Recently by Stuart Pemble

I don't play golf (4 years at St Andrews University and I never lifted a golf club in anger) and, despite being a pretty committed armchair sports fan, I don't particularly follow golf. In fact, I'm in firm agreement with Mark Twain, who memorably described the game as "a good walk ruined". That having been said, I do like playing golf computer games (I hope I'm not disclosing some deep psychological flaw in my make-up here) and I have certainly heard of Mr Woods, and had done so before his private life descended into the (for me at least) unimaginable media hell of recent times.

As the political furore over the Pre-Budget Report dies down (was it an electoral sop to Labour's traditional voters or a genuine attempt to preserve a fragile economic recovery?), the brutal truth remains that our public finances are in pretty dire straits; and our political leaders face some stark choices as to where to spend our tax pounds.

One of the ways economists analyse the benefit of government spending is to calculate a multiplier which shows the additional economic activity stimulated by each pound spent. According to a recent report prepared by LEK, a firm of management consultants, railway transport, health and veterinary services and construction lead the way, each with a multiplier of over 2.

Every year, as Remembrance Sunday approaches, I adopt what I like to think is a slightly more philosophical outlook on life than my usual day-to-day worries about Dundee United's midfield (better than could be expected) and Scotland's chances of success in the Six Nations (non-existent); although my good lady assures me that I am just being even more pretentious than usual. I'll leave it for you to decide where the truth lies, but I do hope there is an important message hiding in what follows.

Here's what brings me over all reflective: no matter how dreadful things may get politically or economically, there is an immense good fortune in having been born a citizen of a First World democracy like the UK. Despite the ongoing economic gloom and the seemingly never-ending headlines about the money our elected representatives spent at John Lewis on flat-screen tellies, twenty-first century Blighty remains a nation based on some fundamental and important foundations. Freedom of speech, education and healthcare for all (whatever the flaws in practice, the principle holds true), free and fair elections and the rule of law may not be utmost in our thoughts on the morning commute, but they underpin every aspect of our way of life, including our business dealings. I'm no Adam Smith, but free trade seems to sit more easily alongside a free political system than it does a totalitarian one.

But, as this time of year reminds us, these freedoms are not without cost. 1968 remains the only year since the end of WWII when British service personnel have not been killed on active duty; and considerably more have been severely injured and disabled. Yet all this loss and suffering may have happened in conflicts where our freedoms might not have obviously been under attack or where the benefit of hindsight questions the wisdom of going to war in the first place. And these concerns raise their head before you get into the difficult ideological arguments about whether or not any war can be morally justifiable.

However, and whatever your views on war in general or specific conflicts (past or present) in particular, I would like to think that most (if not all) of us agree on the importance of remembering the sacrifices made by others to protect our way of life. My usual introspection on this issue was highlighted last week by two contrasting stories - the sorry tale of Sheffield Hallam student Philip Laing who could face jail after being caught urinating on a poppy wreath after a very heavy drinking session and the rather odd but now overturned ban against wearing a poppy that toiletries store, Bodycare, briefly imposed on its staff.

Bodycare's explanation was that it viewed the poppy as a charitable symbol and, seeing as it was company policy to forbid any charitable emblem of any kind, staff were asked to remove their poppies. Whilst not ignoring the incredibly important work done by the Royal British Legion for which the annual poppy appeal is a huge fundraiser, it seems to me that this argument misses the point about buying and wearing a poppy. It is a lot, lot more than a charitable donation - rather, it is in itself an act of remembrance and, if the possible custodial sentence faced by Mr Laing gives us any indication, one which we as a society still value as being hugely important.

Indeed, taking some time out of our busy working days once a year to contemplate the sacrifices made on our behalf seems the least we can do to say thank you for the freedoms we all enjoy (and perhaps take for granted). So, at 11am this Wednesday (the symbolic anniversary of 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month when the fighting finally stopped on the Western Front leaving an estimated 1.5 million dead), I hope you might find the time for some quiet reflection. And if the pressures of modern living mean that you can't, then why not find another moment to remember? As we are encouraged to do in the famous verse of Laurence Binyon with which I began the blog, "At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them."

