Scotland: Independence Referendum

Lord Nickson Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nickson (CB)]

My Lords, I am honoured to be sandwiched between two Welshmen. To the best of my knowledge, the Nicksons were border reivers and, before the union of the Crown, stole cattle equally from the Scots and the English. I am delighted that my old colleague and friend the noble Lord, Lord Lang, has had such a wonderful debate and made such a memorable speech to launch it. He has instigated 40 other wonderful speeches around this House, and I hope that he is proud of that because he most certainly deserves to be. He was my boss when Scottish Enterprise came into being; I was its first chairman. Economic conditions were a bit difficult and we had a pretty difficult birth, but we can both be relatively happy that the organisation put up then is broadly still trying to deliver enterprise in Scotland a quarter of a century later. We were also colleagues on another board, that of General Accident.

It is a great sadness to me that most of the companies for which I ever worked in Scotland now do not have their names. General Accident is now Aviva in Norwich, Collins has gone, and Scottish & Newcastle succumbed to the Danes. Scottish & Newcastle had equally good provenances north of the border in Edinburgh and south of it in Newcastle. God help us that it happens but it occurs to me that, were the yes vote to come to fruition and had I still been at Scottish & Newcastle, if it were in our shareholders’ interests we would have moved everything we could to Newcastle pretty quickly. That is what I fear might well happen for business if there were a yes vote. Business wants certainty. It wants to know that it can make long-term investments with the confidence that they will be worth while. It does not want all the changes that will inevitably happen. If there were a yes vote, do not let us think that what happens at that moment will stay; there will be further divergence and further difficulties for business in terms of regulation. Things will become more difficult. Do not let us assume either that this is not being looked at by global businesses, from wherever their headquarters are, whether it is Calgary, Houston or Hong Kong. Do not let us think for a moment that what is going on now in Scotland is not going into their corporate planning for the future.

When I thought about what to say in this debate, I thought that I would talk a little about business, which I have done, and secondly about currency. It would be quite impertinent for me, following what was said by the governor and the speeches made here today, to launch into the issue of currency. However, there is one issue that has not been mentioned. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, mentioned Scottish banknotes. The noble Lord, Lord Cavendish of Furness, produced a £50 note out of his pocket. I have here a £10 note. On it is the face of Robert Burns.

I have not seen that it is on one of Alex Salmond’s wish lists to retain Scottish banknotes. However, I would go back slightly further than the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to 1694 and the Bank of England Act, and to 1695 and the Bank of Scotland Act. We then come to 1727, after the Darien adventure, and the RBS challenging the Bank of Scotland monopoly. Ever since then, through the centuries, the ability to produce Scottish banknotes has been defended. If we go forward another 100 years, Sir Walter Scott is credited with leading a campaign to defend the ability of Scottish banks to print Scottish notes. He did it under the most wonderful pseudonym of Malachi Malagrowther, but he got the credit for it anyway. Over another 200 years we have been through various banking Acts, culminating in the Banking Act 2009. All of them have given the right for Scottish banks to produce Scottish banknotes.

However, as we all know, they are not strictly legal tender. They are promissory notes, unlike the Bank of England notes. The governor said yesterday that in negotiations various things would have to be given up in terms of sovereignty. I wonder, if the Government were wishing to be tough, if they might say to Alex Salmond that he cannot have Scottish banknotes any more. In any case, they are only issued by three Scottish banks, two of them largely owned by the British taxpayer, the other owned by the Australians, so how will he have the right to produce Scottish banknotes? However, as I believe that he is a man of great ambition, perhaps he has in mind that having come from the Royal Bank of Scotland, in some 50 years’ time he might see his own head on a Scottish banknote. I hope that that does not happen.