TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 19: The City of London feat. Riley Quinn

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

Did you know that the City of London, the small mini-enclave that dates back to Roman times, is a separate state entity that predates the United Kingdom by hundreds of years? And that its special status makes it basically immune to disclosure rules and financial oversight? Well, sort of. Riley steps in to explain The Land of the Weird Bollards and much more. We offer one Britainology a month in addition to all the weekly TF bonus content for $5 a month, and if you desperately want more Britainology, there's also a second episode available each month on the $10 tier. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of Britannology. It's me, Miles Rebbards. I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Nate Bethea. Hello. I'm recording remotely today because much like Jair Bolsonaro, I've been stricken by heaven and I'm lying on the couch feeling ill. I think I have the opposite problem of Jair Bolsonaro, which is to say, well, let's not get into that,

but you can use your imagination of all the many ailments Jair Bolsonaro has, imagine what the opposite of those might be, and you can guess. Yeah, Nate's looking good as hell. Nate, I don't think that it's possible to have the opposite ailment of Jair Bolsonaro because Jair Bolsonaro has every ailment. They are all of the ailments that are opposite from one another. He has.

He has them. It is kind of weird to me because a former paratrooper army captain turned weird hypochondriac hits a little bit too close to home, but at the same time, I'm not the president of the largest country in South America, so I guess that's where the comparisons end. I'm sure there are some people online who do believe that about you though. The question is, Nate, can you do a flexo? Yes, I guess you do multiple flexos better than Jair Bolsonaro can.

There you go. That is one thing that is very funny to me is a lot of these like super hardcore tough guys, like even when they know they're going to be obligated to perform push-ups in front of people, like they just go, they seem to do zero practice at all. They just look like they're humping the ground and it's wild to me, man. Dude was in the army. I'm sure they do correct flexos in the Portuguese army,

the Brazilian army, or the Portuguese army too, either. It's just wild to me, man. I don't get it. I think personally is what they should do is a much more impressive and technically demanding lift, something like a snatch. I don't know what was it, like Joe Biden challenged that guy to push-ups and then the old guy, the old guy, Grassley. Chuck Grassley did some weird push-ups with, I think...

Excuse me, there's a guy called Chuck Grassley. Yeah, he's a guy in the Senate who's sundown. Oh, come on, Milo. We got to do some Americaology. Chuck Grassley is an 87-year-old senator from Nebraska, I know Iowa, I think, and he refuses to let his... Chuck Cornley, am I right? He refuses to let his aides run his Twitter for him

and he just types in the most deranged old man lingo with bizarre abbreviations and telling insane stories that go nowhere because he just runs his own Twitter. Yeah, it's wild. Also, it's like the almost Trump shit. It's different. Trump has lots of had, I hate to say had,

lots of strange vendettas that he would like to go on and had a very unique way of talking. Chuck Grassley, I don't think, knows the difference between Twitter and Microsoft Word. I don't think he knows where he is at any given point. Also, it's kind of like a hybrid of Trump and Biden. Yeah, it's an old man. I'll give you an example of a Chuck Grassley tweet.

Now, bear in mind, this is one of the more iconic ones, but it's from nine years ago. So, October 26, 2012. Fred and I hit a deer on Highway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled Fender rubbing on tire, we continued to farm, assumed you're dead. He does a lot of like complaining about the history channel. It's great.

I love it. Anyway, he tried to do push-ups to make a political point. A lot of people in America have been, there's something happening in America where people are trying to do push-ups to make a political point. I just think that they should replace it with a more technically demanding lift like a snatch. Yeah.

I mean, to be honest with you, the Army has changed the physical fitness test, and I don't really know the specifics because I don't have to care anymore, but it does actually involve some kind of a bar lift instead of the old Army physical fitness test, which was push-ups, sit-ups, and a run. Yeah.

It'd be funny if the guys were trying to make a political point by like doing Zumba. Yeah, exactly. You're going to do a perfect crow to make this political point. We're going to honor our veterans by doing a full Billy Blanks Taibo class. I actually think it would be better

if they challenged dudes to defeat some strength by making them do Turkish get-ups or something like that. I hate Turkish get-ups. It requires so much coordination. You have to wear a fez. It's just a bizarre exercise. I mean, it's a tough exercise. You do it correctly and don't injure yourself.

It's good. Where's the Turkish get-up? You start lying on the floor and like you may be holding a kettlebell and you sort of go one motion to the other to sort of stand. It's a good hip strengthener. It also is good for sort of core stability.

Basically, you take away on a bar or a kettlebell. I've seen guys use a full squat like bar with plates. And basically, you either start it from on the ground or you start it from like, you know, holding it up in the air but with your back on the ground and you get all the way up to a standing position holding it with one arm. It's just a very strange motion to kind of like work through.

And of course, lots of people get really... What's the right word here? They get super... They get over-enthusiastic about how much weight they can do with such a strange motion. And needless to say, it leads to some gyro bull scenario-esque injuries. It sounds like you could really hurt yourself doing that.

Yeah. That's CrossFit for you. It's the great orthopedic injury machine. I loved it. I loved to tear a rotator cuff to put it on point. I definitely used to be into CrossFit when I was much younger. That is not surprising. Yeah.

The crossing of the fit is the birthday boys reward. I loved it. It was great. I was sort of very proud of my relatively low Fran time. I thought it was great. But the problem... Fran time. Yeah.

The workouts are all given... Are we doing this? It's just... It's no. Americanology. We've taken it over. We've taken over the names. Unless they're really hard workouts,

then they're given the names of people who died in the service of the country, specifically the U.S. Oh, wow. Those are called hero workouts. Oh, man. Oh, I really... I hated CrossFit before, but now I like...

I didn't know I had more hate in me for CrossFit, but I did. CrossFit is super like almost joined the military guys. Like it's a very... There's a huge contingent of that. And there's tons of true perspective stuff that goes into it. Like I've seen hero workouts named after people I knew in real life who died. It's really weird.

It genuinely weirds me out. And it's funny because I feel like CrossFit is actually not particularly good in the way it's done for people in the military for two reasons. And then we can move on. Number one, because it teaches you with the speed and the numbers of reps, it teaches people terrible form. Awful. Awful form.

And for stuff that like where they are doing grading, like it doesn't matter if you can do 50 kipping pull-ups. If you can't do fucking 10 actual pull-ups, you kind of suck. And then also like just the propensity for injury of like screaming and going harder and like not stopping if you're hurt. Like the last thing you need is fucked up people on... This is just shouting at you to do deadlifts faster.

You're not in a good working program. Yeah. I remember being at Osan Air Base fucking on a temporary assignment when I was in Korea and I was just gonna go to the gym. Part of the gym was occupied by like a... I mean, this is folks in the military, but doing like a CrossFit sort of authorized CrossFit class. And the guy was just like yelling at them.

And I'm like, man, fuck this shit. Like, I just... I'm not gonna pay money and give my free time away to have some dickhead yell at me like this. It's just not gonna happen. I'm still on the hero workouts thing. Really proud of my incredibly low donor time. That's actually a really funny bit to do a donor hero workout. I just have to murder everyone in the gym.