Regular readers of the Business Blog will have noticed that revolution is in the air. Cast in the roles of Brum's own Danton and Robespierre are John Clancy and David Bailey. Their revolutionary text is this blog from a few days' ago in which they advocate confiscating the land owned by Britain's 100 largest landed estates and returning it to the control of the Crown so as to give the economy a £100 billion boost.

The nub of the argument is that Britain's current landed estates are nothing more than an unfair historical accident and that very few (if any) of our richest landed families have done anything which in John's and David's eyes now merits their vast wealth. The article ends by asserting that "before you say it's a crazy and can't happen, please note that most other countries have had land revolutions at some point. The enduring feudal legacy of British land ownership needs to be tackled for the benefit of wider society". So, no doubt with a stirring rendition of la Marseillaise as an accompaniment, I think we are all supposed to knock on the door of Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe (its local connections mean that the Calthorpe Estate is a particular target) and ask him to hand over the keys to all the loot.

I hope that I'm not the only person who thinks this is an idea that is at best a wee bit daft and at worst downright dangerous. Here's three (I trust pretty obvious) reasons why:

(1) Everyone involved owns the land in accordance with the laws of this country. How they inherited the land may seem unfair and arbitrary, but it isn't illegal or obviously wrong. If you are going to redistribute land, when was it ever 'fair' (whatever that means) that some people had property and others didn't?

(2) If you're going down John's and David's route, there doesn't seem to be any intellectual justification for stopping at the hundred richest families. Why not the richest thousand? Or the richest million? Or the land of anyone who earns enough to be a higher rate taxpayer? Or the land owned by anyone who pays tax at all? Heck, if we're going to have a revolution, why not have a real cracker where we confiscate everyone's land and run the country along proper communist lines?

(3) Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the whole idea has the hint of snobbery (or inverse snobbery at least) about it. Picking on posh and rich landowners is no more (or less) arbitrary than deciding to confiscate the land owned by former commercial lawyers called John who run SMEs, business academics in the Coventry area called David or Dundee United-supporting lawyers called Stuart all in the name of the greater economic good.

Dr Linus Pauling, the only person to have won the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Peace, once said that "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away." I for one can't help but think that John's and David's idea is definitely one to be thrown as far away as possible.

You may not have heard of Dustin Kolodziej's court case against Cheney Mason, but it is a story of legal woe from America which may well become a staple of law degrees for years to come.

Mr Mason is an attorney. In 2006, he defended (unsuccessfully) Nelson Ivan Serrano against charges that Mr Serrano murdered four people. During the trial, Mr Mason tried to prove that it was impossible for Mr Serrano to have been in Florida at the time of the murders because a surveillance video showed Mr Serrano in Atlanta on the same day. Mr Mason was so confident that it was impossible for Mr Serrano to have been in Florida that, when being interviewed on national TV, he 'offered' $1 million to anyone who could prove otherwise. His precise words: "I challenge anybody to show me. I'll pay them a million dollars if they can do it."

Step forward Mr Kolodziej, a recent law graduate, who worked out how the trip could have been done, videoed himself doing it and sent the tape plus a request for $1million to Mr Mason. Mr Mason refused to pay and Mr Kolodziej has sued him for the money.

In UK law at least, Mr Mason could well be advised to get his cheque book out. One of the most famous of all legal cases involved an advert issued by the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, who manufactured a carbolic smoke ball as a cure for flu and other illnesses in the 1890s. They were confident of the success of their product and placed a number of adverts offering a £100 reward (a lot of money in late Victorian England) "to any person who contracts the increasing epidemic influenza colds, or any disease caused by taking cold, after having used the ball three times daily for two weeks, according to the printed directions supplied with each ball." A Mrs Louisa Elizabeth Carlill saw the advert, bought one of the balls and used it three times daily for nearly two months. She then caught the flu and successfully sued for the money, with the court accepting the principle that a person can make an offer to the whole world which is capable of being accepted.

