New Statesman Scotland
The Prince's Trust, Scotland, is partly a public badge of the civic virtue of HRH the Prince of Wales, but is also a valiant attempt to re-educate those whose understanding and competence has been shredded by attending Scotland's fourth-rate schools. The new board of the trust consists of the usual suspects - Fred Goodwin, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland; Ian Russell, number two at ScottishPower; Kirsty Wark, the ubiquitous broadcaster; and Gerard Eadie, Scotland's champion double-glazing salesman.
Goodwin says the trust is committed to "raising the self-esteem of Scotland's disadvantaged youth". It is difficult to fault such good intentions, but what is this mysterious quality of being "disadvantaged"? The two defining characteristics seem to be council estates and municipal schools. Scots, especially Establishment Scots, seem to have a blind spot about the degradation these two experiments have imposed on working people across the country.
Under its local director, Euan Davidson, who devises the mix of strategies, the Prince's Trust will continue to help blighted 14- to 25-year-olds to develop self-confidence, learn new skills and find work.
Cynics suggest that the trust delivers another commodity. In exchange for the expensive time of these busy executives, it delivers high-grade respectability. To be able to pick the phone up and ask for a favour with the slightest hint you are calling on behalf of the Prince of Wales gives the participants a frisson of delight.
Local authority schools will continue to manufacture mediocrity with complete impunity - and immunity to political reform.
Ofex, the very junior market in young small-company shares, has been avoided by the big fund managers. It is populated by companies nobody has ever heard of, the only exception being Glasgow Rangers football club, which has done well this year.The large institutions behave as a herd, all chasing the "safe" proportions - the fashionable stocks such as the dot-com names that have recently crashed.
However, the fund manager Scottish Value Management is bucking this safety trend and investing £20m in Ofex stock. Colin McLean, who runs SVM, is impatient with the timidity of too many funds. He says that, by offering exposure to these low-profile but high-potential stocks, he should be able to provide better returns than his rivals, who swap only swathes of the top 250 plc shares. It is good to see deviant behaviour in the home of the most conservative profession in Scotland - the Edinburgh fund managers.
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