Lloyds is Scottish too
The Scottish Nationalists trying to stop HBoS being bought by the English seem to have missed one important point. Lloyds TSB is Scottish.
The bank that has come to the rescue of HBoS is as Scotch as a tartan kilt, a bottle of Glenfiddich or Robbie Burns. If Edinburgh rock had letters running through it they would say Lloyds TSB.
For those in doubt, Lloyds’ Scottish registration number is 95,000. Its registered office is Henry Duncan House, 120 George Street, Midlothian, Edinburgh EH2 4LH. It holds its annual general meetings in the country, as those who went to Glasgow to vote this year should remember.
(Henry Duncan, by the way, was the Scotsman who founded the world’s first commercial savings bank.)
So when former bankers Sir Peter Burt and Sir George Mathewson, backed by Scottish Nationalist Party leader Alex Salmond, argue that HBoS should be kept in Scotland they seem not to have noticed that its bidder is already Scottish.
And the reason Lloyds – founded in Birmingham in 1765 by Sampson Lloyd – is Scottish was to keep Mr Salmond’s nationalists happy. Until 1995, it was English.
Scotland does not like losing banks, however – as the fuss over the nationalisation of its two major mismanaged institutions shows. When Standard Chartered and HSBC wanted to buy Royal Bank of Scotland in the 1980s the bids were blocked to protect Scottish banking.
When the Trustee Savings Bank was floated in 1985 it was decided to register the company in Scotland to give the nats another bank. And when Lloyds bid for TSB a decade later after that bank got into trouble, the deal was turned upside down so that little TSB bid for mighty Lloyds to ensure that instead of losing a bank, Scotland gained one. That’s why and when Lloyds became Scottish.
Since then Royal Bank of Scotland has bought the English NatWest. And when the English Halifax merged with the smaller Bank of Scotland, it became Scottish too so that Edinburgh did not lose BoS.
Scotland has done so well in collecting banks that Barclays and HSBC are now the only English banks. They are also the only two not having to be bailed out by the government. What a co-incidence.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:49 am
Bring back the Trustee Savings Bank and give back to Scotland where it thrived for so many years until the English got hands on it. If it were still operational today it would be celebrating it 200th anniversary Jan 2010.