Expert Comment

A blog post from Politics and International Studies Professor Wyn Grant:

Commodity trading houses are secretive, largely unregulated, pay relatively little tax and, until recently, have made big profits. Not surprisingly, they have come under increasing scrutiny with the Financial Times headlining a major investigation on Monday ahead of its global commodities summit which was marked by an anti-industry protest...

A blog post from Politics and International Studies Professor Wyn Grant:

It's fair to say that Mrs Thatcher was no fan of football. She tended to see it through a 'law and order' lens, although it has to be admitted that there were serious problems of that kind during the time she was Prime Minister...

Predictably responses to Mrs Thatcher's death are polarised between those who adored or admired her and those who hated her. Professor Wyn Grant, Politics and International Studies, believes Mrs Thatcher was the first person in power to argue against the dominant view that Britain's relative economic decline was inevitable and simply had to be 'managed'.

A blog post from Department of Economics Professor Mark Harrison:

In my heart, at the time, I was enraged by what Margaret Thatcher did. But now she belongs to history. In my head, looking back as an economic historian, I have to acknowledge the necessity of it. When she came to power, our country was a pretty miserable place: stagnant, strife-torn, and full of bullies. Money was more equally distributed than it is now, but money was worth less than power, and power was highly concentrated in the hands of state monopolies, private monopolies, and organized labour...

As people all over the UK today discuss Big Data, following the BBC's Horizon TV show last night, The Age of Big Data, Assistant Professor Tobias Preis commented, "The age of Big Data has arrived, and is constantly transforming the world we inhabit. BBC Horizon showcased some of the areas in which revealing patterns from vast amounts of data, in particular for the prediction of future behaviour, is of vital social and economic importance."