The soaring towers of Canary Wharf in London: you could not get a more powerful symbol of the very real entity that laid waste to the UK economy than Canary Wharf.
Now we hear from some who, in all seriousness, want to replicate it here in Birmingham. Indeed, they use its name as something positive to aim for. Really? Canary Wharf?
From those towers came those who brought you The Crash, the resultant deepest recession of most of our lifetimes; and its very real and devastating consequences for real people, real families and, let's not forget, real businesses.
The real culprits of destructive casino banking came from there – those actually behind and responsible for all the financial chaos, the bailouts, the public sector services culls.
From those tragic towers came the very real incompetence, greed and arrogance of the Canarian co-conspirators. The denizens of those thrusting financial fortresses themselves built a tottering mass of financial and economic dodgy architecture and then caused the whole citadel to collapse.
Just to be clear, the value of HM Treasury's taxpayer support to the banks, whose HQs are clustered around Canary Wharf, currently stands at £123 billion – £44.5 billion is still directly on loan. You'd have thought that before we started betting the farm on the financial services model of regeneration of a city that we might have got the money back from the very banks to whom we are proposing to hand over the city centre.
How on Earth anyone could invoke those disastrous city totems as something positive and aspirational for a future Birmingham really is beyond me. It is thinking drawn from another century – indeed, another age.
Faced with challenge, some go back to what they know best. In the face of tried and tested failure, let's try the same thing again and again - in case it might work this time. Some might say this is a peculiar, almost Shakespearean, definition of municipal madness.
A mega-financial services driven approach to a city's regeneration is indeed a tried and tested, but failed, prescription. It was found wanting quite some time ago.
I've no problem with building on this city's long and successful history in financial services and utility banking. Let's invest in that. But to suggest effectively that we base the future economic development, construction, infrastructure and regeneration of the city upon it is tired and dangerous thinking.
It is unambitious, one-dimensional and concentrates the idea of a city on its centre. We need to re-imagine and re-think the city in terms of its entirety – access all areas.
The Canarians apparently call to their aid (as they always do) the tens of thousands of high-rise, high-octane, high-rolling jobs that will come when you build these castles in the sky. 10,000 more financial jobs in the city centre, eh? I look forward to the increased transport chaos that will bring. And how many of those jobs will be filled by citizens of Birmingham, I wonder?
As I wrote last month, evidence suggests that the jobs actually created for the city-dwellers of Birmingham from such a Canary Wharf dream of towers will be low paid, insecure service jobs.
And what also gets my goat is the fact that they also suggest the diverting of literally 100s of millions of pounds of 'investment' to construct and service these Towers of Brummie Babylon.
Now that is the ultimate irony. The authors of financial collapse get to have another go at inflating the bubble again and start first with what they started first with before: big construction, big property, big offices and definitely BIG business.
We shouldn't be looking to London to inspire us here in Birmingham. Indeed there is much already here in the city to inspire us.
Digbeth is, to my mind, the real microcosm that deserves attention. Its development has been inspirational and can become a pattern for the rest of the city. Many would say it developed organically so in spite of, rather than because of, the intentions of the city's 'powers that be'. It shows a real energy and creative drive. It shows what can happen when you build on the real strengths and lively energies of this young city of the 21st Century.
The new rewiring of the city's economic life, and finding and developing the new economic DNA to drive the city will not come from the dead hand of Canary Wharf casino financial services. It will come from new industries ready to find investment and support from new banks, new economic pathways and, yes, the city's 'powers that be'.
It comes from creative industries, food, tech, 3D printing, digital media and entertainment, online retail (less the bricks and mortar Bullring style), product curation and wider curated commerce, fashion, art, jewellery and small-scale sustainable manufacturing. All can co-exist and complement, side by side and (most importantly) across the city. The talent pool for this is much more suited to this city, and already present in it, than big finance. We can also better prepare the training and education pathways to support it than financial services.
Indeed mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City is doing precisely this in response to the acceptance of the loss of financial services sector and its jobs there.
Over there, venture capital investment is piling into these areas. Over here, then, we need to rewire investment away from big construction, big commerce and big finance and into a new vibrant economic base and built on our existing strengths. It's ironic that instead Birmingham seems to be going backwards in these Canarian desires. It's a dead Canary.
A vibrant financial services sector is something that can develop from a successful real economy base: its actual real business folk. We are putting the cart well before the horse here. What will these new-build financial spires invest in? They will invest in themselves – in a false economy.
As New York City shows – when there is a commitment to re-imagining an real city economy, based on making and creating, the money will come to invest in it.
So let's stop building towers in the sky and build a new city economy on the ground and across the city – access all areas.
John Clancy is a Labour Birmingham councillor in the Quinton ward
