An alarm went off in London on June 23, but the city’s bankers hit the snooze button and went back to dreams of quantitative easing and lashings and lashings of cheap cash insulating them from an ever grimmer geopolitical environment. But it’s growing too late to ignore reality and the City should be particularly alarmed by the UK government’s direction of travel this week.
Of all the policy initiatives to emerge from the ruling Conservative Party’s conference in Birmingham this week, most shocking was the idea that UK businesses should compulsorily publish the numbers of foreign workers they employ.
With one of the most international workforces in the world, the City would be sucker punched by such a policy. While the British public has little love for finance, the industry’s premature decline has worrying implications for the tax coffers that fund public services in this country.
Key to avoiding that situation is the ability of banks and investment firms to hire international talent without politically motivated, onerous bureaucracy.
Fully considering the other grim implications of such a policy is beyond the remit of this leader. But for too long, ill defined sentiment has driven how the UK talks about immigration. Banks are better placed than most to counter popular narrative with the facts and experience they have privileged access to.
Taking that line will not be an easy choice. A YouGov poll shows support for the policy at 59% of the public and banks already rank abysmally in popular perception.
History, though, will be a kinder judge.