
for the UK Industrial Biotechnology Innovation and Growth Team (IB-IGT)
Web: www.chemicalsciencesscotland.com
Email: sandy.dobbie@cogency.biz or caroline.strain@scotent.co.uk
Footnotes:
CHEMICALS
1. Hoaas, D and Madigan, L (1999), The Social Science Journal 36(3):
525-532.
2. CEFIC (European Chemical Industry Council).
3. David Ingles Consulting/Cogency Chemical Consultants.
4. CEFIC (European Chemical Industry Council).
5. DTI - Chemicals Innovation and Growth Team; (DTI is now the
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform - BERR).
6. Chemical Industries Association.
7. Scottish Government.
8. Scottish Government.
9. Evidence Limited; Report on Metrics for the Scottish Research Base
(Scottish Government, Feb 2008).
Courtesy of Chemical
Sciences Scotland
DUNDEE: FROM JUTE, JAM AND
JOURNALISM TO BIOCHEMISTRY,
BIOMEDICINE AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
By Professor Sir Philip Cohen FRS FRSE
Scotland has a long tradition of excellence in higher education and science. Scotland could already boast four Universities
five hundred years ago when England only had two, while the Royal Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1783, is one of the
worlds oldest national academies of science, arts and letters.
C
ompared to these venerable institutions, the University of Dundee is a relative newcomer. The University College of Dundee was founded in 1881
but was soon after affiliated to the University of St Andrews. It was renamed Queens College Dundee in 1954 and only became an independent
University in 1967. Remarkably, only 40 years later, Dundee is widely recognised as one of Europes strongest centres for life sciences and
biotechnology and - with thousands of scientists working in these areas - this sector accounts for 16% of the local economy. In this article I give a
personal account of the history of life sciences at Dundee, explaining how this remarkable transformation came about and how it was achieved.
BIOCHEMISTRY AT DUNDEE
As in other parts of the UK, biochemistry at Dundee developed as an offshoot of physiology. In 1940 Robert Cookie Cook, an Australian who had worked
at Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins (the co-discoverer of vitamins), was appointed to a lectureship in physiological chemistry at Dundee.
However, almost immediately Cookie began a vociferous campaign to have biochemistry made an independent department. He was so persistent
that in order to get some peace George Bell (the Head of Physiology) allowed him to equip as a biochemistry laboratory a small building on the edge of
the campus that had previously stabled the horses used in funeral processions. In this decrepit building Cookie built up a small team of biochemists and
finally succeeded in having Biochemistry recognised as a separate department in 1965 (a name that had previously existed only on his headed
notepaper!). He then managed to grab the lions share of the research space for Biochemistry in the Medical Sciences Institute that was being built to
deal with the expansion of the Medical School intake that had followed Dundees separation from St Andrews. By this time Cookie was close to
retirement and Peter Garland was recruited from the University of Bristol in 1970 to become Dundees first Professor of Biochemistry and Head of
Department.
Peter Garland came to Dundee from Bristol, which under Philip Randle (later Sir Philip) had become the UKs premier biochemistry department). Many
had warned Peter that he was putting his career at risk by moving to a backwater like Dundee, but Peter had realised that with a new building and
positions to fill there was a real chance to make an impact. He decided to make the development of protein chemistry his first priority and this led him to
appoint a 26 year old postdoctoral fellow - then working at the University of Washington in Seattle - as his first Lecturer, and so I joined the embryonic
Department of Biochemistry at Dundee in October 1971.
In those days the UK operated a Dual Support system in which universities were supposed to provide the infrastructure, equipment and most of the
LIFE SCIENCES
Wheel of Royal Research Ship Discovery Stephen Beaumont
costs of research, and one only applied to the Research Councils for an extra salary or two and/or particularly expensive consumables. Having been trained
at a relatively well-endowed institution (University College London) and being rather nave, it had never occurred to me that the University of Dundee had
almost no money to support research. It became obvious almost immediately that we would all need to obtain more substantial research grants than was
normal at the time, if we were to be successful. This proved to be more easily said than done, especially for a junior faculty member like myself. Indeed, it
was only the receipt of 1,000 from the Wellcome Trust (backed by a letter of support from Philip Randle) that enabled my laboratory to keep going during
the summer of 1976. Peter Garland decided that if we stopped doing experiments because we had no money, then we really were finished. So the
Department ran up a huge debt, which worked for a time because the Universitys finance department did not quite realise what was happening.
The Biochemistry Department was rescued by Adam Neville soon after he became the Universitys Principal in 1978. Adam realised the importance of
the Biochemistry Department for the future of Dundee as a research centre of excellence. He therefore solved Biochemistrys financial problems by diverting
money from less productive Departments and closing others, which did not exactly endear him to the rest of the University. This enabled Biochemistry to
make a number of key appointments during the Neville era in the emerging fields of molecular biology, cell biology and glycobiology. These included David
Lilley, Graham Warren, Colin Watts and Michael Ferguson, all destined to later become internationally renowned scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society
of London, and Christopher Higgins (now the Vice Chancellor of the University of Durham). The UKs biochemical community, who had not been following
these events all that closely, were therefore surprised when the Dundee Biochemistry Department emerged from the Governments first Research Assessment
Exercise in 1986 with the highest internationally outstanding rating, despite the departure of Peter Garland to industry in 1984. With further key
appointments, such as David (now Sir David) Lane (the discoverer of p53, the guardian of the genome) and Peter Downes (the current Head of Life
Sciences at Dundee) plus the creation of the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit (MRC-PPU) under my direction in 1990, it was clear that
the Department had finally arrived in a big way.
THE COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES AT DUNDEE
By this time the Medical Sciences Institute was virtually full and it was clear that more space would be needed if Biochemistry was to develop further.
Hundreds of letters were sent to wealthy philanthropists and charitable trusts but all fell on stony ground until an unexpected windfall arrived from the
actor Sean Connery, who donated 25% of the fee that he had earned from his brief walk on part as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood Prince of
Thieves. This initial donation of US$62,500 stimulated further fund-raising efforts culminating in an award of 10 million from the Wellcome Trust, still
thought to be the largest single charitable donation ever given to a Scottish institution.
The 14 million Wellcome Trust Building, completed in 1997, was set up as one of the first Research Hotels in the UK, the scientists recruited being
offered space to house their research teams if they could win highly competitive Research Fellowships to pay their salaries from a Research Council, a
Medical Charity or the Royal Society. This novel strategy, aided by the magnificent views over the Tay estuary from the recruitment and fund raising room
proved so successful that the life sciences sector at the University of Dundee doubled in size within a few years and at remarkably little cost to the
University of Dundee. The speed with which the Wellcome Trust building was filled led to construction of a major extension, the Sir James Black Centre
which was completed in 2005. The 21 million needed to build and equip it this time came from many sources, including the Scottish Research Infrastructure
Fund, The Wolfson Trust and substantial commercial and industrial income that by now the Biochemistry Department was earning.
During this period the traditional departmental boundaries were swept away to create a College of Life Sciences (CLS) arranged into interdisciplinary
research divisions. Today, there are some 800 scientific and support staff from over 50 different countries working in the CLS research complex, a
powerhouse that today includes eight Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 21 Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and 13 elected members of the
European Molecular Biology Organisation.
THE SCOTTISH CROP RESEARCH INSTITUTE
The Division of Plant Sciences was set up in 2007 as a partnership between CLS and the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI), which is located three miles
west of the main University campus. Set up originally as the Scottish Horticultural Research Institute to support the traditional soft fruit and jam-making
industries of Dundee, and originally made famous by the invention of the Tayberry, SCRI has also developed enormously over the years following its merger
with the Scottish Plant Breeding Station in Edinburgh and relocation of the latter to Dundee in 1981.
LIFE SCIENCES
Sir Michael Atiyah speaking on 25th November 2008 at the unveiling of the James Clerk Maxwell statue outside the Royal
Society of Edinburgh with - in the background left to right - the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the sculptor Alexander Stoddart,
Lord Wilson (President of RSE) and the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, Alex Fergusson MSP.
Photo Gary Doak. Courtesy of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
With over 350 scientific and support staff SCRI is one of the UKs premier plant research institutes and was one of the first to translate its research into
the development of new plant varieties. No less 80% of the UKs raspberry plants and 90% of Spains raspberry plants were developed at SCRI and almost
every supermarket in the UK sells products that they have developed. For example, the blackcurrants in Ribena, one of the UKs iconic soft drinks brands,
come from plants developed at SCRI, while the next generation of superior potato varieties are being developed in collaboration with multinational
companies, such as Pepsi and McCain. Lady Balfour, the UKs best selling organic potato, and six other named varieties of potato stocked in supermarkets,
are derived from the eight commercial potato breeding programmes that are ongoing at SCRI.
A recent independent economic survey found that SCRI generated 14 in revenue for each pound of Government money invested and that it contributes
160 million per annum to the UK economy.
MEDICINE AND PRE-CLINICAL SCIENCE AT DUNDEE
Following the completion in 1974 of the Ninewells Hospital and Medical School Complex two miles west of the main University Campus, the development of
clinical medicine and pre-clinical science at Dundee has also been impressive, the latter helped by recruitment of several leading scientists wishing to
collaborate more closely with the CLS powerhouse. Highlights over the years include the development of minimal access keyhole surgery by pioneering
cancer surgeon Alfred (now Sir Alfred) Cusheiri, and the recruitment of Roland Wolf and his Cancer Research UK Molecular Pharmacology Unit from
Edinburgh.
DARTS, a population database originally developed to monitor the health and treatment of diabetics in Tayside from the cradle to the grave, has
proved to be a remarkable resource and has recently been extended to cover the whole of Scotland. It has been exploited by Andrew Morris, his colleagues
and collaborators to identify mutations in human proteins that predispose to many diseases and with Dario Alessi in CLS to reveal that metformin, the drug
used most commonly to treat Type 2 Diabetes, also affords significant protection against many types of cancer.
Irwin Mclean in the Dundee Medical School identified the gene responsible for causing 50% of eczema and a significant percentage of human asthma
in Europe and North America. This discovery - which has revolutionised our understanding of these diseases - was named the Times Higher Education
research achievement of the year in 2006. Pre-clinical medicine joined CLS in receiving the highest five star rating in the last Research Assessment Exercise
conducted in 2001.
According to the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, the University of Dundee ranked first in the field of Pharmacology, second in the field
of Biology and Biochemistry and fourth in the field of Molecular Biology and Genetics among all the Universities in Europe over the period 1997-2007, as
judged by the number of times its research papers were quoted by other scientists in their publications (termed citations). Indeed, all of Scotlands seven
most cited papers over the period 1995-2005 were published by life scientists at Dundee. The University of Dundee was also voted the most desirable
University in Europe for a Life Scientist to work in, in successive polls conducted by The Scientist newspaper in 2005 and 2006.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF BIOTECHNOLOGY AT DUNDEE
It is no coincidence that the largest clusters of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies tend to be located in cities with the strongest life science
research bases, such as Boston, Massachusetts in the USA and Cambridge in the UK. This is because the ideas that lead to the creation of new companies
frequently emerge from ground-breaking fundamental research, and because the strongest life science centres produce a flow of bright, well trained
scientists that the companies can recruit. It is this mix that has contributed to Dundee becoming the hub of the biotechnology industry in Scotland and
explains why the Intermediary Technology Institute (ITI) for Life Sciences set up by the Scottish Government to stimulate the development of biotechnology
industry in Scotland, is based in Dundee.
Currently, there are some 29 biotechnology companies in the Tayside region of Scotland, a third of which are spin-outs from the University. The first
biotechnology company, Shield Diagnostics, was spun out from the Medical School in 1982. It later merged with Norwegian company Axis to become Axis
Shield. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and employing 400 staff worldwide, it is still Dundees largest biotechnology company.
Other companies founded by University of Dundee scientists include Cyclacel, a cancer drug discovery company, and CXR Biosciences, which applies
advanced genomics to develop safer and more effective drugs for the personalised treatment of disease. Founded by Sir David Lane in 1996 and capitalised
on the NASDAQ index, Cyclacel employs 60 staff and has developed several drugs that are undergoing human clinical trials. CXR Biosciences, founded by
Roland Wolf and Cliff Elcombe in 2001 employs 45 staff.
LIFE SCIENCES
School of Life Sciences Research, University of Dundee.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of BMJ Architects.
In 1999, the US biotechnology company Upstate Inc., set up its European headquarters in Dundee to capitalise on a growing commercial relationship it
had developed with the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit (MRC-PPU) based in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee. In addition to
marketing proteins and antibodies developed by the MRC-PPU, Upstate Dundee also decided to market kinase profiling a technology that the MRC-PPU
and CLS had developed in the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy, a collaboration with six of the worlds major pharmaceutical companies that is widely
regarded as a model for how Academia and Industry should interact. Kinase profiling proved to be so successful that Upstate was acquired for US$205
million in 2004 by Serologicals, which was in turn acquired in 2006 for US$1.4 billion by S&P500 company Millipore. The Dundee division of Millipore
currently employs about 65 staff.
An extremely significant development for biotechnology in Scotland was the decision of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to set up a research institute in Dundee
aimed at developing biomarkers to diagnose human disease and exploit them for the early demonstration of drug efficacy. This project is being carried out
through collaboration with the four major Medical Schools in Scotland and their associated National Health Service Trusts. Initially based in the College of
Life Sciences at Dundee, Wyeth will relocate at the end of 2008 to a purpose built institute on the Ninewells Hospital campus, which can house up to 120
scientific and support staff.
This is the first time a research institute has been set up in Scotland by one of the worlds top ten pharmaceutical companies and is likely to have a
major beneficial impact on biotechnology throughout Scotland. Indeed, Aberdeen-based Haptogen, a company specialising in the development of novel
therapeutic antibodies, was acquired by Wyeth in 2007 and looks set for significant expansion.
Yet another important recent development has been the decision by Swedish biotechnology company Cellartis to set up a new operation in Dundee
aimed at producing high quality stem cells for the treatment of disease.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN?
Today, there are 4,300 people working directly in life sciences and biotechnology in Dundee and thousands of others jobs in the service sector are dependent
on it. Dundee is no longer the city of jute, jam and journalism (although journalism continues to thrive), but the city of biochemistry, biomedicine and
biotechnology. In a year when the annual research income of the College of Life Sciences has reached nearly 50 million, it seems a far cry from the mid
1970s when I nearly had to close down my laboratory for the lack of 1,000. In addition to the usual ingredients of success (hard work, perseverance,
capitalising on opportunities and occasional good fortune), it was the enormous amount of effort put into recruitment that was crucial for the success of the
College of Life Sciences at Dundee. A place is only as good as the people who work in it and the appointment of team leaders, who were not only
outstanding scientists but also prepared to put in the huge effort needed to develop the enterprise and build up world-class infrastructure and equipment,
was critical.
It took from 1970 to 1990 to lay the seeds of success and only over the past 10-15 years has life sciences and biotechnology been able to capitalise on
the groundwork in a way that is having a major impact on the local economy. A key take-home message is that sustained long term funding of
fundamental science by Government is crucial, because it may take many years before any field of research reaches the stage where it becomes obvious how
it can be exploited to benefit health or create wealth. In my own field of protein phosphorylation it took 25 years before there was any commercial interest
in what I was doing. Yet today protein phosphorylation has become the largest area of drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. So the application of
research can often be a lengthy and unpredictable process. Who would have thought that the most important application of the space programme would be
the invention of the internet?
Philip Cohen has worked at the University of Dundee since 1971. He is a Royal Society Research Professor, Director of
the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, the Founder Director of the recently created Scottish Institute for Cell Signaling
(SCILLS) and was knighted in 1998.
He is also co-Director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT), the UKs largest collaboration between
academia and the pharmaceutical industry, which received a Queens Anniversary Award for Higher Education
in 2006.
LIFE SCIENCES
School of Computing, University of Dundee.
Keith Hunter (T:07831 117 980) / Courtesy of Page\Park Architects.
CAMPUSES IN AYR / DUMFRIES / HAMILTON / PAISLEY University of the West of Scotland is a registered Scottish charity. Charity number SC002520.
SCIENCE AND THE
NEW SCOTTISH
ENLIGHTENMENT
By Professor Anne Glover
Scientific discovery, and perhaps more importantly, a vision of the power of science, were arguably the most defining
features of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was of course driven by a remarkable collection of intellectuals -
scientists, philosophers, economists and literati.
D
avid Hume, a philosopher rather than a scientist, championed the scientific method. Many others, including James Hutton, Joseph Black and James
Watt gave us important scientific principles, discoveries and innovations that underpin so much of what we now take for granted in our modern
world. At the time of course, many did not appreciate the significance of these ideas and it is only with hindsight we can recognise how these ground
breaking contributions have come to shape our daily lives.
How did so many remarkable men apparently come to be in the same place - broadly lowland Scotland - at the same time? What was it that sparked so
many innovations and discoveries? Why did this not take place elsewhere in Europe, to quite the same degree?
There are no clear answers to these questions but it seems that part of the answer lies in the ease by which a critical mass of intellectuals could meet
and exchange their latest thinking and discoveries, in clubs and coffee houses. These were the forerunners of todays think-tanks, where ideas from across
the spectrum of science and arts could be shared and abraded against one another.
The underlying thesis of this compendium of essays is that we can today characterise many aspects of modern Scottish life as signifying a new Scottish
Enlightenment. This is not as fanciful as it may sound to those outside Scotland.
Of course, Scotlands science today is conducted in an environment which would be quite unrecognisable to those in the original Enlightenment of the
18th century. Science on the whole has necessarily become a vastly more public and collaborative effort, with most scientific endeavour being taken forward
by large teams, rather than by inspired and often wealthy individuals working on their own. Advances are now generally incremental rather than in large
