Saturday 17 December 2016

Royal Bank of Scotland : A banking failure made in Edinburgh by Scots Nationalists


"The cataclysmic collapse of RBS – which ensnared many of its employees and shareholders in its inflated vision of world domination – is a vivid example of the dangers of narcissism that has led to shame and economic misery for millions of people.  It is interesting to note that George Mathewson, the former Chairman of RBS who notoriously recruited Fred Goodwin as his successor, has long been a Yes supporter.  While Alex Salmond was of course also employed there as an economist in the 1980s.  Another interesting parallel is between Goodwin’s ‘Make it Happen’ slogan and Salmond’s similarly vague and aspirational ‘this is our moment’ language."
Read more here THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY NATIONALISM
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Another connection between the SNP and RBS is Andrew Wilson who is currently heading up the SNP's own "Growth Commission" enquiry. Wikipedia states he started  with the Royal Bank of Scotland as a business economist in 1997  and while in RBS Group worked in a variety of roles including Deputy Chief Economist and since the 2008 financial crisis as Head of Group Communications. You have to wonder about what involvement someone with the title Deputy Chief Economist had on the decisions that helped bring RBS group to its knees ?  There seems to be an awful lot of interconnections between the people responsible for the failures in RBS and that are also involved in SNP/YES groups. See more info by clicking here 
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This Story Reported by Iain Martin a well respected Financial Journalist (Career Details Here)

Alex Salmond blithely declares that an independent Scotland would be a land of milk and honey in which business magically flourishes, the economy will outgrow England’s and taxes will be slashed.
This crazily unrealistic and deeply irresponsible prospectus is very reminiscent of another Scot, whose arrogance and monumental incompetence cost British taxpayers £45 billion when they had to bail out the Royal Bank of Scotland, of which he had been boss.
Step forward Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, who walked away from the wreckage of the once-proud institution with a £693,000-a-year, index-linked pension. It was his management of the Edinburgh-based bank that helped to trigger the worst recession since World War II — the financial crash in 2008.
In the wake of this catastrophe, I spent two years researching and writing a book on Goodwin and the ignominious collapse of RBS, which he and his colleagues had run into the ground at such enormous cost to the rest of us.
What emerged was that Goodwin was a deeply dysfunctional individual bent on domination, and immune to common sense.
Crucially, I believe the similarities between him and his fellow Scot, Alex Salmond, are deeply troubling and should act as a warning to all Scots as they vote today.
Like Salmond, Goodwin wanted to realise a patriotic dream of never-ending expansion in which nothing could possibly go wrong. And just like Salmond, he savagely suppressed dissent and refused to listen to sensible warnings about the serious risks that lay ahead
Six years on, Salmond seems to have failed to learn the lesson. Instead, he charges ahead, making reckless promises about Scotland’s future that are eerily reminiscent of Goodwin’s bombastic claims in the boom years for the prospects for RBS.
Perhaps this is not surprising because Salmond had very close links to Goodwin and the others who ran RBS at its peak.
When Goodwin made the single most calamitous of his many catastrophic decisions — to over-extend and recklessly buy ABN Amro, a Dutch bank riddled with toxic debt — it was Salmond who urged him on.
Freshly installed as First Minister of Scotland in May 2007, he wrote to Goodwin. ‘Dear Fred,’ he began, on Government-headed paper. ‘I want you to know I am watching events on the ABN front closely. It is in Scottish interests for RBS to be successful and I would like to offer any assistance my office can provide. Good luck with the bid.’
Salmond signed off with a flourish: ‘Yours for Scotland, Alex.’



The absurdly over-valued £55 billion ABN Amro takeover, which would double the size of RBS and thus make it vulnerable to potential market shocks, turned out to be a disaster, the worst deal in banking history.
Yet even as Salmond put pen to paper, it was clear to most experts that a financial storm was gathering. American banks had already begun issuing warnings about sub-prime mortgages (loans to high-risk borrowers who were unable to repay the money).
What’s more, before the deal — which saddled RBS with billions of pounds of toxic assets — was sealed, the easy availability of credit on the financial markets had started to dry up. By the time the deal was completed in the autumn of 2007, another bank, Northern Rock, had already effectively gone bust, requiring a taxpayer bail-out, and it was clear that there were more huge problems ahead in the financial world.
Admittedly, Salmond wasn’t the only leading politician who fawned in front of Goodwin and RBS in the years before disaster struck. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair cultivated Goodwin, and talked to him regularly. Goodwin and his wife were dinner guests of the Blairs at Chequers.
It had been at the instigation of Salmond’s predecessor as Scottish First Minister, Jack McConnell (now Lord McConnell), that Goodwin was given a knighthood for his services to banking and the Scottish economy.
But Salmond was much closer to RBS than either Brown or Blair. As one of Salmond’s friends told me: ‘Alex is an RBS man through and through.’ His links to the bank go back to the early Eighties, when he started work there as an economist.
After seven years — much of it spent examining Scotland’s then-booming oil sector — Salmond left to pursue a political career. Duly elected as an MP, he maintained extremely close links with the bank, and became friends with its pro-nationalist chief executive, Sir George Mathewson, Goodwin’s predecessor.

