Standard Life’s Far Right Board needs exposing:
Keith Skeoch, Executive Director of Standard Life, is on the Board of Reform Scotland, the neo-conservative lobby group which wants to abolish the minimum wage, privatize the NHS and pensions, and still further restrict trade unions.
It is difficult for Tories openly to campaign against Scottish Independence as everyone in Scotland hates them, so they do it with their corporate hats on. This is most of the board of Standard Life:
Garry Grimstone, Chairman, “lead non-executive” at the Ministry of Defence, London
Keith Skeoch, Executive Director, right wing political lobbyist
Crawford Gillies, Non Executive Director, Chairman of Control Risk Group, of London, the “security consultancy” of choice for ex MI5 and MI6 officers
Noel Harwerth, non-executive Director, Director of “London First” – [Honestly, I am not making this up]
David Nish – Chief Executive, Member of the “UK Strategy Committee” of “TheCity UK”. “TheCity UK” being a body of the City of London.
John Paynter, non-executive Director, was vice chairman of JP Morgan Cazenove until the 2008 crash
Amazing that lot oppose independence, huh?
Standard Life also threatened to leave at the time of the devolution referendum and gave out No campaign materials to staff. “Leave” of course is a relative concept – the above bunch just pop up from London from time to time to check on how the serfs are doing.
I published this information on 27 February when they last tried to influence the independence debate. Standard Life is again trying today to influence the referendum campaign by a press release claiming it will move key departments to London in the event of independence, enthusiastically amplified by the BBC, Guardian and all the other reactionary media.
Well, here is an opposing press release, from me. If anybody thinks that an Independent Scotland will be a place where major strategic companies can still be controlled by swivel-eyed right wing ideologues, they may get a very nasty shock from the people of Scotland.
“they may get a very nasty shock from the people of Scotland.”
Let’s hope the vote isn’t gerry-mandered with an event that causes sphincters to seize up.
“If anybody thinks that an Independent Scotland will be a place where major strategic companies can still be controlled by swivel-eyed right wing ideologues, they may get a very nasty shock from the people of Scotland.”
… Such as meeting a spawny-eyed left-wing nazi, coming from the other direction!?
The establishment are desperate. The Scots can see through the BS. I want an independent Scotland and an independent England too. A yes outcome will be the fillet the English need. The Westminster elite are very much aware of this.
We are talking about scare mongering at least 200,000 voters into voting NO in fear of losing their livelihoods. This cannot happen for the simple reason that such jobs, to be filled in the south would require at least a 25% pay rise due to higher costs of living. Even more importantly they would alternatively have to import an army of English speaking South Asians or Philipinos (as is happening in an outsourced NHS) and their families, politically untenable. They may not be outsourced either, not even to Ireland, due to confidentiality requirements eg HMRC jobs. These voters (including their families) can rest easy and fly away from Standard Life’s gilded cage to perch free on a Scots pine without hesitation, YES is the word !
If that is the board of Standard Life, it is best for people to stop any kind of transaction with these monsters, and leeches. Insurance is a fraud anyway, but to find the sting in the tail, with these free loaders whose sense of entitlement to others hard earned cash is evidently a god granted right, is just a step too far.
Good Luck Scotland, and free Scottish people.
Like canceling their policy, and withdrawing their money, Passerby?
That’s just the directors of the NO vote want voters to do.
“Standard Life also threatened to leave at the time of the devolution referendum and gave out No campaign materials to staff. “Leave” of course is a relative concept – the above bunch just pop up from London from time to time to check on how the serfs are doing.”
That’s disgusting. These people who live in the south of England and just pop up to Scotland from time to time to hand out referendum campaign materials deserve to be taken out and shot.
Adding fuel to the already raging fire David Cameron gave his almost dirge like speech, at the headquarters of Scottish Widows, which I think is part of the Lloyds group. Though Standard Life do have form when they threatened to pull out of Scotland in 1992 if devolution (never mind independence)went ahead.
Also today we have BP spouting their doom and gloom scenario if Scotland dares to defy, Westminster and become independent.
