Empowered Funds LLC Buys 36 Shares of IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDXX)
Online Display Advertising Market is Booming Worldwide | Big Giants Google, Meta, Smart AdServer 12-23-2024 07:40 PM CET | Advertising, Media Consulting, Marketing Research Press release from: HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Pvt. Ltd. Online Display Advertising Market HTF MI recently introduced Global Online Display Advertising Market study with 143+ pages in-depth overview, describing about the Product / Industry Scope and elaborates market outlook and status (2024-2032). The market Study is segmented by key regions which is accelerating the marketization. At present, the market is developing its presence. Some key players from the complete study are Google, Meta, Amazon Ads, Adobe, Microsoft, Verizon Media, The Trade Desk, AppNexus, Criteo, Quantcast, MediaMath, Taboola, Outbrain, Smart AdServer. Download Sample Report PDF (Including Full TOC, Table & Figures) 👉 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/2618154-global-online-display-advertising-market-2?utm_source=Akash_OpenPR&utm_id=Akash According to HTF Market Intelligence, the Global Online Display Advertising market is expected to grow from 250 Billion USD in 2024 to 500 Billion USD by 2032, with a CAGR of 12% from 2024 to 2032. The Online Display Advertising market is segmented by Types (Banner Ads, Video Ads, Native Ads, Retargeting Ads), Application (E-commerce, Apps, News Websites, Media Platforms) and by Geography (North America, LATAM, West Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, Oceania, MEA). Definition: Refers to visual advertisements displayed on websites, apps, and social media platforms to engage audiences and promote brands. The market is driven by the shift to digital advertising, advancements in programmatic advertising, and growing internet penetration globally. Dominating Region: • North America Fastest-Growing Region: • Asia-Pacific Market Trends: •AI Targeting, Personalized Ads, Video Dominance Market Drivers: •Digital Marketing Growth, Data Analytics, Mobile Usage Market Challenges: •Ad Blockers, Privacy Concerns, ROI Measurement Have a query? Market an enquiry before purchase 👉 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/enquiry-before-buy/2618154-global-online-display-advertising-market-2?utm_source=Akash_OpenPR&utm_id=Akash The titled segments and sub-section of the market are illuminated below: In-depth analysis of Online Display Advertising market segments by Types: Banner Ads, Video Ads, Native Ads, Retargeting Ads Detailed analysis of Tank Container Shipping market segments by Applications: E-commerce, Apps, News Websites, Media Platforms Geographically, the detailed analysis of consumption, revenue, market share, and growth rate of the following regions: • The Middle East and Africa (South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Egypt, etc.) • North America (United States, Mexico & Canada) • South America (Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, etc.) • Europe (Turkey, Spain, Turkey, Netherlands Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.) • Asia-Pacific (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia). Buy Now Latest Edition of Online Display Advertising Market Report 👉 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/buy-now?format=1&report=2618154?utm_source=Akash_OpenPR&utm_id=Akash Online Display Advertising Market Research Objectives: - Focuses on the key manufacturers, to define, pronounce and examine the value, sales volume, market share, market competition landscape, SWOT analysis, and development plans in the next few years. - To share comprehensive information about the key factors influencing the growth of the market (opportunities, drivers, growth potential, industry-specific challenges and risks). - To analyze the with respect to individual future prospects, growth trends and their involvement to the total market. - To analyze reasonable developments such as agreements, expansions new product launches, and acquisitions in the market. - To deliberately profile the key players and systematically examine their growth strategies. FIVE FORCES & PESTLE ANALYSIS: In order to better understand market conditions five forces analysis is conducted that includes the Bargaining power of buyers, Bargaining power of suppliers, Threat of new entrants, Threat of substitutes, and Threat of rivalry. • Political (Political policy and stability as well as trade, fiscal, and taxation policies) • Economical (Interest rates, employment or unemployment rates, raw material costs, and foreign exchange rates) • Social (Changing family demographics, education levels, cultural trends, attitude changes, and changes in lifestyles) • Technological (Changes in digital or mobile technology, automation, research, and development) • Legal (Employment legislation, consumer law, health, and safety, international as well as trade regulation and restrictions) • Environmental (Climate, recycling procedures, carbon footprint, waste disposal, and sustainability) Get 10-25% Discount on Immediate purchase 👉 https://www.htfmarketreport.com/request-discount/2618154-global-online-display-advertising-market-2?utm_source=Akash_OpenPR&utm_id=Akash Points Covered in Table of Content of Global Online Display Advertising Market: Chapter 01 - Online Display Advertising Executive Summary Chapter 02 - Market Overview Chapter 03 - Key Success Factors Chapter 04 - Global Online Display Advertising Market - Pricing Analysis Chapter 05 - Global Online Display Advertising Market Background or History Chapter 06 - Global Online Display Advertising Market Segmentation (e.g. Type, Application) Chapter 07 - Key and Emerging Countries Analysis Worldwide Online Display Advertising Market Chapter 08 - Global Online Display Advertising Market Structure & worth Analysis Chapter 09 - Global Online Display Advertising Market Competitive Analysis & Challenges Chapter 10 - Assumptions and Acronyms Chapter 11 - Online Display Advertising Market Research Methodology Key questions answered • How Global Online Display Advertising Market growth & size is changing in next few years? • Who are the Leading players and what are their futuristic plans in the Global Online Display Advertising market? • What are the key concerns of the 5-forces analysis of the Global Online Display Advertising market? • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors? • What are the different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Global Online Display Advertising market? Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter-wise sections or region-wise report versions like North America, LATAM, Europe, Japan, Australia or Southeast Asia. Nidhi Bhawsar (PR & Marketing Manager) HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited Phone: +15075562445 sales@htfmarketreport.com About Author: HTF Market Intelligence Consulting is uniquely positioned to empower and inspire with research and consulting services to empower businesses with growth strategies. We offer services with extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events, and experience that assist in decision-making. This release was published on openPR.Alberta working to get money's worth on Turkish medication deal after two years
Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed at least 34 Palestinians, health officials in the enclave say, as Qatar voiced hope of fresh momentum in efforts to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. or signup to continue reading The health officials said that an Israeli strike hit a house in Gaza City late on Saturday, killing four women. The Israeli military did not provide an immediate comment on Saturday's strikes across Gaza. The death toll was revised upwards from 30 reported earlier in the day by the Palestinian health ministry, which also said dozens were wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and militants in the daily death tallies, and Reuters could not independently verify the figures. Israel accuses the Islamist group of using civilian population and property as shields. Hamas denies this. Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said Qatar was engaging with the incoming Trump administration on Gaza after sensing fresh momentum for ceasefire talks following the US election. Donald Trump's Middle East envoy has travelled to Qatar and Israel to kick-start the US President-elect's diplomatic push for a ceasefire and hostage release deal before his inauguration on January 20, a source briefed on the talks told Reuters on Thursday. Hamas said on Saturday a ceasefire agreement could only be reached if it secured an end to the war in Gaza, reaffirming its outstanding position. Israel says the war can only end once Hamas is eradicated. "Stopping the war and aggression is the condition for any agreement," said a Hamas statement, quoting a top official of the group, Mohammad Darwish. Hamas has not appointed a new leader after Israel killed the group's chief, Yahya Al-Sinwar, in Gaza on October 17, but the statement described Darwish as the head of the leading council. Darwish met with Turkey's foreign minister on Friday and Iran's foreign minister on Saturday to discuss the developments in Gaza and the region, the statement said. Both meetings were held in Doha, Qatar, which announced earlier on Saturday that officials were trying to revive the ceasefire talks. "He (Darwish) explained that Hamas was open to offers by the mediators as long as they served the interest of our people and ending their suffering," the statement said. The war in Gaza has been raging for over 14 months, with much of the enclave laid to waste and more than 44,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza health authorities, as Israeli forces continue their drive to wipe out Hamas and rescue hostages taken by the militant group. The deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades began when Hamas stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and taking more than 250 hostages back to Gaza. In the occupied West Bank on Saturday, a Palestinian man was shot dead by Israeli forces at a checkpoint, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Police said a security guard had shot him after he threw firecrackers at the forces there and that a knife was found on his person. The Israeli military said that on Friday it killed several Hamas militants who were identified as operating from a structure in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, according to a statement issued on Saturday. Palestinian health officials said at least 20 people, including six children and five women, were killed in that attack. DAILY Today's top stories curated by our news team. WEEKDAYS Grab a quick bite of today's latest news from around the region and the nation. WEEKLY The latest news, results & expert analysis. 