I'm just wondering if someone's thought of doing that, like to troll like, you know, a CrossFit gym in Maine or something like that, get them to do work, actually do the class. Got my donor time sub 30. Fuck's sake. Oh, fun. It's funny because like we're kind of on like a dad chat, Americaology vibe,

but we're gonna talk about something very not related to any of these things today. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, before that one final thought. Hero workouts, but for cops that died in service. There are those. Oh, no. It's anyone.

Firefighters, cops, soldiers, a lot of soldiers. Border patrol. Yeah. Border patrol. Military working dogs. If you have a thin line flag, if you have a thin line flag honoring your profession, there will be a CrossFit hero wad named after you.

It's a matter of time. Until we get a tow truck driver hero wad. I'm just thinking about like somebody who, you know, like they scalded themselves to death with a hot cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee while working in the 911 dispatcher office and they get a wad. Yeah. You have to lift a phone a hundred times. Dispatchers do have a colored line for like the thin whatever line.

Yeah. And they're going to get a hero wad. What do they fucking die of RSI? Probably the hero wad. They probably died of the wad. Yeah, exactly. They did the hero wad for their friend, the hero who died from the Dunkin Donuts scald and then they died

having cardiac arrest, trying to do CrossFit. In the long term, it's all just hero wads. America ends with just a billion hero wads. It's weird, man. It got weirder over time. I remember when the only one was the one named after like the lone survivor seal, like it was like Murph or some shit. Murph was a fucking killer.

I mean, I'm sure Murph in real life was also a fucking killer, but that wad was a killer. He definitely was. I saw some wild shit too. Like I saw this thing on fucking Instagram where they were doing like say their names, which were like specifically like riffing on the say her name sort of thing about like black women who have been killed, like particularly by the police, but in general, like the fact that black women,

black women, like victims don't get named in the press, like that kind of a thing. But they were doing it for like soldiers who died in combat. And I'm like, everyone says their fucking names. Fuck. Like the guy in the picture was a friend of mine. It was like they did his whole home state. Did the flags at half mast for him when he died?

Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? But it is wild to me that anything oriented around any kind of like it once, once you've got like a Navy seal hero workout that every single person decides they also need a hero workout and anything that's around social justice invariably gets like fucking transmogrified into like cop and troop stuff. The Navy seal hero workout is you start off in a pool and there's a dinghy floating in the pool and you have to swim over there, climb onto the dinghy and then stab four punching bags. Yeah, exactly.

The Navy seal wad is basically like they have a bunch of box jumps shaped like children. And you've got to make sure to fucking clear the entire room by box jumping but knocking them over with your heels as well. That's right. And yeah, the more alert listeners may have noticed that we have Riley with us. Hey, what's up? I love coming on this podcast. Yeah, it's your friend Riley from that other podcast. Yeah, you might listen.

You might listen. Maybe you don't listen to it. Maybe you just listen to the Britonology. I'm the guy who signs up for the Britonology Patreon on Trash Future and doesn't listen to any other content. Yeah, that's right. There's got to be at least one. And I like you. Thank you.

If you're that fan, do do write in. Yeah, postcard though. Only physically write in. Yeah, only work out the address by trial and error. Work out and then maybe the address will come to you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, do the do the hero work out for podcasters. Yeah, do the hero to the TF hero workout.

That's right. Yeah, the thin purple line. Yeah, what would the TF hero workout be like? You have to like knock down three white monsters, vape an entire jewel pod, eat an enormous plate of oysters, buy a cup of buy a cup of coffee, but get charged for soup. Badges. I was going to say at the end of it, you have to you have to you have to

in one final feat of strength, rip the exhaust system off of BMW convertible. It's still too painful. It's a workout that happens in a weight vest, but all the weight in the vest comes from medals that they gave to like people who just did normal jobs in the Soviet Union. Oh yeah, nice. Yeah, that's good. I'm very upset about my BMW exhaust.

What kind of car? I'm a law and order guy. What sort of car is it that you have? The BMW. Interesting. You got that after going to what university? I forgot. Angry Ruskin. Excellent.

So it's going to be on masters of our domain. Is there a topic? What are we doing? Yeah, that's right. We're on masters of our way to die. And yeah, what we've got Riley here to talk about it, we're kind of doing a Britonology where I'm not going to do the explaining. Riley is going to do the explaining because we want to talk about the city of London because we're doing a special two-parter.

We always do two Britonologies a month, but this one is actually a two-part. So this is going to be your $5 Britonology about the history of the city of London. And it pairs like a fine wine, like a fine Niagara Pinot Noir. So pretty good from there, you know. That's what I hear. You said that unique escarpment. It pairs very finely with the other episode we recorded with my actual brother Matt about what it was like working as a city broker in the 90s,

but I am confidently predicting will be the spicier of the two episodes. No, I'm going to try to make this as... Look, if you have some opinions about local government in the 19th century and time immemorial, then maybe this will be spicy. Who can say that? Yeah, that's right. We'll get loads of guys in like monocle falling into their soup. Like, what did he just say?

Well, that's the weird thing actually when you talk about city reform. That still is the reaction to even mild proposals that this ought to be looked at. I love to foreshadow. So it's all... I mean, I'm unable to go onto a podcast without making notes, I guess. Sure. Well, this is great because it means I have no time this week because as we've previously mentioned, someone stole the exhaust off my car.

So you doing the notes for this has been very helpful for me. So basically, right? The city of London is... I'll start with a quote. This is from 1957 and it was a report on reforming local government across Britain, which was the following. Logic has its limits and the position of the city lies outside of them. And this is a theme that comes up kind of again and again

when we talk about city reform. There have been several... The city is like a kind of Escher painting. So it's kind of like non-Euclidean financial space. Well, it's a square mile. It's not a square mile. It's a city that doesn't have any inhabitants, really. And it's a corporation that doesn't have any customers.

It does actually lie outside of the realm of... It is a strange little thing. Now, listeners to the TF may or may not know our Britannology as well. Can we talk about this on TF a bit? They may not know that the city of London doesn't refer to metropolitan London. That thing that's roughly ringed by the M25. The city of London refers to the square mile, the medieval city of London, that's at the centre, roughly, a little bit to the east of metropolitan London.

The old city of London. Yeah, more or less. We are currently sat about 200 metres from the border of it right now. Yes, that's right. It's one of the few entrances, I believe, not guarded by dragons. Yeah, that is right. I think there are, what, 17 dragons? The Jizya police got rid of those in Tower Hamlets.

There are actual dragons? Yeah, there are statues of dragons on plinths that ring the traditional borders of the city when it was no longer defined by walls. I see. Well, because they have those little bollards everywhere, don't they? They have the city of London crest on them. Well, that's a different thing entirely. That's because there's so much to talk about the city of London.

