John Kay

So does tentative adolescence give way to independent adulthood? The likely SNP victory does not alter the fact there is no majority in Scotland for independence and little chance of one.

Ahead of the alternative vote referendum, John reviews the arguments with a French perspective – and comes out in support of the change.

A small fraction of the ingenuity devoted to the construction of complex financial instruments that no one should want could advantageously be applied to the construction of less complex instruments that meet the needs of the Big Society.

From the start, PFI conflated the desirable aim of exploiting private sector management skills in project supervision with the undesirable aim of obscuring public finances with complex funding structures. It created an industry of advisers with a vested interest in its own expansion.

The interpretation of fairness is culturally specific but rarely does it correspond to measures of income inequality. Fairness is a perception, not a Gini coefficient.

Good quangos have specific technical expertise and their purpose is to take issues out of politics. Bad quangos have no distinctive skills and are designed to put issues into politics.

Government spin is especially debilitating because government is a monopoly supplier of much of the information that an informed democracy requires.

The Independent Commission on Banking headed by Sir John Vickers which the coalition Government has established will be told that such a separation between utility and casino can’t be done – although it was done in Britain for most of the 20th century.

There is no simple answer to the question: “How should capital gains be taxed?” So there are as many different regimes as there are national tax systems and they are often, as in Britain, in a state of seemingly endless flux.

Britain cannot aspire to continental European levels of public services with lower tax rates. Any British government has to confront that simple fact.