Article
The EU agenda of Andrew Burnam means courting a partner whose standing ambition is to neutralise the City. The better match lies across the Atlantic.
EVERY NOW AND THEN, a British Prime Minister discovers the grass is greener in Brussels, while Brussels consistently reminds him it intends to pave his lawn and ship the turf to Frankfurt.
The Eurocircles, that Franco-German clerisy which sets the weather in the Commission, the ECB and the finance ministries of Paris and Berlin, have never hidden their view of what continental editorialists call "Anglo-Saxon capital." The phrase names no ethnicity and no single institution. It is a composite villain stitched together from Wall Street and the City of London, the hedge fund and the private-equity house, the short seller and the banker's bonus: the foreigner who buys your factory, trims your payroll and books the profit in a currency you do not print.
Neutralising Anglo-Saxon influence inside the member states is no accident of integration. It is one of integration's governing purposes, and it supplies the rhetoric to match the actions.
The record speaks for itself. In April 2005, Franz Müntefering, then chairman of the SPD, told Bild am Sonntag that certain financial investors descend on companies like swarms of locusts, graze them bare and move on. An internal party list of "locusts" soon leaked; Goldman Sachs and KKR were on it. The provocation had a trigger. Hedge funds had just forced Deutsche Börse to drop its bid for the London Stock Exchange and ousted its chairman and chief executive.
Anglo-Saxon capital had committed the unforgivable sin of winning the hand against German national interest.
In 2010, former Italian Commissioner Mario Monti presented A New Strategy for the Single Market. In his report to Commission President José Manuel Barroso, Monti explicitly identifies an Anglo-Saxon economic model and contrasts it with continental European social-market economies. He describes the Anglo-Saxon Member State (the UK) as favouring deregulation, market liberalisation and limited EU intervention in industrial and social policy and alludes to "tension" between the two models.
A year later, the ECB tried law where invective had failed. Its 2011 oversight framework required clearing houses handling large volumes of euro business to sit inside the eurozone, which would have marched critical London infrastructure across the Channel. Britain sued, and in March 2015 the General Court annulled the policy, finding that the ECB lacked competence over securities clearing. Frankfurt lost the case but kept its appetite.
Christian Noyer, then governor of the Banque de France, supplied the doctrine. In December 2012, he declared there was no rationale for the largest financial centre active in the euro to be offshore, and that the bulk of the business should be "under our control." He said it in Tokyo, where he was promoting Paris as a renminbi hub. Offshore, apparently, is a vice only when others practise it. His own analogy gave the game away: Washington tolerates dollar trading in London but keeps the core at home. Noyer was describing a currency empire, not a single market.
In November 2024, speaking at the Collège de France, Emmanuel Macron explicitly contrasted continental European financial structures with Anglo- Saxon capital markets and criticised the diversion of European savings towards American financial intermediaries.
As recently as November 2025, French Parliamentary proceedings identify the predominantly Anglo-Saxon character of major private-equity investors and express concern about the public company model of ownership for French companies.
Brexit removed the British litigant and left the ambition naked. EMIR 3, in force since 24 December 2024, imposes an active account requirement that obliges EU counterparties above set thresholds to clear a representative share of euro and zloty swaps and euro short-term rate derivatives at EU clearing houses. The target is unmistakable: LCH cleared roughly 80 per cent of euro OTC interest-rate derivatives. The yield has been thin. ESMA's own interim report of July 2026 records only moderate and still limited uptake of EU clearing. The market keeps voting for London; Brussels keeps redrafting the ballot. Add the bonus cap Britain contested in Luxembourg and scrapped once free to do so, and the pattern is complete.
Why, then, would anyone in Westminster want back in? The rejoiners point to frictions: lost passporting, duplicated authorisations, equivalence granted at Brussels' pleasure and withdrawn at its whim. Yet national interest is a threshold argument, not a line item. One does not weigh savings on paperwork against membership of a club whose central bank regards your largest export industry as a supervisory anomaly. The issue is whom the EU is for, and on finance the answer has never been London.
The opportunity lies west. In September 2025 HM Treasury and its American counterpart launched the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future, charged with linking the two capital markets and easing cross-border capital raising. Its first ten recommendations, published in July 2026, envisage a "multi-money" system in which stablecoins and tokenised deposits coexist. It is a start, if a timid one.
The ambition should be a single liquidity pool. America brings depth: the largest equity and Treasury markets on earth, and pension money in quantities Europe can only legislate about. London brings plumbing: multicurrency netting, the world's leading foreign-exchange market, and clearing infrastructure that already handles swaps in dozens of currencies.
Join them through mutual recognition of prospectuses, substituted compliance for derivatives, cross-margining between LCH and its American peers, and common rules for tokenised collateral, and capital stops paying a toll at the Atlantic. Brussels offers Britain a seat at a table laid for someone else's dinner. Washington offers half the kitchen.
None of this comes free. American regulators have a long reach and a short temper, FATCA is no love letter, and the current administration greets allies with tariff schedules. A transatlantic pool would mean accepting a measure of extraterritorial supervision. But the arrangement would be sovereign and reciprocal. And the asymmetry is decisive. Washington, for all its truculence, wants a strong London as the eastern terminus of dollar finance. Paris and Frankfurt want London's business as a trophy.
Britain spent forty years telling Europe the City was an asset; Europe spent forty years treating it as a target. Burnham's rejoin agenda calls a return going home. Some homecomings are better described as extradition.
