Sants slips away loudly

Sunday 17 June 2012

No-one could accuse Hector Sants, outgoing head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) of inconsistency: his belief that everyone else is to blame never fails.

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In his swansong interview, Sants suggested last week that the financial crisis might have been avoided had Alistair Darling only listened to him and allowed Lloyds TSB to buy Northern Rock in the run-up to its collapse in September 2007: "I think things would have been different if the government and Bank [of England] had taken my recommendation."

It doesn't say much for Stuart Hosie, the SNP's Westminster finance spokesman, that he seized on the arrogant delusions of Sants as an opportunity to berate the former chancellor. Sants, who was passed over to head the FSA's successor body after being black-balled by the Treasury Select Committee (an Ian Fraser Sunday Herald exclusive on March 4), has an impeccable history of piling blame on others to mitigate the uselessness of the FSA during those crucial years, including his predecessor John Tiner and the FSA's former head of retail Clive Briault.A Vintage performance last week by Scots economist and commentator Prof John Kay, suggesting in po-faced tones on BBC programme The Week In Westminster that an independent Scottish currency might be known as the "bawbee". Needless to say this prompted a rare Radio 4 airing of the 19th century advertising ditty-turned folksong "Ally Bally Bee" (aka Coulters Candy). Agenda's in-house researchers were sent to discover the origins of the Scots term for a unit of coinage equivalent to sixpence. It turns out that the story that it is a corruption of "baby" – from a coin depicting an infant Stuart king – is mythical. The best guess is that the coin was named after a 16th Century mint master known as "Sillebawbey". Prof Kay's native sense of the ridiculous did not endear him to the First Minister, who forgot to include him in the renewed line-up of Council of Economic Advisers.

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Sants slips away loudly

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