The EU and The City of London

The EU's desire to take power and more importantly money away from The City of London and move the income to Frankfurt and Paris moves along apace as the EU's three supra-national bodies to oversee banking, insurance, and securities will have binding powers to impose rules for the first time, limiting National authorities to "day-to-day" management. Also the three bodies will take decisions by qualified majority voting (QMV), the standard procedure for single market issues - there will be no veto. This means that the UK could be powerless to stop EU regulation that would be harmful to The City and that the UK (one of the world's financial centres) would have no more voting power on financial regulation than Malta, a lovely country but no financial power.

A suspicious person might think that Gordon Brown's blaming of the banks and new enthusiasm for the EU was linked to his hopes of a role with an EU financial authority soon after his general election defeat. What finer post for the man who has screwed up the UK economy and never won a general election than a post running the EU economy; for some reason the name of Neil Kinnock comes to mind...