steps but are - overall - on a much larger scale, and government is now the principal funder of research. All this said, there are some interesting parallels
that can be drawn between these two periods of scientific advance.
As in the original Enlightenment, Scotlands science and innovation continue to lead the world in many areas. The underlying causes for this success are
similar in some ways, as they are very much to do with the positive ambience and environment in Scotland. The common thread is the key advantage of
having a relatively compact and intensive science base, easing the process by which the main players can cooperate and collaborate. Our size is therefore a
virtue and we are now capitalising on this again with remarkable effect. I will set out our latest scientific credentials a little more clearly.
They are perhaps most easily illustrated by the fact that Scotlands universities consistently win around 12% of investment by the UK Research Councils
and even higher percentages of major health charity research funds - such as the Wellcome Trust. Overall our market share of research funding in the UK,
already well ahead of our population share, grew faster than any other part of the UK last year, to 14.2%, up nearly 2.5%. Probably most impressive though
LIFE SCIENCES
Chemical glasses used by Joseph Black.
is the finding in a recent independent report that relative to our GDP, Scotland outperforms all other countries in the world in terms of citations of research
publications. The same report also found that we were second in the world in terms of the impact of our research. So our science base continues to perform
exceptionally well and is highly competitive in UK and world terms, with some evidence that - if anything - this is accelerating.
We are particularly strong in the life sciences, informatics and energy research, and we provide the home for several of the UKs centres of excellence. In
this short article it is only possible to provide a snapshot of Scotlands very broadly based science base. However, some of our key strengths should be
highlighted.
The Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh, recently opened by our First Minister, houses the leading UK centre for this work, and is one of
only four similar projects in the world. The Edinburgh Technopole provides the site for HECToR - the UKs largest computer. In Dundee we have a remarkable
concentration of life science excellence. Glasgow is home to some leading blue sky research in gravitational waves and, with Edinburgh, is also closely
involved in the work at the worlds largest experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Aberdeen has great strengths in energy research
as well as developing imaging technology which is now so crucial for our pursuit of medical science.
Scotland though, like many other small nations, does face a problem in that it cannot be excellent at everything. With over 25 universities and research
institutes there are also risks of overlap and of spreading research resources too thinly to be effective in some areas. Many of Scotlands university research
communities, encouraged by funding from the Scottish Funding Council, have therefore come together to forge cross-university alliances or research pools,
with close collaboration on research topics and joint graduate schools. These innovative collaborations ensure that in subject areas such as physics,
chemistry and the life sciences, research excellence and critical mass is maintained across a much larger breadth of research areas than would otherwise be
possible. While these initiatives are relatively recent - one of the first, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance was established in 2005 - they are already
proving to be successful in many ways. They are, for instance, attracting increased numbers of international research stars to base their work in Scotland. This
type of alliance exploits the close geographical proximity of the institutions in Scotland and indeed it is difficult to see how it could work well in larger
nations with geographically dispersed infrastructure.
Our research institutes too are increasingly looking to form alliances with universities and other institutes to form structures which are much stronger
and more competitive.
I am sure that David Hume would very much approve of the strong Scottish Government statements in recent years about the importance of science to
our economy and our quality of life. The Scottish Government has had a science strategy since 2001, bringing together policy across a range of interests, and
helping to ensure that the contribution of science is optimised.
As part of this strengthening I was appointed to the role of Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland in 2006 (the first such position within the Scottish
Government). In addition to this, a new framework for science - Science for Scotland - was published in November 2008, which provides an updated context
for science policy and continues to emphasise the crucial role of science.
A key issue is in developing and exploiting scientific discovery, something that continues to challenge all economies.
One of the scientists of the Scottish Enlightenment, William Cullen - a Scottish doctor and chemist who was one of the founders of the UKs oldest
medical society The Royal Medical Society (RMS) - discovered the cooling power of evaporation and created small amounts of ice by the process but
apparently did not try to scale this up or indeed imagine its potential uses. In Edinburgh in 1756 he gave the first documented public demonstration of
artificial refrigeration but it was not until the preservative power of refrigeration was understood that a real use of this discovery was achieved.
Cullens discovery was ahead of its time in terms of exploitation. In Scotland today, we have a wide array of schemes to support and speed up this
process - including Proof of Concept funding, Enterprise Fellowships, three Intermediary Technology Institutes in Life Sciences, Tech Media and Energy, and
the Interface initiative which supports companies in finding research in Scotland that might be of use. We also have a number of major science investments
where there is a strong emphasis on developing commercial applications from scientific discovery, such as the Informatics Forum Project and the Scottish
Centre for Regenerative Medicine. The Scottish Government has also announced 10m for an international Saltire challenge prize in renewable marine
energy, launched in December 2008.
Part of the original Enlightenment was around a greater appreciation of the role of science although of course this was very much confined to the
LIFE SCIENCES
Student research at Glasgow University which is
home to some leading blue sky research in gravitational waves.
Courtesy of the University of Glasgow
A major force in Scotlands
life science industry
Central Scotland is home to more than 360 life
science related companies, 9 world class universities
and several highly respected research institutes.
Together they provide employment for over 24,000
individuals.
Continued investment in industry and in state-of-the-
art research facilities provides a conducive
environment that allows experts in related fields to
work closely together. World class expertise in areas
such as the cardiovascular system, leukaemia,
oncology, veterinary medicine, stem cell research,
immunology, bioinformatics, medical devices and
more, underpins a wealth of exciting translational
research and technology convergence.
Vibrant, innovative and competitive central
Scotlands life science community continually rises
to the challenge.
Nexxus promotes and supports research
excellence, innovation and knowledge
transfer within the life science community
in central Scotland.
The website provides information on life science
related events in Scotland and worldwide - plus
comprehensive information on central Scotlands life
science research and news; its local companies and
institutions; and general information on living and
working in the area.
Sign up now for regular communications, free
networking events and to keep up generally with
whats new in central Scotlands life science industry.
T: +44 (0) 141 330 5381
W: www.nexxusscotland.com
E: info@nexxusscotland.com
Nexxus is funded funded by a number of organisations including the European
Regional Development Fund see website for more details
intelligentsia of the day. Today in Scotland there is a much more widespread view of the positive power of science and its role in underpinning economic
success and providing quality of life improvements. People on the whole have progressive views on scientific research, and encourage their children to
engage with science. Our network of science centres cater for over a million visitors a year and there are many cultural celebrations of science at science
festivals around the country.
I do therefore agree that we are currently enjoying a new age of scientific enlightenment in Scotland. It is wider and deeper than the earlier one and I
have every hope that it will generate many more successes for Scotland and secure Scotlands place in the modern world.
Professor Anne Glover Frse, Faam is the Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland.
Anne currently holds a Personal Chair of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Aberdeen, and has honorary
positions at the Rowett and Macauley Institutes. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of
the Natural Environment Research Council, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
Anne was born in Arbroath, went to school in Dundee and her first degree was a BSc in Biochemistry from the
University of Edinburgh. She was awarded a PhD in Microbial Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge.
Most of her academic career has been spent at the University of Aberdeen where she has an active research group
pursuing a variety of areas from microbial diversity to the development and application of whole cell biosensors (biological sensors) for
environmental monitoring and investigating how organisms respond to stress at a cellular level.
Annes laboratory has made a major contribution to our ability to track microorganisms (for example genetically modified microbes) and
assess their activity in natural environments. As part of a strong commitment she has to making sure scientific knowledge is used to benefit
the community, this research was commercialised as a spin out company from the University of Aberdeen in 1999 and to date, the technology
has been successfully applied in Scotland, the rest of the UK and in Europe and North America.
Through her roles in teaching and speaking at science festivals and to lay audiences, Anne has been keen to try and convey the
excitement and relevance of science to non-scientists. She has promoted this activity through her role on the Natural Environment Research
Council where she has also been involved in setting strategy, optimising mechanisms for science delivery and scientific training and securing
budgets for environmental research in the UK.
Anne has held many editorial responsibilities, served on a wide range of committees and currently serves on the Natural Environment
Research Council (NERC), the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council/DTI LINK Bioremediation Programme Steering
Committee and NERC Environmental Genomics Steering Committee. She was recently recognised in March 2008 as a Woman of Outstanding
Achievement by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technologys (UKRC)
Anne is married and, with her husband Ian, loves to go sailing around Scotland and over to Norway. She also enjoys cycling, travelling,
reading and listening to music.
LIFE SCIENCES
Students on campus at Edinburgh University.
Courtesy of the University of Edinburgh
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,
INFORMATICS AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT TIME-
TRAVELLER
By Professor Sir Timothy OShea
In the mid 1960s I was a schoolboy computer enthusiast who wrote programmes that learnt to find their ways through
mazes. I was quite clear about where I wanted to go to university, but was defeated by the then arcane admission
procedures of the University of Edinburgh and had to wait till 1973 to achieve my objective.
T
hat year I travelled from Texas to give what was happily a well received paper on self-improving teaching systems at the International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. Before the end of that day I was offered a four year research post at the Bionics Research Laboratory in
the School of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh. I arrived to join a bustling community of more than 200 mostly young researchers who had come from
around the world to build robots, invent new computer programming languages, automatically process human language and argue with extraordinary
ferocity about the nature of intelligence and how computers might best be used to improve our understanding of human cognitive abilities.
The history of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh is well described on the Informatics website
1
by Jim Howe who successfully led the School for many
years. During the Second World War, Donald Michie worked at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing on breaking the German codes. He then became a Reader in
Surgical Science at the University but in 1963 reverted to the strong interests he had developed in thinking machines during his time working with Turing.
Michie, like many of the researchers who later joined him, had a very unconventional approach to university administration and captured premises, staff and
computers.
The University subsequently agreed to the existence of an Experimental Programming Unit and by 1966 had created a Department of Machine
Intelligence and Perception headed by Michie. This became a magnet for a number of brilliant scientists from quite different backgrounds who were all
intrigued by the possibility of constructing machines that could learn, reason, walk or talk.
A Scottish Enlightenment thinker travelling in a time machine from late 18th century Edinburgh to the School of Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s
would have felt very much at home. Scholars from very diverse backgrounds (Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Linguistics, Mathematics, Philosophy) arguing
from new sources of evidence (the output of computer programmes, the actions of robots) about the fundamental nature of intelligence. They would also
have been comfortable with the use of neologisms (Bionics, Meta-Mathematics, Theoretical Psychology, Computational Linguistics) and the development of
new research methods as part of the journey involved in creating a totally new fields of study. Our time-travelling Enlightenment thinker would also have
been very comfortable in the seminar rooms or laboratories as they would have looked very similar too or might even have been identical to rooms they had
used in their own time.
The success of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh owes a great deal to the Scottish Enlightenment values that pervade the University. A
key is the willingness to pose and attack big fundamental questions. Another fundamental is the enthusiasm for inviting scholars and students from all
around the world and from the widest range of backgrounds to join the research enterprise. The link with Stanford is the most important one for Informatics
INFORMATION & COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (ICT)
The success of Informatics and Artificial
Intelligence at Edinburgh owes a great deal
to the Scottish Enlightenment values that
pervade the University.
Courtesy of the University of Edinburgh
at Edinburgh and is well supported by Scottish Enterprise. It is not an exclusive link and there are well-travelled routes to other major artificial intelligence
and computer science research centres in the USA, Japan, China and mainland Europe. Edinburgh is a key node in a world community of researchers.
The Edinburgh academic who has studied at MIT and Cambridge, researched in Stanford and Tokyo and worked with industry in Germany or France is
typical. It is almost impossible to be successful without an international perspective that spans the commercial and the academic domains. There is a very
great openness at Edinburgh to applying the outcomes of research to commerce, to medicine and to other disciplines. I am especially excited by the
intersection of Informatics with the Life Sciences and with Medicine. Systems Biology will be immensely important for fundamental medical research, for
predictive medicine and for the development of new medicines and therapies.
Forty years ago admitting to working in Artificial Intelligence was a good way of provoking silly jokes about vets (AI) or boring lectures on the
impossibility of machines ever emulating the full richness of human reasoning. Nowadays nobody seems to be surprised that a computer is the world chess
champion or that a mobile phone may exhibit limited speech recognition and learn to recognise the characteristic vowel sounds of its owner. Many of the
successes of the field are even less visible. The search techniques that underpin the operation of Google and similar database engines are directly derived
from work in the 1960s on automated reasoning.
The nature of the Artificial Intelligence research enterprise has changed with a much greater emphasis on searching for commercial applications and
creating new companies. There is also a great drive to engineer to a very high standard, devices based on very restricted subsets of the technology. This
ruthless reductionism is not new to Scottish research. In the 1970s, Freddie the Edinburgh Robot famously finessed the problems of moving in the world by
moving its world instead first under its camera eye before then picking up objects from the world that it had moved to under its impressive - and rather
alarming - large pair of mechanical arms.
Visitors to the Informatics Forum today can safely shake hands with a beautifully engineered robotic hand designed for use by humans who need a
prosthetic hand. They can also see how Artificial Intelligence search and natural language analysis techniques area being applied to massive medical
databases and how planning tools are being applied in virtual worlds such as Second Life or to the design of new parallel processors for very powerful
supercomputers.
A feature of contemporary work is the great extremes of specialisation and scale of many of the computer tools that are in use. Speckled computing
involves tiny communicating computers with sensors that are literally minute specks which can be sprayed on to devices to make an extraordinary range of
distributed real world applications possible. My favourite example scenario involves each item in a laundry basket discussing via its computer speck with a
washing machines computer speck which is the most appropriate washing cycle for it and the consensus laundry view being communicated via the speech
generator on the washing machine to the human owner. Such speckled computers can now be manufactured for pennies but do require sophisticated
programming languages if they are to be effectively deployed.
At the other extreme the HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) supercomputer based at the Universitys Advanced Computing Facility costs
113m and is capable of 63 million million calculations a second. If everybody on the planet could carry out 10,000 calculations in a second at the same
time they would still have to find some way of working cooperatively and productively together. This supercomputer provides researchers all over the UK and
their international partners with ways of undertaking complex computer simulations, including forecasting the impact of climate change, projecting the
spread of epidemics, designing new materials and developing new medical drugs. Such immense computer power is necessary to take advantage of the
Edinburghs important link with Stanford for Informatics is well
supported by Scottish Enterprise. Scottish Enterprise
Headquarters, Glasgow (designed by BDP).
freedom
Its good business, not rocket science
Imagine the
to focus on your business
In an inspiring and accessible working environment, with flexible
properties and leases, and with the best partners for your business.
www.edinburghtechnopole.co.uk
Ian Murphy
Edinburgh Technopole
Tel: +44 (0)131 440 3510
Email: ian@edinburghtechnopole.co.uk
James Thomson & Peter Fraser
DTZ
Tel: +44 (0)131 222 4500
Email: james.thomson@dtz.com
peter.fraser@dtz.com
BRING THIS REALITY TO YOUR BUSINESS
Contact
extraordinary quantities of digital data that are now available about humans subsequent to the sequencing of the genome, as well as about the world from
satellites in space and sensors on the surface.
Scottish leadership in this domain depends on our success in devising the programming languages and computer tools that can take advantage of both
the massive programming power and the ubiquitous sensing devices. This in turn is based on 40 years of being at the forefront of world research in Artificial
Intelligence.
Edinburgh is thus a natural home for the national e-Science centre which acts as a focal point for research and training on how scientists from the
whole range of disciplines can effectively analyse data, build models and test theories using contemporary computer technology. These techniques are also
being increasingly deployed by social scientists and scholars in the humanities. In fact it was Professor Sidney Michaelson, an Edinburgh computer scientist
and contemporary of Donald Michie, who pioneered the approach of using automated text analysis to test whether different important texts - such as plays
attributed to William Shakespeare - were in fact written by the same person.
An activity that has become vitally important is effective digital preservation. If data is used to deduce important results about human illnesses, climate
change, adolescent culture or renaissance literature then it is essential to preserve the corpus of data, so that when new information becomes available or
new questions need to be posed, we can accurately and efficiently access the original data. This is the work of the new Digital Curation Centre based in
Edinburgh - a Centre I am sure David Hume would understand as the library for the digital age.
In 2008, as our Enlightenment time-travellers wandered around our brand new Informatics Forum they would be very comfortable with a buzzing
community of 600 researchers from all over the world. Joseph Hutton, the originator of Geology, would not be perplexed by teams of supercomputer-using
researchers engaged in multi-disciplinary endeavours with strange new names. Principal Robertson who devised the modern style of writing history would, I
