Kirsty Blackman: ...The SNP has concerns on a few fronts. I will not repeat the stats, but I almost entirely agree with what he said. I thank Unite for its work and for its briefing. There are various issues with the merger, particularly relating to consumers and security. We were pleased when, back in June or July, the Minister talked about regulatory hurdles that have to be cleared for this merger to take...
Kirsty Blackman: ...in which it has been undertaken is a bit unfortunate. To me, it seems that this is not a political issue, but it is being made to feel like one. To give some context, there have increasingly been mergers in stock exchanges. There were 18 stock exchanges internationally in 1999, but that had decreased to five by 2012—those numbers were given in a Library briefing paper.
Kirsty Blackman: Those are the numbers that were given in a Library briefing paper, so I assumed they were correct. There has been a move towards stock exchange mergers in recent years. Therefore, the merger is in the context of the London Stock Exchange Group looking to compete with bigger stock exchanges and needing to be a bigger stock exchange in order to do that. I want to make clear that the merger is...