Indeed, Sir George is now an adviser to Salmond and has been a noisy advocate for independence.
The fact that Goodwin made such a mess of the bank has meant that it has often been overlooked that it was Mathewson who originally steered the Royal Bank of Scotland on the road to disaster.
It was his view that there was no reason why Scotland should not have the best of everything in the world. As part of this mission, he launched a radical overhaul of the bank, codenamed ‘Project Columbus’.
The message was that a great Scottish institution was setting sail for an exciting new world. What could possibly go wrong?
An aggressive programme of takeovers was duly launched in England and the U.S. In 1998, when he needed a successor to continue this rapid expansion, Mathewson hired a young accountant called Fred Goodwin.
Together, the two men became heroes of the Edinburgh Establishment after winning the battle to take over an English bank — NatWest — that was twice the size of the Royal Bank. In triumph, the pair travelled to its offices in the heart of the City of London to inspect their prize.
Like mediaeval monarchs on a cross-border raiding party, they ordered the wine cellar — like spoils of war — be transported to Scotland. In the aftermath, as the Edinburgh banks boomed and their profits soared in the early 2000s, the Scots’ sense of self-confidence soared.
When Goodwin took over from Sir George (who became chairman), he was so obsessed with beating English rivals, such as Barclays, that he pig-headedly refused to heed the danger signals.
Disgracefully, profit projections were produced that were, in fact, pure wishful thinking. And anyone inside RBS who dared to question the wisdom of the impending ABN Amro deal was squashed.
Sir George (who by now was no longer RBS chairman) championed the takeover in his new job as chairman of a hedge fund which wanted the Dutch giant sold off.

For his part, Salmond was desperate for Goodwin to succeed because it would suggest that anything was possible for a brave new Scotland. 

Humiliatingly, though, just a year later, RBS had to be rescued by the UK Government.

The original article can be read via this link HERE
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"RBS reaches settlement with shareholders"  Scots might want to ask themselves whether this settlement was made to keep Fred Goodwin away from having to stand up in court and expose his own as well as SNP's Salmond and "Yes" supporter Mathewson (the former RBS Chairman who recruited Goodwin) from having their reckless and gung-ho approach to the way they ran the Bank (and perhaps the same issues within the wider Scottish Independence cause by the same people) put under real close scrutiny to protect their own careers. What we don't yet know is just how many reckless Nationalists were involved in helping ruin the Bank at a senior level who appear now to have escaped being found responsible and could be working within other Financial organisations or Government.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40173587

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Thursday 8 September 2016

SNP has opted for "Independence by Ignorance"

 A write up by Alex Bell , Alex Salmond's own previous senior SNP strategy advisor.

The original article can be seen on the link below
https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/opinion/alex-bell/281357/arrogant-elitism-at-the-top/ 

There is a reason of course why the SNP try to keep the Scots nation ignorant of real trusted facts like GERS or explain to the nation how the Scottish economy works and that is if the SNP were ever to tell the truth of the facts then the majority of Scots would run a mile from Nationalism and from the SNP for good.

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    @BrynTeilo



Wednesday 24 August 2016

Fraser of Allander Institute "Independence is impossible to operate with this level of deficit"


Scotland’s share of North Sea oil tax revenues slumped steeply from £1.8bn to £60m last year. 

The Fraser of Allander Institute, an economics think tank at Strathclyde University, directly challenged Sturgeon’s statement on Wednesday that “the root to closing the deficit is fundamentally on the revenue growth side”.

Closing a 21% structural deficit would need rates of economic growth for Scotland not seen in current lifetimes, the FAI said. As Sturgeon had pointed out on Tuesday, the Brexit vote was likely to make those efforts even more difficult.

 “It is simply not possible to operate under independence with a deficit at this scale – full stop ” the FAI said. “The Scottish government needs to set out the tough choices that it would make alongside a detailed and comprehensive plan for how it would manage the public finances under independence. This won’t be easy, but is essential.”
The data put Scotland’s net fiscal deficit last year at £14.8bn, including North Sea receipts, £522m higher than the previous year. That was equivalent to 9.5% of Scotland’s GDP. The UK’s estimated deficit for the same period was 4% of GDP.

Asked how an independent Scotland could meet the EU’s requirements for an annual spending deficit to be lower than 3%, Sturgeon said independence would change Scotland’s overall financial position. “I accept Scotland faces, whatever our constitutional arrangements, a very challenging fiscal position, [but] the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” she said.

