Without the City, this country wouldn’t work
Julia Hoggett is right – the City isn’t just for fat cats. But that’s a communication problem, not a substance problem. The City, and financial services at large, don’t exist in a vacuum.
Every day half a million people pile into the Square Mile, and many more beyond it, to ensure the wheels of UK finance keep spinning around. That isn’t just to serve the City, though.
Without that work, the economy would grind to a halt – with businesses unable to get credit, punters unable to get mortgages, homeowners unable to get insurance. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, understandably, the reputation of global finance and therefore its UK hub took an almighty hit.
The Harry Enfield skit that still occasionally does the rounds on Twitter – in which an irate audience member is applauded to the hilt as he bemoans ‘the bankers the bonuses the bankers the bonuses’ – appropriately captures the national mood.
But it is beholden on the City’s leaders to change the narrative. Hide in the shadows for too long and, when the economy turns sour, inevitably the finger is going to be pointed at those who seem to most embody ‘the economy’.
Take the cost of insurance. Yes, your car probably costs more to insure this year than it did last year – but that’s just what cost inflation does. But without the army of people working in reinsurance, and re-reinsurance, those premiums would be significantly higher.
Explaining that might be difficult but it is an effort worth making. There is an ad campaign doing the rounds by one of the UK’s larger financial institutions currently which depicts the leaders of other banks as selfish, Gordon Gekko-esque caricatures, interested only in the size of their office rather than their staff, their branches or their customers.
Anybody who has spent a single second with the new leaders of the City’s institutions knows that depiction is way off the mark – and it does no credit to the wider industry, and the wider Square Mile, to play on it.