think, be relaxed about digital curation applied to the humanities and other fields. Our distinguished visitors from the 18th century would, I hope, be
impressed that we have constructed a very effective building with exciting new spaces to facilitate the robust intellectual debates that drive Informatics
forward. I also suspect that like me they would enjoy the strange collection of hopping and jumping robots that inhabit the peripheries of the Forum.
Professor Sir Timothy OShea is Principal & Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh.
Timothy OShea was born in Hamburg in 1949 and started writing machine learning computer systems while at the
Royal Liberty School. He obtained a BSc in Mathematics and Experimental Psychology from Sussex and a PhD in Computer
Based Learning from Leeds University. He worked as a researcher in the Computer Science Department of the University of
Texas at Austin, the Bionics Research Lab, Edinburgh and the Systems Concepts Lab, Xerox PARC. He founded the
Computers and Learning Research Group at the Open University in 1978. He was promoted to an Open University personal
chair in Information Technology and Education in 1986 and was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 1993. In 1997 he was
elected Master of Birkbeck and subsequently appointed Provost of Gresham College and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of London,
holding the three posts concurrently until he returned to Edinburgh as Principal in 2002.
His current board memberships include Scottish Enterprise and the British Council and he is Convener of the Universities Scotland
Funding Strategy Group. He has recently been appointed as Chair of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and will take up post
from 1 January 2009. He holds an honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University and fellowships from Birkbeck, the University of the
Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Professor OShea was awarded a Knighthood in the Queens 2008 New Years Honours List in recognition of his services to higher
education.
Website: www.ed.ac.uk.
Footnote:
1. www.inf.ed.ac.uk.
Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of Bennetts Associates.
SCOTLANDS
HIDDEN JEWELS
By Edward Chance
Scotlands ICT industry is one of the hidden jewels of the Scottish economy, comprising a wealth of highly talented
technology companies developing and delivering high quality solutions.
T
he industry is of considerable importance in its own right, worth in excess of 5bn and employing more than 105,000 people. It is also essential to the
emerging knowledge economy, underpinning innovation, competitiveness and service throughout the Scottish economy and creating an unequalled
platform for productivity improvements.
It also benefits from the presence of 13 universities engaged in teaching and world class research, and the recently established Scottish Informatics &
Computing Science Alliance has been created to further develop Scotlands position as an international research leader in informatics and computer science.
INDUSTRY EXPERTISE
Scottish ICT businesses design, develop and deliver products, solutions and services for key local industries including financial services, life sciences and
energy, and supply a wide range of other industries across the UK, Europe and other international markets.
The breadth of the industry is considerable, including telecommunications companies, software engineering firms, web developers, IT services
businesses, networking businesses, games developers and IT infrastructure firms. The business base ranges from the Scottish operations of multinational
companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, EDS, SAIC, and Logica to micro businesses of one or two people. Major telecoms providers BT, 02 and Thus,
all have a substantial presence in Scotland.
Scotland has attracted considerable inward investment in ICT over the years, with long standing investors such as IBM who first set up in Greenock in
1951, NCR in Dundee and Sun in Linlithgow. More recently there has been investment in software development, business process outsourcing and back
office infrastructure, with companies such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon all setting up operations here.
Complementing the larger companies, is a cornucopia of indigenous businesses, mainly in software engineering and IT services.
Scotland benefits from an exceptionally broad range of capabilities across the ICT value chain - whilst much of the manufacturing end of the electronics
industry has now moved to other locations there is still significant research and design in areas such as semi-conductor design, and optoelectronics and
displays.
An increasingly competitive communications infrastructure with ubiquitous broadband access is provided by a variety of telecommunications companies,
including BT, Thus and the Scottish operations of other operators such as Cable & Wireless. This is complemented by hosting services and data centres, with
high quality managed services, providing a secure and reliable technology environment.
Many companies are involved in software development. The majority supply the blue chip and corporate business sectors, with an exceptionally wide
spread of end markets.
Whilst many businesses concentrate on the lucrative UK market, a growing number have developed international markets. Companies as diverse as KAL,
Memex, ciboodle, Axios, Gael, and McLaren run international businesses supplying products from software for bank ATM machines to contact centre
systems, from Scottish headquarters.
SPECIALITIES
The wireless innovation centre at Hillington Park provides a focal point for the increasing number of businesses operating in this fast growing and dynamic
sector, particularly in mobile applications and content, Machine 2 Machine (M2M) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications.
Dundee has gained a reputation for games expertise and is home to companies such as Real Time Worlds, Tag Games and Denki. The University of
Abertay with its International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment, specialises in games technology and research and has built an
exceptionally close relationship with Sony in Japan over many years.
INWARD INVESTMENT
The Scottish financial services industry is a major employer of skilled ICT professionals and over the last few years Scotland has provided an increasingly
attractive location for software development and IT services for international banks such as JP Morgan, Barclays Wealth and Morgan Stanley. Other
technology companies such as Dell and 02 have based technical support centres here, and NCR and Amazon have located their European development
teams in Scotland.
A high quality of life, combined with a skilled, English speaking workforce and competitive labour costs, continue to make Scotland an attractive
location for inward investment.
INNOVATIVE AND FLEXIBLE
Immensely innovative and fast moving itself, the ICT industry globally has driven an unparalleled pace of change. In their short history, computers have
evolved from mainframes, through minicomputers, to networked desktops, and then via the web and wireless networks, to mobile and ubiquitous
computing, where information systems are always on, always there. ICT provides many of the building blocks to ensure we continue Scotlands long tradition
of innovation into the 21st century. It opens up new processes and new channels to market, underpins innovation across many other industries such as
financial services, distribution and biotechnology, and enables new process and service transformation in sectors such as tourism, medicine, media and the
public sector.
Fleet of foot and very responsive, smaller ICT companies are constantly developing new products and solutions, whilst the multinationals are an
ongoing source of knowledge transfer, bringing ideas, techniques and best practice from around the world.
A range of R&D grants and start up assistance is available to support companies in bringing new products and services to market. Many smaller
companies punch above their weight, providing enterprise level products and services. Typically modest, these businesses often undersell their capabilities
and are not well known outside their immediate market place. The capacity of these domestic assets needs to be better recognised and nurtured as we strive
to meet international innovation rates.
HOTHOUSE FLOWERS
Scottish universities are bursting with new ideas, from the world class School of Informatics at Edinburgh University, through games and animation at
Abertay, Dundee and Glasgow, to the communications expertise at Glasgow and St Andrews University, as well as computing science in Aberdeen, Robert
Gordon, Dundee, Napier, Stirling, Strathclyde and the University of the West of Scotland.
Scotland has one of the five largest top-quality research clusters in Informatics and Computer Science (ICS) in the world. About 20% of the top
computer scientists in the UK work in Scotland, securing around one-fifth of national ICS research funds. Specialities are as diverse as next generation
networks, artificial intelligence, assistive technologies, bioinformatics, security, robotics, virtual reality, animation and games.
Dell offices Glasgow.
Courtesy of Dell Inc
The challenges for tomorrows systems - including new ways of securing, interfacing, modelling and engineering them - have helped to set the agenda
for SICSA whose key themes are:
Next Generation Internet
As the Internet evolves towards ubiquity, research targets include security and trust, programmability, manageability and mobility.
Multimodal Interaction
Personal ubiquitous interfaces require research enabling multiple, rich communication channels between people and vast bodies of information.
Modelling and Abstraction
Processing ever-larger volumes of data raises new challenges in the development and use of predictive models of complex systems of interacting elements.
Complex Systems Engineering
New systems must be engineered to meet the needs of industry and society, operating robustly within an often hostile external environment.
In addition to the wide ranging excellence within the Informatics and Computer Science Departments, there are a number of initiatives across Scotland
that demonstrate how software and computer science are becoming increasingly essential to research in sectors as diverse as physics, engineering and life-
sciences. These include HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource), The National e-Science, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, the Scottish Imaging
Network, the White Space Centre (a 3D immersive environment laboratory for research on real-time interactive visualisation), the Northern Research
Partnership Computational Systems Joint Research Institute and virtual reality facilities at Heriot Watt University.
The issue is how to harness all this capacity? An increasingly sophisticated infrastructure catalyses and fosters commercialisation and the development
of academic spin outs, although there is still a long way to go before Scotland achieves the fluid cross-fertilisation of ideas and expertise between academia
and industry that typifies the situation across the industry in the US.
SKILLS
The Scottish industry benefits from a highly skilled workforce with strong engineering skills. Approximately 50% of the workforce has first degree or
equivalent qualifications, and the fast moving pace of technology means the industry already has a culture of life long learning. These skill levels help to
generate considerable added value.
Computing Science and Information Systems are taught at all of Scotlands 13 universities, and many of the further education colleges deliver industry
certified training, for example Cisco and Microsoft approved courses. The telecoms sector has traditionally relied on apprenticeships as a significant route
into the industry, with certification again often delivered through further education.
A number of initiatives have been established to meet specific requirements, including the Dell Academy at University of the West of Scotland, providing
specialist training for Dells Glasgow support centre, and the Industry Alliance for Jobs helping disadvantaged youngsters to gain entry level industry
certification to improve their employability.
Computing Science and Information systems are also taught at school level. Through DIVA (Digital media and ICT Vendor Alliance), specialist modules
have been developed in collaboration with industry. The programme is designed to ensure that the curriculum, resources and awards for schools and colleges
in Scotland are enriched by cutting edge developments within the IT industry. Examples include the database programming module, developed in
collaboration with Oracle. With significant numbers of ICT professionals working in financial services, health care and the oil and gas sector, much of the
workforce has deep knowledge of these industries.
LIFE LONG LEARNING
There is a growing catalogue of continuing professional development from Masters and PhDs to a significant body of qualifications being developed by the
professional bodies such as BCS and the IEEE. However, further development is needed to ensure we meet advances in ICT technologies. Online learning,
from the informal skills development generated through industry user groups to the e-universities established by organisation such as Google, provide
examples of how this may be achieved.
Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of Bennetts Associates.
WHERE TO NEXT?
The challenge we now face is how to grow the ICT industry to be an even greater contributor to the Scottish economy. To be a crucial element of a modern
knowledge company, populated by creative, vibrant, world class companies developing leading edge technology solutions that are internationally
recognised. To do this we must encourage companies to be increasingly customer focused and innovative, to look beyond Scotland and aggressively address
international markets, and to exploit academic research more successfully. Targeting inward investment that complements the existing business base, will
help to build greater critical mass, and foster a culture of collaboration.
Within the domestic market the industry needs to help other Scottish businesses to optimise their use of ICT to underpin productivity improvements and
innovation and to exploit technology to open up new markets.
Key issues that must be addressed include successfully growing companies of scale, much greater emphasis on international markets, higher levels of
productisation, skills development, public sector procurement and supply chain development.
The development of the ICT Forum and the recent announcement of the ICT Industry Advisory Group, are important steps forward in forging the close
cooperation between Government, industry, academia and other organisations, essential to the further development of the industry.
ROLE OF ScotlandIS
ScotlandIS provides a focal point for Scotlands ICT sectors. As the trade body for software, telecoms and IT services we generate market intelligence for the
industry, organise and facilitate intra-industry networking, as well as inputs to policy development on issues of interest to the industry, including skills,
innovation and public sector procurement.
We work closely with partners such as eskills UK, and are represented on the ICT Forum, ICT Industry Advisory Group, the Scottish Employers Forum,
and Technology Ventures Scotland.
Edward Chance is CEO of the Adventi Group, a Scottish headquartered ICT Company. Edward is an experienced business
leader and evangelist on the importance of information technology in schools and with young people.
Prior to joining Adventi, Edward was Area Vice President, Oracle Corporation UK Ltd., with responsibility for Oracles
business operations in Scotland and the North of England. Edward joined Oracle in 1989 and held various roles within the
company including product development, consulting and sales.
Edward holds a BSc in Computer Information Systems, from Glasgow Caledonian University; Post graduate Diploma in
International Business, Edinburgh University; and an Executive MBA from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, Paris.
Edward also sits on the Council of the CBI in Scotland; is married to Shirley-Anne and has two children Mark and Hannah.
Web: www.scotlandis.com
Microsoft Offices, Edinburgh.
REINVENTING
SCOTTISH MEDIA
By Atholl Duncan
Story telling, debate, music and performance sit centre stage in the new Scottish Enlightenment - lived and loved by Scots
today as passionately as in the life of Robert Burns. However, this next decade will see the landscape of Scotlands creative
and media industries change, perhaps, more quickly than it has changed in any period since the time of the Bard.
T
he 20th century saw extremely successful periods for our television, radio and
newspaper industries. Budgets were plentiful and readers, viewers and listeners
thronged to consume our story telling.
The 21st century sees these industries converging as quickly as consumers scatter. It
sees the funding models of media companies challenged by the shifting sands of audience
behaviour. It also sees a second digital revolution changing the horizons and habits of
everyone in modern Scotland.
Television audiences to our Scottish news programmes are comparatively strong. More
than two million people tune in every week to get their news from BBC Scotlands TV
bulletins - Reporting Scotland. STV also attract large and healthy audiences for their
evening broadcasts from Glasgow and Aberdeen.
Once the choice was simple - BBC or STV? Now viewers in Scotland can access more
than 470 different TV channels broadcast from every corner of the globe.
The bulletins of Fox, Al Jazeera, Russia Today and CNN are now as readily available in
Newmachar as New York.
This multichannel explosion means that the audiences for our traditional main evening
bulletins - when analysed over the longer term - are in a gradual and slow decline.
The commercial pressures brought about by this digital revolution impact on
advertising revenues for STV and for commercial radio stations across Scotland as
audiences disperse.
Our Scottish newspapers see their sales drop. Some watch as 10% falls in readership
occur year on year. Traditionally lucrative advertising from property and recruitment also
plunges.
DIGITAL MEDIA AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
BBC Scotland, Pacific Quay, Glasgow.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980)
Below: Neil Oliver (presenter of Coast and
A History of Scotland). Courtesy of BBC Scotland
Income lost from such declining advertising on TV, radio and newspapers is not replaced with equal sums from increased advertising on the internet.
The rise and rise of the internet as a home for news, information, debate and entertainment is relentless and staggering. In early 2007, around 800,000
people in Scotland got their Scottish news from BBC Scotlands website. By late 2008, this has risen to nearly two million unique users every week. An
astonishing 150% increase in just over 18 months.
Every corner of our media industry is in a state of flux. Everyone in Scotland who wants to tell a story or communicate a message faces a new challenge
in how best to do that.
PR companies, like those involved in the return of the Wispa chocolate bar, now target social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo
rather than the traditional broadcast and newspaper outlets.
Our old ways do not do in the digital age of today. Scotlands media and creative industries must reinvent themselves. Wherever there is challenge,
there is opportunity.
BBC Scotlands news online service is now part of most Scots daily routine of finding out what is going on. Many others use it from abroad to find out
what is happening here.
The web is no longer just a place to do research, find facts and read articles. Increasingly it is a place to watch video at a time unconstrained by TV
schedules.
In 2004, two and half million watched video of the Athens Olympics on
the BBCs website. In Beijing in 2008, this figure was surpassed within hours
of the Games Opening Ceremony and the number of video views soared to
more than 40 million by the close.
The BBCs iPlayer - which allows the audience to view a large range of
programmes across the broadband internet - has been a phenomenal
success in its short life. For many people it has revolutionised the way they
consume the BBCs TV output, allowing them to watch their favourite
programmes anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Its use increases by 20% every month and lays down an attractive
alternative to the traditionally scheduled television channel.
The opportunities for the creative and media industries in Scotland are
immense. BBC Scotland has invested 188m in the best digital broadcasting
centre anywhere in Europe. It sits on the banks of the Clyde beside the
foundation stones of the shipyards which made Clydeside famous and on the
quays which watched the emigration of the Scottish diaspora to every corner
of the globe. These new broadcasting headquarters lie just over a mile from
the room at the Central Hotel in Glasgow which saw John Logie Baird
transmit the first long distance television pictures in 1927.
John Logie Baird's first television. The Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland
This new Clydeside industry is the same old Scottish industry of Burns - storytelling, performing, songs and debate. This output from Scotland can form
the core of a new Scottish Enlightenment to take to wider audiences wherever they may be.
The BBC will treble its investment in programmes made in Scotland for the UK networks over the next few years. Drama production thrives around the
River City soap opera stages within new facilities at BBC Dumbarton. Amid these developments sounds a new debate over whether Scotland should have a
new digital TV channel to add choice and compete with the BBCs public service offering.
As Scotland celebrates the 250th anniversary of Burns with the Homecoming, BBC Scotland embarks on perhaps its most ambitious project. Spanning
television, radio, online and events, Scotlands History will tell the story of our country to the world in a way that it has never been told before.
The centrepiece is a new landmark 10-part TV series - A History of Scotland - co-produced with the Open University and shot in high definition, to be
shown across the UK. It is also the catalyst for a raft of radio programming, a new website, interactive game, audio walks, concerts and events going
through to late 2009.
Where once Burns captured our history in pen and ink, now our story becomes a truly multiplatform experience which reaches around the world in an
instant and in a fusion of words, pictures and sound.