But this medieval city is now the sort of central business and financial district, or one of the several, and it's the most venerable. What's unique about this one, though, is that it was also kind of Britain's and Western Europe's, arguably. Again, it's fortunes rising and falling and so on and so on, since basically the medieval era before the Norman conquest. It was also the financial center then. It's where people came together to do any kind of complex trade

that would be larger than a, you know, this village to that village. It was where it all happened. Home to your medieval crypto guys. Yes, exactly. 13 dragons, as a matter of fact. I'm into Tithe coin. Yeah, that's right. So there are, so essentially, this is,

why it's matters now is that the city of London as is a local authority, number one. Yeah. It's also, so it's a local authority that administers the things for the people who live in the city of London. So that's mainly people who live in the Barbican. Yeah, it's like four guys. There's some, there's some thousands, a couple thousand.

It's the most sparsely populated bit of central London, certainly. And in fact, London entirely. It's the most sparsely populated administrative area. So it is a local authority. And it's that local authority acts like a local authority. There are schools. There's public housing. There's the normal things you would expect.

There's garbage collection. There's normal things you would expect a local authority to do. But there is also another, and then there's the geographical entity, the square mile that's guarded by the 13, no, sorry, not 17 dragons. And then, there is the corporation of the city of London, which is a local authority that should not exist in modernity, but does because of a lot of coincidences and power struggles throughout the last thousand to 1500 years.

Right. Okay. The corporation of the city of London is an elected body. And it's elected by a combination of the people who live in London. So they elect Alderman from its many wards. These wards being like cheap, wall worth. Yeah, they all have like weird ass names. Yeah.

And cheap is a great place. It ain't cheap to live there. Let me tell you that, folks. I don't think anyone does live in cheap. Cheap is one of the ones where no one actually lives in it. So like, there must be at least one guy who lives in every, like, I don't know. There's got to be a few apartments in each of these. So like tower has peace.

So basically, though, the wards are stuff like they're called stuff like Ventry, Dowgate Bridge with London Bridge, cheap, which has like cheap side sort of off bank, Wallbrook and Corn Hill, which I think one of them has bank in it. Well, because cheap goes almost all the way up to Hoban, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. Cheap is tiny. These wards of the city of London, because the city of London is a square mile.

Yeah. The wards are tiny. The wards are a few streets. Yeah, yeah. The street cheap might go all the way, almost all the way to Holburn, but the ward cheap does not. Okay. Right.

These wards will contain like maybe one main street and then a few streets are shooting off of it. Okay. And the thing is right. All of this is important because when you elect the government of the city of London, it is not just the people who live in the wards who elect the older men who choose the government and elect the Lord Mayor. It is businesses.

Yes. Businesses and this is decided by size, by number of employees, but the businesses are supposed to vote for their own interests, not for their employees interests. So the bigger a business is, the more votes it gets on the various assemblies, the various assemblies that make up the corporation of the city of London. So when TF gets its office in the Gherkin. We will get a vote.

Yes. Yes. And how do they calculate the size of a business? Is it based on turnover or what? Number of employees that come and work in the city. Right. Right. Okay.

The city has its roots. We get to vote for our employees, but explicitly not in their interests. Not Alice. No. No. She doesn't come. No. So that's, she's out.

I'm afraid. She's out. So we, and this is. Well, due to an arcane law, Alice actually gets a vote anyway, because of how many medals she owed. That is the kind of thing that actually would, that's the kind of thing that actually happens. Yeah.

So this is this, and so this is the strange sort of, and it is a very ancient democratic institution. It was, in a sense, it is, it was, it was, it remained a direct democracy through it from basically forever. It has always been this way. It has never, it has never in recorded history being another way. And when I say never in recorded history, that is a term that is very legally loaded.

Right. Because the city of London is, it was granted its official charter by Charles II, but that official charter did not reference another charter. It just said all of its rules and freedoms, as we are familiar with through history. Right. Okay.

So in effect, right, the city of London, as most cities have charters, right? Yeah. You know, the city of York was made a city by a government at some point. Yeah. Right. The city of York was made a city, which means that there is a clear sort of institutional hierarchy

between government and city, where the city of York is has certain, it is able to do certain things and it is able to do those things as those powers are devolved from the political establishment, from the, from the politic. Yeah. Right. The city of London,

because it was, it would, because basically the phrase is that William the Conqueror came friendly to the city of London. He didn't actually subdue it. He knotted on it. Yes. William the Conqueror knotted on the walls. He contributed the city of London.

So William the Conqueror came friendly to the city of London and then basically agreed that it would join his state, but it joined his state more or less by agreement. Yeah. Again, this is glossing a history that's much more complex. It's not as though the city of London knew, like the city of London was not co-equal, but its authority derived from the fact that it has,

quote, always been like this. Right. And so, for example, and then so what happens is no one, there is no, the city of London, the corporation of the city of London does not, like for example,

I don't know Hackney Council, Tower Hamlets Council, owes its ability to govern and carries out the tasks of an ordinary council because it has received that authority from the state. Yeah. The city of London has not received its authority from the state. Its authority predates the state

and reached a settlement with the state, which is incredibly significant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, I mean, the basic, the mythology of it, right, is that William the Conqueror was like having too much trouble with the walls of the city and so he decided that it would be easier

just to like come to some sort of arrangement with them, which is why it has certain privileges, which other local authorities and areas do not to this day. Again, that's, I think that the real answer is more just like he needed money and the city of London could lend you money. Okay. And that's been the relationship between the city and the Crown

and for, you know, hundreds of years subsequently. In fact, there is an official position in Parliament called the Remembrancer for the city of London, who I believe was installed in the time of King Charles II to remind the king of his debts to the city and who in modernity acts like an official financial industry lobbyist that is part of the British Parliament.

Awesome. Yeah, we don't know why he's there and he's not democratically accountable to anyone, but the businesses in the city and you can't get rid of him. Cool. He's there forever. I also like that he's called the Remembrancer.

Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That is kind of good. So in fact, this the first time we speak of the city, I mean, Charles II sort of, sort of writes its, writes it in its privileges, meaning through inspectimus,

which basically means we have inspected in Latin and refers to confirming privileges that were already there. But the idea of the city of London had privileges that were already there goes back beyond the Magna Carta, beyond William the Conqueror. Again, the Magna Carta actually does.

It's one of the, this is I believe still in force, but recognizes, but does not specify the nature or source or anything of the city of London's ancient liberties. It's this black box in the center of the country that just happens to have all the businesses in it. Inspectimus sounds like a spell cast

in a turf version of the Harry Potter universe. Oh, a Harry Potter universe. Yes. So look, and there has been changes to the city over time, mostly they're actually just making it more powerful. The number of, there are nine,

last I looked, there were like 9,000 or so residents of the city of London. Like I said, many of them living in Barbican or in the estates near, they're the estates near Spitalfields. They have one vote each or electing like the Lord Mayor and whatnot. And then businesses have 32,000 votes

that was increased from 32,000 votes from 23,000 votes by Tony Blair. Our old friends. Our old friends. Dear friends. And so in addition to the Remembrancer, which is the world's oldest financial industry lobbyist. He's so old, that guy.

He's just like pissing and shitting himself in Parliament. Yeah. Croaking from the depths of hell. Yeah. To remind you that we need to establish Britain as a globally competitive financial center. I love a corporation. Thanks.

