For a start it’s Owen Jones in a beanie. But other than that:
Today we are having tea and biscuits at his flat overlooking other multimillionaires’ yachts in London’s Docklands, but Stevenson remembers a time, as a child in Ilford, east London, when he had barely any clothes apart from his school uniform. That gave him a near-manic drive to succeed in the privileged world of the City, while also leading his rivals to underestimate him — and pay the price. “Rich people expect poor people to be stupid,” Stevenson says.
Traders in The City – and yes, he was a trader, not a banker – have always come from those who know how to trade. Half of them still wearing white socks with black shoes by the time they retire with their millions.
Many a City house has prospered by having an Irish Marquis, or one of the dimmer Emglish Viscounts, – but with good manners of course – to usher the money in the front door and half a dozen costerboys making the money in the back room. The costers being paid an order of magnitude more than the poshos.
Class matters in The City – because this is England, of course class matters – but the City is deeply, deeply, unsentimental about class. Certainly the least sentimental place about it in the entire country. If class can be used to make money then it will be. So too if talent can be used to make money then it will be. And when there’s a distinction between class and the ability to make money then it’ll be the money that wins.
If that Irish Marquis trades as well as the white socks lad then he’ll be paid as much as the white socks lad. If he can’t he won’t and will remain on a tenth the sum.
It’s a meritocracy for fuck’s sake.
«For a start it’s Owen Jones in a beanie.»
Not if the beard is genuine, it’s not.
Once upon a time Ilford was an aspirational area, somewhere you moved out to and would then stress the Essex part of the address to demonstrate an element of having “made it”.
I spent a couple of years at school there in the 1980s and have very fond memories of the well-kept big gardens I passed going along the Cranbrook road. Most of those have gone for driveways now.
Not sure when the area took a turn for the worse but I’m pretty sure that it was after this fellah left school.
“Tea and biscuits”
City Trader ? Special Brew and Coke and then a trip to a lapdancing joint.
Ilford? Suburb of Islamabad these days. Although Seven Kings is more like Peshawar.
Sir Desmond Glazebrook.
llater,
llamas
Traders in The City – and yes, he was a trader, not a banker – have always come from those who know how to trade.
ISTR that when Greenpeace or FoE or some other lefty ner-do-well’s tried to storm one of the trading floors – Metal Exchange? – they got physically chucked out on their arses by the traders…
IPE I think. Futures and options in oil and gas. Not just chucked out, beaten up and chucked out.
#”“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.””
Most stuff where class is a factor is either a daft waste of money charities or government.
You can see it in a letter in today’s Guardian:-
“Successive reports have revealed that between 20% and 65% of professionals in occupations as diverse as medicine, law, journalism, sports, MPs, the arts and high court judges were educated in fee-paying schools and/or Oxbridge, despite only 7% of the UK population attending such schools and about 1% attending these two universities.”
Most of those are not where the money is.
Law went from being good money, to absolutely stuffed full of women in the late 90s.
Journalism is way over capacity.
Sports? Outside of men’s football, rugby and golf, most sports barely pay a mortgage. And the one with the most money of those is overwhelmingly working class.
MPs? Spend a lot of time working for the party, fighting unwinnable seats, for an £80K salary for a few years. And that’s the ones that make it. A lot of people who want to be MPs never become a candidate or are in the party that is out of power for 15 years.
The arts? A tiny number of rich, successful rock stars and actors. And a gazillion people who spend years and never make it, all of whom have to be factored into the equation.
High court judges? Judges come from barristers. Does it pay more than defending Philip Morris? I somehow doubt it, so I’m pretty sure that lawyers that want a Maserati and a blonde with big tits and don’t have money aren’t going to be high court judges.
The only exception in there is medicine, and that’s because of the high barriers to entry into the profession. Create a series of open exams that take a few weeks, that anyone can pay a fee to sit, after which they can be a junior doctor, and I think you’d see a very different class of people in medicine. We’d probably get better doctors, too.
You want working class kids avoiding most of these jobs. You want them trading, running call centres, writing code because it pays better. It lifts them out of poverty. Their kids can go and be ballerinas if daddy makes good.
As the old joke goes: there are 16,000 barristers in England; there’s enough work for 8,000 of them; and all the work is actually done by 4,000 of them. You can earn 7-figures if you’re a commercial KC in a top chambers (or a senior partner in a ‘magic circle’ solicitors), but most criminal barristers struggle to make a living (cf Rumpole – this is not new). Some middle ranking barristers become judges because the pension benefits are good.
MPs may be on £80k, but you can easily treble that by employing your wife to run the constituency office, judicious use of second homes, huge pension benefits, etc..
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,”
Tarquin and Jocasta didn’t care to be manhandled by the Lower Orders eh? Lol.
I do not know about the peple me tioned in this post. But it is all Jobs for the boys. You have to be a piece of work to make it in the elites. If you are nice or shy or weird then you are hated by the powers that be. It is one big conspiracy in favour of he bullies. I am not referring to the people in this post.
In Glasgow, Coventry, Llandudno, Sydney, Wrexham, Manchester, Liverpool, Dundee,, Darwen, Dubai, Portsmouth, London, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Miami. The city has power.