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DAILY Test your skills with interactive crosswords, sudoku & trivia. Fresh daily! Advertisement AdvertisementWe commend Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for standing firm and opposing the dismissal of the hush money/Stormy Daniels case that resulted in Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York last spring. Now Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan should do the right thing and stay Trump’s sentence until he serves out his second term in the White House — but let the conviction stand. We find Trump’s argument that the verdict delivered by the electorate on Election Day should render moot the verdict delivered in Manhattan criminal court unpersuasive. Trump’s lawyers argue that it is ridiculous to have a state criminal sentence overhanging a president for the entirety of his term, and we agree that it is a bizarre situation, but one borne of a bizarre situation that this president — who hid campaign-related payments to a porn actress he had an affair with — and the country that elected him have put themselves in. It is even more ridiculous, we believe, to have this conviction — not a politically-enacted one, not a frivolous finding, but the result of a full trial and unanimous jury — disappear because Trump is now on his way back to the White House. The three other Trump criminal cases, a federal indictment and Georgia indictment related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his illegal retention and hiding of classified documents, are, in fact, disappearing. The reason is mostly the calendar and an overly broad immunity decision about “official acts” from the U.S. Supreme Court. Had there been sufficient time, those were strong cases with more than a possibility of resulting in convictions and prison time for the former president if they’d been allowed to mature. The Manhattan counts were about actions with fewer national and national-security implications than these cases, but these are no less crimes for having been lower-profile. Almost none of the public defenses of Trump have actually argued that he did not do what he was convicted of; they largely land on the idea that we shouldn’t care, that Trump should effectively be allowed to violate the law because of his imminent return to the Oval Office. The latest push to have the case dismissed doesn’t center really at all on the relevant facts or the case law, but entirely on the premise that Trump is now past the point of being held criminally responsible, even post-conviction. Trump’s past cannot be erased. In truth, the mark of a democracy in crisis is not when a leader faces criminal liability, but when a leader cannot. Even if this case truly has to wait until 2029 until it sees a resolution in the form of sentencing — which, as we’ve noted before, is not likely to be jail time in any case — then so be it. We hope, too, that one day Trump really can be held accountable for Jan. 6 and all his other machinations to suspend the peaceful transfer of power, and for his dangerous retention of some of the country’s most sensitive records. At the very least, we can impose punishment for the crimes for which he was already convicted. Even if it happens four years from now. — New York Daily NewsWith new season on the horizon, PWHL evaluating more than 25 expansion proposals
DETROIT – If President-elect Donald Trump makes good on his threat to kill federal tax credits for electric vehicle purchases, it's likely that fewer buyers will choose EVs. Yet tax credits or not, auto companies show no intention of retreating from a steady transition away from gas-burning cars and trucks, especially given the enormous investment they have already made: Since 2021, the industry has spent at least $160 billion on planning, designing and building electric vehicles, according to the Center for Auto Research. Recommended Videos In campaigning for the presidency, Trump condemned the federal tax for EV buyers — up to $7,500 per vehicle — as part of a “green new scam” that would devastate the auto industry. His transition team is reportedly working on plans to abolish the tax credits and to roll back the more stringent fuel-economy rules that were pushed through by the Biden administration. It is far from clear, though, that the Trump administration could actually rescind the credits. Trump's argument — one that most economists dispute — is that a rapid U.S. shift toward electric vehicles would lead to most EVs being made in China and would swell prices for America’s auto buyers. He has said he would redirect federal revenue recaptured from a canceled tax credit to build roads, bridges and dams. Ending the credits, which were a key provision of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, almost certainly would reduce EV sales, which have been growing in the United States this year, though not nearly as fast as automakers had expected. The slowing growth has forced nearly all auto companies to scale back EV production and delay construction of battery factories that are no longer needed to handle a more gradual transition. Jonathan Chariff, an executive at Midway Ford in Miami, one of the company's top EV-selling dealers, said he thinks ending the tax credits would severely hurt sales. The credits reduce monthly payments, he noted, making an EV closer in price to a gasoline counterpart. “It becomes more affordable,” he said. “Otherwise, those individuals won't be able to afford the payments.” Chariff calculated that the $7,500 credit could shrink a buyer's monthly payment by between $200 and $250, allowing many to afford an EV. On average, electric vehicles sell for about $57,000, compared with around $48,000 for a gasoline vehicle, according to Cox Automotive. (Though they cost more up front, EVs generally are cheaper to operate because maintenance costs are lower, and in most cases electricity is much cheaper than gasoline.) To qualify for the credits, EVs must be built in North America. EVs that contain battery parts or minerals from China or any other nation that is deemed an economic or security threat to the United States qualify for only half the federal credit. Because of that restriction, most of the 75 EV models on sale in the U.S. are not eligible for the full credit. All EVs, though, can receive the full credit toward a lease — a benefit that Trump likely will target. Some plug-in gas-electric hybrids qualify for the credits, too. Asked about the president-elect's opposition to EV tax credits, Trump's transition team would say only that he has “a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail.” Elon Musk, a close adviser to Trump and co-leader of a commission that intends to identify ways to vastly shrink the federal government, appears to be aligned with the president-elect in canceling the tax credits. Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla who spent an estimated $200 million to help elect Trump, has said that ending the credits would hurt his rival companies more than it would Tesla, the U.S. sales leader in EVs by far. “I think it would be devastating for our competitors and would hurt Tesla slightly,” he said. Even so, it might prove difficult for Trump to rescind the credits without help from the new Republican-led Congress, many of whose members represent districts where the EV credit is popular. Trump has floated the idea of using a constitutional theory by which a president could decide whether or not to spend money Congress has appropriated. The president-elect has promoted the concept of “impoundment,” under which congressional appropriations set a ceiling — but not a floor — for spending federal money. John Helveston, an assistant professor at George Washington University who studies electric vehicles and policies, said that in his view, the impoundment theory wouldn't apply in this circumstance because the EV tax credits affect government revenue and are not an appropriation. In any case, Helveston said he doubts Trump could persuade Republican lawmakers to remove the credits from the Inflation Reduction Act because so many congressional districts benefit from the tax breaks. “Cutting the EV tax credit makes it harder for the battery factory in their town to sell their product,” he noted. A 1974 federal law bars a president from substituting his own view of spending programs, said David Rapallo, associate law professor at Georgetown University. If Trump cancelled the tax credits, Rapallo said, it would be challenged in court. Research by J.D. Power shows that once people know about the tax credits, they're far more likely to consider an electric vehicle. In the meantime, federal subsides, not only for buyer tax credits but also for converting factories to EV production, are helping General Motors, Ford and Stellantis make the enormously expensive transition away from gasoline vehicles. It's also helping Detroit's Big Three compete with foreign rivals, notably Chinese automakers that received government subsidies and had a head start in developing EVs, said Sam Fiorani, a vice president at the consultancy AutoForecast Solutions. At present, Ford and GM, while profitable overall, are losing money on EVs, unlike Tesla, though both expect their electric-vehicle operations to generate positive earnings in the coming years as costs ease and more vehicles are sold. Eliminating the federal tax credits, Fiorani suggested, would “hurt the Detroit Three in the long run as they become less competitive against global players making the technological leaps” for electric vehicles, GM, Ford and Stellantis all declined to comment, though their executives have said in the past that they will continue to develop EVs while still selling gasoline vehicles and hybrids. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents most automakers, has written to Trump in support of the tax credits, arguing that they help ensure that the U.S. “continues to lead in manufacturing critical to our national and economic security.” Hyundai, the Korean automaker, which has spent more than $7 billion on an EV factory in Georgia, could also suffer. The company sped up construction of the huge plant near Savannah and is now building EVs in the United States to try to capitalize on the tax credits for buyers. In the end, most automakers say their ambitious plans for transitioning to electric vehicles won't change regardless of policy changes in Washington. “We plan for the long term, so political considerations aren’t a factor in how we approach product development or capital investments,” said David Christ, vice president of Toyota North America, which is building a battery factory in North Carolina. ____ AP writers Fatima Hussein in Washington and Jeff Amy in Atlanta contributed to this report.UN says bystanders must step in to help end UK's violence against women epidemic
TOM HARRIS: The SNP is chronically addicted to spending on the bloated public sector - as services get ever worse. But without seismic reform, this tartan gravy train is doomed to hit the buffers Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport By TOM HARRIS FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL Published: 16:46 EST, 6 December 2024 | Updated: 16:52 EST, 6 December 2024 e-mail View comments The devolution era has brought with it an employment bonanza. There are more jobs than ever. Workers are better paid than ever before. And they’re retiring on ever more generous pension packages. There’s just one problem – and it’s a serious one. An unsustainable one. That growth in jobs and in remuneration has been in the public sector, not the private one. It’s the private sector which creates wealth through economic growth, through taxes – corporation tax as well as the income tax of its employees. It’s thanks to that revenue that governments can afford to spend on vital services like health, education and transport. The public sector, on the other hand, doesn’t generate wealth; its chief function is to provide services, not generate profits. That’s a balancing act, a virtuous cycle, that has endured for as long as there