NEWS that NatWest bank – formerly RBS Group – is threatening to move its HQ to London if the Scottish electorate has the democratic temerity to vote for self-government will confuse lots of folk north of the Border.
After all, the bank’s London-based bosses have been saying the same thing for donkeys. Only last July, Sir Howard Davies, the pro-Unionist chairman of the board, made the same announcement. That’s the guy who had to resign as head of the London School of Economics after he hobnobbing with Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Lybia.
NatWest still has lots of employees at work in the old RBS HQ campus at Gogarburn. This enormous, 100-acre complex was built as a vanity project under the old RBS regime of Fred “The Shred” Goodwin. It cost an absurd £350 million.
My guess is that independence or not, NatWest wants rid of this while elephant. The truth is that the bank has been run from London since it was nationalised after the 2008 financial crash. Changing the company’s legal address will mean nothing.
I know this because, when I was an MP, myself and other SNP reps were occasionally invited to a posh dinner with the then RBS chief exec, Ross McEwan. These events took place at Drummond House, a wonderful 18th century concoction owned by RBS at the top of Whitehall. As Mr McEwan spent most of his working week in London, this was the appropriate imperial setting for his attempt to persuade (or browbeat) us into accepting his plan for the bank’s future.
READ MORE: RBS could quit its Edinburgh HQ in the event of a Yes vote
This “vision” consisted of downsizing RBS into a separate entity while McEwan got on with running a profitable London-centred bank. Or at least stymieing the bank’s sea of red ink so McEwan could declare he had “turned the enterprise around” – a move that would get him another job. (He now runs National Bank of Australia.)
In response, I took McEwan to task for failing to look after the bank’s customers – particularly small businesses who had been forced into insolvency by the RBS GRG unit, so their assets could be stripped. On one memorable occasion, McEwan lost his temper with me and had to apologise in writing the following day. His framed note hung in my loo.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that this latest NatWest statement is a smokescreen for the pivot to London the bank intends to make anyway. It is just convenient to blame it on the uppity jocks wanting independence. NatWest’s new CEO is Alison Rose, the first woman to head a UK lender. She was a NatWest insider and has no sentiment for the old RBS.
The Royal Bank was originally the company created to wind-up the Darien Scheme and pay off the Darien investors, as part of the corrupt deal to buy votes to secure the passing of the Act of Union.
So perhaps it is time we looked forward rather than back. The truth is that in an independent Scotland the retail banking system will be foreign owned and run from London. The top question is what to do about it?
We need a local banking sector that is Scottish controlled. The new, publicly owned Scottish National Investment Bank should have its remit extended to include business lending.
At the same time, the Scottish Government and local authorities (who have extensive borrowing powers) should create a new system of community-controlled local savings banks, that would ensure money stays in the community. We could call them the PBS – the People’s Bank of Scotland.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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