The City of London’s chief coping mechanism for dealing with Brexit’s threat to the financial services business is to dismiss the loss of jobs and investment as a trickle rather than a flood.
Yes, cheerleaders argue, some 7,500 jobs have been moved to the European Union, but that’s a fraction of the hundreds of thousands predicted by the doomsayers. Sure, job openings in London’s finance industry almost halved in 2020, but that had a lot to do with Covid-19. Of course EU share trading has flowed to the continent, but it’s a low-margin business that’s symbolic at best.