Samizdat: "In Defence of The City" by Julian Rimmer So Mervyn King thinks its depressing for bankers to delay

their bonuses until April and the new tax year to avoid the top rate of tax? I hadnt thought of this ruse and so shouted over to the C in Cf, Hey, Scott! What was my fourth quarter bonus again? It was somewhere between a negative value and zero. Ok, can you delay that payment until April 7th so I pay just 45% tax on it rather than 50%? Sure, Jules. Whatever you want. The Governor of the Bank of England may as well be disappointed that people cross the English Channel to load up on cheap booze n fags rather than fill the treasury coffers here. Hed probably be heartbroken to discover that people often pay cowboy builders for shoddy jobs in cash to avoid VAT and professionals in the carnal knowledge industry rarely declare their earnings when filing tax returns. He would be furious if he discovered my wife now backloads a large percentage of her discretionary spending until the January sales when consumer goods are often cheaper than the month before. He may as well request of bears that they desist from excreting in a sylvan setting. Enough is enough. Ive had my fill of the hypocritical guff and the banker-bashing politics of envy. Ive been waiting patiently for someone to stand up with fists (and buttocks) clenched and shout, Fcuk you. Some of my best friends are bankers but the Arthur Scargill or Bob Crowe of investment banking has not been forthcoming. I have been thinking for some time to write a polemic entitled In Defence of The City which would at last present a counter-argument to the prevailing presumption that everyone in the Square Mile is a cnut and that everyone outside of it is an honest-togoodness, law-abiding, tax-paying, community-minded citizen. My day-to-day existence involves (for the most part unwelcome) interface with South West Trains staff, police officers, the Inland Revenue, local councillors, bus drivers, small shopowners, local tradesmen, call centre staff serving a range of credit card and media companies, traffic wardens, professionals in the carnal knowledge industry and employees of the hospitality business. I can state without reservation or fear of contradiction that there are just as many self-seeking, dimwitted, jobsworthy, supercilious, lazy, intolerant, dishonest cnuts in those sectors as there are in mine. Ill let you into a secret Gentle Reader. Finance: it wasnt my chosen vocation. In my final year at university, this grizzled but focused and through professional (often abbreviated as Turd-Polisher) whose logorrhea you now read, had no chosen direction in life or the faintest idea of how he would earn a living. Scion of an unsuccessful scaffolding dynasty he ended up in this game almost by default because theres very little for which an arts degree qualifies you. Investment banking had three main attractions. First, it afforded the opportunity to dress smartly which I considered crucial at that time. Second, I was reliably informed that the birds in banking were top-notch which again, I considered of paramount importance. Lastly, there was the small matter of a two grand Re-location allowance which Salomon Brothers were offering graduates upon successful application/ slipping through the recruitment net. I had a 3000 overdraft at the time, a sum which I considered impossible to repay through conventional means in 1989. The chance of repaying

most of it in one shot was too good to refuse so I informed my friends and family that I would not, as expected, go on to teach worthily at a crumbling inner-city comprehensive school in a grim northern metropolis. I sold out, renounced my (lightly-worn) socialist principles and laid the votive offering of my soul at Mammons altar. Theoretically, it was a cynical manouevre, short-term fix and I planned to escape the sterile and rapacious world of finance as soon as I had repaid my overdraft. I told my friends I was an agent provocateur who would bring down the moneylenders temple and the whole capitalist edifice from the inside. I worked at the largest investment bank in the world and voted Labour, for fcuks sake. The goal shifted gradually from debt repayment to a little runaround car to a small nest-egg to the downpayment on a small flat to the paying down of that mortgage to the purchase of a small cottage in la France profonde to paying for a wedding to buying a family home to carrying out extensive and grandiose building works to that family home and then back to where it all began: repaying debts that look insurmountable from this standpoint. Somewhere along the way, though, I lost or maybe I decommissioned what Gordon Brown would call my moral compass. Somewhere on that journey (maybe descent is a better word) I started liking my job and most of the people I encountered in it. There was no Damascene moment although perhaps it was the natural contrarian within me which reacted when the world started to fall apart, it seemed as though the centre could not hold (Yeats phrase) and every fcuker out there, from Vince Cable to the dumb fcuks BBC news reporters managed to buttonhole on the street, started laying the blame for the worlds woes on the shoulders of bankers (whatever that word actually means.) The crisis in 2008 probably crystallised much of what Id been leading towards for the previous two decades and it provided me with the perfect opportunity to take on all those smug and sanctimonious pr!cks at dinner parties who repeated the platitudes and received wisdom of governments and politicians in stating that the global economy going down the pan was essentially the fault of me and my coke-snorting, champagne-swilling, Lamborghiniwielding kind in the City. Stockbroking doesnt have its own union or a militant spokesman to organize strikes and cause economic mayhem at the first whiff of paycuts or redundancies. It doesnt have a voice. Media coverage since the crisis began in 2007/2008 has, of course, been unremittingly negative about banking and nasty bankers. The narrative spun by the government has focused on absolving themselves of any responsibility for the credit and housing bubbles and distracting attention from their reckless government spending in the boom years. If you are charmed by the myths of the middle-class faux left, listen to the likes of the self-exculpating Brown, Balls and Cable and are gulled by all those crusty, unwashed Occupy London fcukers who have the monetary sophistication of mediaeval peasants rolling round in the mud, you would imagine politicians, regulators, borrowers and savers, like the rest of the populace, were duped by the wicked financial wizardry of Bond villains in Wall St and Canary Wharf. Dont ask me what caused the crisis. Even though I lived through it, was a casualty of it (sacked, like the Wilfred Owen of stockbroking, in March 2009) and emerged from it indebted and saddened I was fundamentally none the wiser for the experience. I cant believe I was in any way to blame for it, however, unless with my dumb,