The works of Robert Burns are also the focus for a significant and culturally rich new project to be built on Clydeside. Over the next few years BBC
Scotland will make audio recordings of his complete works - all 600 of them. This will consist of nine hours of broadcasting, using well known actors. These
recordings will be made available to audiences in Scotland, the rest of the UK and abroad - on radio and the web - as a wonderful legacy of the life and
works of Scotlands bard.
In our journalism, the central themes of Burns - themes of nationhood, internationalism and equal opportunities - remain key themes of our
broadcasting today as much as they were the themes of his writing, poetry and oratory.
Debate about Scotlands future - as we approach European, UK and Scottish Parliamentary Elections - will be as colourful and passionate as ever.
Interest in Scotlands stories will reach a new intensity.
In the same way that the works of Burns have transcended time and travelled to every corner of the globe, the ambition of the BBC - as the national
broadcaster of Scotland - is to produce creative content which marks our place at the forefront of the new media world.
From our Clydeside base we will weld together creative content built with the fingers of our own rich talent to once again take Scotlands stories to the
hearts of our people and to the hearts of many more the world oer.
Atholl Duncan is Head of News and Current Affairs for BBC Scotland. He leads more than 200 journalists who tell
Scotlands stories on radio, television and the internet. He has worked in media and communications for nearly 30 years
and has been responsible for the BBCs coverage of most of the major news stories in Scotland over that period including
the Lockerbie disaster, the Dunblane shootings, the Glasgow Terror attack, and all the main Scottish and UK Parliamentary
Elections. Between 2003 and 2006, he was Director of Corporate Affairs at Scottish Water. He has also been a non-
executive director of Sportscotland since 2001.
Website: www.bbc.co.uk/scotland.
The modern skyline of Glasgow 's River Clyde at dusk with BBC Scotland on the right.
David Woods
The GLENEAGLES word and the EAGLE device
are trade marks.
The Gleneagles Hotel
Tel: +44 (0)1764 662231
Email: resort.sales@gleneagles.com
Internet: www.gleneagles.com
Treat yourself to a stay at the legendary
Gleneagles Hotel in the Perthshire countryside,
just an hours drive from Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Relax in our sumptuous guest bedrooms. Dine in
style in our four top-class restaurants including the
only two Michelin starred restaurant in Scotland.
Indulge yourself at the new award-winning spa.
Play on three of the finest championship golf
courses in Scotland. Enjoy a wealth of outdoor
experiences, perfect for all the family, including
horse riding, fishing, falconry and off road driving.
And so much more besides.
Its all part of the Gleneagles difference.
SCOTLANDS
TOURISM INDUSTRY
By Peter Lederer CBE
With approximately 200,000 employees, the tourism industry is at the core of Scotlands economy, generating over 4 billion
in revenue each year. Tourism supports around 9% of employment in Scotland and 13% in the Highlands, touching every
sector and each part of the country.
I
t is a complex industry with a wide range of players, ranging from small B&Bs to
large hotel chains. What unites the industry is its ambition for growth - to grow
tourism revenues for the benefit of the Scottish economy. This ambition is central to
everything we do and is the driving force behind all our innovative activities and tactics.
Scottish tourism has adapted well to changes in the global market place and the
expectations of todays visitors. However it is a challenging environment, particularly in
the current economic climate, with exchange rates, fuel costs and other factors all taking
effect.
Of course it is not all doom and gloom as change brings opportunities as well as
challenges. For example, many more people are likely to holiday domestically or take
shorter haul journeys during the credit crunch, providing us with significant opportunities
in the UK and European markets. As Scotlands national tourism organisation, we at
VisitScotland - through our research and sophisticated analysis of market behaviour - are
well placed to respond to changing circumstances and we are adapting our marketing
where necessary. In this way we continue to maximise opportunities and take advantage
of changing trends.
It is in this environment that initiative and innovation in tourism is more important
than ever. Scotland is competing against over 200 other countries, which is why the
industry must strive to achieve quality whilst meeting the needs and desires of our
visitors at all times.
Scotlands first ever Homecoming year is just one of the creative ways in which we
are raising global awareness of Scotland as a quality must-visit, must-return destination.
Homecoming Scotland 2009, a year long event, sees Scots being encouraged to play
TOURISM
Culzean Castle near Maybole, Carrick on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland.
Below: View from the southern shore across Loch Tay to Kenmore,
Perthshire. Pic: Paul Tomkins. VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
their part by inviting friends and relatives to visit during 2009. A programme of new and enhanced events will take place across the whole country.
Inspired by the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scotlands national poet and international cultural icon, Robert Burns, Homecoming aims to encourage
Scots and those who love Scotland to visit in 2009. A Scottish Government initiative, it is managed by Scotlands national events agency, EventScotland in
partnership with VisitScotland.
From Burns Night (25th January) to St Andrews Day (30th November) 2009, the countrywide programme of Homecoming events and activities is being
designed to celebrate some of Scotlands great contributions to the world which still live on today and are often incorporated successfully into contemporary
society and promotion of Scotland worldwide. They include Burns himself, whisky, golf, Great Scottish Minds and Innovations and Scotlands culture and
heritage which have a presence both at home and through Scotlands global family. The events will complement the vast range of world-class attractions
already offered in Scotland. From the worlds biggest ever Clan Gathering in Edinburgh to Celtic Connections in Glasgow and from the Open Championship
at Turnberry to the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival, there will be something special for everyone.
As part of its Homecoming Scotland marketing activity, VisitScotland has coordinated the most comprehensive connection with Scotlands diaspora to
date. As well as reaching the officials of around 1,600 Scottish organisations worldwide, VisitScotland and EventScotland have enlisted the help of the
International Burns Federation, Global Friends of Scotland and Global Scots, to encourage their members to start planning their travel to Scotland in 2009.
VisitScotlands innovative marketing campaign for Homecoming Scotland 2009 will reach out to both the diaspora and the best tourism prospects in the UK
and overseas, encouraging them to join Scotlands year long celebration.
In addition to hosting events like Homecoming and ensuring that our visitors experience the very best of what Scotland has to offer, VisitScotland aims
to do this in a sustainable manner, so that our unique heritage and dramatic landscapes are maintained for the benefit of future generations.
Sustainability and green issues are now very much mainstream, with governments, businesses and individuals all involved. Tourism, as one of the main
economic drivers in the UK, has its part to play and this is where the
Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS) comes in; something which
VisitScotland has embraced and works hard to promote to its businesses.
The GTBS is the leading sustainable tourism certification scheme in the
UK. Businesses opting to join are assessed by a qualified grading advisor
against a rigorous set of criteria, covering a range of areas, like energy
and water efficiency, waste management, biodiversity and more.
Businesses that meet the required standard receive a Bronze, Silver, or
Gold award based on their level of achievement. The current network of
members is comprised of a wide range of business types, who are each
supporting innovation, including accommodation providers, visitor
attractions, corporate offices and others.
In order to entice businesses to become sustainable and sign up to
GTBS, VisitScotland pledged its commitment by establishing Going
Green. The scheme includes a list of ideas to help Scottish businesses
work in a way that is conscious of the environment, which is available
online and free of charge. It aims to help businesses see the benefits of
working in a more sustainable way. It is a stepping stone approach to
help operators begin moving along the green path and see for
themselves that it is not difficult or costly and will save them money.
Tourism is a constantly evolving industry, with many exciting
opportunities and projects ahead of us. Whether you are a city B&B or a
hidden gem visitor attraction, everyone involved in this fantastic industry
TOURISM
Hammer event in the Luss Highland Games. Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
Below: Looking over a small lochan to the Mountains of Glen Coe, in the Lochaber District, Highland.
Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
has a responsibility to make their voice heard. If we are to overcome the challenges currently before us, it is more important than ever that we all work
together, identifying opportunities for growth and removing barriers where they exist.
Our ultimate strategic goal is to increase tourism revenue and I look forward to Homecoming Scotland 2009 and its fantastic innovative programme of
events and activities bringing us closer to this and proving to the world, once again, that Scotland is indeed a quality and unique destination with so much
to offer each type of visitor.
For more information on Homecoming Scotland, to sign up for the Homecoming Scotland newsletter or to send an electronic invitation to friends and
family go to www.homecomingscotland2009.com.
Peter Lederer, CBE, FHCIMA, MI is Chairman of VisitScotland. He joined Gleneagles in 1984 as General Manager and was
appointed Managing Director in 1987 before becoming Chairman of Gleneagles 2007. Previously he held operational,
administrative and senior management positions in Canada for 10 years with the Four Seasons hotel group in Toronto,
Ottawa and Montreal, and with Plaza Hotels in Toronto. He was also, a partner for two years in a design, construction and
consulting firm providing services to the hospitality industry.
Born in London in 1950, he was educated at City of London School followed by a four-year Hotel and Catering
Management Course at Hendon College, London.
Peter is committed to improving quality, educational standards and training opportunities within the hospitality and tourism industries.
He is a Patron of the Hospitality Industry Trust Scotland and The Queen Margaret University College Foundation, as well as a Trustee of the
Springboard Educational Trust. Peter has been appointed an Honorary Professor by the University of Dundee and was awarded an Honorary
Doctorate of Business Administration by Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. In addition, Peter is a Master Innholder and Freeman
of the City of London, as well as a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Innholders.
He was appointed Chairman of VisitScotland in 2001 - having served as a Board member since 1995 - and is currently serving his third
term as Chairman. He represents VisitScotland on the VisitBritain Board. Peter is also a Board member of The Leading Hotels of the World and
member of the Council of CBI Scotland. In 1993 he won the Tourism Catey award and in 1997 was honoured as Hotelier of the Year. In her
1994 Birthday Honours List, Her Majesty The Queen appointed him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the
industry. This was followed by the honour of Commander of the British Empire in 2005.
Peter is married to Marilyn and has two sons Mathew and Mark.
Web: www.visitscotland.org
TOURISM
Boats on Loch Leathann with the Old Man of Storr in the background.
Brian A Jackson
SPORT
Looking over Swilcan Bridge towards the clubhouse at St Andrews Old Course.
Stephen Finn
GOLF IS SCOTLANDS
GIFT TO THE WORLD
By Peter Dawson
The etymology of golf is uncertain but it is probably linked with the Scots word gowff, meaning, to hit. Certainly, Robert
Burns would have known of golf in his time.
T
he game, it is believed, was well established in St Andrews more than 300 years before his birth. Early references note it to be a popular pastime
when Scotlands first university was founded there in 1413. In the entire works of Robert Burns it appears only once, in an early satirical poem on a
tangled political situation of the day involving Lord North, Charles James Fox and William Pitt.
But, word an blow, North, Fox and Co.
Gowffd Willie like a ba, man:
When Burns was a young man the writer Edward Topham shared his observations on golf with the readers of his published Letters from Edinburgh:
The diversion which is peculiar to Scotland, and in which all ages find great pleasure, is golf.
Tophams contemporary account dating from 1775 is a fine description of the game and its place in Scottish society even if, for his own taste, he
prefers cricket and tennis on point of dexterity and amusement.
His writings are clear evidence that golf took root in Scotland and capture important early clues as to why it has gone on to achieve a global
presence. He observes its universality: It requires no great exertion and strength, and all ranks and ages play at it. They (the Scots) instruct their children
in it, as soon as they can run alone, and grey hairs boast their execution.
A few years earlier, Scots author Tobias Smollett in his novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker noted, in 1771: Of this diversion (golf) the Scots
are so fond, that when the weather will permit, you may see a multitude of all ranks, from the senator of justice to the lowest tradesmen, mingled
together in their shirts and following the balls with the utmost eagerness. . . .
That St Andrews is central to the history of golf is no accident. It was the resting place of the relics of Saint Andrew and the countrys religious
capital city. However it suffered greatly during the period of reformation. Its religious significance was destroyed, its under-funded university was in
danger of being moved to Perth and its huge cathedral, once attended by Robert the Bruce, lay in ruins.
One group intent on reversing this state of affairs was the Twenty-two Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Kingdom of Fife who first presented a
silver club for competition over the links of St Andrews on 14th May 1754.
A minute of the time makes their intentions clear: The Noblemen and Gentlemen above named being Admirers of the Ancient and healthfull
SPORT
Exercise of the Golf and at the same time having the Interest and prosperity of the Ancient City of
St Andrews at heart, being the Alma Mater of the Golf, Did in the year of our Lord 1754 Contribute
for a Silver Club having a St Andrew Engraved on the head thereof, to be played for on the Links of
St Andrews upon the 14th of May said year and yearly in time coming, Subject to the Conditions
and regulations following.
By 1766 the players who competed for the silver club had formed themselves into the Society
of St Andrews Golfers. In 1834 they were granted the Royal Patronage of King William IV, who gave
his consent for the society to be renamed The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
In truth, it appears that golf and Burns largely went their own ways but what they hold in
common is that they are recognised worldwide as inherent to Scotland and its heritage.
The world of golf looks on St Andrews and Scotland as its spiritual home and to us, The R&A,
for leadership and practical help. Our base in the clubhouse that overlooks the first tee on the Old
Course is an icon of the sport.
Most golfers will know The R&A as the world governing body that makes and amends The
Rules of Golf. We do this at no cost to the game and on behalf of affiliated national golfing bodies
in 120 countries worldwide. Our reach extends throughout Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and the
Americas, outside the United States and Mexico, where the United States Golf Association is the
governing authority.
Sports fans globally know us best as organisers of The Open Championship, golfs oldest major
and its greatest prize. It regularly attracts over 200,000 spectators, including more than 10% from
overseas and on television it reaches some 600 million households around the world.
The custom has become established that The Open is staged in Scotland six years in 10 and
from independent research we know that it brings a 75 million benefit to that part of the country
that is its host venue.
It is fitting that in 2009, Scotlands designated Year of Homecoming and the 250th Anniversary
of Robert Burns birth that The Open returns to the poets home county of Ayrshire and to Turnberry
after a gap of some 15 years.
Those golf fans who remember the famed Duel in the Sun between Tom Watson and Jack
Nicklaus at Turnberry in 1977 will judge that we have been absent from the Ayrshire links for too
long.
The players - both at the top of their game - matched each other stroke for stroke over the
four days of the Championship, each carding 68, 70 and 65 for the first three rounds. After 71 holes, they were separated by a single shot and, at the 72nd,
Watson matched Nicklaus unlikely birdie from three feet. Watsons winning score at Turnberry of 268 was equalled by Zimbabwes Nick Price in 1994 but
has not - as yet - been bettered.
Younger fans will simply be keen to see Tiger Woods back from injury at Turnberry and perhaps eager to witness Padraig Harrington attempt to claim his
third Open Championship title in a row. Only four players have won The Open in three consecutive years, but not since Australias Peter Thomson was
crowned Champion Golfer of the Year at Royal Liverpool, Hoylake in 1956, having won the previous year at St Andrews and at Royal Birkdale 12 months
before that.
Looking ahead to 2010 we celebrate the 150th Anniversary of The Open Championship, first played in 1860, with St Andrews set as the host venue.
The commercial success of The Open allows us to help provide public access golf - for the first time - in countries like Brazil and The Czech Republic,
train referees in China and run grassroots coaching schools in dozens of countries around the world. We can also take a lead in the promotion of sustainable
golf development, preserving playing quality while protecting the natural environment.
SPORT
The 9th hole at Turnberry. Photo Getty Images
Left: The Silver Club. Courtesy of R&A Heritage
LETTERS FROM EDINBURGH
[Some observations on the Diversions, Customs, Manners, and Laws of The Scotch Nation by Edward Topham. Written in the years 1774 and 1775.]
The youths in this country are very manly in their exercises and amusements. Strength and agility seems to be most their attention. The
insignificant pastimes of marbles, tops, &c. they are totally unacquainted with.
The diversion which is peculiar to Scotland, and in which all ages find great pleasure, is golf. They play at it with a small leathern ball, like a
fives ball, and a piece of wood, flat on one side, in the shape of a small bat, which is fastened at the end of a stick, of three of four feet long, and
at right angles to it.
The art consists in striking the ball with this instrument, into a hole in the ground, in a smaller number of strokes than your adversary. This
game has the superiority of cricket and tennis in being less violent and dangerous, but in point of dexterity and amusement, by no means to be
compared with them.
However, I am informed that some skill and nicety are necessary to strike the ball to the proposed distance and no further, and that in this
there is considerable difference in players. It requires no great exertion and strength, and all ranks and ages play at it. They instruct their children in
it, as soon as they can run alone, and grey hairs boast their execution.
Golf has become a truly global game from its origins here in Scotland. At The R&A we are working for golf to ensure that it remains true to its enduring
qualities, so much in evidence in the country from the time of Robert Burns, 250 years ago and before.
Playing the game should be encouraged for both young and old and should be accessible to the greatest number. It should be international in its
outlook and promote harmony and fair play. Perhaps with such a legacy it is not surprising that we are currently seeking golfs reintroduction as a Summer
Olympic sport from the games of 2016.
I for one would like to think that if Burns was alive to write about our game today he would be content to describe golf as Scotlands gift to the world.
Peter Dawson is Chief Executive of The R&A. Peter Dawson was born in Aberdeen and educated at George Heriots School
and Westcliff High School. He is an Engineering and Management Studies graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
and spent over 25 years in the heavy engineering industry in Europe, North America and Asia. He joined The R&A as Chief
Executive in 1999. He is married and has two adult children. Apart from golf, his interests include most sports and current
affairs.
Acknowledgements:
I am grateful to Dr Penny Fielding, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh for her research and expert advice and to The R&A
Heritage Department.
SPORT
Padraig Harrington with the Claret Jug.
Photo Getty Images
CONFERENCE & BANQUETI NG
AT CELTI C FOOTBALL CLUB - EXPERI ENCE PARADI SE
For all enquiries or bookings please contact Martin McAvoy:
Call 0141 551 4405 or email mmcavoy@celticfc.co.uk
CELTIC PARK IS A UNIQUE VENUE THAT OFFERS YOU THE OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE
AN EVENT THAT INSPIRES TEAMWORK, SUCCESS AND MOTIVATION.
With a winning combination of over 35 conference suites, offering you
flexible facilities that can accommodate conferences, exhibitions,
meetings, receptions and dinners for over 800 people.
With easy access from the main motorway routes, train stations & bus
links there is also complimentary parking with over 800 spaces.
Special Offer
Conference Package From25 per person
Package includes:
Room Hire
Tea, Coffee and Biscuits on arrival
2 course finger or fork buffet lunch
Afternoon tea, coffee & pastries
Jugs of water within main meeting room
Flipchart with pens
Complimentary car parking
Data projector and screen

