Mr Garnier, a Conservative member of the Parliament’s Treasury Committee, says that a so-called Brexit might make it worthwhile for Scots to go it alone to usurp London’s position.
“If I was Nicola Sturgeon trying to find an alternative purpose and role for Scotland, you could do an awful lot by trying to snaffle that financial services hub from London,” Mr Garnier, a former banker, said in an interview.
“That’s exactly what I would be trying to do in terms of trying to build a financial services hub that would be the natural successor to London by leaving the union of the United Kingdom and staying within the European Union.”
There is no possible manner in which Scotland’s economy could backstop a global finance centre.
And Edinburgh’s a nice place and all that but the total population is about the same as just the workforce of The City.
Think about it for a bit. A place reliant on the Scottish pound backstopping global banks? Or if they’re in the euro then what’s the point? Why not Frankfurt?
And the centre also needs to be a centre. So top-notch transport links are a must.
Frankfurt works. Prague, say, doesn’t. Edinburgh even less.
Shouldn’t Scotland just remain in the UK and try to reform it from the inside?
Remember, these are the geniuses who demand to be paid comparable to senior figures in industry.
The past week has shown that once you get them off the script, they are clueless. Or just mad.
The omnishambles engulfing the political class in general at the moment seems to pretty much destroy the “rule by experts” argument beloved of Proggies.
“Shouldn’t Scotland just remain in the UK and try to reform it from the inside?”
Excellent, I’ll keep that one 🙂
abacab
Chapeau, sir, chapeau.
A, the home of RBS and HBoS as a financial hub? Why not? And Gordon Brown is the regulator perhaps?
Say you are Morgan Stanley or J P Morgan and you say to your top banker in London “we need you to move to Frankfurt”. unless they are in the highly unlikely position of being German, the answer is likely to be “No thanks, I will move to Goldman Sachs”. In effect you de-skill your workforce to people who are prepared to work in Frankfurt. Equally, you could say “We want you to move to Paris where we have to let you work a 35 hour week and it will be impossible to ever sack you” . Won’t happen.
MarkT
In the event there is no passport access to the Eurozone, I predict you might see some Front Office jobs where they have to be domiciled in a Eurozone location move. Of the candidates within the EU, the only one I can think of would be Dublin, partly due to language and also because I don’t think the terms and conditions within the Irish Labour Market are as ludicrous as those in France or Germany, but if the numbers are even one tenth of the most apoclayptic predictions from some of the more hysterical remainers I will be absolutely gobsmacked – and I think you might persuade some London based people (those without families) to move to Dublin Short term it’s still a big ask…..
It’s also chuffing cold and damp. Understandable you might want to stay there if you were born there, but I’d rather move to Frankfurt.