We're on the wrong road with this flight from Square Mile

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. One minute we're inordinately proud of having in our midst the world's leading financial centre. The next, we do not want to know.

Suddenly, the City is anathema. All the talk is of ending the over-reliance on financial services and creating industrial jobs in the regions. David Cameron, Nick Clegg in a major speech at the end of last week - they're all banging the "rebalancing" drum.

This completely ignores the fact that the banking crisis was international, not based in London, and was caused by a handful of out-of-control players. It also circumvents the failure of the authorities and the regulatory framework to bring them to heel.

And it avoids the reality that most of the City of London did not do anything untoward, that
the bulk of banking, insurance, law, shipping, accountancy, commodities trading and all the other activities that make up the Square Mile did nothing deserving of any blame.

They also want to "rebalance" the economy in another direction, to stop the dependency on the public sector, to replace the public-service posts that are lost with ones in the private sector.

But the reason civil servants were shifted out from London in the first place was to provide a substitute for the employment that vanished as companies packed up and relocated their manufacturing abroad.

It's as if the Government is intent on undoing the past. Just like that. And meanwhile choosing not to nurture (worse, to actually oppose in speeches and stance) one of our few economic jewels.

Why do they think businesses took their plants overseas? Why do they suppose companies have not
rushed to invest in the North-East, North-West and the rest? It's not through want of trying - I've lost count of the trade missions to the likes of China and India, and to what end?

Until we improve our infrastructure and raise our state education standards, and remove the impediments to doing business in this country, we have not got a hope of competing, not to the
extent that the scales can move in the right direction, let alone begin to "rebalance".

That will take time, and political guts. They should be developing a balanced, twin-track approach: attempting to regalvanise the regions and boosting the City.

Instead, we're heading down a single track without a clear means of travel.