IMPORTANT: We are lowering the paywall on our site for our coverage of the McCrone Report today. We believe it is vitally important that everybody can access it. You can support us with a subscription here: www.thenational.scot/subscribe and make sure you pick up extra copies of the printed paper.
THERE are not one but two McCrone Reports, the second one being the professor’s investigation into teachers’ pay and conditions instigated by then First Minister Donald Dewar in 1999.
It is his original McCrone Report, however, which we examine today, and the man behind it was the perfect choice to write it in the dying days of Edward Heath’s Conservative Government, because McCrone was the best expert in the civil service on the issues of Scotland’s political economy.
READ MORE: What to expect from The National's McCrone report series
He had proven that assertion a whole decade earlier, before he even joined the civil service and when he was just 30, by writing the definitive work on Scotland’s Natural Resources, published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in February 1964.
Born in Ayr in 1933, Robert Gavin Loudon McCrone gained his degree at Cambridge University before studying for his masters in economics at the University College of Wales, in Aberystwyth. He later achieved a PhD and Honorary LLD at Glasgow University.
It was at the same university that he became an economics lecturer before he joined the civil service as an adviser, firstly to the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs. At the time the Scottish Office did not even have a separate economics department, but McCrone was asked to head it up from 1970.
His value and integrity as a civil servant was displayed by the fact that Conservative and Labour governments used his talents.
For more than two decades he was chief economic adviser to successive secretaries of state for Scotland. He also became head of two Scottish Government departments within the Scottish Office – the Industry Department for Scotland and the Scottish Development Department.
On leaving the civil service in 1992, he became Professor of Applied Economics at Glasgow University and later a visiting professor at Edinburgh.
He has lectured and written extensively on economics as well as housing and industrial matters and prior to the independence referendum in 2014 he published the well-received Scottish Independence: Weighing up the Economics, which, as ever with his work, was well-written and impartial.
It didn’t please everybody, but it was typical McCrone – honest and forensic in its detail, just like his work on Scotland’s oil.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here