Puzzled tourists have been left wondering if independence has already been declared after being told their Scottish pounds were worth less than English ones.
A top New York hotel and US currency traders have been offering different rates depending on whether a customer’s £10 note was adorned by Charles Darwin or Sir Walter Scott.
The divergent rate for Scottish and English notes was branded “very unfair” on holidaymakers from north of the border last night – amid intense debate over the currency of an independent Scotland.
A board at the front desk of the luxury Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York – famed for creating the Waldorf salad and being a temporary home for Marilyn Monroe – recently showed that a Scottish pound was worth $1.3387, but an English one $1.3429.
The hotel told the Press and Journal the company Deepak which supplies the information had insisted that, while the notes were “interchangeable over there (the UK)”, they were also “completely different”, and that although “they are both sterling they are not the same”.
The UK Treasury could not confirm the claims last night, insisting: “There is no economic reason for currency dealers to offer a different exchange between two interchangeable notes such as these.”
A spokesman for Choice Forex, a currency services firm based in New York’s Empire State Building, said that, although the value was the same, when it sold excess Scottish notes it received slightly less than for English ones. “They are the same currency and exactly the same value,” he said. “But when we have excess Scottish or Northern Irish notes we have to sell them off and the wholesalers pay us less. The notes are valued the same but there is a smaller market for them.”
The SNP says an independent Scotland would retain the pound in a currency union with the rest of the UK, but the Treasury insists this would be “unlikely”. Other options for Scotland post-independence would include using the pound without any formal currency union, joining the euro, or creating a new currency.
Stewart Hosie, SNP Treasury spokesman, said: “This is a very unfair situation, which Scottish holidaymakers to various parts of the world will sadly have experienced for themselves. It highlights the deficiencies of the current arrangements, and one of the opportunities for a formal sterling area between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK will be to bring Scottish notes into parity with English ones once and for all.”