It's that. It's also just like don't regulate us. Yeah. Stay out of our business. It's well that you basically have the franchises extended to companies. That's, as I understand it, the Legislative Corporation of Hong Kong

has representation from the boards of corporations like in their legislature. Like you have like Senator Microsoft basically, but like it's wild that London has that. That it's like the voter base is companies. Yeah. I mean, who do you think came up with the system of governments of Hong Kong?

Exactly. Exactly. But it's just wild because that's not something that I feel like I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the arcane bullshit that goes into the way the British government runs. And I had no idea about this. So basically, I think a lot of people don't know about it because a lot of people don't talk about it because it's this thing

where it's like... It's impolite. As that's the rule around the table. You don't talk about religion, politics, or the city of London. And I mean, so we have this, if we think about this, right? We think about the self government of London. It's sort of, let's just, all of this is sweet generous as of William the Conqueror.

It gets sort of officially recognized by the British state as like this kind of not co-equal, but this thing that's sort of external to its control vis-à-vis all the other local authorities or what would be parishes would become local authorities, whatever. As a British state grows up, I mean, you can't say British state referring to like the 12th century. But the main, the highest levels of government here, whatever they would have been at the time,

recognized basically as slightly to the side of the sovereign's authority. And in effect, it means, right, that London can do what it wants. When it received refugees from displacement, from enclosure in the Midlands, the reason that Derry is often, was called London Derry by British people, is that the city of London exported all of its refugees to Derry in Ireland. So it was, and then basically tried to be like, tried to colonize basically,

tried to let all the London guilds, which were like the main, which were sort of the main organizations in the city, right? So there were guilds, like the worshipful company of Mercer's was the oldest one, was the first just like merchants. But then you have Cordwayners, Ferriers, Haberdasher's and so on. We love to Cordwayne. Yeah. Big on that.

This, in fact, became, they've continued to add to the worshipful companies. There was a worshipful company of management consultants, for example. Oh, man. Oh, boy. They're so worshipful, those guys. We love to worship them. Yeah, they worship something. They're worshiping the Big Accel spreadsheet.

Right. So there are these... We're going to be like a worshipful company of e-girls or whatever. Yeah, I'm sure. That would be cool. If there are a lot of them who start working in the city, you know? Yeah. Why not?

I just like the idea of being observed by alien anthropologists with the same sort of detached view that British anthropologists had in the 19th century. And they discovered that actually that is what all humans in the developed world worship is the Excel spreadsheet. They're like, well, they do spend a lot of time doing their devotions at it every day. It's like, yeah, fair enough. That's right. So that's the other sort of...

When you talk about sort of how the city governs itself on a day-to-day basis traditionally, at least, it has its council, which is the Alderman and the Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor as well is an international diplomat who has no relationship with the British state as you might think about it. He, for example, will spend a lot of money going on delegation visits to Hong Kong or whatever to promote Britain's interests abroad. But again, these are not the interests of people. This is not even remotely democratically accountable interests.

The interests of the city of London, which is primarily... Whose primary constituents are banks. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Banks are people too, guys. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. Because the word corporation means body. Who has bodies? People. Well, exactly. That's why it was called the corporation of the city of London because it was an alternative body politic. But it wasn't just a corporate...

We didn't call it a corporation like 20 years ago. It was called a corporation from the high medieval period. Right. So it's better than the mid medieval period. Yes. Exactly. Smoking on that shit stopped the peasants' revolt. Well, it was a Lord Mayor of London that killed Watt Tyler, as a matter of fact.

So the London has essentially always been like this. Amazing. No. So in fact, one of the interesting things, right, is you wonder... You ask why in Northern Ireland, the orange order people are all wearing like bowler hats. Excuse me. I knew they were wearing orange. I didn't know about the bowler hats.

They wear bowler hats in orange and go on parades. Yeah. The reason they wear bowler hats is because the city of London paid for them to be there. Oh. Now, one condition is that you must wear a bowler hat. The city of London basically founded the first order of men's rights activists and paid them to go march around in the street. The orange order have to wear braces, loud ties and pink socks and pinstripe suits under

the orange gear whenever they go marching, carrying umbrella, that sort of thing. And so anyway, I digress. So if you have your council, your alderman, you have your guilds as well. And all of these come together to run the city out of the Guild Hall. And a lot of people talk about the city of London as a kind of tax haven in the middle of Britain, and they are sort of right. Right. What it more does is, especially through its ability to influence politics, of which it

has considerable through, for example, its lobbying efforts and so on. It basically creates the connect... Now, journalist Nicholas Shaxson calls this the multi-ring theory of tax avoidance. What you have at the center of tax avoidance is the city, which coordinates lots of different activities, which involve keeping things offshore. Right. And so it, for example, will use the crown dependencies. That's like the Channel Islands.

That's fucking Bermuda, shit like that. No, no, no. Those are the British overseas territories. Those are different. Oh, okay. Channel... Crown dependencies are Channel Islands. They're the inner ring.

Right. There are trillion... I think over a trillion pounds sort of passes through those. The British overseas territories are slightly further removed. That's Caymans in Bermuda and so on. Right. Okay. And what Caymans in Bermuda are run by the British government.

Now, they're run by the British government at arm's length. Right. The British government could essentially turn off their tax haven status. Right. It doesn't. And yet. And yet it doesn't yet. And this is partly because...

Weird how that happens. And this is partly because of the influence that the city has. So, in addition to being an ordinary local authority, like I mentioned earlier, because every single time the sort of some version of the national state or sovereign authority that exists in England or Britain or the United Kingdom or whatever comes and sort of works and works it with the city, it always remembers or it always remembered in history when we're talking about kings who needed to like raise taxes to put... Because they remembered so.

Barons. Yeah. Partly. What side their bread is buttered on. And so every time they are going to write a law, they basically all... That law will generally contain a paragraph saying this law does not apply to the city of London, more or less. So, for example...

Such as the anti-dogging law. Dog anywhere. Yeah. Here's a challenge for you. If you wanted to know how the city of London, a political body that is a local authority, spent its money on financial industry law being say this year, how would you go about that? Computer hacking. No, no.

You were a journalist. What would you do? What would you do? Do a freedom of information request. Sorry. Doesn't apply. Oh. Well, that's fun.

Yeah. Even now, even right now in 2021, if you attempted to do a freedom of information request on the city of London, outside the functions it performs as a local, normal authority that is not allowed. Ah. Yeah. So, you could do it on the kind of like city of London council that does bin collections and that sort of thing.

Yeah. You can't do it on... Public, tell me your... I want freedom of information request. I want to see your procurement process for, I don't know, bin men. For outsourcing... Finding the hardest bin men. Yeah.

Tell me your procurement process for your hardest bin men game show. What tests do you subject them to? What lifts are they required to do? You could... Here I work out for a bin man. Yeah. So, you could do that. You could lift a whole dumpster over your head.

That's the thing. If a bin man falls in the line of duty, I would absolutely support a hero workout for them. But sadly, if I got smoked in Afghanistan, I would be very, very sad. If people were doing a stupid workout named after me, they would annoy me. But it would probably annoy me more is learning that because of this, the British government definitely, definitely does not take advantage of any of these lack of reporting requirements when it comes to how they lobby the banking industry. Yeah.

