City of London

The hon. Gentleman puts his case in a balanced way. Let us not think that it is only Lord Turner who says such things. Incidentally, Lord Turner was also criticised at one point for being "Red" Adair Turner, and it was said that he was only speaking as he did because of his links with the current Government. However, having read the Sunday papers, I note that he is also held in high esteem by the Opposition Front Bench and is perhaps destined for a role in the Bank of England. His views cannot be dismissed so easily. Stephen Green, another establishment figure, who is chairman of HSBC and the British Bankers Association, and also an ordained Anglican priest, published a book this year. He said:""The industry collectively owes the real world an apology for what has happened and it…owes the real world a commitment to learn the lesson,"" Paul Tucker, deputy-governor of the Bank of England, said, under the dome of St. Paul's cathedral:""We can't give meaning to our lives and have a financial system and economy of integrity purely on the basis of self-satisfaction… We need to have a sense that what we're doing is socially acceptable."" I have reflected on my reading of the Financial Times over the summer and thought about what value there is in any of those criticisms. Another report, which I recommend to hon. Members, was produced in the summer by the centre for research on socio-cultural change at Manchester university. Manchester is a traditional centre of all sorts of industries, including manufacturing, and services and perhaps has a slightly different perspective. The report was written by a variety of people, including some academics and some people with experience in venture capital and so on. They came up with a number of reflections and I shall go through a few of them and then make one or two concrete suggestions. First, the authors of the report reflected on the fact that, in this generation, the reports done on the financial crisis have largely been insider jobs. The Bischoff report was commissioned by the Treasury. Of the eight people who were the secretariat or the sherpas for that report, seven came from the City of London; only one was a civil servant. Looking at some of the previous inquiries on finance, I think that the Wilson committee was active in the 1980s, Macmillan did a report in the '30s, and the Radcliffe committee worked in the '50s. A much wider range of people were involved in the reports and in coming to the conclusions that those committees reached. Those reports stood the test of time for a generation—I studied them when I was doing my economics A-level and degree. In this generation, there perhaps has not been an outside look at the City following the financial crisis. Secondly, the report from the centre for socio-cultural change at Manchester university produced interesting figures on tax and employment. Of course the City of London has been a big generator of tax—£203 billion in a five-year period—but, to put that in perspective, there has obviously been a big financial cost, because the City has operated in a very procyclical way. The International Monetary Fund calculates that the direct up-front financing cost to the UK taxpayer has been £289 billion in the past year, which includes the cost of the bank recapitalisation fund, the special liquidity scheme and nationalising Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. The IMF calculates that if all the Treasury loans and guarantees are added to that, the figure could be more than £1,000 billion. There has been an economic cost, which has been felt by ordinary people in my constituency.