The Blog That Likes To Say Yes

There is no point bringing back the TSB name without reconstituting the Trustee Savings Bank. I am available to be a Trustee.

Seriously, who are they going to be? And why? As with HBOS, RBS or the East Coast Main Line, which has twice been renationalised yet which is to be privatised for a third time, no sane person is going to want to buy the TSB.

The suggestion that any would, like the refusal to consider renationalising the railways across the board, or to renationalise the utilities, indicates the wholly irrational and doctrinaire nature of the opposition to, not of the support for, public ownership.

Those who hold that utterly unpragmatic position are now even trying to flog off the postal service, a privatisation which even Margaret Thatcher explicitly ruled out. Nor did she privatise the railways. That was done by the men who had removed her. Reversing it would be one in their eye. Yet still there is an absolute refusal to consider doing so.

TSBs, before they all merged, and the TSB, after they had all merged, were very strong in Scotland (where they had started) and in Northern Ireland, quite strong in the North of England, and relatively strong in Wales, the Midlands and the West Country. But they barely existed in the South East.

They were very much expressions of the culture of the British Transleithania, and that culture is if anything more different now than it was when shares in the TSB Group PLC were first floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1986.

Trustees of the reconstitution should be drawn from each of Scotland, Wales, the North East, the North West, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, the West Midlands and the West Country. The London Stock Exchange must be allowed absolutely nowhere near it.