And next, that's one thing I've learned from your stories is that people are getting smoked in Afghanistan every day. So... I'm not fucking loud. The city essentially has a number of different organs as well. It has the city of London Police as distinct from the Metropolitan Police. Yes. Which is...

The city of London is one of the most noticeable things about the city of London. If you go into the boundaries of the city, you have the little fucking the bollards that have the logo on them. And also, you have the weird city of London cops who are not like Metropolitan London cops. They have like a different uniform, which looks extremely 90s. And they have like their vehicles look very different and they have a big stupid crest on them.

But also, it's too small to really have its own. So they're always kind of coordinating with the Met anyway. But like... Oh, yeah. And they have the little... When you go in, they have these little like vehicle chicanes with like a little booth where like a city of London policeman could sit and like do a customs check. Yes.

I didn't like what. I never is one. It's because that... In fact, this is related to the bollards is that the city of London decided to very subtly fortify itself physically. Right. So there are actually very few routes into the city of London. And those routes that there are, the big ones anyway, those tend to be guarded by police

in cars. Oh. And what is the purpose of that? Oh, it's because it's anti-terrorism. This is a recent thing. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they were worried about someone driving in a car bomb, basically.

And so they made it... Someone wants to blow up all the money. That's where we keep the money. Yeah. Shit. That is, in fact, where they keep all the money. So the tax haven thing works, right, is that all of the activity is coordinated by lobbied for the city of London.

And the idea is that you move the assets of your clients around offshore and keep them offshore. So money moves from the Caimans in Bermuda, it comes to maybe the Channel Islands to get invested in something or to be spent, but it never comes back to Britain. And it's from the city where all that activity is coordinated. I see. The city has hundreds of millions of pounds available to spend each year from income on the assets that it owns.

Again, you can't know what those are, by the way. Sorry. Yeah. Well, we sort of do know what some of them are, right? Yeah. It owns like Epping Forest, for example. Hanson Heath, I believe, as well. Yeah.

But it owns... It's a landlord of great sort of swaths of central London, not itself. No. Individuals within the city mostly own itself, but the city as a corporation has huge investments all over the place. It owns schools. It owns... It's a commercial landlord.

It also just like has had an enormous amount of money since forever. And all of that money has always remained outside the British tax system because it's like... Because there's no way to even access it. You can't be... They'd have to create a new law to tax the city of London from its city cash. And we can't do that. No.

Oh, the Remembrance Air would tell you not to. No, exactly. And that's why he's still there. Or rather, he would remind you not to do it, and you'd be like, oh, yeah, I was going to not do that. And that's the thing, right? This is a local authority that is also an international financial regulator that's elected by businesses that is untouchable in a way that no other local authority is, right?

And we're central... It's like local authority, Baz. And central government has no mechanism to go and touch that local authority at all, to do anything with it. So effectively, you have this little bit of Britain where you have reverse... You have reverse austerity. You have lavishness. And you can't know about it.

You can't touch it. You can't tax it. Nothing. And it is used, in fact, as financial industry lobbying money. And in two separate occasions from 1853, three separate occasions, rather, there have been attempts to essentially integrate and coordinate the city of London into Greater London and abolish the City of London Corporation. I presume they were very successful.

Oh, yeah. It worked super well. Yeah. It's been something that has always needed... We always sort of needed to sort of, you know, know. So Herbert Morrison, who is a relative of the Butter Stairs guy, Mandelson. The Butter Stairs guy. I love that he is now known on this podcast as the Butter Stairs guy.

Yeah. Very, very Buttery Stair guy. Well, hang on, wasn't it actually technically, Mandelson's not the Buttery Stairs guy. It was the guy whose apartment he was living in. Yeah, well, these things change. They're like the Egyptian guy, was it? Who died by falling down the stairs? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was Mandelson was saying that that guy had a very Buttery Stair case. Anyway. Sorry, just a bit of T.F. law there, if you're trying to keep up at home. So Herbert Morrison, who was once like the one of the first secretaries of the London Labour Party, said in the 1917, is it not time London faced up to the pretentious buffoonery of the City of London Corporation and wipe it off the municipal map.

The city is now a square mile of entrenched reaction, the home of devilry of modern finance and that journalistic abortion, the stunt press. The city is an administrative anachronism, the stunt press here, meaning like sort of early Fleet Street tabloids and stuff. And how things have changed. Yeah, they've changed so much. Well, that's actually weird, isn't it? All the papers used to be in the city.

Yeah, they always used to be in Fleet Street. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like right by the Royal cause of justice, ironically. Yeah. So when Morrison's talking about ceremonies, he's basically talking about the fact that this is an old boys, the oldest boys network of all. Yeah.

The fellas. Yeah. This is the fellas where they essentially have, again, since the medieval period, been dressing up in funny costumes and sort of doffing their caps to one another. Oh, it's an eyes wide shot party. No, it's just that it's all guys. Oh, OK. Yeah, it's all the fellas.

Yeah, it's a cool eyes wide shot party. There are so there are some myths that, for example, like the Queen cannot actually even drive through the city of London. She can't enter it officially without like interacting with the Lord Mayor, right? Like she has to come in and the Lord Mayor sort of preemptively gives her permission to enter the city, the idea that like if the if the Queen if the Queen's car takes a wrong turn and like has to like, I don't know, go down

like Upper Thames Street or whatever, that that's fine. Yeah, that's fine. Who would even know? City of London Police. Yeah, the Queen out. Excuse me, Madam, are you the Queen? Now, the lady, the gentleman, you, the special branch officer, you were conveying this lady who is in relation to the Crown in the sense that you yourself,

Madam, are the Queen. Now, this, of course, is the City of London. So you have actually crossed in relation to yourself, the border of the city of which of which you are not permitted as a monarch. Yeah, more or less, Queen gets like an 80 pound fine. That'd be great. I'd love that. Yeah, I'd be very funny.

It's just just for taking a wrong turn because of some like medieval settlement between her and like some merchants. This is kind of shit that happened to me. Got an 80 pound fine for driving a van through a tunnel the other week when they'd closed all of the bridges, became the fucking Joker. Get a van through a tunnel. You can't drive a van over two tons through the rather high tunnel. It doesn't say that.

It just says this height and this width, which the van got because there's like a physical thing that you have to fit through like the bag thing at an airport and the van fit through it. And I don't know what weight the weight the van is. It was fucking rented. It's about one of the smallest vans you can get. So the on London. Yeah, I'm just so mad about the van.

The Lord Mayor basically is this guy who has a his main thing again is being an international financial diplomat and also just providing an excuse for like some of the lamest people in the business world to like awesome. Put on red velvet coats. He has an elaborate stage coach. And he essentially is I like that he's very fancy. But for like he would be like the envy of any man in the 18th century. Yeah, you're an absurdly wanton stage coach.

He lives in the mansion house. And of course, yeah, the house house. And you are. Is it so the Lord Mayor of the City of London, right? Different from the Mayor of London, of course. Yeah, still has a lot of power. Yeah, the Lord Mayor of London. I've seen I have seen pictures of various Lord Mayor's of London.

