Value For Money

Gordon Brown writes “that we are prepared to share the risks as well as the opportunities. And when things are difficult we are in a position to support each other — stronger together, weaker apart”.

O a separate Scotland as part of an “arc of prosperity” with Iceland, the Irish Republic and Norway, he points out that Iceland is broke, Ireland is in recession, and Norway has gone cap in hand to the US Federal Reserve for £2.9 billion.

“We have seen the problems in Iceland, we’ve seen the problems in Ireland. We were able to put the whole strength of the United Kingdom’s resources behind these two banks and I think it’s important because I value the Scottish banking tradition,” he writes.

As I have no doubt that he does.

He can prove it by guaranteeing that the merger including HBOS will be headquartered at Edinburgh (although it will be so huge that it will continue to employ just as many non-frontline staff elsewhere in the United Kingdom), that it will use Scottish (i.e., British) call centres rather than the overseas ones favoured by certain other participants, and that Her Britannic Majesty's Government will always retain both its preference share and the controlling interest in the Royal Bank of Scotland, as safeguards of the Union.

Call centres, one might add, are a hugely important example of how utterly fallacious was the claim that we could survive as a "service economy" with no manufacturing base. Once we had sent our manufacturing sector to China and India, our service sector rapidly followed to India, and only not to China because there are not so many people there who can speak English, or at least who have certificates to say so. And the Chinese are learning quickly.