Lootman wrote:No but another factor was the "Big Bang" deregulation of the City in 1986, which brought in the big American banks with their culture of puritanism, political correctness and long hours. They re-exported the protestant work ethic back to us, and that ended the previous cosy "gentleman's club" atmosphere.
Not that long afterwards most of the UK city firms had been taken over by the Americans, the Japanese, the Swiss or the Germans. And then the old guard left, which they could easily afford to do.
Spot on, although the Yanks were slowly building presence several years before. The Brits got way with it pre-Big Bang because jobbers and brokers typically only dealt with someone they knew - whether your friends from public school, from long lunches (Friday was 'get ratted' day) or their clubs.
Even the more senior jobbers, whose background may have been more barrow-boy than Eton, mellowed to fit in.
The idea then of doing business with someone you didn't know (but whose firm's credit was good) was anathema. Firms were relatively tiny and business was mainly domestic. No wonder they were deservedly savaged by Goldmans, Morgan Stanley, Chase et al.
If politics was mentioned, you were assumed to vote Tory. Even though deregulation, especially the abolition of fixed commissions and removal of broker/dealer demarcation was pushed by Chancellor Nigel Lawson on Margaret Thatcher's watch, you still supported the Tories. It wasn't so much that laws were changed, but that the Stock Exchange was cudgelled to enter the 20th Century after being threated by Mrs Thatcher with referral to the Restrictive Practices Court - a case that the Exchange would easily have lost.