A similar principle may well apply in the USA, although each case depends on its own unique facts. In Carlill, a key issue was the fact that the offer of £100 was backed up by £1000 being placed on deposit at a bank - it was therefore to be taken seriously and wasn't an advertising gimmick. More recently, Mr John Leonard failed in his attempts to redeem 7,000,000 Pepsi points for a Harrier jump jet, on the basis that the Pepsi TV advert on which Mr Leonard relied was cleary intended to be a joke. Mr Kolodziej's chances of success may well depend on his persuading the court that Mr Mason was being serious when he issued his challenge.

In the meantime, if you want to avoid being involved in a legal cause célèbre, be careful what you 'offer' to the world at large.

You may have seen press coverage recently of the newly-published autobiography of Dave Jones, now manager of Cardiff City. His story is not a happy one, although he emerges from it as someone of courage, dignity, forgiveness and basic human decency.

In 1999, when Mr Jones was the successful manager of Southampton, he was falsely accused of child abuse from a time when (in the mid 1980s) he worked part-time in a Merseyside school for children with educational and behavioural difficulties. The allegations were entirely made up - his (still anonymous) accusers admitted as much - by a group of former pupils at the school who were themselves in prison at the time. Despite there being no evidence against Mr Jones whatsoever, the allegations were made public, he lost his job and spent £400,000 clearing his name. His family went through goodness-only-knows-what trauma (including a visit from his local social services department to see whether his four children should be taken into care) and Mr Jones to this day endures deeply unpleasant chants from opposing 'fans' at grounds across the country. Tragically, Mr Jones believes that the news of his arrest caused his previously healthy father to fall into a coma from which he never recovered - something Mr Jones blames on the police leaking the story to the press.

And yet he was innocent. In addition to his accusers admitting that they concocted the whole thing (Mr Jones was one of a number of people against whom allegations were made, some of whom were wrongly imprisoned), one alleged at the trial that the police helped him to plug holes in his evidence.

At the end of the trial, the judge made a telling comment: "No doubt there will be people who are going to think there is no smoke without fire. I can do nothing about that except to say such an attitude would be wrong. No wrong-doing whatsoever on your part has been established."

If any good can come from this unpleasant tale, I would hope that society stops attributing guilt to people who have been accused (whether rightly or wrongly) but not found guilty of a crime. Lawyers, especially those involved in criminal defence work, are often pilloried for defending people who society assumes must be guilty. And yet, as Mr Jones's own experience shows, you only have to be falsely accused of a crime to appreciate the importance of the presumption of innocence in our legal system. As he himself admits "You know, that is a phrase that I used to use a lot. 'No smoke without a fire'. It just seems obvious that if there is a controversy surrounding someone, then something has to be wrong. But that is not a phrase you would hear me saying now. I have learnt the hard way that it is possible to be accused without there being a shred of truth". To help make the point, Mr Jones's book is simply called "No Smoke, No Fire".

That's not to say that those found guilty of crimes should not be punished in accordance with the law - rather, a serious plea that we avoid reaching our own judgment on people until the judicial process has run its course. I hope you agree.

Unless you are a practising lawyer (or rather a practising lawyer who takes a keen interest in the identity of our senior judiciary), the answer may well be no. But, if you're interested, he's a very distinguished and successful commercial lawyer who has just been promoted to the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, the most important and powerful court in the UK (and, as it happens, for a number of Commonwealth countries as well).

