Tim Worstall's site is a wonderful source of bracing sense. Here, he destroys a silly piece by Tristam Hunt:

At the heart of this immense darkness was the City: from the great finance houses of the Rothschilds and Barings to the scurrying Camberwell clerks caught so precisely in EM Forster's Howards End hero Leonard Bast. Yet like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank today, the Edwardian corporate chieftains had ever less interest in their UK hinterland. The City looked out to the world - to the railways of Peru and the tea plantations of Ceylon. 'London is often more concerned with the course of events in Mexico than with what happens in the Midlands,' noted the Economist, 'and is more upset by a strike on the Canadian Pacific than by one in the Cambrian collieries.'

The result was a massive outflow of capital. Between 1870-1914, the United Kingdom was responsible for 44 per cent of global foreign investment - compared with 19.9 per cent by France. The consequence was that funds which might have gone into British manufacturing went on quick bucks abroad. The needs of industry were forgotten as London's counting houses bought low and sold high like the private equity funds of the day.

Quite disgusting, tragic even. One of the richest countries on the planet (as Britain was) sending its capital abroad to be invested in mines, railways, water systems, docks, mills and factories, where the poor of the world could find work and better life. I mean, really, who could possibly countenance the idea that the rich might spend their money improving the life of the poor? Ought to be a law against it, obviously.

(And this is in similar vein.)