Looks like if like a sort of like old timey admiral fucked a parrot. That's kind of his vibe. If you just want to picture that in your head. Yeah, so the Lord Mayor of London, basically the role now is to represent support and promote all aspects of the UK financial service industries. OK. And so they're and that but also they put on the Lord Mayor's show. Awesome. Is that where they post hole?

It's a I wish that's a Lord Mayor's only fans. Yeah, no, that's where they they do a little parade, basically the livery, all the livery companies and guilds in the Lord Mayor and dockets, coat and badge men and the honourable artillery company and and and various other people do like a little parade through the City of London, like to remind every and the thing is weirdly any time there's an attempt to reform the City of London, the Lord Mayor's parade is always more lavish.

It kind of seems like like a combination of Swiss guards and the Swiss financial system. Like, you know, basically it's like, oh, we have these guys work 15th century helmets of doing funny salutes with white gloves. By the way, we have Nazi gold. Like it's the same sort of duality, if you will. I love the idea of that being an own. Oh, if you try and reform us, we're going to get even more lavish. Like, you know, I'm going to I'm going to balance some

beluga caviar on the end of my dick. If you try and pass, I mean, guys try to change the laws. There is going to be kink at Pride this year, you motherfuckers. City of London Pride, it's financial pride. So the you're if you're become the Lord Mayor of the City of London, which I'm going to. Yes, you are sworn in in a ceremony called the silent ceremony. Oh, well, that sounds ominous about that.

Join me in the silencing and now the Lord Mayor makes their declaration of office and everyone's there in full ceremonial dress, including the sheriff's Alderman town clerk, the Chamberlain, swordbearer, the common crier and the sergeant at a harm's awesome to chamberlain. This is for the financial industry. Yeah, yeah, awesome. And these guys are all like full management consultants who I'm just laughing at the idea of there being like a like a passing the guide on changing

of the guard thing for Goldman Sachs. Yeah, effectively, I know. Yeah, yeah, it's just weird, isn't it? Like it seems as though this is all of the sort of ceremonial affectation of something between a city, state and a military regiment, but it's for this really arcane governing body that basically has enough influence to not be folded into the larger state. Yeah, correct.

And so basically what happens is the Lord Mayor, the outgoing Lord Mayor asks the swordbearer to hand over the keys to a safe in which the official city of London seal for like sealing documents is kept. Yeah, the swordbearer kept it alive that long. The swordbearer then takes off his cap. OK, and then he's wearing like a ball cap, like a palace. Probably a lot of cap with some corners on it. Yeah, and reaches inside the hat to take out a key.

Yes, yes. He then hands the key to the like the Lord Mayor, because Lord Mayor is it's like the it's like the Oxford Union, right? Where everyone wants to get a turn as the president. And so Lord Mayors are elected only for a year. Right, right, right, right. It's a good year, though. Yeah, it's a hell of a good year.

You live in that fucking house. You get all the stuff, you have a small apartment in that. I mean, it's a free dinners. Yeah. No, you're not paid anything, though. It's actually kind of expensive to be Lord Mayor of London. It's very much a victory lap position. But I could still podcast. Yeah, exactly. I just get a free apartment.

That'd be cool in mansion house. You could go to all of the hotspots of the all bar one, I imagine. Yeah, various prets. Yeah, various prets where I'm like, I'm on Jay. The Pelt Trader pub, which actually isn't bad. Yeah, prayer actually also pretense the British state. William the Conqueror came to an arrangement with Pratt because it was a French business.

So anyway, so the sword bearer takes the key from his hat and gives it to the outgoing Lord Mayor, who then passes it to the incoming Lord Mayor. The incoming Lord Mayor returns the key to the sword bearer and the sword bearer replies the ceremonial phrase, my Lord Mayor, I shall keep it under my hat. This is very similar to the way that you do a change of command ceremony in the U.S. Army.

It's very weird to me that that's that's like old timey regimental system sort of stuff, but in a city government. I mean, I'm sure there's weirder shit like that in America. Like in the way that, you know, some cities, their sanitation department wear what effectively look like military uniforms for like their formal uniforms or something. I'm sure there's weird stuff out there in America. But it is very, exactly.

But it is very, very funny that they have this and they're like, I shall keep it in my hat. That's that's good. You know, that gives me a lot of confidence that only the brightest and most keenly aware people are being put into these positions because it is a position demanding such seriousness. I like the idea of a bunch of American garbage men having to do like drill in dress uniform, like with little white gloves on.

And there's like a British bin man sergeant major on loan to them. He's going like, brooms up. So like a lot of this, if you like, it's kind of informal. How the power it has, it's informal. There's two parts of its informal power. There's the three parts, I think it's more of a family. There's three parts of the of the informal power that the city has. Number one is the legal power it has that dates that that goes back

to the fact that it was kind of always recognized as outside the British state and it was a or sovereign authority and was always able. Every time it dealt with sovereign authority, it was able to successfully push it back. So, for example, the first Lord Mayor of the City of London was originally the Portree of the City of London who like the Office of Lord Mayor isn't doesn't go back beyond William the Conqueror. The first Lord Mayor of the City of London was a man named Henry Fitz Alwyn and basically like in an exchange for London businessmen,

lending the crown money and the time of sort of King John Richard the first, the Robin Hood time, the Office of the Portree, which is like the Portree being a port warden or officer of the Crown, was turned into a Lord Mayor, right? So these some of these offices are are not are created through agreements between the city and the state, but they're not. They don't flow from the authority of the state. Right? Rightly. Let me get you to speculate a little bit here without naming names again.

I get the impression that the way this arrangement works in the modern day absolutely facilitates a lot of what you might call Panama Papers shit. Yes. Yes. And OK. And because yeah, I'm just laughing that it's all drawing upon an authority that was established in Robin Hood times, but that still applies. Because I mean, yes, there were the same sort of issues of people not wanting to like fork over to the state. And as Dr. Yaniga said, obviously, medieval taxes were in fact bad.

They were like unfair taxes left it on people so they could go like slaughter the heathen moor or whatever the hell they wanted to do. But it's also at the same time, though, like you didn't have the issue. It wasn't like you had, you know, medieval guild merchant being like, I shall use the powers of London to hide my ducats with Prestigeon. Like it's they didn't have offshore finance. You know what I mean? Like they didn't exist.

And the fact that that now does exist in the frayers to put these coins under their hassles, the idea that that you can basically that the one this one weird trick stopping financial disclosure from happening is is effectively like, you know, some Sherwood forest, you know, band of merry men style shit. Like it's just it's very wild to me. Well, so it's the if you think about it, right? It's and this is why I talk about how it has informal power. Like if you're a business based in the city of London, like it's not like

you're not in Britain. Like you still are based in Britain. It's that you are in a bit of political authority that shields you from or that that's whole job is to make sure that the state doesn't fuck with what you're doing. Right. You're you're you're in your if you're if your business is, for example, the moving around of offshore funds so that it can be invested and grow without paying taxes, the remembrance of the city of London is there to make sure

that you can coordinate those activities from Bishop's Gate, right? And that those those still remain important. So we have the we have the informal authority of of the fact that this is a separate and other place whose rights and privileges come from a settlement, agreement, compromise, memory. We also have a second kind of informal power, which is quite simply the fact that they are they have a lot of influence, structural influence in British policymaking and in global influence as well.

