Any other business: A protest against the last time the Stock Exchange was invaded – by bankers in 1986

As mass expressions of anti-capitalist rage go, ‘Occupy London Stock Exchange’ has been a bit of a damp squib. What was meant to be an assault on the epicentre of evil dealing, co-ordinated with similar eruptions in New York and elsewhere, swiftly turned into an extended coffee morning on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Perhaps the genteel protesters did not realise that their target was ill-chosen anyway because the Stock Exchange building in heavily defended Paternoster Square (owned by the Mitsubishi Estate company of Japan — there’s globalisation for you) houses only the market’s bureaucrats, while the evil dealing itself takes place in cyberspace above. What I’m sure they did not realise is that they were heralding the 25th anniversary of the last time the Exchange was invaded — by bankers, when the ‘Big Bang’ reforms came into effect on 27 October 1986.

Those were the measures that turned the City into a closer imitation of Wall Street by abolishing fixed dealing commissions, removing barriers between broking and market-making, and allowing high-street banks to taste the glamour of investment banking by buying up Stock Exchange firms. It is instructive to look back at what we said about Big Bang on its 20th anniversary in 2006, at the very height of the boom. ‘So has it all been a success?’ asked my former City boss Sir Martin Jacomb. ‘The answer is a resounding yes.’ Foreign banks and investment managers had flocked to London; the proportion of global dealings and the number of jobs secured were ‘astounding’.

As for me, I began by sounding a more sceptical note: ‘Within banks like ours [Sir Martin and I both worked for BZW, the predecessor of Barclays Capital] it destroyed shareholder value, job security and collegiate trust and made millionaires of some very undeserving people; on a wider front it encouraged … excessive risk-taking in increasingly volatile markets, while doing nothing to protect or boost savings.’