Those fireworks over Edinburgh last night had nothing to do with the festival. It was 62,500 active members of the Royal Bank of Scotland final salary pension schemes sounding off about the bank’s plan to limit their retirement benefits.

The RBS proposal can’t have come as a surprise. The bank is being less draconian than Barclays, which is ending existing members’ contributions to its defined benefits scheme. Lateral thinkers at RBS may wonder why, as employees of a bank majority-owned by the government, their retirement plans are subject to cuts, while those of their public-sector cousins seem sacred.