has been a welfare state. But it’s a system that is now in danger of collapsing in on itself. Stephen Boyle, Auditor General for Scotland, has warned that the current situation, with wage and jobs growth in the public sector outstripping those in the private, is ‘unsustainable’. Even before last week’s Scottish Budget, when Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced her spending plans for the next year , Mr Boyle set out in stark terms the challenge facing Scotland’s political leaders, and the consequences of those challenges not being met. He said: ‘For some time, myself and others have called for urgent reform of Scotland’s public services to address the public sector’s unsustainable finances and the threats these pose to services. It’s critical that the Scottish Government moves at pace to reform the design and delivery of public services.’ Spending on Scotland’s public sector has soared - but the system is now in danger of collapsing, argues Tom Harris Political generosity has given public sector workers an economic advantage over staff in private industry and an advantage over workers doing the same jobs south of the Border. Which is fine – but only if it is affordable. Devolution was never going to result in a leaner, more efficient public sector. Just cast a glance back at the main proponents of the devolution project in the 1980s and 1990s: trade unionists (representing far more public than private sector workers), churches, charities and a whole range of politicians from the Left-wing parties, many of whom, astonishingly, ended up being elected as MSPs themselves. The campaign was energised by the Thatcher government’s financial discipline. Asking local authorities and Whitehall departments to constrain the growth in public funding was anathema to those on the Left. Scotland needed its own parliament in order to produce ‘Scottish solutions to Scottish problems’ – code for ‘more spending than the UK Government will allow’. And so it has proved. Scotland is addicted to public spending, public jobs and public services for which we shouldn’t have to pay . Take a look at Ms Robison’s Budget as a fine example of the ‘something for nothing’ principle that dominates Scottish political discourse. She wants the two-child benefit cap in Scotland to be abolished (though not until the beginning of 2026) and wealthier pensioners will hold on to their winter heating allowance, unlike in England. There was even some mild relief for Scotland’s taxpayers – some of them, at least, who will be marginally better off once thresholds on lower income tax bands have been shifted slightly upwards. It’s time Scotland started cutting its coat according to the cloth we can actually afford, Tom Harris argues But the Scottish Government’s own figures suggest that the number paying the higher rate of tax (42 per cent) will rocket from 60,000 to 554,000, while the number of advanced rate taxpayers who pay 45 per cent is forecast to soar by 14,000 to 128,000. Wealthy Scots are regarded by our political classes like the private sector: only there to provide a ready stream of cash to fund the public sector. Exactly how well spent is that money raked in from business and individuals? Glasgow City Council, which has some of the worst areas of financial deprivation in the country, recently hired a new chief executive at a cost of £200,000 a year. Salaries must be competitive with the private sector to attract the best candidates, we are told. But the new incumbent, Susanne Miller, like almost all her predecessors, is another veteran of the public sector. Caroline Lamb, who’s in charge of our struggling NHS, received a pay rise earlier this year, taking her own salary up to £200,000. Meanwhile, Audit Scotland raised concerns about ‘unacceptable use of public funds’ at the Water Industry Commission for Scotland. These included spending £77,350 of taxpayers’ cash sending the chief operating officer of former boss Alan Sutherland business-class to an extended MBA course at Harvard and £402.41 on a dinner for two at a luxury hotel. And let’s not forget Ken Thomson, the former senior civil servant with the Scottish Government, who told a group WhatsApp chat during the Covid pandemic: ‘Just to remind you (seriously) this is discoverable under FOI. Know where the “clear chat” button is.’ He also said ‘plausible deniability’ were his middle names. Mr Thomson retired from the civil service in November 2023 with a CBE and a pension pot worth £1.4million. It’s not just exorbitant salaries but ill-judged policy decisions that put pressure on government budgets. The disastrous debacle over ferry procurement by the Scottish Government has seen costs spiral from less than £100million to more than £350million, on vessels that are now more than seven years late. Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport Advertisement Had a private company embarked on such a slipshod, incompetent process to secure two new boats, it would either have gone bust or its shareholders would have stepped in. But in Scotland, the public purse is regarded as bottomless, so long as politicians are spending the cash on the ‘right’ things. Before she was forced out of her job as Secretary of State for Transport , Louise Haigh awarded an inflation-busting pay rise to train drivers without asking for workplace reform in return. That approach is writ large in Edinburgh, where the answer to every political problem is always more cash. In years gone by, it was generally accepted that public sector pay, on average, was a bit lower than what the private sector could afford, due to the greater efficiency and profit-making mindset of the latter. But health and local government workers were compensated with better pensions and the prospect that their retirement, when it came, would be more comfortable than if they had paid into a private pot. That is another assumption that has been upended. The public sector now leads the private in both salary and pensions. It’s little wonder that demand for work in the public sector is growing while the private sector faces serious skill shortages and unfilled vacancies. This mindset is not confined to Scotland and pre-dates devolution – even if devolution has given local politicians more freedom to feather the public sector nest. In the 1980s, when local authorities lost much of their housing stock to people who exercised their right to buy, it might have been expected that housing departments, with significantly fewer properties, would shrink or even go out of existence. Instead many of them grew in size! More staff were hired to do less and less work. