Claim 921edb0aChecked 09 Jul 2026
Partly True/FalseOn the truth scale
“In the Eighties and Nineties, London became in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
London did become much more globally important in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the 1986 ‘Big Bang’: official HMRC material says it introduced electronic trading and let banks and other financial institutions join the London Stock Exchange, while a 1990 Hansard debate says the reforms “consolidated London as the great world financial centre in this time zone.” (gov.uk) But the claim is overstated if read literally as saying London only then became a global centre. Bank of England material shows London was already being assessed as a world financial centre in 1989, and its history notes London had long been a principal centre of trade and finance before the 1980s. So the transformation in that period is real, but not from zero, and “entrepreneurial flair” is a subjective gloss rather than a verifiable fact. (bankofengland.co.uk) Sources: HMRC, “Financial markets: background: big bang” (https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/stamp-taxes-shares-manual/stsm121020); UK Parliament Hansard, “Financial Services And The Single European Market” (https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1990-10-15/debates/92811646-087c-451f-a3dd-8eb1922a8c03/FinancialServicesAndTheSingleEuropeanMarket); Bank of England, “London as an international financial centre” (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/1989/q4/london-as-an-international-financial-centre); Bank of England, “History” (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history?level=1); Bank of England, “The overseas and foreign banks in London” (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/1961/q3/the-overseas-and-foreign-banks-in-london).
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+ 37 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |