Last night, the City of London Corporation hosted the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet. It’s an opportunity for the new Lord Mayor of the City of London to outline his ‘Connect to Prosper’ theme for the year ahead. You can read more about that here: Lord Mayor calls on London to use its unparallel global connections to address global challenges in areas like AI and climate change (cityoflondon.gov.uk)
The Lord Mayor highlighted that the City of London is home to 40 learned societies, 70 higher education institutions, 130 research institutes, over 24,000 businesses – with more than 300 languages spoken. And will encourage greater connections between these institutions to find solutions to global challenges such as poor mental health and climate change. As part of Connect to Prosper, over the summer, The Lord Mayor’s Appeal and its charity partner MQ Mental Health Research, along with Oxford University and the Wellcome Trust, launched GALENOS – an open access repository of scientific papers it’s hoped could speed up global mental health research by two to three years.
It’s also an opportunity for the Prime Minister to provide an update on the UK’s international affairs. You can read his speech here: PM speech at Lord Mayor’s Banquet: 13 November 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
The Archbishop of Canterbury also gave a vision of hope. You can read his remarks here: Archbishop’s speech at Lord Mayor’s Banquet | The Archbishop of Canterbury
The event is attended by “the great and the good” of the Square Mile. The Guildhall also welcomed some “Stop Rosebank” protestors outside, including Greta Thunberg. This year I was pleased to see student representatives from the City of London’s family of schools in attendance. The Prime Minister also took time to chat with each of them.