I've quoted once already from an article on the City of London that George Osborne wrote in 2006, but I think it worth doing so again. In this Telegraph article he said as a conclusion:
[W]e need to get the City's infrastructure right. It needs robust security to protect its streets and electronic communications.
It needs good transport links and it needs a pool of skilled labour from which to draw talented workers. Sadly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has identified a poor skills-base as one of the major weaknesses of the British economy.
It is not clear that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is remotely interested in giving the City the support that it needs.
Apart from his annual appearance in a lounge suit to give the Mansion House speech, Gordon Brown has shown little interest over the past nine years in supporting the City or promoting London as a global financial services centre.
His priorities as Chancellor have lain elsewhere and I believe that has been a mistake. In this fiercely competitive global economy the City of London is the jewel in the crown of the British economy and no government - or would-be government - can afford to let it slip away.
Brown's lounge suit was daft; it was also an act of defiance. Osborne indicates acquiescence throughout. And let's be clear, what we're now seeing is the fulfilment of his plan to turn the UK into a tax haven. The crash has changed nothing; Osborne still sings to the City's tune.
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Here’s someone who should be in charge in the City, former Met detective Rowan Bosworth-Davies. All Richard’s readers should follow his blog.
Agree
I should read it more often
Feel free to link here
R
People have lost confidence in the City. I have stock and shares. My investments are loosing money, but the companies managing my investments always seem to be making bumper profits.
SO NO THANK YOU TO THE CITY.
Did you read this nonsense piece in FT? http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ad8decac-768f-11e2-ac91-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2N4OO9LkR. The advantages he cites of location and language are permanent. Any other advantages are driven by self interest which does the rest of the economy no good at all.
Indeed – you’re right
Ahem, if memory is correct the “Jewel In The Crown” was a phrase applied to our Empire in India. What, pray, happened in 1947? Also, for much of the time one key money spinner was the growing and export of opium. Perhaps, history has gone to George’s head.
Maybe those photos of him and the hooker was his history degree practical 🙂
I particularly like this part:
“When I began to appreciate this discriminatory attitude towards crime, I began to read the works of Edwin Sutherland, the American sociologist, who confirmed for me my deeply-held suspicions. When talking about the phenomenon of ‘White Collar Crime’ a phrase he coined in a book of the same title, published in 1949, Sutherland said;
“…The thesis of this book, stated positively, is that persons of the upper socio-economic class engage in much criminal behaviour; that this criminal behaviour differs from the criminal behaviour of the lower socio-economic class principally in the administrative procedures which are used in dealing with the offenders; and that variations in administrative procedures are not significant from the point of view of causation of crime….””
A quotation from a report cited on this blog last week seems in order here, Richard:
‘…finance contributed less than 7.5% of all government tax revenues; even at the height of the Brown years the finance sector’s contribution to government receipts was only just over half of the contribution from manufacturing (6.8% against 13.4%). From this point of view, the question is how a sector which was as large and profitable could pay so little tax. (Erturk, et al 2011, p.15, ‘City State and National Settlement’, CRESC).
Taking both these findings into account, one wonders why so much praise and attention is lavished in the City. But then we can thank rampant corporate capture, cowardly politicians, decades of discrimination against manufacturing and anything much else that takes place outside of London and the south east (except country houses, of course), and the consistent misrepresentation of the scale and usefulness of the City and banking and finance more generally by most of the media, as starters. The current government are simply following this tradition, albeit with even more enthusiasm than neo-lib Labour.
Osborne suffers from the naive belief that sky-high reported profits in the City must be evidence of its economic value to the wider economy. But it’s far more likely that, beyond a reasonable amount, they derive from deviant and anti-social behaviour like speculating in food that drives up costs.
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/22-5
Even in a core business for the City – Capital Intermediation, i.e. acting as a dating agency between those with capital to invest and those needing investment – gross margins have risen in response to deregulation giving the lie to some of the key assumptions that underpin the neo-liberal project.
http://www.demos.org/publication/cracks-pipeline-part-two-high-frequency-trading
When they talk of the public sector crowding out the private, why do they never mention the FIRE sector crowding out the productive sector?