The 1841 census was the first to include an individual’s place of birth. It also collected detailed household information not previously collected. Last week there was much excitement among the genealogical fraternity when this census went up on the internet. The Ancestry website now has the seven censuses from 1841 to 1901 available online.

But the world is running away from us faster than we can catch up with it. Each morning planes take off from Heathrow every 30 seconds dispatching armies of investment bankers to the far corners of Europe armed with plans to restructure companies and even entire industries. Estimates fluctuate wildly about how much pollution this produces. The airline industry tells us that British planes only contribute a tenth of one percent of global emissions. But others claim that aviation accounts for thirteen percent of British greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the boom in cheap flights this is also the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases…and hence a big problem.

One reason for the discrepancy is in the class of planes selected. Then there are theories that carbon dioxide causes more damage when released at high altitude…while others argue that planes hopping from London to Frankfurt don’t actually go up very high. There is also talk about the non-CO2 effects of aviation so environmentalists include Uplift Factors in their emission calculations of between two and three…though there is no scientific consensus about this.

It is easy to see why the City of London has so enthusiastically embraced European integration. In the first place the banks themselves are more European than twenty years ago when the City was still dominated by banks such as Barings, Schroeders and Warburgs. They may have had the German-sounding names of their immigrant founders but they were quintessentially English and impossibly grand in a way that only an English institution can be.

But today many of the biggest employers in the City really are German…such as Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank…or Dutch or French. And the people who work for them…or for the big American banks…are likely to be called Frederico or Raul or Anne-Marie and to be armed with doctorates and MBAs from the best business schools. There are thousands of ambitious multilingual graduates now seeking their fortunes in the Square Mile.

But the Europeanisation of the City is more than just a matter of personnel and brass name-plates. The business has changed. Twenty years ago the business of the City was still primarily focused on the domestic market…a legacy of decades of exchange controls that ended only in the early 1980s. Investment research was organised along national lines and corporate financiers relied for much of their income on domestic mergers, acquisitions and capital raisings, backed up by fat fees from a more clubby era. Europe was hard work with different accounting standards, little respect for shareholder rights, unfamiliar stock exchanges and differences in currencies and language.

Nowadays every bank regards Europe…and not just Britain…as their domestic market. All the big banks organise their research along European lines. Companies like BP and GlaxoSmithKline are compared with European competitors while fund managers invest across national borders. The truth is that the City has done extraordinarily well out of European integration. In fact it has the feel of a boom town. It has ridden out the millennium bear market and last year it hit new records for Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Companies from every part of Europe including prospective European Union members like Ukraine and Turkey are clamouring for the prestige of a London listing.

This has led to a rather peculiar situation. While the City of London has embraced the single market and persuaded the British Government…though not the British people…to throw open the country’s borders to the free movement of people, goods and capital, other countries in the European Union continue to refuse to play by the rules and look for ways to protect their domestic companies from overseas competition. The worst offenders are the countries thought to be the most pro-European like France, Germany and Italy. The Italian Government for instance refuses to allow foreign-owned banks to buy local banks. And Germany still allows listed companies to ignore the views of investors.

A year ago an article in The Spectator reckoned it was clear which way things were heading. ‘The City has financial muscle on its side, it has EU law on its side, and it increasingly has the EU Commission on its side too. ..That is why national governments are increasingly dismantling some of their most extreme anti-business laws…such as France’s 35-hour week and Germany’s oppressive business taxes…while as a rearguard action, still calling on Brussels to resist the spread of Anglo-Saxon Capitalism.’

Our money came in from NCAB just before the May Holiday Weekend so today in my little corner of the world of globalisation my principal task was to clear William Franklin & Sons’ payables by disbursing two thousand pounds to the translators who had worked on the project. As PCHut was still waiting for its broadband connection I had planned to take the train to Ashford. But at eight o’clock a call came in from Francoise asking for help with some computer glitches. So I ended up going into Hastings instead and making my connection to Barclay’s ibank from the Hastings Public Library. Afterwards I went in search of a good internet café in Hastings and discovered Mahavi’s.