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. But change would take two qualities that are sadly lacking in our political institutions – leadership and courage. No Scottish politician ever lost votes by saying they wanted to expand the tentacles of the state ever further. No MSP ever failed to win a round of applause by demanding that, however tough a local government spending round, there must be no reduction in any local authority’s workforce. Labour, with its close ties to the unions, is particularly vulnerable to political pressure to maintain support for profligacy in the public sector. Unions themselves have reflected that cultural shift from private to public in the last four decades. In the 1970s, they dominated the workplace, ordering bosses around by threat of industrial action that could be triggered with no more than a show of hands at a meeting hastily convened in a nearby car park. Following legislation introduced to regulate the unions, membership has dwindled to about 22 per cent of the workforce. And only 12 per cent of members are employed in the private sector. So it’s logical that when unions organise for better wages, more job security and more jobs for their members, they’re doing so overwhelmingly on behalf of the public sector. And Labour, funded largely by those trade unions , knows which side its bread is buttered on. The SNP also likes to preen itself as a left-wing party and has, while in charge of the Scottish Government, extended its relationships within Scotland’s trade unions. The Scottish Trade Union Congress, once the exclusive domain of the Labour Party, has developed positive relations with SNP ministers. There is little prospect of tighter financial discipline in public institutions when the country’s two biggest political parties are in thrall to the unions and to the public sector workers they represent. The gravy train that is so generous to senior council, health service and quango officials isn’t about to be derailed so long as either the SNP or Labour hold the financial reins at Holyrood. But opinion polls make bleak reading for the prospects of the Scottish Conservatives – at least for those ambitious Tory MSPs who might hope for a ministerial job one day. And it remains to be seen what disruption will be caused when the first cohort of Reform MSPs arrive in May 2026, as the polls suggest they will. Whichever party grasps this particular nettle, doing nothing to restrain the disastrous growth of the public sector is no longer an option. We've all heard the joke about the three schoolkids arguing in the playground about which of their dads is the fastest. One says his is a racing car driver, so is the fastest. The second boasts that his is an airline pilot and therefore the swiftest. But the third boy says his dad works for Glasgow City Council and must be the fastest because although he finishes work at five, he’s always home by four-thirty. As a former local government employee I’ve seen the waste and inefficiencies that have become ingrained in the system. The fiercely-defended ‘flexitime’ system was designed to allow those with particularly large workloads to accumulate extra hours that they could ‘bank’ and use for extra time off later. But it became an entitlement that was regularly abused by staff, who would arrive early in the day and sit at their desks reading newspapers, or wait in the office doing the same at the end of the day, just to add to their total of accumulated time off. Woe betide any manager who threatened to reform or even scrap the system. Up to two whole days a month could be wrangled if you knew how to exploit it efficiently enough. And many did. It is just one of the countless ‘Spanish practices’ that still hobble the public sector, and that’s before we even look at the extraordinary cost to the public purse of employing ‘agency’ (private, freelance) healthcare staff on our hospital wards in lieu of proper full-time nurses. Meanwhile, private sector workers struggle on with their lot: lower pay, more hours, less job security. Private firms must sink or swim, depending on their own efficiency and ability to innovate, not to mention the hard work of their workforce. Yet the public sector is guaranteed, from one year to the next, that it will keep going, no matter what. Scotland desperately needs that spirit of efficiency and innovation in every part of our economy. Those who genuinely care about the future and quality of our vital services must understand that they are doing them no favours by allowing inefficiencies and costs to spiral. If the current situation is, as Audit Scotland has warned, unsustainable, that means action must be taken and taken soon. For the sake of our public services and those many Scots who depend upon them, it’s time to start cutting our coat according to the cloth we can actually afford. 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