Scotland’s tax revenues were estimated at £53.7bn, but the Scottish and UK governments spent £68.6bn on public services in Scotland, and on Scotland’s share of UK and overseas spending.

Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, said the figures “should act as a reality check for those calling for another independence referendum”.

“During the independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon personally promised a second oil boom. Her own government’s figures show she misled people and that is unforgivable,” she said.

The SNP’s own figures confirm independence would mean severe cuts over and above those already being imposed by the Tories, at exactly the time when our public services need more investment.”

David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, said: “Scotland weathered a dramatic slump in oil revenues last year because we are part of a United Kingdom that has at its heart a system for pooling and sharing resources across the country as a whole.

The fact public spending was £1,200 per head higher in Scotland than the UK as a whole also demonstrates that the United Kingdom, not the European Union, is the vital union for Scotland’s prosperity.”

Sturgeon denied that this meant the country was being subsidised by the rest of the UK, saying Scotland had paid in a higher rate of tax revenues than the UK on average in recent decades.

That position ignores the far higher levels of public spending in Scotland, which needed in effect an injection of £15bn last year from the UK treasury.

Sturgeon denied that closing the gap would require spending cuts or tax rises. “What I say is growing revenue is the priority. Public spending in Scotland is higher than the rest of the UK for some very good and in many respects unavoidable reasons, such as its rurality. It costs more to deliver health services to island communities,” she said.

Sturgeon insisted that the data offered cause for some optimism. It showed that taxes from the onshore economy, excluding North Sea revenues, had grown by £1.9bn. At 36.5% of Scotland’s GDP, this was the best figure since the financial crisis and more than offset the £1.7bn lost from the decline in oil and gas taxes.

But she said the overall figures underlined her anxieties about the damage that leaving the EU could do to the Scottish economy. “Leaving the EU will leave the task of growing the onshore economy so much harder than it might be,” Sturgeon said.

Prof John McLaren, an independent economist at Scottish Trends, said future oil revenues were never likely to recover enough to significantly cut the deficit. A doubling of current oil prices to $100 a barrel would still only raise oil receipts to £2.8bn.

McLaren said Scotland’s worse position compared with the UK was likely to continue for the next five years, the direct reverse of claims made in Alex Salmond’s white paper on independence in 2013 that Scotland’s tax revenues and finances would remain stronger than the UK’s.

“Scotland’s fiscal position relative to the UK can be forecast with greater certainty and is likely to remain at around the current level – about 5.5% of GDP worse off than the UK’s,” McLaren predicted.

David Mundell, the Scottish secretary, said: “Scotland weathered a dramatic slump in oil revenues last year because we are part of a United Kingdom that has at its heart a system for pooling and sharing resources across the country as a whole.

Whole Article can be read by clicking here 
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Thursday 26 May 2016

How to try to Politicise a Child to try to get what you always wanted from the start.


The Brain Family from Australia are trying to claim that their Son's first language is Gaelic to try and obtain permanent citizenship in Scotland.  A brief scan of Kathryn Brain's Facebook page reveals they "just happen" to be rampant Scottish Nationalist followers which the SNP are only to happy to use for Political gain.

They are trying to claim that because their son is learning Gaelic that they should be able to stay, however it can be seen from Kathryn's Facebook page that her son has also been getting taught in "English" which of course is widely spoken in Australia  where the Child was born. Young Lachlan was seen on TV talking English to Nicola Sturgeon so clearly is an English speaker. Not quite the image being circulated via "Social Media" is it ?

https://www.facebook.com/greggkathlachlan/media_set?set=a.10150705693063688.455248.600118687&type=3

As happens often, whats being portrayed in the media is not the real situation at all, the SNP MP's are as usual simply trying to use this issue for personal plaudits and Political gain. From the Westminster Hansard record the real story can be seen for oneself , perhaps Dingwall or the Highlands simply doesn't need more Archeologists or Health and Safety people in the Highlands and that is why she cannot get a suitable job to meet the laid down immigration criteria in law ? Between the Hansard record and Kathryn Brains own writings it's clear that they moved to Scotland knowing how precarious and risky their situation was from the start..yet it was still one they chose to put THEMSELVES AND their son through by their OWN decisions.

Read the true Hansard record of events for yourself and ask yourself honestly if this is how the SNP is trying to make out in the media how things really are ?   https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-05-26/debates/16052622000002/BrainFamilyDeportation



































 Strangely Kathryn Scotland already had a Referendum on this and the Nation said "NO" to Independence in the Referendum that Sturgeon said was a "One in a Lifetime Oppertunity". Perhaps Sturgeon just cannot be trusted to ever tell the truth on these matters ?

