What's more shocking - that 30% of BarCap's UK employees aren't British, or that 70% are?
Strangely, a large majority of the people Barclays Capital employs in the UK are British citizens.
The Times asked various investment banks in London what percentage of their staff are non-British; only BarCap responded. The answer: just 2,500 out of BarCap's 8,500 UK-based staff are from outside the UK.
This seems low. Surely the City is awash with cosmopolitan types?
Maybe so. A random sample of 20 people working at Brevan Howard in London suggests that a mere 55% are from the UK. And a couple of years ago, the City of London Corporation estimated that at least 40% of people working in the City and Canary Wharf were from overseas.
Are BarCap's Britons mostly in the back office?
BarCap's Briton-quotient may have been upped by the fact that it employs at least 300 people in Glasgow and that Britons occupy a disproportionate number of the more operational roles in its Canary Wharf head office.
The bank declined to offer us a more detailed breakdown of the functions occupied by its British employees. However, headhunters point out that Britons at banks in general tend to earn less and do less demanding jobs than their counterparts from elsewhere.
"There is prejudice against Britons," explains Dominic Connor of P&D Quant Recruitment. "Banks employ British people because they live down the road and they speak the language, but on the whole British people are not as smart and well educated as the French, the Germans, or the Norwegians.
"Even most US bankers in London are better educated than the Brits," he adds. "The American education system is atrocious, but most Americans in the City are post-grads."
Is the British education system really so dreadful?
A recent study by the OECD lends weight to the possibility that Britons are a race of ill-educated illiterates: the UK scored behind most other developed countries and only slightly above Portugal for a range of educational achievements.
A quant headhunter from another search firm claims only 35% of the front office quants he deals with are British and that most are French or Chinese. And Connor says having the British education system on your CV can be a disadvantage - so much so that some candidates are keen to emphasise their schooling elsewhere.
All of this may help explain why the UK government felt the need to relax immigration restrictions on people earning more than 150k. Could it be that British people are good for core head office functions and corporate broking roles, but that the higher paid front office jobs go to persons originating somewhere else entirely?