SCOTLANDS
SPORTING TRADITION
By Louise Martin
Sport is as important to Scottish culture as the Bard himself. Scotland has always been a pioneering sporting nation, the
home of a range of sports including golf and curling, and home to passionate spectators and participants.
O
ur temperate climate and stunning natural resources provide the ideal environment for participation in a wide range of sports. Our people - with our
history and traditions, our entrepreneurship and our sense of national and community pride - have made Scotland a sporting nation and contributed to
the development of sport across the world.
The last 250 years have seen significant developments in sport, some of which have been driven by the Scottish Enlightenment.
During this, our Homecoming year, let us look back and celebrate Scotlands sporting history, traditions and achievements and let us look forward with
excitement to the future and to further realising our sporting potential.
SPORT IN THE DAYS OF BURNS
The first recorded competitive sport may well be the Ancient Olympics held in BC 776, although sport predates recorded history. Sport has probably always
been a part of human life even in ancient times, being linked to the needs of man to develop the necessary skills for survival in his society.
Back in 1759, Scotland was obviously a very different place to the Scotland that we know now. However even during Burns lifetime, sport was integral to
the culture of the nation and its individual communities.
Although there is no evidence that Robert Burns participated in sport, there are several references to it within his poetry and writing. Perhaps the best
example is the reference to the sport of curling in Tam Samsons Elegy.
When Winter muffles up his cloak,
And binds the mire like a rock;
When to the loughs the curlers flock,
Wi gleesome speed,
Wha will they station at the cock,
Tam Samsons dead?
The poem, including technical terms still intelligible to curlers even today, describes a curling match played on an ice loch. First documented by the notary John
SPORT
He was the king of a the Core.
To guard, or draw, or wick a bore,
Or up the rink like Jehu roar
In time o need;
But now he lags on Deaths hog-score,
Tam Samsons dead.
A solo surfer in the aquamarine waves off a beach on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides.
McQuhin who recorded a challenge about throwing stones across the ice between a monk at Paisley Abbey and a relative of the abbot in February 1541, by
the end of the 18th century curling had gained the title of Scotlands Ain Game, being played by gentlemen across the country in the winter months.
Many of Scotland other national sports were also well established in the days of Burns including golf, football, rugby, shinty and the Highland Games.
These sports, rooted long in history still have cultural importance in modern Scotland, and indeed are a means by which we demonstrate and maintain our
rich history and tradition.
Since the days of Burns, Scottish sport has evolved with society. With the evolution of civic society, sport no longer became about mans need to survive
but rather the need to develop and gain status. There was a clear move away from violent sports and Burns himself who spoke out against blood sport in the
poem On Seeing a Fellow Wound a Hare with a Shot in 1789. As peoples life choices have been increased so have the range of sports in which Scottish
people participate.
Developments in society and culture have meant that since the days of Burns sport has changed from being an activity for able bodied men to being an
important part of life for all Scots, regardless of sex, age or disability.
The sense of self control and moralism engendered during the Victorian era, influenced the beginning of greater regulation of sport. During this period,
many governing bodies, including the Scottish Football Association, Scottish Rugby Association, Royal Caledonia Curling Club, Mountaineering Council of
Scotland were established to regulate their sport and these organisations have also had a pivotal role in developing their own particular sports.
Scotlands industrial revolution influenced the type of sporting activity that Scottish people engaged in and the means of doing so. Urban and
infrastructure developments led to more innovative use of space for sport, including parks, swimming pools and ice rinks. It saw the development of sports
clubs, where originally people of similar status, class and background would come together to participate and socialise. Now some 15,000 sports clubs in
Scotland not only form the backbone of Scottish sport, but of community life.
The consolidation of the railway allowed for truly national sport to develop, with people being able to travel across Scotland and across the UK. Also
technological developments across the centuries and decades have continued to shape our sporting society.
Significant changes in the population of Scotland through immigration have brought new sporting influences and shaped Scotlands sporting culture, and
migrating Scots have spread Scottish sporting traditions across the world.
The opening up of the world through exploration, immigration and technology has been important to Scottish sport. It has allowed for the development
of a shared understanding about the power and benefits of sport, not least demonstrated by the ideals of the Olympic movement - Personal excellence, fair
play and cultural understanding. Through being a part of international competition, sport has strengthened Scottish national pride.
Finally, the growth of the media in recent times has showcased to Scotland a full range of sport and allowed our people to enjoy outstanding
performances, which in turn have shaped our sporting culture.
MAINTAINING AND BUILDING ON SCOTLANDS PROUD SPORTING TRADITIONS
Scotlands strong sporting traditions have continued to be shaped by all these factors. Let me provide some specific examples of where Scotland is continuing
to build on a deep rooted sporting tradition.
CURLING
First played in the Scottish lowlands, curling developed across Scotland and provided a means of competition between and across communities. As Scotland
developed as a nation the game expanded nationally and notably Grand Matches were introduced whereby the North of Scotland could play the South, and
in a very real sense the whole nation could participate in its ain game. The Royal Caledonia Curling Club records of the 1929 Grand Match reported an
estimated 200 tons of weight were on the water, resulting from 2,500 competitors (and all their stones), 620 rinks and between 2,500 and 3,000 spectators -
so there were upwards of 10,000 feet on the ice! Also, as an English Pressman was heard to remark, his weight estimate did not include the bottles of
Whisky!
The history of competition between high and lowland Scotland is fiercely protected, including through the continued scheduling of the annual Grand
Match. The 2008/09 draw has 600 team entrants to play on 300 rinks on the Lake of Menteith, weather permitting. That is an estimated 2,400 pairs of
curling stones, 1,200 decked in tartan playing in the Grand Match of Scotlands ain game.
SPORT
Curling was once
predominantly an outdoor
sport in Scotland.
The Trustees of the
National Museums of
Scotland
With the development of ice rinks and climate change, curling has largely moved indoors, and Scots continue to lead the way in the sport. Who can
forget Rhona Martin playing the last stone, our other Stone of Destiny, in Salt Lake City in 2002 to win an Olympic medal for an all Scottish Team GB. An
achievement matched by the Scottish Wheelchair Curling team winning the World Championships in 2004 and 2005.
GOLF
Scotland is the world renowned home of Golf, which it is believed has been played here since the 12th century. The first documented game was played in
Edinburgh in 1456 and Mary Queen of Scots is reported to have played in 1567, highlighting the cultural prominence of the game. In Burns time the game
grew from strength to strength not least due to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews being founded in 1754.
Around 380,000 Scottish adults play golf regularly in Scotland at over 600 golf facilities and five of the nine Open Championship courses are in
Scotland. Our rich golfing tradition and renowned courses attract around half a million visitors every year, generating in the region of 300 million for the
Scottish economy.
There have been many inspirational Scottish golfers and moments over the years. These include Sandy Lyles bunker shot at the 18th hole to become the
first Briton to win the Masters in 1998, Sam Torrances putt in 1985 which wrested the Ryder Cup back from the Americans for the first time since 1957 and
the same man led the European team to victory in 2002 at the Belfry.
Whilst Scotland may be The Home of Golf, it is not the only one, for golf is one of Scotlands biggest cultural exports. There are now more than 32,000
golf courses in the world, with many designed and managed by Scots. The first golf course in the Peoples Republic of China opened in the mid-1980s, but by
2005 there were 200 courses.
SHINTY
Gaelic settlers from Ireland brought the game of Hurling to Scotland, which in time was adapted to become the truly Scottish sport of shinty. Shinty became
a popular game particularly in the rural highlands of Scotland where it was traditionally played through the winter months. It became an integral part of
another Scottish tradition, that of celebrating the New Year. On the morning after Hogmany, whole villages would come together to play games featuring
teams of up to 80 a side. This tradition continues in villages across Scotland today, as does the tradition of village rivalry which is regularly demonstrated
through sport.
Just as shinty was the result of Irish sporting influence, Scottish emigrants took the game to Canada, where it influenced the development of one of
Canadas national sports. A game of shinty played on ice at Windsor in Nova Scotia is thought to have been one of the key influencers in the development of
ice hockey, and indeed in Canada informal hockey games are still called shinny today.
THE HIGHLAND GAMES
In the 11th century, King Malcolm III of Scotland summoned contestants to a foot race to the summit of Craig Choinnich in order to find the fastest runner in
the land to be his royal messenger. Some historians view this as the origin of the Highland Games and in turn influencing the development of Scottish
athletics.
The Highland Games developed as a means by which Scottish clans came together. During times of English occupation after the Jacobite Wars, Scots
were forbidden to train with weapons and therefore continued to train but with implements such as the caber rather than the sword in preparation for
uprisings. Later the clan gatherings became expressions of competition between the Scottish clans and many of the emblematic symbols of Scotland - the
bagpipes, Highland dancing and of course tartan - were all rooted within the Games.
Highland Games continue to be a feature of Scottish life hosted in villages and towns across the country. The largest, the Cowal Games in Dunoon,
attracts around 3,500 competitors and 20,000 spectators every August. The Scottish traditions of the Highland Games have also been exported, exemplified
by the New Caledonia Club of San Francisco which has hosted a Highland Games every year since 1865, attracting more than 50,000 people in recent years.
FOOTBALL
It is thought that football was being played by school children in Scotland from the 17th century, and certainly there are several ancient ball games dating
SPORT
Scotland is one of the
leading nations in mountain
biking and every year Fort
William hosts the Mountain
Bike World Cup.
Courtesy of EventScotland
back far earlier which may have been ancestral to the sport. The Kirkwall Ba Game, is one such example. The annual game is still being played in the town of
Kirkwall in Orkney today and involves a competition between the residents of the town. Starting at 1pm in the town centre, 200 residents in two teams
compete against each other to move the ball to the opposite end to their part of the town, by whatever means they can.
Following the founding of the Scottish Football Association in 1873 - only the second football association in the world - the game was regulated and
grew to become Scotlands most popular sport, a sport which is embedded in Scottish culture.
Football is played in every Scottish community and school, including 5,000 football clubs across the nation. As well as those participating in the sport,
many more Scots are regular spectators. The 1937 Scottish Cup Final at Hamden Park still holds Europes record club attendance of 146,433, and Scotlands
tartan army who follow the international team, are renowned as some of the most passionate football fans around the world and as ambassadors for
Scotland.
Our football clubs, players and managers have given us reason to be passionate. Great Scottish achievements include those of the Lisbon Lions, the
Celtic team who won the European Cup in 1967, and the Scottish manager Alex Ferguson, who led Aberdeen to European victory in Gothenburg in 1983
before going on to lead Manchester United to many more.
Scotlands passion for football has remained undampened even through some difficult times such as the collapse Ally McLeods' Scotland team in the
1978 Argentina World Cup, for even in sporting adversity there were glimmers of what Scotland can achieve, namely Archie Gemmills wonder goal against
Holland.
RUGBY
Rugby was born in England in 1823 and quickly became a popular sport in Scotland. The Scottish Football Union (now the Scottish Rugby Union) was
founded in 1873, but even before that Scotland challenged and won the first rugby international against England in 1871. This international challenge
between Scotland and our auld enemy has been played almost every year since, with the Calcutta cup being one of Scotlands most valued prizes.
The fixture has produced some of the sports most iconic games and sporting moments, not least in 1990 when Scotland captain David Sole famously
walked his side out to beat England and win the Grand Slam.
Scotland has always been at the forefront of the sports development, for example in 1995 Scotlands Gregor Townsend executed a sublime inside pass -
the celebrated Toony Flip - that yielded Gavin Hastings late match-winning score against France in the Five Nations.
CYCLING
In 1839 Kirkpatrick Macmillan from Dumfriesshire - the son of a blacksmith - saw a hobbyhorse being ridden along a nearby road and decided to make one
for himself: but one with a difference, for he invented the bicycle. The invention and ongoing refinement of the bicycle has led to the development of the
sport of cycling.
It is a fitting tribute to Scottish innovation that in 1993 Graeme Obree broke the world one-hour record on a bike he built from domestic appliance
parts, that tandem cyclist Aileen McGlynn (one of Scotlands current top Paralympic athletes) won gold in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and that Scotlands
greatest ever Olympian, Chris Hoy, won all of his Olympic medals on a bike.
Scotland is also one of the leading nations in mountain biking. Fort William hosts the Mountain Bike World Cup every year and thanks to our stunning
landscape and investment through our Forestry Commission, Scotland is home to an abundance of world class mountain biking facilities.
OUTDOOR SPORTS
The amazing natural resources Scotland offers have shaped a rich culture of participation in outdoor sports and recreation. Our hills were always here but
may have predominantly been seen as obstacles and difficulties in travel until Sir Walter Scott roused the imagination of Scotland - and the world - to
appreciate their marvellous beauty. Now, through mountaineering and hillwalking, millions of people have enjoyed our scenery through sport.
Scots and visitors have also traditionally enjoyed fishing in Scotlands rivers and seas, with the traditions of trout and salmon fishing dating back
centuries. In recent times, visitors coming to Scotland for freshwater angling have been estimated to contribute 60 million to the Scottish economy every
year.
SPORT
Scotland provides a mecca for watersports, with sailing on the waters around the Hebridean islands on the west coast of Scotland being amongst the
most dramatic and exciting in the world.
Scotlands strong sporting tradition of enjoying outdoor sports was both demonstrated and strengthened by the first Acts of the devolved Scottish
Parliament, which gave Scotland one of the most open access laws in the world.
SCOTTISH SPORT DOES NOT END HERE
Scottish men and women have achieved incredible sporting feats over the years across a wide range of sports. Take motorsports and the phenomenal
achievements of Scottish drivers including Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Colin McRae, which have shaped their sports. Or in athletics, where people in
Scotland and across the world continue to be inspired by Scottish performances including Allan Wells 100m world record at the Moscow Olympics or Liz
McColgans defiance of heat and humidity in one of the all time great 10,000 metre runs to take gold in the 1991 Tokyo World Championships. The list is
endless.
It is not just our elite performances which embed sport within our Scottish psyche, it is the regular participation of our people. There are over 70
established sports in Scotland, as diverse as Archery and kabbadi, baseball and canoeing, karate and surfing, and many more being played informally across
our communities. Scots have been participating in - and led the way in developing - many sports since the days of Burns. Others are new and have been
shaped by our changing culture but all of them form part of the new Scotland and are integral to Scottish life.
OUR SPORTING POTENTIAL
This, our Homecoming year, is an exciting time for Scottish sport. Not only will Scotland be hosting events such as the World Fly Fishing Championships and
The Open, but we are looking ahead with excitement to the 150th Anniversary of The Open at St Andrews in 2010, the London 2012 Olympic and
Paralympic Games, Glasgows Commonwealth Games in 2014, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in 2014 and many more.
We are looking forward to the spectacle of such events and to the memorable moments and iconic performances that they will no doubt provide, but
more than that we are looking forward to the lasting legacy that they will have on sport in Scotland and on Scotland as a nation. With increasing levels of
investment at a national level, world class facilities - both natural and built - and an unparalleled passion for sport, we have further potential to achieve.
Our Scottish sporting tradition as part of our culture will continue to develop and I am sure we will see Scottish sport attaining even greater success in
the foreseeable future.
Louise Martin is Chair of sportscotland, Scotlands National Agency for Sport. Prior to this Louise was the Immediate Past
Chair of the Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland. Louise has a long and ongoing association with the Games as a
competitor, team manager, and an administrator.
Louise was first elected as a board member to the Commonwealth Games Council for Scotland (CGCS) in 1995 and
was CGCS Chairman from 1999 until November 2007 when her term closed in line with CGCS constitutional requirements.
The first woman to hold this post on the CGCS, she is also currently the Commonwealth Games Federation Honorary
Secretary, being re-elected for a third term in November 2007.
In 2003 Louise was awarded the CBE in the New Years Honours List for services to the Commonwealth Games and as CGCS Chair led the
successful Bid phase for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, resulting in Glasgow being awarded the Games in November 2007.
Louise has previously served two terms on the sportscotland board and was appointed to the Scottish Institute of Sport board in
September 2007. Following the merger of the Scottish Institute of Sport and sportscotland in February 2008 she was co-opted on to the
sportscotland board. She also sits on the boards of UK Sport and Active Stirling and is the Chair of the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame selection
panel.
SPORT
Left: An artists impression of
what the athletics stadium
planned for the 2014 Common-
wealth Games may look like.
Above: BBC Sports personality
of the Year, 2008 Chris Hoy at
the parade in London to
celebrate the achievements
of British competitors at the
2008 Summer Olympics
16-10-08.
Courtesy of Nick J Webb
CORPORATE HOSPITALITY
RRS Discovery Adrian T Jones
SCOTTISH BUSINESS
TOURISM
By Caroline Packman
For centuries Scotland has been the birthplace of great theorists and academics as well as powerful entrepreneurs and
pioneering inventors.
A
dam Smith, David Hume, Robert Burns - their names alone are globally recognised and
they still add immeasurably to Scotlands appeal as a destination today. However it is their
modern day counterparts who are actively contributing to the economy by positioning
Scotland in the spotlight on the global business tourism stage.
Business tourism - which encompasses conferences, exhibitions, corporate meetings,
association conventions, incentive travel and corporate hospitality - currently contributes almost
1bn each year to Scotlands economy. It equates to 20% of the total tourism expenditure in our
country.
In 2007, over 2.6 million business trips were made to Scotland and significantly, the spend
per night of the business traveller is almost twice that of other visitors. Overseas business tourists
are even more important, with spend per trip double that of their UK counterparts. Edinburgh and
Glasgow rank second only to London in terms of the number of international association
meetings hosted, and Scotland accounts for a quarter of all such meetings held in the UK. Unlike
leisure visits, business tourism does not exhibit marked seasonality and the slight conferencing
peaks in spring and autumn counterbalance the summer peak periods for leisure visits.
A major reason for our success in attracting conferences lies in Scotlands global reputation
as a vibrant, contemporary business destination and the home to long-established, well-respected
universities. We were - and continue to be - a small country blessed with a disproportionate
number of internationally-renowned leaders in their fields. They may still be enlightening in the
traditional disciplines of their historical counterparts such as the arts, philosophy, medicine and
economics, but now they innovate in fields undreamt of 300 years ago such as life sciences,
electronics, e-business, aerospace and energy.
In the fast-moving e-nabled 21st century, Scottish firsts still come thick and fast. For
Edinburgh Castle.
Below: The Honourable, Daunta Hubner, Commissioner for Regional Policy, European Commission
addresses attendees of the 2007 GLF Europe at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.
Courtesy of Microsoft
example 6LL3 may not be a household name but her alias Dolly The Sheep is, as are the MRI scanner, the ATM cash machine, recent breakthrough
announcements on Alzheimers treatments and mass immunisation against cervical cancer. Even the temporary electric power for the 2008 Beijing Olympics
was provided thanks to a Glasgow based company.
The old and new Enlightenments give us our world class reputation for innovation and academic excellence - especially valuable as the main subjects
of international association conferences held worldwide are of a medical science theme (19%), closely followed by technology (14%) science (13%) and
industry (7%).
Consider just a small sample of the association events already secured for Scotland
in the coming years:
2,100 delegates for the International Mycological Congress in 2010.
800 delegates for the Obstetric Anaesthetists event in 2011.
2,500 delegates at the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology Association
Conference in 2011.
Our outstanding science and research facilities, our technological and business
capabilities and the unending drive of our enlightened thinkers to dream, explore, adopt
and invent, all inspire their global counterparts. Our current leading professionals play an
enormous role in attracting conferences and associations and VisitScotlands Business
Tourism Unit (BTU) recognises, encourages and supports their efforts.
The decision making process behind the choice of international destination for an
association meeting is a long one, often made many years in advance. Very often a
crucial deciding factor is how the destination makes its bid for the business and indeed
who delivers the bid. A high proportion of all successful bids for conferences are won as
a direct result of an invitation from a local member of an organisation, academic
institution or a professional body. This is where our Scottish Ambassadors, all well-
respected experts in their fields, use their influence to strengthen the case for
conferences to come to Scotland. Working in partnership with the four city convention bureaux in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee - and the
Scottish universities - we help support the bid process with a range of professional materials and expert advice.
It is clear that hosting a conference brings an immediate economic benefit to Scotland, but more significant than this attracting a major conference to
Scotland reinforces the countrys credentials in that discipline and hence makes Scotland a more attractive location for inward investment. The calibre of
business visitors we attract is high and they are often the potential influencers in corporate location and trading decisions. VisitScotlands BTU collaborates
closely with Scottish Development International to target the corporate market, particularly in Europe and North America. Partnerships such as this are
essential to leverage the strength of the Scottish brand in an overcrowded communications market place. Scottish Development International and
VisitScotlands BTU are united in promoting Scotland as a thriving, professional, business orientated country, welcoming on a corporate and personal level.
In 2009, as part of the Year of Homecoming celebrations, Scotland will welcome the Forbes European CEO Conference to Gleneagles - an excellent
opportunity to showcase the best of what Scotland has to offer for business events to around 200 of Europes top executives.
The BTU also taps into Scottish Enterprises Globalscots programme - a network of around 900 business leaders with Scottish connections around the
world, who are well-placed to influence decisions on conference and incentive travel destinations.
However, historical and current innovations - alongside considerable business achievements - do not on there own create a dynamic business tourism
environment. The range of venues and locations available at a destination is also fundamental in destination choice.
To compete on a world scale with destinations as diverse as Barcelona, Beijing and Boston, world class venues are required and this too is an area
where Scotland has a competitive edge.
How many countries can offer a globally iconic venue such as Edinburgh Castle for a reception for up to a thousand people? Or the highest restaurant
and conference centre in the UK at the top of the Cairn Gorm mountain? Or the opportunity to dine at the Captains table - Captain Scotts table that is,
onboard the Antarctic exploration ship the RRS Discovery? Or the chance to dine in splendour in the Great Hall at Stirling Castle where Mary Queen of Scots
enjoyed her wedding feast? Or where more recent royalty ate on board The Royal Yacht Britannia?
The Queens Golf Course at Gleneagles, Perthshire.
Pic Glyn Satterley VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
Below: Business tourism - which encompasses conferences, exhibitions, corporate meetings,
association conventions, incentive travel and corporate hospitality - currently contributes
almost 1bn each year to Scotlands economy. Courtesy of EventScotland
Scotland is not short of more contemporary venues either. Scotlands main four cities have their own conference centres - each of which has
undergone significant investment and expansion in recent years reflecting the popularity of Scotland for business tourism and the highly competitive global
market.
Major development is planned for the countrys flagship venue, the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) in Glasgow where a 62m purpose
built National Arena will be added to existing facilities. The development - which will be Europes first integrated exhibition, conference and entertainment
venue - is part of a 562m master plan by the SECC to completely transform the 64-acre site into a world-class conference and exhibition destination.
In addition to this, the capital city continues to invest in its reputation for providing exceptional service to delegates. The purpose-built Edinburgh
International Conference Centre (EICC), which has been named as one of the top five-star conference centres in the world, has plans to invest in a major
multimillion pound expansion in the next few years, anticipated to open in 2012.
Aberdeens strength in the oil, gas, energy and renewables sectors continues to attract major international events to the citys Exhibition and
Conference Centre (AECC). Further north and the Highlands can be seen to be increasing its capabilities in the conference market, most notably through the
development of The MacDonald Aviemore Highland Resort. The flagship Inverness venue Eden Court Theatre has also recently undergone a multimillion
pound upgrade.
Business tourism and leisure tourism are closely interlinked. Over 30% of delegates extend their stay either pre or post conference, which is in no small
part due to us being the home of golf and whisky.
Over 30% of delegates also claim that they would be likely to return to the destination of a conference here for a holiday. So business tourism is an
integral part of the wider tourism product of Scotland and it plays a significant role in meeting the countrys ambition to grow the overall value of tourism to
the Scottish economy by 50% come 2015.
Business tourism is inextricably linked to other key elements of the New Scottish Enlightenment. Information technology improvements being driven by
Scottish companies are finding applications in conference planning and delegate management. Meeting planners can take virtual tours of facilities on-line
from the other side of the planet. Dynamic marketing materials can be downloaded across any time zone in the global market place. New direct airline
routes and connections to key hubs offer greater accessibility to a wider audience making Scotland more reachable than ever before.
Most significantly, Scotland continues to produce some of the worlds great thinkers and academics helping it to maintain an international presence. The
disciplines in which we lead may have changed over time, but as Scotland continues to discover and develop, its tradition of innovation and hospitality
remains at its heart, and that is a winning combination for business tourism.
Caroline Packman is Head of Business Tourism at VisitScotland. Prior to joining VisitScotland in 2003, she worked for The
Tussauds Group, initially as International Marketing Manager with Madame Tussauds London and then as New Business
Development Manager.
She led projects to set up Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas and Hong Kong. She also has brand marketing experience in
the food industry.
Caroline has an MBA in International Business and a BA (Hons) Degree in Languages from Heriot-Watt University in
Edinburgh.
Scottish Exhibition and
Conference Centre, popularly
known as the 'Glasgow
Armadillo'. Bill McKelvie
T
h
e

