Brexit: leading banks set to pull out of UK early next year
Storm clouds above Canary Wharf in London. British banks can currently offer financial services across the EU unimpeded [Image: Andy Rain/EPA].
Oh dear.
Britain’s biggest banks are preparing to relocate out of the UK in the first few months of 2017 amid growing fears over the impending Brexit negotiations, while smaller banks are making plans to get out before Christmas.
The dramatic claim is … by the chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, Anthony Browne, who warns “the public and political debate at the moment is taking us in the wrong direction”.
A source close to the Brexit secretary, David Davis, said he and the chancellor, Philip Hammond, had last week sought to offer reassurance that they were determined to secure the status of the City of London.
However, the government’s stated intention to take control of the freedom of movement into the UK is widely recognised among officials to be a hammer blow to any chance of retaining the present terms of trade for banks, particularly given the bellicose rhetoric of major politicians on the continent.
The so-called passporting rights for members of the single market allow UK-based banks to offer financial services to companies and individuals across the EU unimpeded, yet the French president, François Hollande, is among those who have insisted in recent weeks that hard Brexit will mean “hard negotiation” and Britain will need to “pay the price” of leaving.
A hard Brexit would involve the UK leaving both the single market, a central pillar of which is freedom of movement, and the customs union, which could potentially reintroduce tariff and non-tariff restrictions on British imports and exports.
Source: Brexit: leading banks set to pull out of UK early next year | Politics | The Guardian
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Is this what Brexiteers mean by their phrase, repeated ad nauseum, “Taking back control”.
So long as they repay all the money they took off the taxpayers first!
They are only interested in remaining on the freeloading gravy train which is the EU!
hold them ask them for bail out monies back dah
And here we are just 3 days before Christmas and no small banks have moved at all, despite this “threat” being over two months old.
Three days before Christmas isn’t early next year.
Not sure I will miss any Bwankers and their long list of misdeeds, greed and bringing the world into near financial meltdown. Any money owed needs repaying if they took any taxpayers money in their self recovery.
Thatcher sold our manufacturing industry (and our family silver) down the river to favour her City spivs. As the financial rats now look to be deserting the sinking HMS Britain what next? No industry, just the service industry which doesn’t have an exportable “product”. The so-called “knowledge economy” won’t put food on the tables of 60 million.