New Statesman Scotland

British Telecom and the Bank of Scotland are to create an Internet venture that promises to cut the price of phone calls by as much as a third. This is odd. BT setting up a rival that guarantees to undercut its own charges? The analogy the new outfit offers is that of the British Airways nurturing of its Go subsidiary to offer cheaper flights.

Quip will be limited to phone calls over the Internet and the biggest savings will be on international calls. It is a measure of its startling cost-cutting theme that, although it is offering a UK-wide service, it will have only a staff of 20 (no misprint - 20 people to create a nationwide phone service).

The idea for BT to generate an internal rivalry was first enunciated by the late Lord (Keith) Joseph. Speaking to an audience at Edinburgh University in 1990, he said that BT's near-monopoly status on phones would best be relaxed by BT itself offering a different contract.

The Bank of Scotland has the aim of getting all its customers, even the most humble ones, connected to its own computers and thus leapfrogging all its rival high-street banks. The Edinburgh bank was a trailblazer with its Hobs telephone banking service ten years ago, far ahead of any London bank. Now its innovation looks quaint, but the Bank of Scotland likes to regard itself as always in the technical vanguard.

BT, which will have 49 per cent of the shares, admitted even before the launch of the advertising campaign to launch Quip that it may be floated as a separate company within three years.

Nobody can explain the selection of the name "Quip". It would be nice to think it was a salute to Edinburgh's James Clerk Maxwell, the father of our electronic age. "Quip" was his favourite word.

One of the most unexpected casualties in an otherwise bustling and prosperous Edinburgh is the city's daily broadsheet the Scotsman. Since the date of the devolution referendum, its sales have fallen 4 per cent. Its current sales are a mere 78,000.

The proprietors of the Scotsman stable are said to be open to any serious offers. One man who has both the money and the cause he wants to fight is Brian Souter, who created the Stagecoach bus company. He says he needs a vehicle to maintain his determined campaign to bar homosexual evangelists from access to Scottish schools.

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