Evidence that the City of London Corporation is a lobbying organisation for the banks is now indisputable

The City of London Corporation brushes off suggestions that it is a lobbying organisation but as media reports yesterday showed - at the very least it certainly uses their services.

On Monday it was revealed that the Corporation are paying out a whopping £120,000 in consultancy fees to a lobbying firm, presumably in their role as a Local Authority.

However London is a tale of two cities and the Corporation has a dual role. As well as being a local authority, it’s been suggested by father William Taylor - a priest in Hackney in east London and a former City Councilor, that the Corporation is also a lobbying group for the banks - a claim it fiercely denies.

However, evidence that has recently come to light reinforces Taylor’s claim and proof that the City of London Corporation is itself a lobbying organisation for global capital is now pretty much indisputable.

In early 2010 the Corporation created and provided the initial backing for the lobbying colossus, TheCityUK (TCUK) which claims to have ‘excellent working relationships’ with HM Treasury and the FSA and seeks to ‘influence policy, regulatory and trade regimes’. They also claim to be independent and politically neutral yet pay for ‘public affairs consultancy’ on behalf of the banking sector - an activity which it is was originally supposed to fund from member subscriptions.

Their specific objective, to ‘protect and promote’ the competitive position of the UK's financial service industries, smacks of the language of the Corporation’s guilds (who swear an oath to the Lord Mayor of the City of London in similar style). And they also describe their objective to ‘ensure barriers to global trade are removed’ in a fashion that Labour peer Lord Glasman says is ‘very much in the style’ of the Corporation, who were so devoted to the ideas behind free trade that they ‘sent support for the American revolution against the will of the Crown’.

Clearly TCUK isn’t independent either. The amount of cross-over between the two bodies is alarming.  Consider this - the president of the advisory council of TCUK is the Lord Mayor; the deputy chairman is head of policy at the Corporation, Stuart Fraser; and Stuart Popham, who sits on the leadership team, is also a board member for the Corporation’s EU liaison body. And when you take into account that these men are jointly ‘responsible for developing’ the banks lobbying ‘strategy’, this looks more and more like an inside job.

Co-incidentally, out of three meetings held between the City of London Corporation and government ministers, between 2010 and 2011 at least one was attended by TCUK too.

Now, this is where it really gets interesting.

In April 2011 the Corporation met with Edward Davey, minister for employment relations, consumer and postal affairs. He was halfway through a consultation on reforming the employment tribunal system, which seems to have alarmed the Corporation enough to demand a meeting with him.

The year before, The Corporation had also paid a visit to Damian Green, Minister for State to discuss the impact on the City of London of the proposed new limit on immigration.

Green went on to say in a speech on 7th September 2010, ‘We absolutely need sustainable immigration levels…. At the same time, we must be confident enough to say Britain is open for business’ and referenced an historic example of immigration providing vital ‘loans from Hanseatic merchants’ and ‘Lombard money lenders’ to argue the Corporation’s case for a points based system of entry to the UK.

When the Corporation met Mark Hoban, financial secretary to the treasury it was to discuss the International Strategy Working Group (ISWG) – a key part of TCUK’s European lobbying structure. The result of the meeting came out in a speech given by Hoban on 22nd November 2010, where he identified the need for a tax-free vehicle for investment in order to compete with European markets which already had a similar product. Just what you imagine the Corporation would be hoping for.

He also gave a speech with reference to ‘merchants from Lombardy ’in it.

What’s immediately obvious is that these speeches hold three things in common: they serve the interests of the Corporation, they are given directly after a meeting between the Corporation and government ministers and crucially they contain exactly the same idiosyncratic references to ‘merchants from Lombardy ’.  

It’s as if the Corporation has typed up these speeches in advance.

Crucially, in an admission that could have been easily overlooked, Hoban refers to the IRSG in his speech as being part of ‘The City of London Corporation’. But it isn’t - right? The City UK and The City of London are separate entities.

Not according to Mark Hoban, who was sitting in the same room as both of them presumably for some time discussing the subject. Or did he just mix them up by mistake? After all, it is almost impossible to tell them apart. In any case, this was a signed-off speech and if no one noticed such a glaring error before it was handed to the minister (or before it was published on the government’s website) then that’s just bizarre.
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But less bizarre perhaps when you consider that Mark Hoban’s wife, Fiona Hoban is also the assistant to the The Remembrancer - the Corporation’s official lobbyist in the House of Commons and a senior position of influence within the City.

In which case, maybe this ‘mix-up’ came about because TCUK and the City of London aren’t two distinct entities at all. In almost every way both bodies represent the same interests, the same old boy’s network and share many senior staff with each other.  Effectively it seems that the Corporation and TCUK are part of one organisation – just different departments. 

But don’t expect the Corporation to stop there. On other occasions, they employ a Tory-leaning PR consultancy called Quiller Consultants - this is especially true in its role as municipal authority.

The company is part of the Huntsworth group owned by Peter Gummer, also Lord Chadlington, and is a major donor of the Tory party. Gummer’s firm gives a donation to the Tory party every August but strangely, in 2008, they deviated from their usual pattern of behaviour and donated in October - the same month that the financial crisis broke out, and it was an amount almost 30 per cent above the usual value.

This fact makes it reasonable to ask the question, was it an attempt to influence Tory party policy in the wake of the financial crisis?

Lord Chadlington also has links to the Atlantic Partnership - an elite networking group set up by Michael Howard in 2001 to foster closer relations between Europe and the United States, with a remit to promote the global free-trade agenda (which sounds right up the Corporation’s square mile).

One unanswered question remains though. If the Corporation provided the initial funding to set up TheCityUK, where did it come from? Was it from the City Fund - its Local Authority and charitable assets - or was it paid for using the Corporation’s ‘private monies’? In other words was the creation of TCUK funded by the mysterious City Cash account which is most probably based on the legacy of Sir Thomas Gresham (and which should have been redistributed amongst the poor as a stipulation of his will)?

It’s also pretty hard to tell if the initial funding from the Corporation ever really stopped flowing in. TCUK kindly provide their annual report online. However, if you attempt to download it you’ll be disappointed. They reserve the right to disclose their accounts only to members. And the members are? That’s right, the financial services and the City of London. What a brilliant example of transparency. In any case, as a member of TCUK the Corporation certainly funds part of their lobbying business

These and the general activities of TCUK, (which is essentially the City’s equivalent of the Foreign Office) bring into doubt director Chris Cumming’s claim that their ‘competitiveness’ includes a commitment to ‘ethical behaviour’. When it comes to undermining democracy through lobbying, ‘ethical behaviour’ is one thing that the Corporation is clearly not putting on the table.

Whilst the vital issue of the unaccountable power of lobbyists is being discussed in parliament - the facts emerging about the role of the City of London are of heightened public interest.

So it’s no wonder then that the Corporation persistently rejects demands for transparency and refuses to publish details of its City Cash account. Because if it did publish it would be damned, for the public might know the truth about the opinion-shapers who seem to guide government policy from the Square Mile.

Over 400 years ago, the Corporation subverted the will of a dying man in order to create a financial power base, which in the 21st century would become the sole representative of the banks that we all bailed out.

Sir Thomas Gresham warns in his will that the City will face God's wrath if they ignore his dying wish. Perhaps in the shape of Father William Taylor, He has come to pass judgment.