The Big Bang

This chapter examines the 1986 Big Bang liberalization of the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which was crucial in transforming the City of London into a truly global financial centre. This policy was the result of a winding institutional process that began in 1979 when the RPC initiated a case against the LSE for non-competitive practices. While Thatcher initially refused to exempt the LSE from this case, things changed following the government’s implementation of its monetarist experiment: MTFS. MTFS was a strategy to discipline the British economy in a depoliticized manner, by locking the government into years of financial stringency. In order for this strategy to be successful, the government had to meet certain monetary targets, which would justify the painful measures. Yet this plan went awry, plunging the economy into a deep recession while the government failed to hit its monetary targets. To prevent the complete presentational collapse of MTFS, the state began to make massive sales of government debt on the LSE as a way to meet the monetary targets. This in turn made it crucially important that the normal functioning of the LSE was not disrupted by a drawn-out court case. The Thatcher government finally decided to exempt the LSE from this investigation in 1983, which began the countdown to the 1986 Big Bang liberalization. The decision that led to the Big Bang was thus, to a significant extent, a desperate attempt to protect MTFS, which had sought to restructure the British economy in line with global competitive pressures.

Abolition of Exchange Controls

This chapter explores the abolition of exchange controls, which transformed the British economy by ushering in a new era of mobile capital flows. Following the IMF’s 1976 bailout of the UK and the advent of North Sea oil, sterling began to appreciate precipitously. While this helped to discipline the British economy and reduce inflation, it also pushed British exporters to the brink of collapse. Governments during this period thus faced a choice between embracing the strong pound to tackle inflation and combating the pound’s rise in order to maintain political legitimacy. The governments of both Callaghan and Thatcher sought to navigate carefully between these two options. By getting rid of exchange controls, these governments hoped that investment would flow out of Britain, causing a moderate fall in the price of sterling. This would make Britain’s exports more competitive without generating a spike in inflation that would likely result from an overt sterling devaluation. The Callaghan administration was held back from totally abolishing controls by a resistant trade union movement. Thatcher, however, was able to fully scrap these controls due to the historic defeat of the trade unions in the 1979 Winter of Discontent. In addition, Thatcher sought to reassure global financial markets that this policy was not an attempt to lower sterling’s value, but was rather driven by a genuine faith in laissez-faire principles. The abolition of exchange controls should thus be understood as a palliative strategy to protect governing legitimacy by providing temporary relief to Britain’s export sector.

Research into Early-Stage Identification of Entrepreneurs and Innovators with Development of an Identification Guidance Framework

Youth unemployment is increasing and some countries are exhibiting unprecedented levels of youth unemployment, which according to research from Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC), is costing the British economy £45bn per year, as well as blighting the careers of workers who miss out on a job in their teens and twenties. Unemployment exists because jobs do not, therefore one way to act to reduce it is to create jobs. It isn’t the governments remit to create jobs, not in the private sector therefore this responsibility is falling more and more on entrepreneurs. This paper seeks to establish a paradigm as to what it is that makes someone entrepreneurial, primarily focussed on positively identifying traits exhibited by entrepreneurs which can be used to assist in that identification process. It seeks to identify the traits and characteristics that make individuals entrepreneurs with a view to devising a framework of identifiable indicators for the tertiary education age group of 16–18-year-olds, leading potentially to early-stage identification of entrepreneurs.

Rhetoric, the Pox, and the Grand Tour

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the Grand Tour, sex, and venereal disease became almost indivisible in the public imagination. The Grand Tour was an essential element of a well-born man's education. Yet a persistent belief developed that continental travel was infecting the youth of England with debilitating disease, and that they were bringing disease home to harm the nation. The belief sprang from medical ignorance and xenophobia, but also from the usefulness of associating pox with the Grand Tour, a rhetorical move that helped to palliate domestic medical problems, enrich sectors of the British economy, and lay groundwork for changes in the control of political power—and that has persisted into our own era's conception of the Grand Tour.

A reappraisal of Joseph Brennan and the achievements of Irish banking and currency policy 1922–1943

Joseph Brennan, as secretary of the Irish Department of Finance (1923–7) and chair of the Irish Currency Commission (1927–43), was a pivotal influence on Irish banking and currency affairs. Yet, within the existing literature, his adherence to conservative British norms is seen as providing a ‘bleak prescription’ for the Irish economy. However, such a view ignores the fact that Brennan was far from dogmatic on banking and currency issues and underplays his incrementalist, and often internationalist, approach to the development of Irish monetary institutions. Brennan's actions up to the early 1940s were based on the realities of Ireland's slowly receding economic and intellectual dependency on Britain, a ‘dependency’ often misrepresented in the existing literature as a more primitive, pre-Keynesian, conservative approach. However, rather than acting as a restraining influence on Irish economic development, the policies Brennan advocated enabled Ireland to avoid the instability associated with many smaller, emerging nation states in the 1920s and 1930s. The focus on continuity – which guaranteed currency and banking stability – represented the realities of Ireland's reliance on the sluggish British economy in the decades after independence. Brennan's achievement, in helping to sustain banking and currency stability notwithstanding economic uncertainty, a fragile political environment (and suspicious banking interests), deserves wider acknowledgement.

The Military and Diplomatic Strands

At the beginning of 1915, concern mounted in Britain over the prolongation of the war, the damage to the British economy caused by uncoordinated military mobilization, and mounting evidence of strategic drift. In addition, political leaders were uneasy over the magnitude of casualties on the Western Front, and nervous at the thought of committing there the Kitchener New Armies comprised of volunteers. Prime Minister Asquith announced a full review of strategic policy to be held during first week of January 1915. Major disagreements over strategy within both army and navy high commands and much lobbying ensued. The planned strategic review was effectively aborted when the British army commander in France complained that the government was starving him of adequate resources, however, and nothing was resolved.