📚 Finished reading Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough.
Oliver Bullough examines what Britain did next in order to try and maintain its status after the decline of its previously mighty empire (thankfully).
Fresh out of opportunities for quite so explicit an exploitation of other people and places for its own economic ends, the country apparently decided to proactively take on a role akin to that of a “butler to the rich” - a metaphorical Jeeves, to any Bertie Wooster who had enough money to pay for the ever-so-professional, ever-so-discreet financial services on offer. After all, who wouldn’t trust you if you were associated with one of the famed and “respectable” centuries-old British institutions?
The clients of these services were by definition all very wealthy. Unsurprisingly, the mix of that base requirement and a reputation for professional discretion meant that the corrupt, the criminal and the kleptocratic oligarchs and other miscellaneous billionaire types - and on occasions autocratic regimes - were amongst the most desired clients for the “global faciliator” that the UK became.
The book casts light on some of the ways in which Britain and its associated territories explicitly, and often knowingly, enabled all sorts of financial crime, money laundering and other unethical practices. Witness the development of the British tax havens and “offshore financial centres”, which are still to be found in places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands.
These are places where the wealthy can hide their illicitly gained wealth from the rest of us, conducting transactions that would never be permitted if known about.
The assertion here is that “respectable” British institutions - think of our elite legal, financial and PR firms, as well as, on occasion, the government - are actively helping wealthy, often foreign, clients conceal their money and protect their reputations by escaping any form of accountability.
In short, Britain is enabling global corruption; helping not only to further enrich the already-incredibly wealth, but to extra-reward those whose massive fortunes come via some form of criminality.
All of this comes, of course, at the expense of the everyday British citizen, amongst others. Every penny (well, billions of pounds) of tax avoided, of criminal costs incurred, of state services provided, of money illegitimately siphoned to foreign lands is a penny less that could be put to good public (or private) usage over here.
All is not lost though. Or at least it does not have to be. As is typical in this sort of book the author does have some suggestions as to how to reform the system in order to cajole the country into being less amenable to being little more than a bag-carrier for the wealthy criminal. Basically we they all boil down to “we need to increase transparency and accountability”.
For example, the state needs to put substantial resources into the agencies that tackle financial crime, including tax avoidance. We need to close any of the extensive remaining loopholes that mean some financial “moral crime” and tax dodge is in fact legal. Any trick that enables the wealthy to launder their ill-gotten wealth or evade the tax due on it needs to be cracked down upon.
However, how we get the state to do that is another question. I’m sure he would agree that it’s unlikely to happen if the issue is left entirely in the hands of the politicians of the day. Can we find a solution, or are we destined, as a country, to pride ourselves only on how discrete a servant we can be to the criminal and corrupt who can afford what we ask? Is there a higher vision to our national culture than simply an ability to paste on a layer of veneer to finances the oligarchs of the day?
The issue isn’t only a local one. By helping corrupt kleptocrats and their organisations move money and hide wealth, worldwide corruption is encouraged and concealed, with global costs both financial and democratic.
The general idea of the book wasn’t a all new to me, but the wealth of detailed case studies meant I came away feeling that the self-evident facilitation of financial corruption was embraced even more widely and even more knowingly by our institutions than I’d have expected. Leading, of course, to the construction of yet another set of urgent reforms we need to add to the ever-growing list of “how do we solve the permacrisis” ideas.
And this is from a book written in 2022. Something I think we can say without too much doubt is that the subservience of companies and states to corrupt billionaires has most certainly got not one iota better since then.