Like they're they are Britain's financial diplomats, right? And then thirdly, you also just have the fact that even non like the city, the Bank of England is is a national it was nationalized. It was nationalized in 1946 by the Atlee government. It was built several centuries earlier to fund the creation of the British Navy. And so the Bank of England has always had a whiff of the state about it, at least. But it's official mission, which only got in 1991 outside the normal central banking stuff is to enhance the international competitive position

of the city, which is what shows to me. I think that there is this sense that there is this sense of authority and that is the Bank of England, which is like effectively an arm of the treasury. But it's stated mission is to well, it's to enhance the international competitive competitive position of the city, meaning the city of London's the Britain's financial industry as represented by the city of London. It much let the thing is right. I think a determined enough government could actually undo the powers of the

city of London. Any liberal or labor government that has wanted to has either been stymied by an incoming conservative government, which basically just, you know, turns off the whole the whole business. That's what happened in 1853. That's what happened in 1894, I believe. And then Blair just decided to go with it and swim the other way and make it more powerful.

Right. It's the I just really like the key under the hat thing. He was watching that. He was like, do it again. But that's the third arm of informal power is this form of spectacle and pageantry and all of this sort of, you know, midi basically just medieval like like playing pretend that sort of the that like if you're a 46 year old insurance manager, you know, you like to go along and play pretend and you're sort of you're getting to be involved.

But the fact that you're talking, I think there is a sense that this is something that I think Britain does quite a bit is use the fact that everyone else perceives it as this sort of quite rarified and ancient place much to its advantage. And I think that's what all of these sort of stupid ceremonies do for the city. I welcome the key and I would encourage the Lord Mayor to go further by handing it back to me so I can put it under my hat. I'm just also laughing at the fact that, you know, like you said,

the conservative politics have stymied reform, but also like people have just been hypnotized by our Renaissance fair. And that's just like that's basically made it impossible to like, no, it's just too much pageantry. We love the pageantry. We want to we want to dress up and chain mail. Like it's just we have dumb shit in America. Don't get me wrong.

Like we have people who like to put on dry corn hats when they're mad and when they're happy, but it's not. It's not for all seasons. Why fold it into government yet? The stuff that we do weirdly enough, the stuff that we do have is all like relatively recent and just in a lot of ways, sort of uncomfortably fascist adjacent. You know, I'm thinking like putting in God, we trust everywhere. And, you know, the Pledge of Allegiance and stuff like that, but that's all recent.

That's all like the last hundred or so years. This dating back to like actual, you know, Norman invasion times is insane. And it's weird to me that I don't know. It's proof once again that, well, this is what happens when you don't have an actual revolution in your country ever. Like the stuff just sticks around and, you know, on a long enough timeline, I'm trying to think of what absurd thing we'd be doing now. Like, like basically we'll be at the point if this entropy continues

in British politics, we'll be at the point, like 200 years from now, where Netflix is beaming fucking bright 15 into our heads directly with like a neural link, but you still have to pay for your TV license. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, you have to pay for a TV license to have a brain. TV license authority will come around and check if you have a brain. I mean, I feel like, you know, there's a lot of accusations being thrown around that Britain is obsessed with pageantry and weird oldie world traditions.

But as someone who attended Cambridge University, I don't understand what you're talking about. What did you drive? I've got to run out, Cleo. But the thing is, right, all of this is the other thing about this, right? It's also very secret because there's kind of a nomerita. There's an omerita around the city of London where everyone involved in his democratic politics knows that they're all on the same side.

They know what they're all there to do. Nearly every decision is applauded by consensus. This is all a lot of this is coming from Nicholas Shaxton's amazing book, Treasure Islands. It's about tax havens and their relationship with the city of London. OK. In fact, some of the people working on the reforming the city who are sort of still caring about it and we're sort of caring about it through the Occupy days as well, where, you know, the occupiers

were sort of occupying Patternoster Square in St. Paul's various other places were Founder of Blue Labor Maurice Glassman and William Campbell Taylor, an Anglican minister. And this is this is how Taylor talked to Nicholas Shaxton about London, the city of London, how to think of it. Taylor sees something more than human greed at work. Quote, we are in this grip of something quite demonic. Institutions keep it alive and it's part of all of us.

I see it as a demonic spirit, it's something like a griffin, a mythical creature, which appears in many of the city's ceremonies. It is an intelligent demon, a dangerous thing. And I felt myself in danger at times. I pressed Taylor on this as Shaxton, but he became reticent and sat quietly or for a moment, absolutely wrapped in his own thoughts. Then he ventured, maybe some things are best not talked about.

I do think that it is spiritually very dangerous. The corporation of the city of London is a very dangerous place. I don't want to say that so-and-so is evil. Perhaps not all who work there are bad people, but we're all part of it. And this is after Taylor's experience becoming an elected alderman, specifically on an anti-city position almost for the Port Soaken Ward. And then acting as the only dissenting voice in roomfuls of men and for ermine robes and so on, just a loudly agreeing with one another.

And then, you know, bobbing off to go do something else. Making noises such as... And I mean, I think that we talk about a demon as a fallen angel. This is the oldest direct democratic body in Britain, certainly. The oldest continuously functioning one. It served as a bulwark of sort of many ordinary people for a long time against the, you might say, overweening sovereign authority. At the same time, it has been a sort of capricious commune

deeply sort of selfish and cruel one, subjecting, sort of deciding to use a wave of immigrants fleeing enclosure to, you know, brutalize the Irish. And also, you know, when if it's Lord Mayor is putting down, personally putting down a peasant rebellion. And it has basically, it has, I think, transformed into the opposite of what it might have started as is transformed from an urban commune into the kind of ideological and ceremonial nerve center for global capital. I mean, you could, there's a bit of a financial history to this as well,

where sort of as part of, sort of Euro dollar clearing was a major thing that happened in London. A Euro dollar is a dollar that is traded in European markets between a buyer and a seller. So it's basically non-US dollar denominated trading. This is especially important for oil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's all traded in the oil.

It's all, oil is all traded in dollars, and you don't always want to have to repatriate those funds. So you don't want to. So, you know, a lot of what ends up happening in the classic Euro dollar transaction is dollars are spent in London on, in London accounts, but it's foreign currencies that are between foreign buyers and sellers. The vast majority of the transactions that took place are third country transactions, third transactions between third parties

not related to Britain. It just happens in Britain. A bit like how everyone loves suing each other in Britain as well. Yeah, somewhat. And, you know, it was, it was the finding of that role. It was sort of, it was the fact that the city has throughout its long history come out to assert itself as the sort of nerve center of global capital. And in a sense, whether that is lending money to kings to finance crusades

and thereby taking on more liberties for itself, or by sort of becoming the sort of center of the world dollar market again and again and again, it does that. And the only organization that could really bring it to heal, or sort of, you know, that doesn't require the building of a new organization is the British state. And the British state will never do that because, well, it's tried to several times and has always decided it didn't want to

succeed or was sort of turned into a different direction before it could. Yeah. Or it was having too much fun with the key under the hat. Yeah. It's having too much fun with the hat key thing. Yeah. A guy doing like a three card Monty thing, but with the key under the hat. Yeah, it's too much fun.