insensate herd instinct I just followed everyone else into the abattoir and share the collective guilt for just being fcuking stupid. Bankers biggest problem has always been that the word rhymes with w@nkers but now that I look about me I see much that is admirable and praiseworthy about the business and its practitioners. On the whole (apart from my sidekick the Sidcup Cobbler who has since become a casualty of corporate rightsizing) we get up very early. So early, in fact that most of us have not been to bed and this explains why aged almost forty-six I can pass myself off successfully as Sid James older, less charismatic brother. The banking industry is also characterized by immense tolerance and liberalism. Im from Liverpool, I support Everton and I like country and western music and yet I am not discriminated against because of this. (Now that I think of it: is this why my stock has fallen so low? If I were a native of the Home Counties, supported Man Utd and listened to Rap? Techno? (you tell me) would I write more commission?) Every day I deal with people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, social strata and the people on my distribution list come from Turkmenistan, Russia, Turkey, Wales, Bulgaria, somewhere called Middlesbrough (wherever the fcuk that is) Asia, Switzerland the Democratic Republic of Congo (ok, I made that one up) and all over the shop in fact. This industry is so tolerant it puts others, like construction, Premiership football, the monarchy and the police force (to name but four) to shame. Also, I just throw this point into the ring without giving it due consideration of conducting anything like a scientific survey, there arent many fatties in this business. The average City employee, unless they are being scraped off the pavement underneath Le Coq DArgent, is generally in good shape to my tiny mind. On the assumption that a fool and his money shall soon be parted and with the notable exception of myself (because my money and I were rent asunder by the harsh realities of capitalism) I think the City also boasts a disproportionate number of clever people. Look how much money Fred Goodwin amassed before retiring. Consider how long Nick Leeson, Jerome Kerviel, Kweku Adoboli were able to conceal their unauthorised trading losses before being apprehended. Marvel how Goldman Sachs delays its bonus payments until the lower tax rate is applicable. (Ah, isnt that where we started?) Imagine the ingenuity required to create collateralized debt obligations so toxic that everybody lost money on them regardless of whether they bought or sold. Now compare this kind of intelligence with the punctilious little man who inspects tickets on SW Trains, or the slack-jawed tube and bus drivers who held the country to ransom during the Olympics, or the genius who established the recycling bin protocol or the Einstein who devised the airport security procedure or the tw@t whos supposed to deliver your mail but actually leaves it somewhere miles away that you have to fcuking drive to at 7am on a Saturday instead of having a lie-in to collect. From my personal experience the City is also a very charitable place. Barely a day passes without me being given a shakedown by some client or other to pledge money for his sponsored lunch or massage parlour marathon. I donated to the cause of so many moustaches in Movember that there should be a kind of handlebar variant with extremely downturned corners named after me. A bank gave us the Boris Bike. There was barely an exhibition, concert or sporting event in the last twenty years that didnt have a bank behind it. Compare with those fcuking Shylocks

in the legal industry for example. You ever attended anything enjoyable to which those bloodsuckers contributed other than your own funeral? Excoriated for too long, its time for The Square Mile to stand up, go on the offensive and fight its patch. In terms of value-for-money and social utility I would back the merits of even Subsistence Broking, the least noble strand of this financial tapestry, against the law (charge a lot of money for an absence of opinion), construction (not only does God not exist, asserted Woody Allen, but have you ever tried getting a plumber on weekends?), the police (Cycling on the pavement is our priority/ Working TOGETHER for a safer London? (No, you cnuts, you are. Im minding my own fcuking business), insurance (would be ok without the concept of excess) transport (where to start?), politicians (where to finish?) the press (pedlars of meretricious pap for the most part) film and television (there was me innocently watching TV in the Seventies while in the background every one of my TV idols was humping someone about my age in the back of a caravan) and anyone who works for the government where they supposed to be helpful but just get in the fcuking way. Bankers are paid too much? I just looked at the salaries of various charity chief executives on the Guardian website. The CEO of Oxfam earns 75k, of Battersea Dogs Home 85k, the Donkey Sanctuary 94k, NSPCC 105k. These all compare favourably to remuneration levels for Subsistence Brokers, they have job security and they are meant to be doing this for altruistic reasons. And, of course, compared to what professional sportsmen earn for playing games, well, we are all paupers and I think things are skewed wildly because I can play football quite effectively whereas if you asked John Terry for a view on Turkish banks 4Q earnings prospects or Wayne Rooney how long the Russian discount to Emerging Market price/earnings multiples will persist I suspect you will be greeted with a shrug and expressions of bovine malignity. This is the longest Samizdat I have ever written. I expect it to echo around the corridors of power with the same kind of reverberative as Emile Zolas open letter, Jaccuse. Or, perhaps it will like all entreaties to the Gods of stockbroking, just run headlong into stubborn impenetrable Walls Of Indifference.