Watching Sky news and BBC news I see the No camps air time is vastly superior to the yes camps air time, like a dog who’s noticed his master has a bone in his hand, the media has sat up on its hind legs and dutifully obeyed its master over the indyref debate.
The nature of State power, is to thwart opposition to that power. The nature of the human condition is towards equilibrium, a consequence of being naturally evolved.
By ‘escaping’ from the British frying pan, you will inherit the flames of Scottish faggots. For the same human nature that craves equilibrium, will seek reaction to changes, thus invoking the unyielding opposition of the radicals of the hour; who, by their nature, must react against human nature, causing it to perish under the scourge of nationalist ‘power’, that will broach no alternatives.
By the mandate of independence, you will elect to subjugate your humanity, to the one and only cause: Scottish nationalist power.
Come the year of Scottish elections, 2020 or 2021, which party will you vote, or kill for, the revolutionary party, or the counter-revolutionary party? Pick the wrong side, and you will rapidly learn the meaning of the term ‘power of the establishment’, as it will lose its rhetorical quaintness by then.
JimmyGiro.
Your comment above is akin to someone speaking with their mouth full of marbles, in fact as I try and decipher it I realise I need a copy of the Rosetta tone,just to get the jist of it.
Sorry Republicofscotland, when upset by the madness of fashion and popularity, my left hemisphere loses its dominance, and I write according to intuition, and not according to grammar.
@CM:
How can anybody know what policies an independent Scotland will pursue? Nobody has the right to say what those policies will be.
Sounds like the company prospectus issued by hucksters at the time of the South Sea Bubble offering shares in:
“a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
Huw Edwards on the BBC 6pm News has just repeated the Standard Life threat.
Just one of the big beasts who are coming out in number as if choreographed.
One of their board. A fuller version of Gillies’ CV. Many niches.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=29541188&ticker=SL/:LN&previousCapId=7842634&previousTitle=GEMALTO
.Bain the ubiquitous global Mitt Romney outfit.
.Barclays
.Hammonds LLP An international law firm (Far East, Europe, Russia) now merged with a US firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey since 2011
.All the Standard Life offshoots inc Healthcare who stand to benefit from NHS privatisation as more and more people take out private health insurance.
.Mitie Group outsourced hospital cleaning and ancillary
.Scottish Development International
.Touch Bionics
.Scottish Enterprise
.STI ??
and so on.
the list of tentacle attachments is endless.
This has got to be one of the funniest headlines in the Telegraph ever.
“Cameron close to tears: Don’t vote Yes just to give ‘effing Tories’ a kick”
After about 20 minutes my response was deleted, and it didn’t include any swear words, but it did include something like
HAHAHAHHAHHAhhahhahHHahhHHhHAHAHahhahahHhah
I thought this bloke was supposed to be a salesmen?
What a plonker
Tony
The system that human beings are a part of abhorring excesses and extremes, tends to limit towards equilibrium. However, to invoke the basic laws of physics, in a not so clever fashion is indeed the reasoning of a mad man.
You have mistaken the inertia that opposes the progress of the human condition, as the ideal state, and thus lament the “fashion” and “popularity” that evidently stands in the way of the ideal state.
Facts are Scotland has been part of the “UK” for only three hundred years, tat is only twelve generations, and given the collective memory that exists despite the best attempts of the owners to disrupt, and destroy such memories, has been translated into moves for separation and return to status ante “UK”.
Fact that the extremists in the guise of neo con scoundrels and carpetbaggers joining to exploit the masses of the planet Earth through application of “kinetic” corrections, and overt oppression thereof is the unnatural and extreme that the natural system abhors.
Thus the introduced measures in opposition to this extreme mode of governance by the greedy, degenerate, opportunist, group of self appointed, and self anointed lords of the universe, is an expected and anticipated elegant outcome, that will take place regardless of the degrees of intrusion through introduction of immersion surveillance, and total control systems set in place.
You best accept the realities and wish the Scottish good luck and learn from them how to be free!
==========
Can you elaborate on this supposition, as to why the “no vote” wish to harm themselves financially? Is the financial self immolation some kind of a protest, or a useful strategy?
===
I know I have swallowed a whole bunch of thesaurus and dictionaries, by accident, I mistook these for shreddies this morning!
