Anthony Browne, a former advisor to Boris Johnson who currently works at Morgan Stanley, has been appointed to become the head of the British Bankers’ Association from September. The BBA is the key trade body for the UK banking and financial sector, with over 200 member banks. It is responsible for setting the London Inter-bank Offered Rate, a measure of the average rate charged for loans between banks which was investigated (£) by the American Securities and Exchange Commission over “erratic behaviour” in February.
Browne had a past life as a journalist and think-tanker, with a particular interest about immigration. In 2000, he authored a special report for the Observer, titled The last days of a white world, which claimed that non-whites will be a majority in the US and Britain by 2050, and compared the fate of white Britons to that of the Native Americans, who “used to have the lands to themselves but are now less than 1 per cent of the US population, with little chance of becoming a majority again.” In 2002, Browne wrote a pamphlet for Civitas, Do we need mass immigration? (pdf), which reiterated many of the arguments at greater length, as well as blaming immigration for “rising congestion” and “importing diseases such as HIV and TB”.
His writings on immigration in the Times (archived here) led to David Blunkett denouncing him in the commons as “bordering on fascism”. A later book, The Retreat Of Reason, was praised by the BNP as:
A devastating expose of the effects of Political Correctness and its poisonous effect of public debate in modern Britain. The author shows how the media and government even resort to employing misleading statistical evidence to support their PC objectives. A far reaching book which has the left squealing in horror.
A few months later, the Mirror reported that Do we need mass immigration? was on sale on the BNP’s online gift shop, where it is described as “blaming poverty, crime, TB and HIV on immigrants”.
Browne told the Mirror that:
There is a huge difference between my views and those of the BNP.
Upon Browne’s appointment as Boris Johnson’s policy director, Nick Cohen wrote that:
A concern for fact and a hatred of conventional wisdom have marked his progress from journalism to the Conservative think-tank Policy Exchange, and now on to one of the most powerful jobs in London. . .
It’s not political correctness he [is] against but the perversion of liberalism by Whitehall and the BBC, which holds that it is somehow wicked to talk about racial attacks on whites, anti-Semitism or tensions between immigrants.
Given that the banking sector one of the most cosmopolitan industries in the UK, and that, according to the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society:
the City’s competitiveness is significantly dependent on the functioning of its global labour market, of which a key factor is the immigration of European Economic Area (EEA) and non-EEA talent.
It will be interesting to see which side of Browne comes out in his new job.
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