Alan Bain

Regional Director @MottMacDonald | Trustee @CSFC_famo_club | Follow @AberdeenFC | active travel | urbanism | stadia | opinions my own

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@thomasforth Please put us out of our misery and tell us what the answer is @thomasforth 🙂

[Annemarie Ward 💜 @Annemarieward]

1/2
Scotland has become extraordinarily skilled at narrating suffering while growing strangely incapable of describing what human flourishing actually looks like.
A remarkable new academic paper by Monteux, Smith, MacLeod & Fenton asks a deeply uncomfortable question about “lived experience��, trauma culture, and the permanent management of suffering.

My latest piece explores why recovery culture still believes something many modern institutions seem embarrassed to say aloud:

People can recover.

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@botzarelli @Johnhallmark7 @The_Forty_Four Villa, pitch side lower tier (and upper).

[Simon French @Frencheconomics]

UK electricity generation has fallen 25% from its peak in 2004. Per capita electricity consumption is a third the level of the United States. The UK has the most costly electricity in the world. Half the gas we consume comes from the Norwegian side of the North Sea basin. The residual imported LNG has 4x the carbon footprint of supplying our own. And most depressingly of all the result is a deteriorating UK Balance of Payments, a weaker pound, and a bigger hit to the cost of living. And still the useful idiots want to further constrain UK energy production through high taxes, banning new licences, and gold-plating new energy infrastructure. Their luxury beliefs are behind the awful household disposable income growth of recent years. 🤡.

[Ed Conway @EdConwaySky]

🚨Our film is up
We spent months making this👇
About how Britain shut down many of the factories we need to feed us and defend us.
Will have more to say on it in due course but in the meantime - pls watch, share and let me know what you think https://t.co/wcWaDzyDBf

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@nat95458 Interested. Still have them?

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@scotlandscoeff1 Wales in Pot 1? Very much depends on their result tomorrow night v Belgium.

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@scotlandscoeff1 Play-off semi final is seeded afaik, likely be a home game against the likes of Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia or NI/Slovakia. Final ‘could’ be at home but likely against one of Italy, Ukraine, Turkey or Poland. Inclined to agree that best chance of qualification is to beat Denmark.

[Michael Dnes @MichaelDnes1]

Has government just quietly told us that it’s building HS2?

I’d better explain.

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

Why Rory McIlroy’s sudden frostiness is so jarring https://t.co/bqjZV78Jog

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@John_Stepek @theolodian @thomasforth As a transport specialist @John_Stepek I couldn’t agree more that our chronic under investment in transport outside London has crippled our productivity in the last 30 years. Barcelona has the same population as the West Midlands, one has 11 underground lines, the other doesn’t.

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@thomasforth @John_Stepek Why would a wider tax base outside South East England lead to the type of catch up growth you see in Poland and East Germany @thomasforth though? Seems counter intuitive?

[Alan Bain @alanhbain]

@Feltip1982 @thetimes @ichoosemag @Tropea_harborne @HarborneKitchen No station? University Station is a 15 minute walk from Harborne High Street.

[Adam Tranter @adamtranter]

From the BBC Archive: Will CARS Spell the Death of Birmingham City Centre? (1964)

I'm afraid it did.

Birmingham planners bet big on cars in the 1960s, reshaping the city around traffic flow—not people. The result? A hollowed-out centre, struggling retail, and urban decline.

[Ben Mayhew @experimental361]

It's time for the traditional end-of-year calendar table (smaller chunks of which are available via the link): https://t.co/88pZqRJApi

[James Dacombe @jamesdacombe]

This is just the most obvious thing to do in the UK to boost growth. There is a linear relationship between low cost, abundant energy and higher GDP per capita, something that the UK desperately needs. There is no more obvious way to do this than Nuclear SMRs. It just baffles me that the government isn't spending a huge amount of time fast tracking these projects.

[Richard Jones @RichardALJones]

The most important plot for understanding UK politics & economics now - the collapse in productivity growth since the mid-2000s.
Nothing that governments of last 15 years have done has made a material difference, & if we continue doing the same things we'll get the same result.

[Zia Yusuf @ZiaYusufUK]

Brilliant British engineers at Rolls Royce have pioneered Small Modular Reactors - each of which generate 470MW.

That’s enough to power a million homes for at least 60 years.

They’re compact, totally safe and emission-free.

Why is Britain not doing all it can to accelerate their installation?

Energy would be cheap and abundant, helping our economy boom and making British people richer.

Instead, our politicians inflict hardship on their people, forcing them to subsidise wind and solar to the tune of £300 per household per year for the last decade and giving them the most expensive electricity in the world.

Enough.

[Alec MacGillis @AlecMacGillis]

WSJ front page today: "If security lines, flight delays and long layovers weren’t enough, there’s a new scourge facing holiday travelers: a surprising number of people who think it’s totally OK to have phone conversations on speaker, or watch movies and shows without headphones."