Secrit Cety

Have you been to London? I mean the city of London? I mean the mile square inner city of London? Which is one of the problems of this movie is that this is about the mile square centre bit of London, but doesn't ever quite show where or what that is. This is, in that way, a documentary for Londoners who already know about it.

The point of the City of London is that it is run by corporations, who now wield a whack of political power (in deed, they even have voting rights). Yep, that's pretty screwed up. No matter how nice it might be legally, treating corporations as people has only led to corporations abusing that position.

We get a bit of history of how the City of London grew into London, but that history largely comprises of showing maps from the 18th and 17th centuries and saying that London was more distinct from the surrounding burrows, and now it isn't. Not exactly a great historical discourse there. Then the movie jumps to modern day and says that it is largely a financial power, has all the banks, and runs all sorts of political dealings and tax shenanigans. Basically it has become a 'shadow' economy, and is more powerful than the real economy. (There's a bit of shock implied with showing news of the recession of 2008, but no actual explanation of how that impacted these banks. Good? Bad? I'm not clear at all what was implied.) And then it ends.

This movie clearly has a point it wants to make, that the City of London Corporation is bad, but does not explain itself well.

[END]