You're like stopping around the different hats. You're like, ooh, which one? Ooh, which hat's the key under? Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, there's a billion different things to explore about the city of London. I think it's something that's just not very well understood. Yeah, definitely. And specifically that it's not just this medieval oddity

sort of sitting there in London. It's a medieval oddity sitting there in London that is deeply involved in elements of modernity and that uses its medievalness to shield itself from having to be accountable like a modern political organization has to at least pretend to be. Ye olde tax evasion. Effectively. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like more ends than a necessary. Ends, ease and so on. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I don't know what's now that I've sort of told you sort of, and endless sort of a litany of things about the city of London. What do you think?

In a way, I'm not really surprised that there are this many abstracted layers to it. I find it very funny how much it seems to manage to reinvent itself as a mechanism for obstructing visibility throughout the entirety of financial history, if you will, and that that continues today. I'm not surprised at all. I just, in a way, am kind of surprised that there have been moments where surely it would have been politically advantageous for the government to do away with this and they never have.

And that to me kind of hints at the weird British superstructure, if you will. Yeah. Well, it's because it has been, I think you said earlier, right? It's a state where a state that has been dragged into modernity at every stage, sort of by negotiated settlement, really, where all of its sort of great civil wars haven't been, have been sort of between who gets to control the negotiation of that settlement, the sort of thinking the English Civil War, the Wars of the Roses, and so on and so on, where after the Glorious Revolution, you kind of just have like, all right,

well, we're going, our fights are now elsewhere. And we are going to just, we are going to move on by agreement. And so there are things that are just resistant to being changed by agreement, of which the City of London is sort of emblematic of one of them. It shows that sort of deference in this country is the most powerful force there is. Absolutely. There's nothing we love more. I have a, I have a three-point plan, though. Number one, trash-shoot your office in the gherkin.

Number two, I get elected Lord Mayor of London. Okay. Number three, worshipful company of podcasters. Great. Good. There we go. We're going to, we're going to change it from the inside, folks. Sounds good to me. You know, I said it the other day when we were walking past there,

I always thought the gherkin was a really cool building. So you know what? I can't imagine an all-glass studio really works all that well for acoustics, but I'm willing to fucking deal with it. Yeah, let's do it. We can have a studio, a recording studio elsewhere, and then that be our office where we do like deals and calls and stuff. Where we dress up in like, in like fucking, yeah, just like 80s,

huge-shouldered suit coats and stuff like that. Looking like the cover of Duran Duran singles. Yeah, perfect. All right. That'd be awesome. Just doing Gordon Gekko shit. I'm personally excited to hear what Milo's brother has to say about his experience actually working in the city. That's right.

And if you want to hear about that, you're going to have to subscribe to the $10 tier. Secret tier. Oh, it's so secret. Do you do an even sexier voice for that one? Oh, I keep it under my hat. I keep this extra dick under my hat. That's right. It's the secret dick.

If I was the little mayor of London, I'd make him keep a BMW key under his hat. That's my spare key. I don't want it to get lost. Yeah, so instead of the sort of golden coach, of which I've sent a picture to the WhatsApp group. Yeah. It'd be a golden BMW. No, just be a normal 2012. Yeah, it's cool.

Yeah, a medieval Lord Mayor would absolutely shit the bed if they experienced the luxury of a 2012 BMW convertible. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? All right. Yeah. Actually, maybe I'll make him keep my exhaust under his hat. I was going to say you should just have them create supply caches of replacement

exhaust systems for your BMW that. I want a big hat nailed to the bottom of the car so they can't get at it. Optimize the city of London solely for your loot boxes to repair your car. Yeah. Because the weird thing about organized criminals who steal catalytic converters is they respect the traditions of the city of London. So they like get, they jack your car up and they're like, oh, oh, there's a hat under here.

We can't. Yeah, we're within the boundaries. So yeah, we can't do that. Roll the car beyond the dragons and then we can take the hat. And then no one will drive us across London Bridge. I don't think they do the sheep drive. You know about the sheep driving, right? I vaguely heard about this.

There are some people who have rights to drive sheep through the city anyway, right? Not just the city of London, but like the actual city itself. Yeah. It still does happen. Okay. Where you do, they start with a bunch of sheep. Classic, to be fair. That's how you do it.

And they start near St Paul's Cathedral and then they get a bunch of like celebrities who've been given the honorary, the honorary freedom of London. Oh, hell yeah. I want to see Gino de Campo and Harry Styles drive some sheep through the city of London. I want to see Stacy Solomon with a fucking crook. Joey Essex with a whistle. I'm a celebrity. Get these sheep out of here.

That's right. Me behind them in my BMW. Keeping those sheep moving. Right. So it's usually, but so they give the, so they give the, they give a lot of now like celebrities or other sort of, you know, business grandies, freedom of the city. And then if you have freedom of the city, you can, you can drive sheep over London Bridge. No, Tower Bridge.

Sorry. Yeah. Drive sheep over Tower Bridge isn't in the city of London, is it? Or is it London? It is London Bridge. I think London Bridge is yeah. Tower, again, it's difficult and this sort of probably goes beyond what we're interested in here, but the city owns London Bridge.

Yeah. And so everything just on the other side of London Bridge is the city. Tower Bridge, you're right. Not related to the city. Yeah. Because the Tower of London was built by William the Conqueror immediately outside the city, is his like weird. It's like, well, this is going to be my fucking castle.

I'm the fucking looking at you. We built three actually castles. There were two others also. This is a flag. The Tower of London. One, two, three, circular castles. God, many of the castles were square. Oh, the Normans had actually built a lot of circular castles.

In this case, these towers were square. Oh, the Tower of London is square. Yes, but I'm not sure the original Tower of London was square. I don't think the Tower of London is stone. I suspect the original Tower of London was wooden. This is investment advice. Oh, this is not investment advice. I do not buy Tower of London.

Yeah. Yeah. So isn't that fun? That's very fun. Yeah. City of London, weird place. Drive Sheep through it. Yeah, I love to drive Sheep through it.

Hey, Roddy, thanks so much for coming on. Everything you'd like to plug to the loyal hogs? Check out Trash Future. Yeah, you guys should check that out. Yeah, I think you should give that a go, you know? That's right. There's also this show called Bottleman. That's right.

The Bottleman with me and Dan Beck. We're talking about Canada. Produced by me and Nate. We put the sex noises in. Wait, what? Every episode. Oh, no. British Columbia.

Ah, Niagara Escarpement. That's right. Yeah, that's cool. Trance Canada Highway. Ah, Edmonton Mall. I love the, I love the Niagara Escarpement. What a great, what a great hill. Prince Edward, what?

I really just look very upset for a second there. That's right. Well, this has been Brynology. If you want to hear all about the, what it was like working in the city of London in the 90s with my brother, including some stuff about something called the Stratford Sauna, do, do tune in to that. Otherwise, we will see you next month.

Yep. Have a good one. Bye. Bye, everyone.