Could there be another reason the SNP are falling over themselves to help this particular couple ? Yet hundreds if not thousands of other people get deported from the UK for failing the exact same criteria after coming here on "Study Visas" and failing to find relevant degree work afterwards .. a great many from Africa,India and almost every other country in the World are the SNP trying to engineer an exception to the law for only one family ?  Is that fair on all the others who will still get deported for failing an immigration criteria set in law ? The question that really needs to be asked here is if a special case is being made by Politicising a Child by the SNP because this couple are ardent Nationalist and SNP supporters ?   Yet thousands of other people of all Nationalities are not going to get the same "priviliged" treatment and will continue to be deported back to their own countries..many that are nothing like as safe and secure environments as Australia is ?































































If this doesn't show the duplicity of the SNP i don't know what does both cases happened int he same SNP constituency, one case you will have heard about the other you probably haven't
https://mercinon.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/two-curious-immigration-cases-the-australian-family-and-the-bangladeshi-slaves/
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Brains disgraceful stunt with Nazi "Foreigners" badge at the SNP conference with Sturgeon and other Senior SNP members blessing.





















This act seems to have kicked off a whole raft of complaints but do the SNP ever care who they offend for the sake of Political points ?

Whole article can be read here http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/723283/Nicola-Sturgeon-embroiled-in-holocaust-jibe-row-amid-SNP-Nazi-scandal 
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Which other "Nationalist" Political Party used Children for Propaganda purposes ?




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Kathryn Brain now trying to hide her real identity on Social media 



































































































































       
 

        
       

       


      
    @BrynTeilo
             








Sunday 1 May 2016

Wise Words on the SNP from Neil Oliver.






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Thursday 24 March 2016

All Indycamp hearings at the Court of Session update Edinburgh 27 July 2016


To read the full Timeline as it happened , start at the bottom of the 4th session comments and read from the bottom back to the top. 




ie Costs for Indycamp protest being paid from  ScottishTaxpayer provided funds
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Indycamp Eviction







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Indycamp Appeal case October 28th 2016











 
























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Indycamper's are claiming they are having their phones hacked..no doubt the supposed work of M15. 
http://www.scotsman.com/news/indycamp-protesters-claim-their-phones-are-being-hacked-1-4241570 





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Yet , these are the people trying to tell the rest of us what is better for Scotland ? Jeez.












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IndyCampers Lose Court Legal challenge 27 July 2016 .
The full Judgement can be read here 
https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/search-judgments/judgment?id=35451aa7-8980-69d2-b500-ff0000d74aa7














































A few Indy Campers Comments on the Judgement 










Court Judgement Day 27th July 2016
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This Timeline of Tweets below comes via the BBC from the Court of Session, Edinburgh on the day of the Indycamp Fourth hearing.
 (29th June 2016)


















































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This Timeline of Tweets below comes via the BBC from the Court of Session, Edinburgh on the day of the Indycamp Third  hearing.
 (14 June 2016)

To read the Timeline as it happened , start at the bottom of the comments and read from the bottom back to the top. 






































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This Timeline of Tweets below comes via the BBC from the Court of Session, Edinburgh on the day of the Indycamp second  hearing.
From the Timeline it appears many people in attendance again still did not wish to give their names and addresses and did not  re-appear after the adjournment , could it be that some sort of conspiracy theory is scaring them away ? (27 May 2016)

To read the Timeline as it happened , start at the bottom of the comments and read from the bottom back to the top. 


                       Some sort of conspiracy theory worrying them perhaps ?


Indycamp didn't know there was a Law Society ? 
Yet have been representing themselves in legal argument in the court itself ?
































Day of second hearing , don't the Indycampers even know that the "Declaration of Arbroath" was just a letter to the Pope of the day and not a constitutional document in Law ? Explanation can be found here https://goo.gl/RLyqF6  
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Indycampers get a chance for a second court hearing. 
"In his judgment, Lord Turnbull said much of what was submitted to the court by the two campaigners who addressed him then was not competent or relevant."
see more here
 http://stv.tv/news/east-central/1353039-independence-camps-legal-reprieve-against-holyrood-eviction/
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IndyCamp in-fighting continues amid accusations of a fraud has been committed.  See more by clicking here 

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The  Timeline of Tweets via the BBC from the Court of Session, Edinburgh on the day of the Indycamp first hearing.
From the Timeline it does appear many people in the Public Gallery decided not to re-appear after the lunchtime break , could it be that they didn't think things were going their way or maybe that the Judge had asked for proper Addresses for all the petitioners ?

To read the Timeline as it happened , start at the bottom of the comments and read from the bottom back to the top. 







































































The SNP's Lying Propaganda Wing "Business for Scotland"   http://scottishpatriots.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-snps-propaganda-wing-called.html

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