29 May 2015

City of London opinion hardens to support Britain remaining a member of the EU

27 May 2015: Deutsche Boerse “Exchange of ideas - Blueprint for CMU”. Deutsche Boerse sponsored a conference in London about the mechanics and objectives for Capital Market Union (CMU).  With a powerful range of speakers and panellists, it attracted around 150 senior City practitioners on such a crucial subject for the City’s future prosperity. The discussion focussed on the details of a “single rule book” and how to achieve correspondingly uniform supervision of the firms in a highly integrated financial system across the EU28.

At the very same time, Her Majesty the Queen was giving her Speech to open the new session of Parliament and announcing a referendum on a possible “Brexit”. Quite clearly, if there is a Brexit, then the City of London will play only a minimal part in CMU. These two events at opposite ends of London seemed to be on two different planets – both geographically and politically/commercially.

A German journalist asked the obvious question about this incongruity and I followed up by requesting that we use the `voting machines’ to test opinion. The result was truly remarkable: 91.2 % think the City will be better off in CMU – implicitly therefore staying in the EU.

22 April 2015:  “The City and Brexit”: The report received 408 responses and the result is pretty overwhelming: nearly three quarters would vote to stay in the EU in the event of a referendum. "The main conclusion is clear: “City folk” (i.e. those who are professionally active in and around the UK financial services sector) are most unlikely to vote to quit the EU. Nearly three-quarters (73%) say they will either ‘definitely’ (49%) or ‘probably’ (24%) vote to stay in, while only 12% will ‘definitely’ vote to get out.

Full report

30 October 2013: “Access to Single European Market key to UK competitiveness says business leaders”: Ipsos MORI interviewed 101 UK based CEOs, chairmen, CIOs, board members, directors and partners of companies with a variety of specialisms, drawn from TheCityUK’s member companies. TheCityUK’s members are representative of the financial and related professional services industry as a whole. The report however reveals that whilst the overwhelming majority of respondents are in favour of remaining in the EU, reform is also needed. 65% of those surveyed feel that regulatory change from the EU is one of the most significant challenges to their business and 56% viewed the volume of EU regulation as one of their biggest hurdles.

Full report

© Graham Bishop