Barclays is to shed around 14,000 jobs in 2014, we learnt last week, more than half of them in the UK. These head-count cuts are largely about the on-going process of humdrum branch closures – not only in Britain, but also in Spain, Italy, Portugal and France. Such job losses are sadly inevitable, given the rise of mobile and on-line banking.

This Barclays announcement, though, was spun rather differently. Rather than discussions about banks’ reduced presence on the High Street, our airwaves were instead filled with tales of Barclays’ “courage”, as it distanced itself from “casino banking” in a “decisive break with the past”.
Some 2,000 of this year’s job cuts are in Barclays’ 26,000-strong investment banking division. More such posts are to go, the bank tells us, in 2015 and 2016.
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