This is actually quite important. Lord Collins has become one of the 12 most influential judges in the land, with the ability to make significant changes to the laws which govern your life. He is also the first solicitor to be appointed to the Judicial Committee and has enjoyed an incredibly successful and distinguished legal career combining academic brilliance (he edits the leading textbook on the conflict of laws - the complicated legal area governing the applicable principles when disputes involve both the law of England and Wales and that of another country) and commercial success, as this biography on Wikipedia suggests. I imagine that most interested commentators would consider his new role to be a thoroughly merited and deserved appointment.

Contrast this lack of fanfare regarding Lord Collins's appointment with the coverage in the American media of President Obama's decision to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court. Having spent five or so minutes on this web page of one of the main US broadcasters (picked entirely by random, other American news networks are available) and, in addition to Ms Sotomayor's academic and legal background, I know that she was born and raised in the South Bronx in a tough housing project, is inspired by her nurse mother (who raised her and her brother, now a doctor, single-handedly after their father's premature death) and her favourite baseball team is the New York Yankees.

I also know that her background is mainly in commercial law (as is Lord Collins's), which commentators consider may mean that the Republicans will struggle to challenge her appointment, although there is concern as to whether a recent ruling on affirmative action (which is itself about to be considered by the Supreme Court) is correct. There is also much debate as to whether the possible appointment of the first Hispanic to the Court is a great day in American history, or whether the Democrats making this point are conveniently forgetting when they blocked an earlier (and Republican) Hispanic appointee. The identity of senior judges matters in the US in a way that just doesn't happen on this side of the Pond.

I have always found the contrast between how the UK and the US appoint its judiciary fascinating. I know it's fashionable for Brits to knock America as being litigation crazy but, behind every headline about people suing McDonald's because they didn't realise that the coffee was hot (although this story would appear itself to be an urban myth), there is one of the most advanced and democratic legal systems in the world. We don't have to copy America, but I can't help but wish that we took a bit more interest in who is appointed to judge over our lives.

Assuming that you read the same papers and watch the same telly as me, then, amid all of the headlines surrounding the frankly scandalous abuse of the expenses system by our MPs and Dundee United's drive towards third place in the Scottish Premiership and European glory next season (a story that admittedly doesn't seem to being given its due prominence in the Post's sports' pages), you could have been forgiven for missing the current controversy surrounding the heir to the throne's views on the built environment.

This afternoon, Prince Charles is speaking to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA to its chums) on the occasion of its 175th anniversary. The speech is almost 25-years-to-the-day since, when addressing RIBA's 150th anniversary, the prince famously described the proposed extension to the National Gallery as "a monstrous carbuncle"; in doing so, both scuppering the proposed scheme and incurring the seemingly never-ending-wrath of a chunk of Britain's architectural elite.

25 years later, and history is repeating itself. The latest controversy relates to the design for the proposed development of the Chelsea Barracks site in London by (Lord) Richard Rogers, the incredibly eminent and distinguished architect behind the Pompidou Centre, Lloyds' of London and the Millennium Dome amongst other buildings. The Prince disagrees with the steel and glass design proposed and has commissioned a separate architect, Quinlan Terry, to produce a design more "in keeping" with the area - including the neighbouring Royal Hospital designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

Within the construction industry, the debate has been wide-ranging (with a leading trade magazine conducting a poll - which Prince Charles's preferred design won) but has increasingly become vitriolic, with leading architects publishing a letter of objection and urging a boycott of the speech. The main criticism is that the success or failure of the Rogers' design will depend on the normal planning laws of the land - which should apply equally to all buildings - and that it is unfair for Prince Charles to use his high profile to scupper the plan.

On the other hand, the degree of vitriol seems harsh and unfair. The built environment affects us all - and I would hope that all architects (distinguished and otherwise) would want to design buildings in which we all want to work, rest and play. I find the suggestion that a small intellectual elite should impose their views on us without comment or criticism very hard to take. Perhaps this is an example of the architecture profession protesting too much?

