Claim 48d5c905Checked 09 Jul 2026
Partly True/FalseOn the truth scale
“In the Eighties and Nineties, London became in many ways a genuine global centre for innovation.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
London did become a major global centre in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in finance: the Bank of England described London as a world financial centre in 1989, and later retrospectives say the 1990s saw London re-establish itself as a global centre for capital and culture. (bankofengland.co.uk) But the claim overstates the case if read broadly: the clearest evidence for that period is about financial services, media, and later-emerging tech/digital clusters, while the visible London tech cluster is described as emerging only in the late 1990s rather than making London a broadly recognized global innovation hub throughout the 1980s and 1990s. (publications.parliament.uk) Sources: Bank of England, "London as an international financial centre"; Centre for London, "Introduction" / "London and the world"; House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee evidence on innovation and enterprise in London; LSE Research Online, "Here be startups: exploring London's 'Tech City' digital cluster."
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+ 106 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |
| [2] | warwick.ac.uk |
| [3] | centreforlondon.org |
| [4] | centreforlondon.org |