One in 10 officials to be based in city within three years and 70-strong team will increase to 500

The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, has announced a big expansion of its operations in Leeds, with one in 10 officials to be based in the West Yorkshire city within three years.

Bailey said the 70-strong team at the central bank’s northern hub would swell sevenfold to 500 by 2027 through a combination of voluntary relocation and local recruitment.

Restrictions on collective power led to decades of exploitation and stagnant pay for workers. Why not try another way?

Profiteering is nothing new. Stanley Baldwin had a pithy description for the new intake of Conservative MPs at the 1918 general election, noting that they were “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”. The future Tory prime minister was right. Many companies had found a war economy greatly to their liking, securing lucrative government contracts and making a mint in the process. Profiteering was rampant.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the Unite union, says something similar has been happening since the war on Covid began in 2020. A study of the reports and accounts of almost 17,000 firms – big and small – showed that pre-tax profit margins were, on average, 30% higher in 2022 than they were in the years immediately before the pandemic began.