Alex Salmond, First Minister of the Scottish Executive in the podium. He participated in the celebrations organised in preparation for the next Ryder Cup which takes place in Gleneagles, in Perthshire, Scotland. (EC Audiovisual Services).
Whatever the outcome of this Thursday’s vote, Scotland is to leave the UK now or in the not so distant future. If it was not for the international intervention, including London’s financial and political sharks’ unprincipled meddling, the Scots would have voted for independence with overwhelming majority. During those last decisive days of the referendum campaign an unexpected foe of independence appeared in the fore, the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS is an innermost member of the British lenders club who are culpable for the 2009-2010 financial crisis. RBS was also caught by the EU authorities participating in a cartel relating to interest rate derivatives denominated in the euro currency. Related to that last December the European Commission fined 8 international financial firms (including RSB) a total of € 1 712 468 000 for participating in illegal cartels in markets for financial derivatives.
RSB after it went bankrupt in January 2009 received tens of billions of pounds as state subsidies to keep it alive and today is under government control. In short RBS is in the heart of the international conspiracy of major western banks to extort wealth from the real economy on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The financial crash that sent a large number of Europeans on the dole and the subsequent revelations of the principle role of the British banks and the London City in it have induced the Scots to want independence. Now, the RSB in an unprecedented interference of a business entity in a core political issue, threatens the Scots that in the event of a pro independence outcome of the vote, it will move its corporate seat to England.
The banks hate independence
Understandably this intrusion infuriated the ‘Yes’ campaigners. There is more to it though. One taciturn side of the Scottish independence movement lies in the deep detest of the Scots towards the London’s City ability to turn out monumental wealth, without sweating, as the laborious Scots do. And this, just because the Whitehall government and the London political elite has freed the banks from any restrictions and controls, thus making them free and enabling them to exploit and pig out on the real economy, by usurping other people’s money.
Below the surface of the independence cause lurked the unspoken decision that in a sovereign Scotland the banks would come under the old restrictions and controls, as the father of modern economics the legendary son of Scotland, Adam Smith demanded. In his famous book the ‘Wealth of Nations’, Smith the father of free market economics, when it comes to banks, insists that those institutions should be held under government scrutiny, checks and controls. Smith goes as far as suggesting that bankers should be made accountable to public ethical committees, because their business is prone to unethical practices. The most eminent of these practices is the free printing and usurping of money, as they are actually doing nowadays by the means of central banks.
More threats
Consequently, RBS’s intervention in the Yes/No campaign in favour of ‘No’ was a Westminster inspired move, engineered by Prime Minister David Cameron. Besides it’s not only RBS that plans to move its corporate seat to England in the event of a Yes victory. Almost all the Scotland based banks are allowing it to be understood that they will move out from an independent Scotland. The obvious reason for this behaviour is that no bank can survive unless it’s fed with taxpayers’ money by the government and at the same time gets free money from the central bank. No Scottish sovereign government or central bank is to continue this practice, with or without the use of the Pound Sterling in the new state.
Jim Sillars, the former deputy head of the Scottish National Party, stated that there would be “a day of reckoning” for the Scottish banks in the event of a ‘Yes’ outcome. He had more to say. He explained quite clearly what he meant. Sillars clarified that the “banks would be forced to split their retail and investment banking arms”. This is anathema for every European or American lender. It definitively deprives them from the ability to usurp their depositors’ money for risky placements, which enrich the banks when materialising.
If those stakes turn sour, the banks turn to governments and get subsidies through taxpayers’ money. At the same time they get zero interest rate liquidity from central banks. It’s a deeply ethical or rather unethical arrangement that no European or North American government dared to stop, at the brilliant exception of Iceland. Now it becomes clear that a sovereign Scottish government will change all that. Evidently, the Scottish vote has given rise to a world-wide confrontation between Scotland and the Western banking club, the latter feeling as being under threat if Scotland becomes a sovereign state and asks the banks operating on its soil to split their investment and retail banking activities.
If not today the UK will split soon
Now returning to the title of this article, this writer believes that the UK glass has cracked. The Union forces holding together the UK which worked for more than three centuries do not exist anymore. The British Empire that offered all UK citizens wealth and opportunities all over the world has disappeared many decades ago. The British WWII epic and the common English and Scottish strangle to vanquish Nazism and Fascism is a thing of the past. Then came the deindustrialisation engineered by the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher, which hit Scotland scrupulously, probably because the Scots were voting for Labour.
Today the London City creates almost one tenth of the UK GDP and Scotland is almost completely cut off from this artificial wealth creating machine. On top of that, the City is tightly associated with the London political and economic elites, leaving Scotland out, with the Scots suspecting that they contribute to London’s wealth with their sweat, taxes and by being financially exploited. Let alone the North Sea Oil which the Scots think that England usurps from them.
The Scots will do it again
As the Whitehall government was forced last week to promise, Scotland in the event of a ‘No’ outcome will gain extended autonomy within the UK. This new found self-rule however will not kill the willingness of its people for full independence. It was like that in the first place, when Scotland got its first Parliament in 1998. The London political elite thought then that the Scottish Parliament would extinguish the movement for autonomy.
As it turned out this movement was nurtured and today around half of the adult Scots want to live in a completely independent sovereign Scottish state. If they won’t achieve that this week they will reach it in the near future. The Scottish referendum for independence has already brought a deadly strike to the UK and Britain would certainly loose much of its influence in international and European affairs. The reason is simply that a large part of its soil is under challenge, despite the fact that the Scots are only 5.5 million people while the rest of UK has 58.3 million.
Leave a Reply