T
A
L
I
S
K
E
R

w
o
r
d

a
n
d

a
s
s
o
c
i
a
t
e
d

l
o
g
o
s

a
r
e

t
r
a
d
e

m
a
r
k
s
.

2
0
0
8
Deep and stormy, like the ocean crashing
over the rocky shores of its island distillery;
the only single malt Scotch whisky rugged enough
to call the Isle of Skye its home.
TALISKER. MADE BY THE SEA.
GREAT CHIEFTAIN O
THE PUDDIN-RACE
By Paul McLaughlin
Written in 1786, Robert Burns Address to a Haggis was the Scottish bards personal celebration of the most celebrated of
Scottish fare. Renowned the world over, haggis is our national dish and will forever be linked to Burns. He believed that the
haggis was synonymous with Scottish identity and culture - an acquired taste, unique and robust.
T
he haggis has not changed much since Burns wrote those immortal words. However, the food and drink industry has moved on. While haggis, Scotch
beef, shortbread and Scotch whisky, quite rightly take their places in Scotlands larder, we are fast becoming A Land of Food and Drink and the quality
of our natural produce such as salmon and seafood, venison, fruit and grain, rival what the world has to offer.
Scotland has some of the best natural produce and the most skilled food and drink producers in the world. Our products stand for quality, for beautiful
unspoilt landscapes, clear air and pure water. These are the unique values that people everywhere associate with food and drink from Scotland.
The sector is made up of a wide variety of producers, from multinational companies through to skilled individuals, and that diversity is a sign of the
industrys strength. Scotland is home to many famous global brands, however, a significant proportion of its food and drink is also produced by family-run,
speciality firms whose success can be attributed to innovation, passion and quality.
This year of Homecoming affords us the opportunity to review where we rank as a nation - not just for how we serve the people of Scotland, but also
against our international competitors.
Scotlands tradition and expertise in areas such as animal husbandry, crop research, brewing and distilling have also given the country a strong position
in a fiercely competitive global market. Excellence in raw materials is further strengthened by a strong track record in innovation and the exploitation of new
technology. Scotland has strong research expertise with a specific focus on areas such as human and animal health and nutrition, agriculture and horticulture,
as well as brewing and distilling.
The year 2009 also gives us the opportunity to redress the balance of Scotlands reputation and attitude towards food and drink. We have a job to
educate and spoil our foreign visitors, so that they go home not just with pictures of castles and the dramatic Scottish landscapes, but the lasting taste of our
finest seafood, beef and strawberries. Our food and drink industry has the responsibility to become true ambassadors for everything Scotland has to offer.
On the domestic front this will help raise awareness of our exciting and dynamic industry, the wide range of local produce available in Scotland, and
ultimately encourage consumers to engage with the fantastic range of produce on their doorstep by getting them to buy and cook Scottish.
The food and drink industry is an important part of the Scottish economy and has been highlighted as one of the six priority industry groups by the
Scottish Government. Sales of Scottish food and drink generate around 7.6bn for the Scottish economy and one in five manufacturing jobs in Scotland are
concerned with the production of food and drink. In total, more than 337,000 are employed in the food and drink sector - 14% of the total Scottish
workforce. On a global level, food and drink makes up 27% of Scotlands exports - worth 3.57bn annually.
LAND OF FOOD & DRINK
Whole Haggis.
Monkey Business Images
At the 2008 Royal Highland Show - the ultimate display of Scotlands larder - Richard Lochhead MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the
Environment, unveiled Scotlands first National Food and Drink Policy.
This policy, the first of its kind for the food and drink industry in Scotland, underlines the importance of the sector, not only to the economy, but to the
general wellbeing of the country in terms of sustainability, access to affordable food, healthy eating and reputation as A Land of Food and Drink.
The policy aims to promote Scotlands sustainable economic growth by ensuring the focus of food and drink related activity by Government offers
quality, health and well-being and sustainability, whilst recognising the need for access to affordable food for all.
Scotland Food & Drink is a member-led organisation dedicated to supporting the industry towards achieving its growth ambitions. This is the first time
the food and drink industry in Scotland has come together to share experiences and best practice.
Led by the industry, Scotland Food & Drink has been unique in bringing together every sector - from farmers and fishermen to processors, distillers,
researchers and educators - working to a common commercial goal of growing the industry to 10bn by 2017.
In close consultation with the industry and with support from the Scottish Government, we have identified four strategic priorities around which the
growth of the industry depends; collaboration, reputation, innovation
and skills.
To be successful, we must celebrate and enhance Scotlands
reputation as A Land of Food and Drink. In Scotland, we have the
benefit of amazing natural resources and fantastic, quality produce. It
is vital that we let consumers share in this wealth of choice. Scotland
Food & Drink will work with Government and other key stakeholders
to promote food education to Scottish consumers and to raise
awareness of Scottish produce in the rest of the UK and key markets
worldwide, as well as developing new business opportunities to help
grow the industry.
We must develop collaborative supply chains and learn from
those who do it best, not just within Scotland but worldwide. There
are some excellent examples of collaboration in Scotland but we
need to broaden the scope and scale to encompass larger segments
of our industry to reduce costs, eliminate waste and ultimately
improve customer service. Essentially, we need trust and
transparency throughout the entire supply chain.
To ensure that the industry continues to grow, we must create a
world-class innovation network, linking academic and research
institutes more closely with the needs of the industry. Scotlands
research base is already world-renowned. It is imperative that we
develop commercial success through properly focused research and
innovation.
Whilst endeavouring to achieve all of the aforementioned aims,
we must ensure that we have the skills in place to support the
industry. The first Skills Academy to be launched in Scotland is for the
food and drink industry. Hosted by Abertay University, and using a
format already successful in England, the Academy will provide
access to training and development much closer to the point of need.
Most of all, we must learn to trust each other. The industrys
Above: Fishing Boats
moored at Tobermory
Harbour, Isle of Mull,
Inner Hebrides.
Pic: Paul Tomkins
VisitScotland / Scottish
Viewpoint
Right: Cabinet Secretary
Richard Lochhead at
Royal Highland Show.
Courtesy of the Scottish
Government
Walkers Shortbread Limited Aberlour House Aberlour-on-Spey Scotland AB38 9LD Tel +44 (0)1340 871555 Fax +44 (0)1340 871355
enquiries@walkers-shortbread.co.uk www.walkersshortbread.com
By Appointment to
Her Majesty The Queen
Oatcake Manufacturer
Walkers Shortbread Ltd
Aberlour
aims are ambitious and challenging. To achieve them, we need to work together, all the way from farm and sea to plate, rather than within the confines of
individual sectors, and with the support of the Scottish Government and its National Food and Drink Policy.
Within the competitive global market place, standing still is not an option. If Scotland is to stay ahead of the competition, respond to increasing
consumer demands, meet the challenges affecting our farming and fishing sectors and contribute to sustainable economic development and climate change
issues, as an industry we need to work differently and proactively develop new opportunities for the whole industry, to make us more successful.
To drive Scotland to a true leadership position on the international stage, our industry has recognised that to make this happen we need to work
differently, become smarter and most importantly we must collaborate. This is not a dictate - it is a groundswell of realisation from within our own
companies and trade organisations that we must work together to become more competitive.
Scotland Food & Drink has enabled the industry to become responsible for its own destiny and our work has now begun. We must now tell the world
about our fantastic industry and about the work that we are doing.
Paul McLaughlin is the Chief Executive of Scotland Food & Drink. Appointed in October 2007, he brings more than 15
years international experience to Scotland Food & Drink from a career with The Coca-Cola Company where he was
responsible for the commercialisation of marketing initiatives in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Holland and Belgium.
As the leader of this industry-led organisation Paul has the international credentials to help build Scotlands
reputation as a Land of Food and Drink. He aims to harness the resources of one of Scotlands most successful sectors
and get everyone working together to grow the industry from 7.5bn to 10bn by 2017.
He is focusing the industry on four strategic priorities to grow the value of the industry: collaboration across the
entire supply chain, developing innovation, skills and building Scotlands international reputation as A Land of Food and Drink.
This is familiar territory as Paul gained expertise at Coca-Cola in innovation, operations, marketing and developing collaborative
relationships.
In his first year, Paul has travelled around Scotland meeting producers, processors, key industry players and politicians to increase
awareness of Scotland Food & Drinks commercial goals for the industry and highlight the potential of Scottish premium products in a global
market. He is encouraging SMEs to become members since they dominate the industry. Scotland Food & Drink wants small farmers and
independent producers to be as valued as the large iconic brands.
Paul is an engineering graduate from the University of Glasgow. He returned to Scotland in 2007, works in Edinburgh and lives with his
wife and daughter in Glasgow.
Web: www.scotlandfoodanddrink.org.
A dish of Scottish seafood, including mussels, oysters, lobster and langoustine.
SCOTLANDS
UNIQUE SPIRIT
By Gavin Hewitt CMG
Robert Burns, as a poet and also an excise man, was always keenly aware of Scotch Whiskys place in 18th century Scotland.
The national drink often inspired the bard. From writing fondly that Freedom and Whisky gang thegither to a deteriorating
signature on excise forms as he neared death, the two have long been closely linked.
T
he link between Scotch Whisky and Scotland remains strong in the 21st century. Today, Scotch Whisky is synonymous with its country of origin, socially,
culturally and economically. When people around the world think of Scotland, Scotch Whisky is one of the first images that spring to mind. Whilst
travelling abroad, from North America to Asia, the answer Scotland to the question Where are you from? is likely to spark a lively discussion on
the merits of a favourite dram. Scotland and whisky are inextricably linked.
The first written record of Scotch Whisky distilling dates back over 500 years to the Exchequer Rolls of 1494, with the granting by King James IV of
eight bolls of malt wherewith to make acquevitae to Friar John Cor of Lindores. That this was sufficient to produce almost 1,500 bottles of whisky suggests
that distilling in Scotland was already well-established.
The industry has been transformed in the intervening centuries. It has been quite a journey from cottage distilling to the leading international spirit
drink, a journey that is part of our heritage. It involves Scottish innovation, entrepreneurship and the creation of world famous brands. By 2007, the
equivalent of 36 bottles a second were shipped from Scotland to 200 countries around the world.
These bottles and famous brand names are ambassadors sitting in drinks cabinets, hotels, bars and restaurants worldwide and attract many tourists
who, while knowing little of Scotland, are eager to discover the country from which their favourite whisky originates. As a product that - by law - can only
be made in Scotland, Scotch Whisky is a unique selling point in a crowded international market place.
Last year, according to ScotlandWhisky, the national whisky tourism initiative, over 1.2 million people visited the 50 distilleries and industry sites open
to the public. Located across the country, these distilleries allow visitors to indulge their passion for Scotch and - at the same time - explore the environment
and meet the people that are so integral to its success. No two distilleries are the same and each has a unique setting and story, as well as a distinctive way
of doing things that has evolved over many years. It is also a high quality tourism offering, with distilleries representing 23% of Scotlands five star visitor
attractions.
Whisky Month in May 2009 a key pillar of Homecoming Scotland will be an opportunity to celebrate Scotch Whiskys cultural and economic
importance today. An exciting programme is being drawn up, including special whisky dinner events, individual distillery activities, and a series of
Homecoming initiatives at a revamped Scotch Whisky Experience in Edinburgh. The 10th annual Spirit of Speyside Festival will open proceedings. Speyside is
home to around half of Scotlands malt whisky distilleries and many world famous Scotch Whisky brands. Extended to 10 days in 2009, the Festival will
include a series of distillery open door days and events, including Scottish Serenade, a musical toast to Speysides heritage and tradition.
At the end of the month, the attention will shift to the west coast for the annual Islay Malt and Music Festival, celebrating the islands massive
contribution to the whisky industry. The first ever Isle of Barra Whisky Galore festival, recalling the 1949 film of Compton Mackenzies famous novel, and
the release of a 250th anniversary Burns Malt, will all help to make it the ideal time to come to the home of whisky.
Scotch Whisky related tourism is of huge benefit to the wider economy. That is why initiatives such as ScotlandWhisky - supported by The Scotch Whisky
Association (SWA) and a range of public bodies - have an important role to play. The initiative is five years old and has established a network of over 70
whisky embassies in Scotland. These are hotels, restaurants and three championship golf courses which have met specific quality criteria and have staff
trained in whisky appreciation to help guests.
The initiative has also been instrumental in establishing partnerships that use whiskys appeal to attract visitors and showcase other aspects of local
tourism. The Whisky Coast links together 16 distilleries and other west coast attractions, whilst the new Highland Whisky Festival is a welcome addition to
the tourism calendar.
Today 106 distilleries are licensed to distil Scotch Whisky and as visitors come to Scotland, they will encounter an industry optimistic about its future
prospects.
International growth - 2007 was a record year for exports - is driving major investments across the industry.
New distilleries are planned, old stills are being fired up again and over 500 million of new capital investment has been announced in distilling,
bottling and warehousing capacity during the last 12 months. Broad-based growth in traditionally important markets like North America and Europe but also
in new emerging markets in Asia point to an international renaissance for Scotch Whisky. Indeed, in markets such as China and India, where demand for
premium international products continues to grow, Scotch Whisky is very much the drink of aspirational consumers. Increasingly affluent consumers
recognise Scotch as a high quality product, and are buying it to enjoy but also to make a social statement to friends and colleagues.
Over 2.82 billion in shipments last year - a 14% increase - meant that Scotch Whisky now accounts for over an eighth of total Scottish exports and
over two thirds of our food and drink exports. Scotch Whisky remains one of the UKs top five manufactured export earners. This continuing success is vitally
important to many Scottish communities - from Ayrshire to Orkney - which rely on Scotch Whisky for local employment and tourism. The industry plays a
leading role in such communities, supporting arts, cultural and other local activities, as well as promoting a positive message on responsible alcohol
consumption.
It is also important to the wider Scottish supply chain, with over 700 million a year invested in Scottish suppliers of goods and services. From the
farmers who provide our cereals to the coppersmith who repairs the stills, over 40,000 Scottish jobs depend on a healthy Scotch Whisky sector, jobs often
located in areas that are economically fragile and where other opportunities can be limited.
From small rural distilleries to iconic global brands, Scotch Whisky is a wonderfully varied
industry. Such diversity is one of the industrys strengths. The job of representing distillers,
bottlers and blenders across this industry is that of the SWA and involves equally diverse
work.
An Association representing whisky producers dates back to 1917 and today the SWA
has fifty-four member companies, who taken together account for over 90% of the industry.
Simply put, our role on behalf of the industry as a whole is to protect and promote Scotch
Whisky at home and abroad.
Protecting the integrity of Scotch Whisky - as a product made in Scotland in line with
traditional practice - is a key priority. Scotch Whisky is very strictly defined and has been
recognised and protected in law for many years at UK, EU and WTO level. This protection
underpins its international reputation for quality with consumers. It protects traditional
practice in the whisky industry and guarantees that the product is distilled and matured in
Scotland in oak casks.
However, with success has come imitation and we must work hard to protect Scotch
Whisky from products that are passed off as Scotch Whisky when they are not. For example,
The Loch Fyne Whisky Bar at the Connect Music Festival, Inveraray Castle,
Inveraray, Argyll. Pic: Paul Tomkins VisitScotland / Scottish Viewpoint
Traditional whisky distillery in Scotland. Alin Popescu
as markets develop we must ensure Scotch Whisky is protected from those who profit illegally from intellectual property infringements and fake products.
We are actively discussing better legal protection of Scotch Whisky with the likes of China, Thailand, Brazil and Vietnam.
New UK rules due to come into force in 2009 will be a major step forward in this work, implementing the highest levels of legal protection from unfair
competition and practices. The five individual categories of Scotch Whisky - Single Malt, Single Grain, Blended Malt, Blended Grain and Blended Scotch
Whisky - will be formally defined. As a result, in tandem with new presentation rules, consumers will receive clear and consistent information about what
they are buying. We are also protecting the names of the five traditional whisky producing regions and localities - Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Islay and
Campbeltown - for the first time. It is a massive opportunity for the industry to talk to consumers around the world about Scotch Whisky and what makes it
special, not only to connoisseurs but also those just beginning to enjoy the pleasures and appreciate the complexities of this unique high quality spirit.
Ensuring the future sustainability of the industry is also a key task. This takes different forms, from working with Government and others to promote
responsible attitudes to alcohol consumption to campaigning for fair and equal access to our export markets. It also involves supporting the pristine Scottish
environment on which our products depend.
The industry is closely tied to that environment, its products being uniquely influenced by the supply of natural raw materials and a range of factors
