Recent links of note:
A Tale of Two Cities: How ‘Brexit’ Splits London
Max Colchester and Simon Clark, The Wall Street Journal
With the long-awaited referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union finally upon us, it’s only right to dedicate this week’s “week in review” to some final analysis of next week’s vote. First up is Max Colchester and Simon Clark’s report this week in The Wall Street Journal on the generational split in London’s financial sector. The City is cleaved along age lines, with older bankers tending to support “Brexit” and younger bankers preferring the “remain” side. The main point of fissure seems to be surrounding regulation. Older bankers remember the fast and loose 1980s, when oversight of the financial sector was minimal: they tend to disdain regulation generally but believe that any oversight should come from Britain itself, not the EU. The younger bankers are more sanguine about the prospect of continuing market control by Brussels, citing increasingly internationalized markets. It should be noted that the current situation is all they’ve ever known.
The six best reasons to vote leave
Daniel Hannan, The Spectator
Regardless of one’s position on the Brexit question, it is always worth hearing what Daniel Hannan has to say. The member of European Parliament and New Criterion contributor came to prominence with a famously scorching dressing-down of the then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and has since tirelessly advocated Euroskepticism, forcefully arguing that Britain is not only better suited outside the EU, but moreover that a leave vote is essential to the country’s future. Last week The Spectator hosted a debate on the referendum, in which Hannan laid out the compelling case for “leave.” Put simply: “[Britain] is the fifth largest economy in the world, the second disseminator of soft power, one of five permanent seat-holders on the UN Security Council. [It] exports tea to China, naan bread to India, kayaks to the Inuit. [It has] created more jobs in the past five years than the other 27 states put together. How much bigger do[es] [it] have to be, for heaven’s sake, before [it] can prosper under [its] own laws?”
From our pages:
Trying too hard
Anthony Daniels
On the degeneration of Melbourne.