Of course BP favors a unified Britain. If they puncture the seabed and poison your coast, they want to be sure they can do what they did in the Gulf of Mexico.
They’ll want to pay idled fishermen non-negotiable rates to work in their toxic waste, forbidding respiratory protection as a condition of employment and suppressing diagnosis or treatment of chemical exposure. They’ll want to spread dispersants that multiply the toxicity of crude oil and conceal the damage. They’ll want to truck prisoners to the spill zone and keep them penned there in the toxic fumes like livestock. They’ll want to take over the police powers of the state so they can coercively suppress public investigation of the disaster. They’ll want to hire local police as corporate enforcers. They’ll want government officials there to intimidate observers while making false claims about the danger and extent of the spill. They’ll want to forbid residents to take samples on their own damaged property. They’ll want to hire local scientists and gag them with nondisclosure agreements.
They know they can do all that and more under British rule. They worry that the Scottish people might not stand for it.
@CM
Keith Skeoch, Executive Director of Standard Life, is on the Board of Reform Scotland, the neo-conservative lobby group which wants to abolish the minimum wage, privatize the NHS and pensions, and still further restrict trade unions.
The minimum wage is a job killer, since it denies work to any adult whose work is worth less than six quid thirty-one an hour.
Rather than forcing people onto welfare with the minimum wage, it would be vastly better to have a free labor market and a negative income tax regime for those earning less than a living wage. This would eliminate most welfare, and thus save the cost of the welfare bureaucracy, enabling many of the current welfare bureaucrats to enter the productive workforce.
Privatizing the NHS seems like a good idea too. Why is it that people are free to piss away their money on gambling drink and, if Craig has his way, marijuana, but they are not free to spend their own money on important things like healthcare and their children’s education? I guess the answer is that Scots are too considered too dim to know how to manage their own money for their own good.
As for the Unions, how useful have they really been? They managed to keep the price of British coal at several times the world market price until Margaret Thatcher’s brutal correction of that market imperfection, and they managed to destroy the British motor industry (before it was rebuilt with non-union labor by foreign firms). So, yes, limiting the field of union activity is not necessarily a bad thing.
I don’t know what I wrote, but I wrote something somewhere within the last few days, that resulted in over 500 recommendations…
My disqus “upvotes” total is now over 50,000 yet I keep on getting banned…
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Have you changed your captcha – or has my PC been or your server been hacked?
I used to spell the numbers in English – now I can only write 2 characters.
Do numbers work?
Tony
Essentially the same small interlinked groups manipulating a large business for political ends. They are attempting to create a self fulfilling prophecy. They’ve overplayed their hand though and are now making themselves appear to be reckless, playing fast and loose with investors monies.
What an asinine, stupid, myopic retort! What on Earth you are on? You have been steadily getting weirder in your comments, as the time goes on.
What kind of a stupidonomics, can be so misanthropic, other than a nostrum of clueless “white supremacists”?
Good comment Fedup: hate speech as economic theory.
Crawford Gillies contd
All open and above board? Transparent? NOT.
Scottish Enterprise chairman had stake in firms given millions in investment
Greig Cameron
Deputy Business Editor
.
Thursday 8 May 2014
Scottish Enterprise chairman had stake in firms given millions in investment
COMPANIES in which Scottish Enterprise chairman Crawford Gillies owns shares have received millions of pounds of investment from the publicly funded economic development agency, a Herald investigation has revealed.
/..
http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/people/agency-chief-had-stake-in-firms-given-millions.24161357
Truly amazing but not surprising. We see this sort of thing so often.
Any sanctions? Nah!
COMPANIES in which Scottish Enterprise chairman Crawford Gillies owns shares have received millions of pounds of investment from the publicly funded economic development agency, a Herald investigation has revealed.
“You have mistaken the inertia that opposes the progress…”
Equilibrium is not inertia; it is the tendency towards minimum disturbance. When a natural equilibrium is established, it is formed by negative feedback, that in turn allows it to drift from one stable state to an adjacent one, as, and if, the environment changes.
