GUEST COMMENT: The football is a warning of what could happen to the City if immigration quotas are introduced
Bowing to pressure from the BNPs' favourite newspaper, The Daily Mail, the coalition is corroding the City's ability to hire the people we need. Immigration quotas are about the best way of damaging the economy I can think of. Forget terrorism, tax and the crap transport system.
London is often compared to tennis at Wimbledon, biggest tournament in the world, but with many non-Brits; would anyone bother to watch if we had a quota of British players? Do you know who is the British number 20? Would you pay 200 quid to watch him play our number 50?
Alternatively, think of the City in terms of football. Once English football is stripped of its overseas premier league players, it's not that great is it? English premier teams are multinational and feared, the English FA is English and a joke.
I go to meetings in London where I'm the only person born here, but in Paris or Frankfurt I more rarely meet non-nationals. That is why Europe has four financial centres - the City, Canary Wharf, Mayfair and Edinburgh. We hire the best people; a bank in Paris hires the best Frenchman. That's why we're top and they're not.
To say the City is important to the UK is a big understatement, ask yourself where Britain would get money if not for finance? Maybe making cars? Steel? Organic courgettes, hand made souvenirs for tourists?
A huge chunk of the most useful people working in the City are yanks. Maybe Mail readers don't know this, but the USA isn't in the EU. Britain is putting up taxes, and when faced with immigration caps too, many of the people we want will stay at home or go somewhere better. Some will be important enough that not only will they not contribute to business units in London, the group will be moved with them.
The non-EU people banks import aren't benefit scroungers. They aren't looking for free treatment on the NHS. May of them will contribute more than 60% of their income in tax and pay for private healthcare and schooling. They are helping to reduce our financial problems, whilst getting precious little from the government in return.
We will hear high handed nonsense about how the system will be 'selective', but anyone who has ever dealt with the formless chaos in the Borders Agency knows otherwise.
Quotas aren't racist, they're stupid. The days when the City was wholly run by white 'chaps' like me are gone, and we are the richer for it, but if we damage our competitiveness we are in deep trouble as a country.
Dominic Connor is a quant headhunter for P&D Quantiative Recruitment
