CITY AND SUBURBAN
The Prime Minister throws an egg at an over-regulated City...
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ihave discovered, late in the day, a newly reliable source. This is the City informant who told me a fortnight ago that the Prime Minister would use her Guildhall speech to warn against strangling the City in red tape. Sheer self delusion, I thought. Since when had she joined the local lobby, and whose ministers had put the tape there in the first place? But it was stable informa- tion all right, and came bolting home to land my informant's bet. The form is worth following, for the Prime Minister does not talk in such terms to please her audience. This week the Securities and Investments Board, tape dispenser in chief, brings out a new edition of its rule-book — a dis- appointment to my old colleague Brian O'Connor, who lists reading the current edition as his hobby, along with snail- watching. By contrast the SIB's new chair- man, David Walker, hates it so much that he will not let it into his office. Its successor is shorter by half, written largely in En- glish, and where the old rules derived from the principle of comprehensive admini- stration, the new ones are drafted as deriving from straightforward principles of right and wrong. This line of form should extend to the Financial Services Act. Chips Keswick of Hambros Bank has com- mended the throwing of eggs at its authors. Adopting a complementary approach, Mr Walker's advisers are known to have been keeping a shopping-list of new and im- proved (or old and superfluous) clauses, once Parliament has time for amending legislation. Given the Prime Minister's concern, we should watch for that in the Queen's Speech.
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