If you live in Caithness and heat your home with oil, there is probably no need for anybody to explain to you that heating oil is expensive. You have probably already checked the tank and you may even have checked the price twice, just in case the first time was a mistake.
Britain's railways are preparing for another major overhaul of the way train fares are set. For passengers, the words “dynamic pricing” may immediately suggest the airline model, where the price of a seat can rise sharply as demand increases.
It is becoming difficult to open the news without finding another reason to worry about Britain's economy. Diesel has reached around £2 a litre.
Highland Council-owned D&E Coaches has confirmed the acquisition of Stagecoach’s Thurso and Wick bus operation securing local jobs. This will protect vital services and strengthening public transport provision across the Highlands.
Britain has just passed a significant milestone that could eventually affect the price of almost everything we buy. Average diesel prices have reached £2 a litre, according to the latest RAC Foundation analysis, while the RAC says the national average reached 199.18p a litre at the end of September, above the previous record set in 2022.
There could hardly be a better night for the BBC to bring back The Celebrity Traitors. Twenty-one celebrities have entered the Scottish castle, where nobody knows who can be trusted and everybody is wondering who will be the next to disappear.
A mortgage rate of 7.28% might sound like an American problem. It isn't and the latest jump in US mortgage rates should make British borrowers pay much closer attention to something that rarely gets mentioned around the kitchen table: the bond market.
There is a much bigger question hiding behind the shock announcement that Syngenta is considering closing its Grangemouth operation and putting 377 jobs at risk. It is not simply whether the Scottish Government can persuade the company to stay.
There is a question that is increasingly being asked across the north of Scotland, and it sounds almost absurd when put in its simplest form. Why are we sometimes paying wind farms to stop producing electricity at the same time as Britain is looking for more electricity to power new industries? The answer is that electricity is not necessarily produced where it is needed.
When the cost of living is rising, telling people to save money can sound almost ridiculous. If the household budget is already being squeezed by energy bills, food prices, fuel, council tax and other rising costs, where exactly is the spare money supposed to come from? Yet perhaps that is precisely why we should be talking about saving.
We should perhaps stop asking who is winning the war with Iran and start asking a much more uncomfortable question. What happens if nobody can end it? The war has now entered its eighth month.
First this is probably the longest article we have published - I think the extra length is justified here because the ownership structure is complicated and the article is educational as much as it is topical - Bill Fernie When most of us switch on a .light, put the kettle on or charge a phone, we probably imagine that the electricity is coming through something called "the National Grid". It is an understandable assumption.
Scotland has a pot of money worth hundreds of millions of pounds sitting on deposit. It came from the development rights for Scotland's offshore wind industry.
There is a point at which talking about individual price rises stops making much sense. Council tax goes up, Food goes up, Electricity goes up and Diesel reaches £2 a litre.
If you go shopping in Scotland today, 1 October 2026, some things in the supermarket may look slightly different. Certain sweets may no longer be sitting at the checkout and crisps and other snacks may disappear from aisle-end displays.
For decades, businesses that needed electricity followed a fairly simple model. Build the factory, office or computer centre, connect it to the electricity grid and pay the bill.
At first sight, £2 a litre diesel looks like a problem for motorists and it certainly is. But the much bigger economic question is what happens when diesel at £2 a litre becomes an input cost for the businesses that move almost everything we buy.
There cannot be many places in Britain where you can announce that about 1,000 people are travelling thousands of miles to attend a knitting event and expect people to regard it as an important piece of economic news. But that is exactly what is happening in Shetland.
When a £3.6 billion nuclear contract is announced at Sellafield, it would be easy for people in Caithness to regard it as somebody else's business. Sellafield is in Cumbria, more than 300 miles from Dounreay.
For households trying to work out what next year might look like, there is an obvious question after adding up the rising bills. What is happening to the money coming in? Council tax has risen and food prices are much higher than they were before the cost-of-living crisis.