molgrips - sorry, looking back I wasn't clear in where I was getting to:
The argument of the importance of the City to our economy is the tax take (relatively largely personal, rather than corporation, as the corporates all do deals with HMRC on how much/little they're going to pay). When challenged, the next level of argument is "well, all the talent will leave".
the talent is only paid what it is because it can be and, since the Big Bang, we've had a financial sector (and the peripheral activities - accountancy, law, etc.) living high off the largely unregulated hog.
I'm afraid that other economies, ie Germany, are rather primative. They do a quaint little thing called 'making' stuff
Evan Davies made an interesting summation of the view that we really do need to make stuff AND save money. Not out of some antiquated sense of duty to labour markets of old, or avoiding debt, but because that combination (as seen so succesfully in Germany) forces the domestic producers to export. Whereas we in Britain don't save and seem addicted to imports.
The argument in favour of manufacturing was grossly damaged by the behaviour of trades unions prior to the Thatcher administrations - they gave British manufacturing a bad name. This was worsened by a workforce that was not, for whatever reason, encourage to innovate much more than we did. I wonder if that wasn't some post-colonial hangover we still had (and, to an extent, still do) that Bristish is inherently best. Thatcher did the rest....
So now, we don't amke anything on a large scvale. Sure, we do have manufacturing, but it's specialist and usually high tech/high value. I bet most of that is exported, but it just doesn't have the economic clout of large scale production or an economy based on financial services - FFS, are we destined to fiddle about selling each other services?