Co-operation for Owen banknotes

HOLYROOD MSPs are to launch a debate in the latest move to have the social reformer Robert Owen honoured on banknotes.

Labour MSP Bill Butler has campaigned for the New Lanark pioneer to grace banknotes in time for the United Nations Year of the Co-operative in 2012.

Butler's "Bank on Owen" campaign has secured cross-party support and is set to be debated at Holyrood on Thursday.

Welshman Owen was considered ahead of his time, abolishing child labour and corporal punishment, and providing families in mill villages with free health-care and affordable food. He died in 1858 at the age of 87.

Owen's belief in co-operative principles and equality for all have been commemorated with the granting of Unesco status to the New Lanark World Heritage site, cotton mills and workers' housing he and his father-in-law David Dale founded in the Clyde valley.

Mr Butler said: "By putting such a person on our banknotes we would be serving notice of the type of banking system we wish to see, one which is responsive to the needs of people rather than being driven by the reckless pursuit of profit."

The Anniesland MSP said that more than 1,400 people had backed his campaign, and bodies including West Lothian and Edinburgh City councils.