Why is the Lord Mayor of London still stuck in a 2016 ‘Remainer’ doom loop? asks ALEX BRUMMER


One expects the Lord Mayor of London to bang the drum for the City. The present incumbent Michael Mainelli is, one fears, caught up in some kind of Remainer doom loop.

He tells the Reuters news agency that ‘Brexit was a disaster’ which cost the City 40,000 jobs. 

He suggests that Dublin has gained 10,000 jobs and other beneficiaries include Milan, Paris and Amsterdam.

Perpetual gloom: The Lord Mayor of London Michael Mainelli (pictured) has announced to the world that 'Brexit was a disaster' which cost the City 40,000 jobs

Perpetual gloom: The Lord Mayor of London Michael Mainelli (pictured) has announced to the world that ‘Brexit was a disaster’ which cost the City 40,000 jobs

This is not quite the message of hope which the Government was seeking to send out around the globe when it entertained the great names of business and finance at the Guildhall earlier this week.

Mainelli’s home-made calculations are at variance with consultants at audit firm EY which has been tracking Square Mile jobs since Brexit. It estimated 7,000 job departures in 2022.

The most recent ‘Global City’ report by HM Treasury and the City of London described the Square Mile as an ‘engine room’ driving UK growth and employing more than 1.1m people in financial services across the country. 

If professional services such as law and accounting are included, the number climbs to 2.5m. It may well be that jobs did go as a result of Brexit. Banks had to establish European outlets for regulatory reasons. 

But JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the like – with their towering offices – appear as committed to the City as ever.

The Lord Mayor doesn’t recognise that for every job that may have moved, there are new ones at fintech start-ups. Britain is leading an online revolution.

The biggest danger to the City is not Brexit but the threat of taxes on pensions and wealth creation in the Budget.

Safe houses

As a schoolboy growing up on a farm, a great excitement was being asked by a contractor to sit beside him on top of a combine harvester, which had no cabin, with the huge cutting blades whirring below. 

This was doubtless dangerous, and rightly couldn’t happen today in the age of health and safety.

One couldn’t but think of this when Keir Starmer told the Government’s investment summit this week that he plans to slash red tape and ‘rip out the bureaucracy which blocks investment’. 

Labour’s gung-ho approach to bulldozing planning laws to build more houses and infrastructure has huge downsides.

A recent letter received from a FTSE 100 chief executive quotes a surveyor in his home area of Sussex as saying: ‘I don’t care what happens to residents when they move into a house [referring to a lack of infrastructure]. 

My job is to sell the dream to the developer.’ That housebuilder happens to be Redrow.

In a world where planning decisions are taken on high, overriding local interests, a lack of suitable roads, sewage systems, schools and GP services are lost in the wash.

All this might seem like middle-class complaints over the despoiling of the countryside around them. 

However, poor planning decisions are not confined to the better-off. In Runcorn an incinerator built by KKR-owned Viridor is paying compensation to residents after an energy-from-waste plant allegedly plagued nearby homes with smells, noise and rat infestation.

Analysis by the BBC found that giant incinerators are the dirtiest way that Britain generates electricity. Many of these plants, which process half of the rubbish from UK homes, are located in less well-off neighbourhoods. 

How much worse it will be if planning decisions are imposed on high without due process for local residents.

Bureaucracy is bad. But some red tape protecting the safety and wellbeing of the nation is there for a reason.

Second Advent

Advent, the private equity conqueror of UK defence innovators Cobham and Ultra Electronics, has set its sights on Tate & Lyle. 

The food ingredients group may no longer be in sugar, but has a long history in London Docklands dating back to the 19th century.

Several UK-listed companies – including Direct Line and Currys – have demonstrated this year that there is no obligation to bow down to predators and sacrifice their independence and future growth plans.

T&L’s board, headed by David Hearn, should tell Advent to take a hike.

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