which is a square mile in central London where all the financial movers and shakers are and which is specifically exempted from any oversight via British law.

It is also one the money laundering capital of the planet. You can bet Putin's billions have passed through The City on their way into real estate, yachts, and numbered bank accounts, along with those of every dictator who has ripped off his country and its people, along with drug cartel money, arms running money, and worse.

I think the financial regulators in Brussels were getting a little too nosy. That's why the billionaires and every thug on the planet was in favor of this, chipping in to run an emotional campaign, an early "Make the UK Great Again" sort of thing to reset the clock to back when people were young and learning a trade from dear old Dad, or whatever. Throw some xenophobia along with the nostalgia, that's how the pigs preserved their trough.

No, the City of London is not "specifically exempted from any oversight via British law". Nothing close to it. It has a separate police force from the Metropolitan Police - perhaps that has, via several layers of whispers, become what you heard?

Brexit was a net loss for financial firms in the City - they lost automatic access to providing EU services. They have managed to negotiate terms for continuing business, but it has been, as they said at the time, difficult for them. eg

The causes of Brexit have been caricatured based on whatever angle someone wishes to push.

However two key overlooked points are:
- the abolition of the agricultural wages board by the Coalition government that removed the floor of wages in the agricultural sector.
- the decline of collective bargaining and union density in construction, hospitality and light manufacturing.

Once David Cameron offered a referendum then the Brexit campaign found some willing constituencies. One willing working class constituency was one that used the Brexit vote as a crude mechanism to raise wages. I was a trade union branch secretary at the time (of a very pro-EU union) and some people in certain sectors gained huge pay raises (in some cases 9-15% yearly in the 2016-19 period here in Kent for construction and light manufacturing), pay raises beyond the dream of union negotiations. The reason was that the referendum resulted caused a dramatic reduction of free movement into sectors heavily dependent upon migrant labour, even though free movement technically continued until 2021.

During March-June 2016 I had conversations with many members in my branch who were “voting out” in their words and wages were a big reason.

Brexit was a complex phenomenon.

for Britain. Anyone thinking with what's between their ears instead of their gonads knew that. However, they're not the movers and shakers, those are the people making double sub basements in mansions in the poshest areas of London to accomodate the heated simming pool and indoor spa or whatever the fad is these days among expat billionaire crooks in their multiple pleasure palaces around the planet.

There is a reason Putin was willing to spend so much time and effort trolling emotional thinkers, why he had extra money to play with from coke barons and Chinese fentanyl producers.