Having reeled from Lord Turner’s haymaker yesterday, there was plenty of fight-back from the City.

In his usual style the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said that anybody who did not believe the FSA’s responsibilities included protecting the international competitiveness of the City was “crackers”.

He continued, “Nobody in their right mind would want to do something that targeted London specifically. The City of London generates fantastic revenues for the government.”

And the British Bankers’ Association issued this statement:

“The UK’s financial services industry is a major provider of jobs and source of tax revenues. We are the top centre in the world for global banking and that’s why more than half the 336 banks operating in the UK have been attracted here from other countries. That’s an achievement that we shouldn’t take lightly. If we introduce the wrong kind of regulation or the wrong kind of taxes we could so easily lose that position by driving business abroad. That would mean the UK would receive less revenue through taxes and there would be job losses, not just in the banking industry, but also in all those other businesses, large and small, that provide services to banks. On so many occasions in the past the country has lost chunks of industry through making the wrong decisions. Let’s not do that again.”