Claim 160f2f43Checked 21 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“People who went to the City all day did things that nobody understood.”
Reasoning & Evidence21 Jul 2026
Farage's characterization of the pre-Big Bang City of London as a place where people "toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all" is a fair, colloquially phrased description of a well-documented historical reality. Multiple reputable sources confirm the pre-Big Bang City was widely described as opaque, insular, and incomprehensible to outsiders:
- The Christian Science Monitor (1986) described it as "a cozy, tightly knit club, where old school ties prevailed and outsiders were excluded."
- The Independent (2006) called it "cosy, clubby ways" with "opaque partnership structures," noting it was "insular" and that a senior partner at a major firm had never even left Britain.
- The Times (2006) described the Stock Exchange as "a cosy, old-fashioned gentlemen's club" that was "riddled with anticompetitive practices" and prevented outsiders from getting in.
- The BBC (2016) noted the pre-Big Bang City had a "bowler hat image" where long lunches and friendships mattered more than transparency, and the system of separate jobbers and brokers was opaque to outsiders.
The old City's closed, clubby nature — with fixed commissions, face-to-face open outcry trading, restrictive practices, and old school networks — meant that what went on there was genuinely mysterious to the general public. Farage's characterization is a widely corroborated description of the era.
Sources:
- Christian Science Monitor, "Fuse is lit in London's 'City'" (1986): https://www.csmonitor.com/1986/1021/obang-f.html
- The Independent, "The day Big Bang blasted the old boys into oblivion" (2006): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/the-day-big-bang-blasted-the-old-boys-into-oblivion-422005.html
- The Times, "The day that spelt doom for the long City lunch" (2006): https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/the-day-that-spelt-doom-for-the-long-city-lunch-wgksxtb7n33
- BBC News, "How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever" (2016): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened