The actual amount of money controlled by the City of London Corporation isn't public either - e.g. there is the "City Cash" fund.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

My favourite bit of City trivia is that they have an official representative at Parliament, who gets to sit opposite the speaker - the wonderfully named Remembrancer.

[Edit: For some highly entertaining, if slightly paranoid, ranting about the City and the evils of offshore finance I can recommend "Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxson - http://treasureislands.org/]

And while technically the House of Commons can pass just about any law it wants, the House of Lords generally acts as a counterweight to reign in worst of the Commons. Usually if its not in the governments manifesto and the bill gets kicked back to the Commons then by convention its usually kicked into the long grass unless the changes proposed by the Lords are acceptable.

Of course the Commons could invoke the Parliament Act to push through legislation it generally only does so in rare circumstances (a handful over the last century). However any attempt to do this over anything other than a firm manifesto pledge would likely again plunge the UK into said constitutional crisis.

So the checks and balances in the UK system come from the fact none of parties involved wants to deal with the mess that would result if they didn't follow prior convention.

Don't you mean "Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union"?

Funny - in Australia and New Zealand we have Governors General to represent the Queen, and they're also given the final say on whether a law is passed. In New Zealand the people I've talked to have considered it purely ceremonial, but in Australia 1975 that viewpoint was refuted when the governor general dissolved the parliament.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerr_(governor-general) for more.

There is also a Church of Ireland (which was disestablished as the offical religion of Ireland (which was in the UK) in 1870ish), and Church in Wales. Scotland has sorta it's own church (think it's a slight different variant) which it has a right to exist due to the Act of Union of 170x.

So it's all a bit complicated and depending on how you define "UK" and "UKwide"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scotland

NB Although I've always been an atheist, I grew up in a small community in the North of Scotland dominated by the Kirk and it's more zealous offshoots. If you've seen Lars von Triers "Breaking the Waves" then you'll get the idea.... :-)

I stopped reading Reddit about the time the entirety of r/uk was threatening to occupy twitter or something about this. Please don't bring it here too.

Another reason why The City might pay higher: Since there is so much money at stake/to be made, and since it's so compeditive, and rewards can be gotten so quickly (you could make millions in one year, no need to wait for things to pay off) that it would be foolish for a upper class toff to sit on their hands and not hire the bright young commoner.

It could be that the traditionalist companies probably missed out on a lot of good techies, and hence weren't able to compete and were marginalised by companies who did hire based on merit, not class.

Capitalism at work for our labour.

You can find considerably more interesting contract work outside the City that pays the same as a salaried role in the City - worth considering if you don't mind a little uncertainty, don't want to work overtime, and want to be able to switch around whenever things get dull...

The UK (and Europe) really needs to figure that out. I was able to move to London because I was moving from SV and I got a cost of living increase on top of my US market salary. If I was born here and forced to accept London market salaries I would be looking for my ticket out of here ASAP. As technology and mobility increases it's going to be increasingly important to economies to retain talent, something which I believe is obscured for the super rich who make money by arbitrage highly abstracted from the value in the base economy.

Engineering died in the UK because the management class can't tell the difference between a professional mechanical engineer and a car mechanic (not that the latter isn't a skilled worker). In the rest of the world "Engineer" is a meaningful, exclusive title.

Many people complaining about hiring trouble are complaining about high search cost.

The lesson is that companies are strugglying because they aren't offering enough money. Ergo, if you offer more money, you struggle less.

Only a tiny percentage of developers in the financial world are working on arbitrage, the average bank probably has more developers working on compliance software than arbitrage software. A vast majority of software development work at most banks is infrastructure (integration between systems, data feeds, settlement, etc.) which supports the day-to-day operations.

1) The free market is not efficient

2) There is some hidden benefit to overpaying clueless PHBs

I'm genuinely curious about this, actually...

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

Imagine if everything you ever bought worked this way. You want some eggs? You'll need to go in the store managers office, he'll make an offer and you can accept it or negotiate. You might not even get the eggs. Once you do, you're afraid to tell anyone else how much they cost. How efficient would that market be?

There is a similar thing going on with sex. The difference between a back rub and rub&tug isn't just the target location, it's also the associated taboos and stigmas.

(Circuit IV, for those of you who've read Prometheus Rising...)

The real issue is that, bizarrely, workers buy into silly fantasies about "family" etc., instead of realizing that selling your time for a wage is a market action and must be treated as such.

And hence assuming that a free market is more efficient, that you can make more money by trying to make the market more free-er (i.e. hire based on merit, not class, etc.).

Simply paying more isn't the same as not being exploitative, even if it does make you feel better about yourself. I suppose it might make sense to consider the wider picture too, like how much of that increased income is produced by more fully exploiting other laborers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_labour#Surplus_labour_a...

"Exploitation occurs when those appropriating surplus labour — whether in the form of surplus-value, surplus product or direct surplus labour — are different than those performing surplus labour..."

There is no universal definition exactly but they share certain elements. In particular exploitation is the result of a power inequality between the laborer and the exploiter.

The question is not simply about the split of profits between capital investors and laborers. (Since capital is the accumulation of surplus labor, it's already exploitative.) The original act of exploitation it's self occurs much earlier. When you do not receive renumeration equal in value to that of your surplus labor.

Putting real numbers to those values is hard and I don't really have a satisfying answer to give you. You might find Elinior Ostroms work interesting though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

So - if entrepreneurs give away all surplus value to their employees, what motivation do they have to start businesses?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...

But, are these engineers being paid proportionally to the value they create? That is the acid test. The class system works both ways; people being held down are ingrained to believe that that is their station in life.

You can either have great working conditions and pay, or a good manufacturing industry. Can't have both. Some other poorer country will just treat their workers worse, and so be more productive.

(I'm reading "Thatcher - the downing street years" at the moment - a great read).

Someone needs to explain this to the Germans then.

However, the main problem with British industries and collapse of some of them in 1970's was unionisation and political fighting. This included even outright sabotage, and of course abysmal build quality. My uncle had a Morris Marina, my father a Sunbeam Avenger. Never again a British car. British workers are OK as long as their overlords are Japanese or German.

UK manufacturing value as such is not so bad, after all. The curve looks very much like any other Western country. See http://management.curiouscatblog.net/images/curiouscat_top_m...

The only major country that took a significant dip recently is Japan.

It seems to be working well for Apple...

In any case, the biggest car company in Germany is VW, and I wouldn't consider them a "luxury" car manufacturer. And most of the Mittelstand in Germany are companies that are not household names, but are very successful in their particular industrial niches.

Just as every individual is unique in its skills, experience, available resources and location, so is each country. Surely China's cheap workforce cannot be replicated in Europe or the U.S. and China's biggest problem will be their own middle-class which gets richer, so you can clearly see that a cheap workforce is not sustainable in a growing economy.

Can the world replicate Silicon Valley or Hollywood? Maybe, maybe not, but surely a lot of effort is required and there are also cultural issues that makes this hard. Failure is accepted as a sign of progress in Silicon Valley, but in Japan it's unacceptable.

The way to grow is to rely on your core strengths and make your weaknesses obsolete. So for example if companies move to China for cheap labor, then pay engineers to build better robots, a strategy which in the long run can yield better and more efficient factories.

Look at Germany, they have both but that's partly the vertical companies being ethical and patriotic.

EDIT: In responses asking for examples, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mumbai#City_developm... . The British were responsible for merging the many Islands of Mumbai to get what it is today. Also, the pipelines supplying fresh water to Mumbai were built by the British and are being augmented only in the last decade or so.

I think that says more about India than it does about British engineering.

(fyi I'm neither :)

EDIT: Forgot to add:

The engineering might be good, but the middle management was often really poor and the build quality of mass-produced items was usually sub-optimal.

Combined with post-war poverty here and post-war subsidies there (Japan) the UK had a weird combination of factors.

How much of the continued re-use is due to it being so superior, or the government being so cash poor that they can't pay for any replacements?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12607537

All I shall say is a. I think you'll find it's more complicated than that, and b. look at the data.

It's called an autobiography.

I've heard the left wing excuses and arguments and find them thoroughly unconvincing.

> b. look at the data.

I have.

It's a autobiography by a right-wing leader, so if you talk about subject X then reference said book, it's likely that opinion will be right-wing, which was my point.

Anyway, I didn't mean any offence, and I don't want to get embroiled in a political argument, rather wanted to highlight that.

For what it's worth, the book isn't really filled with opinions, more than it's filled with facts from the time.

eg "We were spending X on British Steel, and the Unions wanted us to spend Y, wanted pay raises of Z, despite falling productivity" etc.

It was a mistake for me to include the book I was currently reading as it instantly isolates half the political spectrum unfortunately.

The unions certainly didn't help their cause, but it took two to tango to create the mess that is the UK economy.

She had to privatise industries because they became ridiculously uncompetitive and expensive to run.

During the previous socialist government the number of public sector workers increased drastically.

British steel was haemorrhaging money. And the unions response? Demand pay increases and strike. Same with the coal industry.

Would you rather she kept us paying billions in ever increasing public sector wage demands?

"Full employment" should not be a policy. You don't spend public money employing unproductive workers in useless public sector jobs just for the hell of it.

Full employment is something that happens naturally when individuals take responsibility for themselves.

The UK economy is a mess because of drastic overspending by socialist governments. Something we're having to put right (again). Shame the lessons of the 70s/80s weren't learnt.

(I agree that the actions of the unions in 70s are also to the blame, but a better approach would have been to engage the unions and slowly transition to better balance of public and private sector industries rather than the union busting and throwing the baby out with the bathwater that MacGregor and Thatcher did)

In answer to your question would I rather pay billions in the cost of benefits to support people being unemployed or billions keeping people working in nationalized industries or the public sector ? At least with the latter you are getting something back for your money rather than people sitting on their arse all day watching daytime TV.

I fundamentally believe that it is NOT and should not be the task of the government to "create" jobs.

We should toughen up benefits, which the current government is already doing, to ensure people out of work don't just sit on their arses all day.

You cannot do what the past socialist governments have done - create tons of unnecessary public sector jobs paid for by debt. That is unfair to everyone and just has to be paid for later.

For example there was a discussion that I half caught on Radio 4 this very morning that claimed the death of manufacturing in the UK is mainly due to the government totally failing to invest in R&D for the last 15 years or so.

I think the truth is probably somewhat more complex and a combination of a lot of factors.

Also find people who were around in the Thatcher days, you'll find a lot of people who either despise her or love her, the book will be biased.

Interesting. Why is it the government's obligation to invest in R&D (of manufacturing?), surely that's the responsibility of the manufacturers themselves?

The debate included anecdotes saying that China, Germany and America have been pumping %-wise much higher amounts into R&D (or schemes to 'encourage' it) through their governments compared to the UK.

This doesn't make the facts she cites, or arguments she presents any less compelling.

It's not really that far fetched to say that "most of our stuff is made in countries with abundant cheap labour".

Investing in R&D would not have solved the fundamental issue - workers in the UK are expensive. Workers in poor countries are cheap.