Hence, if you change by revolution, it can only be stable if the environment is permanently changed to suit the new regime. So, is it natural to force change on humans? Did the evolution of Scottish nationalists diverge? We will find out after a few years from now.
Re: the minimum wage
Scottish garment industry workers have to compete with people working in collapsible factories in Bangladesh where the minimum wage was just raised 66% to $80 per month. That’s why a minimum wage of six quid 31 is a job killer. Of course Scotland could impose tariffs on imported textiles and clothing, say 500%. It would not be an altogether bad idea, but it would raise the cost of living, and it would raise it hugely if the same principle were applied to cell phones, car parts, etc., etc. I’d actually be for it, but CM, of course, is a globalist and therefore dead against.
Garry Grimstone, Chairman, “lead non-executive” at the Ministry of Defence, London,/i>
Is that, somehow, bad?
It seems to me that it’s good that the Ministry of Defense has input from someone who knows something about calculating odds.
The Standard Life statement would appear to be aimed at reassuring the 90% of their policyholders who reside in rUK who face suddenly finding their pensions savings invested in a foreign country, with considerable uncertainties about currency, tax, regulation and EU membership.The prudential regulator is currently the Bank of England, Scotland would need to create its own (indeed this would be a requirement for meeting the criteria for EU membership) or presumably come to an agreement for the current UK regulator to continue covering Scottish financial institutions (which is hardly independence).
Any transfer of insurance policies to a different entity (whether in England or not) as Standard Life say might happen would still have to be approved by a court.
Your amoebic thinking faculty would not know economic theories if they transmogrified to a pitbull and jumped up and bit you on the buttock!
Just read the crap you have shoved on this board; clueless tripe.
I bet you have not a pot to piss in, yet your hatred of all things human derives you to assert:
Did you come to this Earth shattering conclusion all by yourself or did someone helped you with it? Your baseless assertions and denunciations portray a tormented lunatic who should be seeking psychiatric help instead of spamming the internet with utter bullshit.
Well well well,will Sir Ian Wood come out from under the bed soon,I doubt it very much indeed.
“In a new academic paper published today, Professor Alex Kemp has predicted over 150 new oil fields will be discovered that will take the industry well beyond 2050.
The Aberdeen University academic used detailed financial modelling to list 99 projects he said were “commercially viable” over the next thirty years. Professor Kemp also highlighted a further 58 fields he said would become economic after 2050 due to advances in technology.”
Fedup I found your comment really interesting…
“Facts are Scotland has been part of the “UK” for only three hundred years, that is only twelve generations, and given the collective memory that exists despite the best attempts of the owners to disrupt, and destroy such memories, has been translated into moves for separation and return to status ante “UK”.”
I corrected your spelling mistake (don’t worry) – only in the copy and paste.
The reason I found it interesting is that my Wife’s Grandmother – AND Her Sister (born around 100 years ago) both insisted to me, that they were Directly Descended From King Henry VIII’s wives – The Two Catherines Catherine Aragon and Catherine of Parr…
They are Extremely English and Extremely Lancashire and Extremely Country Girls…now of course this could be folklore…but they were both so insistent independently…
To be honest, I am not really a Monarchist..though I was very upset when Princess Diane died..
However, I do like the idea of little girls thinking of themselves as princesses or angels.
My Wife is Both a Princess and an Angel
Maybe even Legitimately (The Historian’s do sometimes not get it completely correct (on purpose)
Tony
Jackie Bird, on Better Together BBC news, interviewing Alex Salmond, Alex looked cool calm and collected, when shot up by the Birdie. Westminster must have been pretty peeved, why? well Jackie’s first question, wasn’t the economy or pensions or even North Sea oil, no the Birdies first shot across Herr Salmond’s bow was “What do you mean Team Scotland versus Team Westminster.”
Meanwhile the man who killed the Lib/Dem’s Nick Clegg was in Selkirk today, giving his take on why Scots should vote no. The deputy PM who when pictured on PMQ’s on the front bench always seems to have the expression on his face, of a man, who’s thinking, “What the bloody hell am I doing here.”
One of the financial lights in Scotland Aberdeen Asset Management, has said that independence would be a good thing for Scotland.