A PR Job For The City Of London

Former Sky finance chief Andrew Griffith has been appointed City minister by Liz Truss, we read here.

By common consent and a small amount of personal experience, Griffith is a top guy and a brilliant businessman.

He was a large part of making Sky such a huge success.

His job now is to lead Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mooted “Big Bang 2.0” for the City, to overhaul regulations and boost competitiveness.

I find all this concerning and the attitudes behind it rather arrogant.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are going to tell one of Britain’s most long-standing success stories where it is going wrong? What do they know?

The folk who never saw a rule they didn’t think should be weakened are scary.

Their starting principle is that regulation stops business occurring, when it must be true that at least half the time the business would not have happened in the first place without the regulation.

There is a passing reference to this in the FT piece which notes that regulators have “cautioned that the City’s international reputation could be undermined if rules are loosened too much and it becomes seen as a less stable place to do business”.

Exactly. The Bank of England isn’t supposed to be an exciting, go-getting institution.

They are the people who say “no”.

It, and the FCA, are boring by design. So everyone understands that the rules are not for bending, that they apply to everyone.

It would be nice to see the City stick up for itself here. To say the rules are there for a reason. That it isn’t proper or necessary for the Square Mile to tote itself around for business.

That business has to prove it is worthy of the City, not the other way around. The chances for disaster otherwise are myriad.