Amid all the doom and gloom surrounding the budget, record levels of debt, unemployment and swine flu (am I the only person who watches the news from behind the sofa these days?), here's a genuine good news story for UK plc.

So please stand and cheer whilst the UK Higher Education sector steps forward and takes a well-deserved bow. Pride of place goes to the ability of our universities to attract overseas students to live and study in the UK. According to the Higher Education Policy Institute's Director, Bahram Bekhradnia, international students (who are treated as an export for these purposes) contribute more to the UK economy than exports in the drinks, textiles, clothing, publishing or media sectors. In fees and living expenses, the more than 300,000 overseas students living and working in the UK between 2006 and 2007 spent over £4 billion. HEPI calculates that this is a net contribution to the UK's GDP of more than £2 billion. By any measure, that's a lot of money, and would merit that description in boom times as well as bust.

It's also good news for the West Midlands with a number of our leading institutions - Aston University in particular (overseas students paid Aston over £14m in fees, 16% of its total fee income, in 2006-2007 and will have invested much more into the local economy) - proving to be very attractive to overseas students.

So, despite all of the press stories about exams (both at school and university) getting easier, the UK education system is still widely admired for the quality of its teaching and research.

However, Mr Bekhradnia warns that there are a couple of clouds on the horizon. First, the fact that, although popular, a UK higher education is expensive. In 2006, Australian Education International calculated that the average total cost of a UK BA or BSc was $93,382; about $10,000 more than an American public university ($82,986) but significantly less than a private American college ($161,257). This makes Britain the second most expensive destination for international students.

He also warns that a number of those countries who export the most students - India and China in particular - are investing heavily in improving their home-grown higher education provision, suggesting that the potential number of international students will shrink over time. This presents a different set of challenges for UK Higher Education; not least in relation to academic collaboration and the provision of the UK degrees abroad. The good news is that our universities' track record of success suggests that they are more than ready to meet the challenge.

Now why didn't Mr Darling mention this in the budget?

I may be guilty of abusing the Post's hospitality with this blog, but I'd welcome people's thoughts on an issue that's really irking me at the moment. The cause of my discomfort - St Andrews in Scotland.

For those who don't know it, St Andrews is a charming, quirky and characterful place in an obscure corner of Fife comprising lots of golf courses, three beaches (including, famously, the one at the start of Chariots of Fire), more history than you can shake a stick at and a wonderful university where, too many years ago than I care to remember, I managed to persuade the examiners at the Department of Mediaeval History to award me a degree.

It's a decision of Dr Louise Richardson, the university's new principal - or rather the reaction to it - that has got me worked up. The furore centres around a student society - the Kate Kennedy Club - which exists to maintain the traditions of the university and the town, uphold and improve relations between the two and raise money for local charities. It is perhaps best known for its colourful and popular annual procession of famous people from the university's past. It also attracts controversy because it refuses to allow female members

Until recently, the Club had the official support of the university. Dr Richardson has decided to withdraw that support because the University can no longer endorse a club "from which so many of our students are excluded at birth". To quote further from the announcement of the decision: "The official endorsement of any club or society which excludes people because of their gender or race would be completely at odds with the values of this university, and our commitment to foster an open and inclusive international community of scholars and students in St Andrews."

I should stress that I wholeheartedly agree with the decision, not least for the reasons given in the previous paragraph. However, not everyone agrees. Some of the comments on this web-page are quite strident and there are even rival Facebook groups (supportive of the decision; and against).

All of which has led me to this blog. You may think it a bit odd that I still care so passionately about what goes on at my alma mater, but St Andrews is that sort of place. I also accept that in the grand scheme of global problems "University principal in equality furore" may not be front page news, but if you've read this far I hope I've tweaked your curiosity.

What genuinely surprises me is that in the 21st century (or in the 20th for that matter) there is a groundswell of opinion that discrimination on the grounds of gender is justifiable and that decisions taken in favour of equality are somehow political correctness gone mad. What do people think?