including location and climate. Great care is, for example, taken in relation to protecting our water resources.
Distillers have made significant investments in energy-saving technologies, recycling excess energy from whisky making to heat local communities and
exporting back to the National Grid. Research into re-using residues from the distilling process also point to an innovative way of creating an alternative
renewable energy source.
As the industry looks ahead to where it wants to be in 2050 - a relatively short period of time in whisky industry terms - sustainability must be at the
heart of each companys operations, and 2009 will be pivotal to that work with a new industry-wide environmental strategy being launched which will set
ambitious targets for the future.
The Association welcomes the Scottish Governments recognition of whiskys importance to Scotland and we look forward to supporting the
Homecoming celebrations next year. Showcasing Scotch Whisky during Whisky Month - May 2009 - is an opportunity to remind the world about the
industrys contribution to our countrys cultural and economic fabric and to use Scotchs global appeal to attract more visitors to Scotland.
Gavin Hewitt CMG, was appointed Chief Executive of The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) in October 2003. Prior to
joining the SWA, Gavin had a distinguished career in the British Diplomatic Service, latterly serving as Her Majestys
Ambassador to Belgium (2001-2003), HM Ambassador to Finland (19972000) and HM Ambassador to Croatia
(19941997). The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) is the trade Association for the Scotch Whisky industry. Its members
account for more than 95% of production and sales of Scotch Whisky. The SWA can trace its origins back to 1917 when an
unincorporated body known as The Whisky Association was founded with its main office in London, and branch offices in
Scotland and Ireland. In 1940 the Scottish branch became the principal office. Website: www.scotch-whisky.org.uk
We believe this ad is already ten words too long.
www.macroberts.com straight-to-the-point business law
SCOTLANDS PLACE
IN THE WORLD
By Linda Fabiani MSP
This Government was elected with a mission and a mandate to renew Scotland; to restore our countrys ambition and self-
confidence. Our overarching aim is to lay the long-term foundations for the flourishing of Scotlands economy and society.
A
s the world becomes increasingly interlinked and competitive, we know that our future economic success and prosperity will be predicated upon the
strength of our human capital and our ability to forge and sustain competitive advantage. As well as promoting Scotland as a great place to visit, our
economic success will depend on an international recognition of Scotland as a great place to learn, live, work and to do business. The key to our
success in promoting Scotland overseas and to our international relations work will be a Team Scotland approach. When everyone with a stake in Scotland
focuses their efforts in the same direction, Scotlands voice is louder in the international arena. That means the Scottish Government, our international
agencies, Scottish businesses, Scottish institutions and other partners working together with a shared purpose to maximise the impact of our message. As a
smaller nation, we recognise we must work hard to ensure we represent our views with a strong and unified voice.
We also recognise the link between economic growth and population growth. That is why we have set a target of matching the EU-15 countries
average growth rate and taken steps to achieve that level of growth. In its first three years, the innovative Fresh Talent: Working in Scotland Scheme
provided opportunities for more than 8,500 of the best international students to remain and work in Scotland upon completion of their studies; an
opportunity they would not have had prior to the schemes existence. This addition to the existing pool of Scottish talent boosts the prospects of existing
businesses as well as encouraging investment in Scotland. The UK Government has seen the benefit of the Scottish approach and has now replicated it
across the other nations in the UK as Tier One - Post-Study.
We continually develop our Fresh Talent policy to ensure we continue to attract the most talented, skilled and hard-working individuals to Scotland,
recognising that sustainable economic growth must be founded upon the right conditions including a pool of talented workers both home-grown and
migrant. Although responsibility for immigration policy is currently reserved to the UK Government, Scotland has a different demographic situation and
different needs to the rest of the UK, so it is important for us to work closely with the Home Office to ensure it recognises our unique needs within the UK
immigration system. We will continue to raise this very important issue for Scotland and push for flexibilities in the new points-based system to ensure it is
serving us as well as it can.
What is most important about Fresh Talent is the strong and clear message that it sends to the rest of the world that Scotland is a nation that welcomes
new Scots - and returning Scots - who have a contribution to make to our economic well-being and to our communities.
Attracting migrant workers to Scotland is only part of the challenge, with retention of that talent equally as important. Providing appropriate and
accessible support to migrants is key and we take this responsibility as host very seriously. Our Relocation Advisory Service provides the kind of support that
THE FUTURE FOR SCOTLAND PLC
ensures we are an attractive destination, and it also points them in the direction of the services available across Scotland from local authorities and others.
Retaining migrants here in the longer term, by ensuring we do all we can to aid integration into existing communities, can enrich those communities and
contribute to their own and Scotlands success.
Scotland, of course, has a long tradition of internationalism, looking beyond its shores for ideas, influences and ways that we can enrich others. Scotland
has deep ties with the Commonwealth, and our Diaspora has a prominent place in the history of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and
many other nations. The Scottish Diaspora is a unique resource that can augment the efforts of Team Scotland. These passionate ambassadors of our nation
tell the story of our people looking beyond our shores and taking their expertise and experience to the world.
Such a Scottish presence around the globe is a tremendous source of advocacy which supports Scottish Ministers vision for Scotland - a responsible
nation in the world, confident in its outlook and ambitious for the future of its people. It is also a wealthy resource which we are inviting to come home in
2009 to celebrate the Year of Homecoming. This initiative is a unique and welcome opportunity with the potential to aid Scotland in resisting the effects of
the current economic downturn.
Our recognition of the importance of an international outlook to our success is reflected in the Scottish Governments International Framework, which
we published in April 2008. It sets out how we as a Government will undertake our international engagement, drawing on the concept of Team Scotland to
ensure a coordinated and considered approach. The framework draws together how this Governments international activities support our primary purpose
of increasing sustainable economic growth, and provides the foundation for how we describe our work in China, Europe, North America and elsewhere. It
sets out the importance of managing Scotlands reputation as a distinctive global identity, an independent-minded, confident and responsible nation at
home and abroad.
In the 21st century, a nations sense of its identity and its history is more important than ever before. Scotlands cultural life remains fundamental to our
collective national identity, as an expression of our historical and geographical life, as a reflection of who we are and an aspiration for what we want to be.
Our international framework makes specific reference to promoting Scotlands culture and to the role of cultural diplomacy in developing our distinctive
identity and making the case for Scotland as a home, a place of work or study, a holiday destination or long-term business investment.
The strength of Scotlands contemporary culture is that while it embraces the traditional it is also modern and vibrant - a living tradition that can tell
the world in a powerful way that Scotland is technologically advanced and innovative. We are a modern country moving confidently into the future by
building on our past, aware of what we want to achieve, engaging with our neighbours, the European Union and the wider international community.
Alongside the promotion of Scotland internationally and encouraging the growth of our economy, Scotland is a responsible nation aware of the positive
impact it can have elsewhere in the world, and sure of our place within it. At the heart of this Governments commitment to being recognised as a
responsible nation is our International Development Fund, which we have doubled since coming into office, rising over the course of this parliamentary
session to 9m in 2010/11. We are aware of the limited resource we can offer as a smaller nation, but our fund is sharply focused to ensure we see
developing nations gain most value from every pound invested.
Scotland has a special relationship with the people of Malawi, which we want to nurture. We work with the Government of Malawi, looking at key
areas where we can build upon this relationship and strengthen our work there, through the highly experienced agencies we have in Scotland. This long-
European Parliament
building in Brussels,
Belgium.
Marek Slusarczyk
established Scotland/Malawi relationship is the reason for our ring-fencing a minimum of 3m per annum from the International Development Fund for our
work with Malawi.
While we recognise our special relationship with Malawi, we are also aware of the potential for wider development work. That is why we have
developed a new Sub-Saharan Africa Development Programme which recognises that while our resources are limited, we can have a significant impact by
focusing our efforts. The programme comprises block grants for Scottish-based organisations already established in our four target countries: Zambia,
Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Darfur region of Sudan. By focusing on established organisations with existing partnerships, our funding can make the greatest
impact. Also, whilst recognising our historic links, we are developing a new programme for the Indian Subcontinent in partnership with Scottish
communities, contributing to the fight against global poverty and supporting a more inclusive society in Scotland. We recognise that people in Scotland can
affect the welfare of others and our campaign to become a Fair Trade Nation is a prime example of this.
Europe is a key audience for Scotland given its proximity and its position as the largest single market in the world. The Scottish Government is
determined to raise Scotlands profile as a nation in Europe, in order to take full advantage of the extensive opportunities that offers, such as boosting
tourism, strengthening trade links and initiating exchange of best practice. Our Action Plan on European Engagement sets out the Governments strategic
approach to working in Europe, outlining what we will do to provide Scotland with a strong voice to capitalise on the economic, political, cultural and
promotional opportunities Europe offers.
This focuses the Team Scotland effort on our Long Term EU Objectives as the most pertinent for Scotland, which are fisheries and aquaculture, EU
budget review, justice and home affairs, EU energy policy, and agriculture. In addition, we constantly update our EU Current Priorities to reflect the issues of
greatest importance to Scotland being discussed in Europe at any given time.
So we are an ambitious Government for an ambitious nation. We want to see a successful Scotland continue to benefit from its place in the
international community, and for others to benefit as a result. By taking our culture to the world, we can demonstrate that Scotland is a modern country
with a diverse and inclusive culture - building on our past and moving confidently into the future.
Linda Fabiani MSP, is Minister for Europe, External Affairs & Culture. Born in Glasgow in 1956, she attended Hyndland
Secondary School and then Napier College in Edinburgh where she achieved a SHND in Secretarial Studies. In 1988 she
furthered her education at Glasgow University where she graduated with a Diploma in Housing Studies.
Linda worked in social housing for nearly 20 years, with her most recent post being Director of East Kilbride Housing
Association.
In 1999 she was elected to the Scottish Parliament as a Central Scotland MSP. Among other roles, Linda was Convener
of the European and External Relations Committee, Convener of the Cross-Party Group on Refugees and Asylum Seekers
and Convener of the Cross-Party International Development Group.
On her re-election at the May 2007 election she was appointed Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Culture, with responsibilities for
Europe, external affairs, culture and the arts, architecture, built heritage, Historic Scotland, Gaelic and major events strategy.
She lives with her partner in Strathaven.
Website: www.scotland.gov.uk.
Scottish Parliament Building.
Keith Hunter (07831 117 980) / Courtesy of RMJM
T
his publication celebrates 300 years of Scotlands
history and the contribution Scotland has made to
innovation, education and development around the
world. It appears at a time of rapid change: of economic and
political change which challenge Scottish higher education
to meet new demands and to deliver ever more effectively for
individuals, communities, businesses and the country as a whole.
Napier University is responding to change, meeting these
demands and is committed to innovation and to continually
responding exibily to changes in our customers needs
and expectations of our courses, our research and
knowledge transfer.
In 2008 we were the top university in Scotland for producing
graduates who secured employment or further study within
six months of graduating. Our success in producing employable
graduates reects our long standing commitment to working
with employers to design courses which are both at the cutting
edge of their discipline and which provide our students with the
skills, the adaptability and the condence employers expect
of their graduate recruits.
Many of our innovative programmes, such as our new suite
of postgraduate health programmes, are a direct response
to employers demand for key skills.
Our groundbreaking Condent Futures initiative, supported
by both public and philanthropic funding, reinforces our
commitment to the employability of our students: designed
to enable students to take an increasing responsibility for their
own personal and professional development and to build well
founded self-condence, this programme is embedded into the
curriculum for all our undergraduate students.
We have rst rate applied research programmes and an excellent
reputation for working in partnership with business to provide
solutions to key problems. Our strengths in areas such as
timber engineering, energy
conservation, transport,
biofuels and the creative
industries nd direct
application in the Scottish
economy. We collaborate with
partners at home and abroad
to transfer knowledge to end
users. Our 2KT project
a collaboration with other
Higher and Further Education
Institutions in the Lothians and
Fife identies, applies and exploits intellectual property
to develop new products and provide solutions to business
problems. And Napier has established the EU-China
Development & Research Centre to establish long term research
collaboration between the University and Chinese institutions.
Our commitment to internationalisation and to playing our role
in promoting Scottish Higher Education overseas is central to our
strategy. One third of our students come from beyond the UK.
Some 2,000 students study our programmes in Hong Kong.
We are one of the most popular universities in the UK for
students from the European Union countries. Most importantly
our internationalisation strategy has, for over 20 years,
been based on partnership: with institutions, business and
governments overseas. We therefore understand our markets
and are well placed to anticipate and respond to changing
needs and aspirations.
Our commitment to working with public and private sector
employers, to providing our graduates with the skills they
need, to working in partnership, to targeting our resources to
maximise the economic and social impact of our research and
teaching and our well established international links will ensure
that Napier University is well placed to continue to respond
to change in the future.
Inspiring Futures
Professor Joan K Stringer CBE, Principal and Vice Chancellor
of Napier University, on thriving in a time of change.
Professor Joan K Stringer CBE, Principal and Vice Chancellor
SCOTLAND IN A
CHANGING WORLD
By Roy Cross
When you say Scotland to people around the world, what do they typically think of? Yes, many of them will indeed think of
whisky, golf, tartan or castles, and a fair number will think of Celtic and Rangers, but to millions of alumni around the world
and the more than 62,000 international students currently engaged in higher and further education via Scottish colleges and
universities, the answer is without doubt Education!
O
ur alumni are proud of their association with Scottish education, and we should be as proud of them as we are of our education system.
I will be having my Burns Supper in 2009 in Kolkata, India, where Scotland is the theme country at the 2009 Kolkata Book Fair. The Fair attracts
more than two million visitors each year, and the Scottish national pavilion - which will showcase Scottish creative achievement and education - will
be at the heart of it. Part of this years programme is a Burns Supper for the alumni of Scottish universities and colleges from across India. I was also in
Kolkata for the 2008 Book Fair, on a recce mission for this years Fair, and I hosted a reception for alumni on that occasion, too.
Among the guests were a group of twenty or so senior civil servants and businessmen who had been together at the Royal College of Science and
Technology - the precursor of the University of Strathclyde - in Glasgow in the early 1960s, more than 40 years ago. Their memories of the College, Glasgow
and Scotland were as fresh as a daisy - and they had spent most of the last 40 years singing the praises of Scotland and Scottish education to anyone who
cared to listen. Affinity Scots if Ive ever met any, and a huge asset to Scotland.
Nearly half a century after the engineers I met in Kolkata graduated, Scottish universities are still providing Outstanding Support for International
Students: no fewer than three of the six universities from across the UK short-listed in this category for the 2008 Times Higher Education Awards were
Scottish. The largest annual survey of the experience of international students in the UK, conducted by i-Graduate, shows that international students in
Scotland are in general even more satisfied with the learning and living experience and the support services of their universities and colleges than
international students elsewhere in the UK are.
Scotland has five universities in Shanghai Jiao Tong Universitys Top 500. It has four in the Top 200 listed in the Times Higher Education Supplement. No
other country of the same size comes anywhere near.
The direct value of education and training exports to the UK economy has been estimated at over 12.5bn. Here in Scotland, the latest data from
Universities Scotland show that the total income of Scottish higher education institutions is 2.1bn, with the sector directly employing 34,149 people - three
times as many people as the nations whisky industry.
A 2006 study found that international students brought in overseas revenue of 235m to Scottish universities and contributed a further 146m in off-
campus expenditure.
The world is changing, though, and Scotland needs to keep pace. Technology has changed. Education has changed. Students have changed. So have
