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.
Struan Stevenson: the best cure for the fool s gold of nationalism is the ballot box
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Scotland must be more ambitious with foreign policy, former SNP MP urges
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CONSIDERING that it is the foundation document of the United Kingdom, there is a vast amount of ignorance about Scotland’s Act of Union which brought about the Union on May 1, 1707. I seriously doubt if any more than, say, 2% of the Scottish population have read all of the Act of Union as passed by the Scottish Parliament on January 16, 1707, by 110 votes to 67. So today and next week I am devoting this column to that Scottish Act of treachery and self-interest. I am not writing about how the Act came about as I have written about that process before, but about the Act itself and what it means for those of us who believe in Scotland regaining its independence – not winning independence but taking it back, which is why my personal slogan is “regain the nation”.