student expectations of education and education institutions. Nowadays, a student in China or India who is thinking of attending college or university in
EDUCATION & TRAINING
Craighlockhart campus.
Courtesy of Napier University
EDUCATION & TRAINING
Scotland has a wealth of comparative information available at the click of a mouse, allowing them to be more discerning and more demanding than ever
before in their academic choices.
The Scottish Government has accepted the challenge posed by these changes. Its strategy, International Lifelong Learning: Scotlands Contribution,
aims to maintain Scotlands position as a world leader in international post-school education and increase economic value to Scotland. However it is not just
about student numbers or the pennies and pounds. We should remember that good relationships are two-way streets.
On the one hand, the international students who study and in many cases settle in Scotland add significant talent to the job market here and give
Scottish businesses access to language skills and a culturally diverse workforce, on the other, the opportunities to study or work abroad offered by global
exchange programmes such as Comenius or Erasmus, both funded by the European Commission, UKIERI (the UK India Education and Research Initiative),
and IAESTE (the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience) - all managed by the British Council - which are fantastic
opportunities for Scottish students to benefit from new cultures and experiences, and acquire new skills. Those new skills will help us tackle the many
challenges that Scotland - and the rest of the world - face in the 21st century.
In Robert Burns time, though, when he was receiving his early education at an adventure school in Alloway, a mouse was still a wee, sleekit, cowrin,
timrous beastie. As chance would have it, the current Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Fiona Hyslop MSP, also went to primary school
in Alloway, the town where Burns set one of his best known poems, Tam oShanter - performed at many Burns Suppers each year.
The Education Act passed by the Parliament of Scotland in 1696, nearly 60 years before Burns was born, is the basis of Scotlands strong claim to have
been the first country in the world to introduce universal education.
Scotland has always laid great store by a broad education, both at school and beyond. One well known (and almost certainly apocryphal) anecdote tells
of a young boy who, after having made considerable progress with Latin at an early age, was compelled by the poverty of his parents to leave school and
take temporary work as an assistant to the gardener at the local big house. When his services were no longer required, the lady of the house gave him a
guinea and said, Well, young man! How are you going to spend your guinea? Oh, my Lady, he replied, Ive just made up my mind to tak a quarter o
Greek, for I hadna got beyond Latin when I left the school.
The preamble to the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act that introduced universal, compulsory provision in Scotland (and served as a catalyst for Englands
Elementary Education Act of 1880) stated that it is desirable to amend and extend the provisions of the law of Scotland on the subject of education, in
such manner that the means of procuring efficient education for their children may be furnished and made available to the whole people of Scotland.
Thirty-seven years later, the stated aim of Scotlands Curriculum for Excellence is to enable all children to develop their capacities as successful
learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society.
Edinburgh University now hosts a Confucius Institute, part of an international network promoting Chinese language and culture. An old Chinese proverb
says If you want a year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want a hundred years of prosperity, grow people.
Yes, the world is changing, yet Scotland and the people of Scotland have the ability to change with it and - when it comes to education - lead the way.
Roy Cross is the Director of the British Council Scotland (since 2005).
Now based in Edinburgh, he has spent his whole career working in cultural relations, with postings in Baghdad, Berlin,
Bucharest, London, Munich and Zagreb.
Roy is currently chair of the Scottish national working party on International Lifelong Learning - Scotlands
Contribution. His areas of specialisation include the theory and practice of networks, language teaching policy, and South-
East Europe. His interests include jazz, film, modern fiction and cooking.
Website: www.britishcouncil.org/Scotland.
Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop with Chinese schoolchildren. An old
Chinese proverb says If you want a year of prosperity, grow grain. If
you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want a hundred
years of prosperity, grow people.
w
w
w
.
q
m
u
.
a
c
.
u
k
A focused university for 21st century Scotland
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh specialises in high quality professional education and research, that informs policy and practice in
health, drama and the creative arts, media and social science, and business, management and enterprise.
We have recently relocated to an innovative and sustainable new campus on the east side of Edinburgh, by Musselburgh, having gained
full university title in 2007. The new campus has been designed to facilitate our distinctive approach to learning and teaching, and to
the creation, transfer and application of new knowledge oriented to social well being, economic development and cultural creativity.
The campus design expresses our aspiration to be an ungated institution a university whose most important stakeholders are
the public.
With our ability to address real social issues, and with the collective imagination and creativity that has brought us to the point where
we stand, in our new campus, with full university title, we are set to make an invaluable contribution to the creation of a healthier,
wealthier, fairer, greener, safer, and, above all, smarter Scotland.
For more information, contact Marketing Tel: 0131 474 0000 Email: marketing@qmu.ac.uk
Scottish Charity No. SC002750
With you all the way.
INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN
AID PROCUREMENT SERVICE
iHAPS
The online resource for Procurement and Logistics Officers
www.ihapsnet.org
BEST LOVED IN SCOTLAND.
SCOTLANDS FAVOURITE WHISKY
Please enjoy our whisky responsibly www.thefamousgrouse.com
proud supporters of
HOMECOMING
SCOTLAND 2009
By Paul Bush OBE
Commencing with the celebrations of Burns 250th Anniversary in January, more than 200 Homecoming Scotland events are
taking place across Scotland during 2009 to celebrate some of the greatest contributions Scotland has made to the world.
These great contributions include Burns himself, The Scottish Enlightenment and Innovation, golf, whisky and Scotlands rich
ancestry, culture and heritage.
R
obert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire in 1759 and by the time of his death in Dumfries 37 years later had amassed a body of work that made him
immortal. Also, as Scots emigrated to the New World, the words and sentiments of Scotlands very own ploughman poet achieved inspirational status
the world over.
The Homecoming Scotland festivities begin around Burns Night in January with a series of Burns-inspired events including Celtic Connections in
Glasgow, the worlds biggest Scottish music festival; Burns Light, a dazzling lantern procession through the historic heart of Dumfries; Zig Zag - The Paths of
Robert Burns, a major touring exhibition bringing together objects from the national Burns collection; Iconic Burns, a spectacular outdoor celebration in
Alloways Burns Heritage Park and the Homecoming Burns Supper which will be the centrepiece of the World Famous Burns Supper celebration which aims
to unite Burns celebrations internationally online for the first time ever. In May, some of the top names in Scottish music and comedy will participate in the
Burns an a That! Festival, in Ayrshire. From April to September a major exhibition of contemporary art Inspired by Burns will be presented at The Mitchell in
Glasgow and his songs and verse will provide the underlying theme for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo in August.
Burns huge impact on the literary world is celebrated throughout 2009. StAnza Scotlands Poetry Festival in St Andrews, and Aye Write!, the Bank of
Scotland Book Festival in Glasgow, are highlights of the month of March. The University of Aberdeen Writers Festival - Word 2009 - takes place in May and
theres the Stenaline Wigtown Book Town Festival in September.
In recognition of Burns astonishing body of work and of the literary achievements of other legendary Scottish writers such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Compton Mackenzie - to name but a few - Edinburgh was in 2006 designated the
first UNESCO City of Literature. In August 2009, Edinburghs two week Book Festival will pay homage to the works and inspiration of Burns.
THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT AND INNOVATION
In the latter half of the 18th century, Scotland experienced a process of intellectual re-birth centred on Edinburgh, and this period became known as the
Scottish Enlightenment. Scientists, economists, philosophers, writers and painters congregated in the taverns of Scotlands capital.
In the years that followed, a breathtaking spate of creativity took place with Scots inventing the bicycle, steam engine, paraffin, chloroform, the
telephone, and helping to develop television and radar. These discoveries, along with other great technological advances, are explored at the 21st Edinburgh
International Science Festival in April.
HOMECOMING SCOTLAND 2009
Edinburgh Military Tattoo, Edinburgh Castle.
Domhnall Dods
GOLF
Scotland is known as the Home of Golf. Having pioneered the game from as early as the 15th century, and with over 550 courses to choose from,
enthusiasts are spoiled for choice. From the iconic Old Course at St Andrews and the coastal links of Aberdeenshire, Morayshire, Ayr, Argyll and East Lothian,
to the inland challenges of Gleneagles and Loch Lomond, Scotlands golf courses are genuinely exciting to play.
The very first Open Golf Championship, the only major golfing championship held outside the USA, took place at Prestwick in 1860, when eight players
challenged for the title over the 12-hole course and it was won by Willie Park, a Scotsman. Since then, the tournament has returned regularly to Scotland,
being played at Carnoustie, St Andrews, The Royal Troon Golf Club, Muirfield and Turnberry.
It is therefore all the more fitting that the 138th British Open should return in 2009 to Turnberry in Burns homeland of Ayrshire, and the 1977 setting
for the classic Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus Duel in the Sun. What is more, 2009 sees the launch of Scotlands biggest ever golf promotion Drive it Home,
which offers a free four-ball at selected golf courses across Scotland for overseas golfers and their buddies.
WHISKY
Known in the Gaelic language as uisge beatha (the Water of Life), Whisky is among the most beloved of distilled spirits in the world. With 95 working
distilleries, each producing a uniquely different flavour, whisky is the stuff of Scottish folk lore and legend.
The month of May 2009 has been designated Whisky Month, starting with the Spirit of Speyside Festival - celebrating its 10th year - and featuring a
new event, Spirit of the West taking place at the spectacular Inveraray Castle. In September, the island of Barra is hosting the first ever Whisky Galore
Festival to commemorate the salvaging of cargo from the SS Politician which sank offshore in 1941. In early November, a series of lavish whisky gala dinners
across Scotland will start with Whisky Live, a two-day tasting and sampling event in Glasgow.
ANCESTRY, CULTURE AND HERITAGE
The worldwide migration of Scottish families and clans throughout the centuries has created a remarkable network of international friendship. The Scots are
an enterprising race, but never more so than when away from their native land. Wherever they have found themselves, be it in the USA, Canada, Australasia,
mainland Europe or Africa, they have left their mark. From such a small nation, the pioneering influence of its sons and daughters has been astonishing.
Today, there are more than 500 active Scottish Clan and Family Associations registered around the world. Each of them plays an important role in the
preservation and celebration of Scottish traditions. Furthermore, the goodwill generated through shared origins has created an immense asset in terms of
communication and understanding in our ever more complex global community. Recognising this, The Gathering 2009, held at Edinburghs Holyrood Park in
July, will feature Scotlands largest ever Highland Games, the World Heavy Athletic Championships, a majestic Clan March up the Royal Mile, and a
spectacular Clan Pageant enacted on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle.
As the focal point of Highland Homecoming, a fortnight-long festival of Highland Culture in October, the Buaidh Chruinneil na h-Alba Scotlands Global
Impact at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness, will explore the way in which Scots have shaped countries and communities around the world. Tracing your
Scottish ancestry has never been simpler. Since its launch in 2002, www.ancestralscotland.com - VisitScotlands official website for people around the world
with Scots ancestry - has proved immensely popular. The site provides a wealth of useful information on how to research your Scottish ancestry along with
practical tips and inspiration to help you plan a trip to Scotland and your ancestral homelands. You will also find clan touring itineraries and details of all
members of VisitScotlands Ancestral Tourism Welcome Scheme.
July sees the launch of the University of Strathclydes first International Genealogy Festival and in September Dundee plays host to the Angus and
Dundee Roots Festival. Throughout the year ScotlandsPeople Centre - Scotlands new national family history centre - which is housed in Edinburghs
magnificent General Register House and New Register House and provides access to millions of historical documents dating back to the 16th century, will be
hosting a programme of exhibitions demonstrating the results of genealogical research into the family history of six Famous Scots.
If you are of Scots descent, whenever you visit opportunities abound to walk in the footsteps of your ancestors: from a visit to your clan homelands, to a
step into the past in our historic cities, castles and monuments.
Around St Andrews Day, Homecoming Scotland 2009 is working with some of Scotlands major promoters to present a thrilling celebration of Scottish
music. From traditional folk heroes to the most cutting edge contemporary Scottish bands, this promises to be a sensational finale to the year.
There are those who come to Scotland simply to enjoy the open skies and magnificent tranquillity of the rural and coastal landscapes. Some come to
explore historic houses, castles and gardens, others for a round of golf, or as spectators or participants in the annual Borders Common Ridings, or at the 60
or more annual Highland Games and Gatherings. Events listed in this programme are just the beginning of the Homecoming Story. Register at
www.homecomingscotland2009.com to keep up to date with the latest news.
Whatever place Scotland holds in your heart, Homecoming Scotland 2009 opens the doors to a multitude of unmissable experiences. Ceud Mille Filte
(a hundred thousand welcomes).
Paul Bush OBE became Chief Operating Officer of EventScotland in August 2007 having joined in March 2004 as Deputy
Chief Executive. He is responsible for the development of Scotlands major international sports and cultural events
strategy. This has included work on events such as Ryder Cup, Commonwealth Games bid, World Cross Country
Championships, Edinburgh International Festivals and numerous other international events.
Paul was appointed as General Team Manager to the Scottish Commonwealth Games Team for Manchester 2002 and
again as Chef de Mission for Melbourne 2006. The 2006 Scottish Team had their most successful Games ever winning a
total of 29 medals including 11 gold. During the 1992 Olympic Games, 1990 and 1994 Commonwealth Games and
numerous World and European Championships, Paul was appointed team manager for both the GB and England swimming teams.
Paul received an OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours for services to sport as Chef de Mission for the Scottish Commonwealth Games.
Web: www.homecomingscotland2009.com
Below: Whisky and Cookery Writer Martine Nouet at the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival which celebrates its 10th birthday in 2009 with an increase to 10 days of activities - Friday 1st May to Sunday 10th
May. There will be over 250 events packed with whisky, music, food and fun. It is also the signature event of the Whisky Pillar for Homecoming Scotland and will celebrate this with a spectacular musical
pageant on the banks of the River Spey on Saturday 9th May in Aberlour. Spirit of Speyside will embrace the folklore and culture of the River Spey, Speyside and its people, through music, dance and song.
Courtesy of the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival
INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
Aberdeen Asset Management PLC 57
Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group 94
Bank of Scotland, Corporate Outside Back Cover
Barclays Commercial Bank Inside Front Cover
BNP Paribas 65
Brodies LLP Solicitors 60
Cameron Presentations Ltd 14
Celtic Football Club 152
Change Recruitment Group 19
Clyde Gateway Urban Regeneration Company 85
Clyde Waterfront Strategic Partnership 86
Colpitts World Travel Limited 49
Diageo plc 162
Dialog Semiconductor UK Ltd 109
DuPont Teijin Films UK Ltd 114
Edinburgh Technopole 135
Edrington Group, The. Owners of The Famous Grouse 180
Giles Insurance Brokers Ltd 72
Glasgows International Financial Services District 58/59
Gleneagles Hotel, The 144
Harris Tweed Authority, The 29
Highlands and Islands Enterprise 12
Irvine Bay Regeneration Company 82
ITI Scotland Ltd 6
Keith Hunter Photography Inside Back Cover
Kinloch Anderson Ltd 166
LINC Scotland 46
Lloyds TSB Scotland plc 54
MacRoberts LLP 172
Microsoft Ltd 20/21
Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland 32
Napier University, Edinburgh 10/176
Nexxus 131
Picsel Technologies Ltd 66
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh 179
Scotia Automated Inspection Services Ltd. 98
Scotland Food & Drink 22
Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre 8
SCRI (Scottish Crop Research Institute) 124
SSCN Ltd 128
Surface Active Solutions Ltd (SAS) 97
System Level Integration (iSLI) 106
Talisker 162
The Bank of New York Mellon 4
tie limited 78
University of Dundee, The 120
University of Glasgow Innovation Network 36
University of Strathclyde Business School 2
University of the West of Scotland 127
Walkers Shortbread Limited 165
Whisky Coast, The 171
William Grant & Sons Distillers Ltd 168
Wyeth Research 123
INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
photographing Scotlands architecture
T: +44(0) 141 886 4503
M: +44(0) 7831 117 980
E: keith@khp.demon.co.uk
Picture Library: www.arcaid.co.uk
Keith Hunter Photography
LOOK AT THI NGS DI FFERENTLY
www.bankofscotland.co.uk/corporate
Part of the HBOS Group
T HE BA NK E NT R E P R E NE UR S HE A D F OR
WHEN
AVERAGE
WONT DO
TALK TO THE BANK
ENTREPRENEURS
HEAD FOR
Were not your average bank. Were the business bank.
So you have our full attention. We know the way to grow
our business is to help you grow yours. So were positive,
realistic and commercial. As well as banking, we offer
you products and services that either give you the
answers you need or help create them. And you cant do
that if you look at things like your average bank does.
Call 0845 605 7084

Scottish New Enlight PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Scottish New Enlight PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

THE NEW SCOTTISH

THE FIRST SCOTTISH

Tea, Coffee and Biscuits on arrival

2 course finger or fork buffet lunch

Afternoon tea, coffee & pastries

Jugs of water within main meeting room

Flipchart with pens

Complimentary car parking

Data projector and screen

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen