Vassal State (eBook)

Introduction

My Search for Facts

Thirty years ago, I got lucky: I bought a single share in an investment and insurance business called Berkshire Hathaway. It cost me $3,000 and I did it just to get some information. In the foggy days before the internet, only those people listed on the Berkshire Hathaway share register received the accounts and the annual letter from chairman Warren Buffett. Half philosophical reflection, half market report, these letters have acquired a kind of mythical status in the business world, in part because Mr Buffett is an insightful man but also because, since I bought that single share, the value of Berkshire Hathaway stock has risen, not just a few times but by a factor of 170, so that, by the end of 2023, it had grown in value to half a million dollars. I have been passionate about understanding business and investment my whole life and my purchase was a welcome accident, really – I was just trying to understand how Berkshire Hathaway worked.

Mr Buffett’s success is a stark illustration of US capital at work – taking calculated risks, buying businesses in profitable sectors and determinedly growing wealth. His approach has not changed in more than half a century, but the US economy has. In the past 15 years, it has been impossible to ignore how three great American commercial forces have become truly massive in their scale and riches: big tech, private equity and US-based multinational corporations. And a basic, obvious question has continued to press on my mind: how much of the UK’s economy is now US-owned?

Originally, I believed such a simple question would be well understood by the British government, and so – because I am nosy – I filed a volley of Freedom of Information requests asking about US corporate muscle here. Simple stuff, but the answers were anything but straightforward.

I started with big state spenders – looking for the value of US contracts with the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the NHS. Both admitted they do not analyse their vast spending by the nationality of the companies supplying them. I approached the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Newport, South Wales, and asked how many UK workers are employed by US corporations. They said that they do not record even this basic data, but, without irony, they offered to put together a guesstimate for me based on figures from Dun & Bradstreet, a Florida-based information company. On the phone, the ONS official expressed with pride that he subscribes to this service – costing $40,000 a year – and said that other government departments cannot justify such cost. Even so, the ONS admitted its estimate of ‘about 1 million’ was too low, as it would not include the tens of thousands of ‘self-employed’ Uber and Amazon drivers, or the delivery workers on platforms supplying takeaway food. Conservative analysis, as we shall see, suggests the true figure is not 1, but 2 million Brits who are ultimately working for American bosses.

What I really wanted was trade data, total sales figures between the US and UK, and I recalled that Britain, along with other Western governments, had started to collect exactly that information. In order to protect tax revenues, the national tax authorities had required all multinationals in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to reveal their accounts on a country-by-country basis. So, I wrote to HMRC’s Freedom of Information department in Newcastle, asking for the turnover, profits and taxes paid by the larger US companies. Their team replied categorically, and somewhat puzzlingly, that they did not have that data. But a few months later, after my persistent questioning, they replied: ‘Please accept our sincere apologies for the confusion caused by our first response. We confirm we do hold the requested information.’ My excitement was short-lived, however, because they then stated that they would not be sharing what they knew, explaining that such secrecy ‘ensures a safe place to consider policy options in private… There is a strong public interest in protecting against encroachment on the ability of ministers and officials to develop policy options freely and frankly.’ I was shocked that, although officials at HMRC had, eventually, admitted that they do hold this basic information on US corporations, which had been gathered at taxpayers’ expense, and which affects how much tax everyone else has to pay, they were still point-blank refusing to share it.

Then, in a fortunate break, one of the HMRC officials must have sensed the absurdity of this because he quietly gave me a vital tip-off: he pointed out an obscure page of the website of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) where the Americans themselves had already published all the information I was looking for, and that the British were at such pains to protect. It was, and is, a treasure trove of data and, for anyone who reads columns of numbers as a hobby, it is a full-blown, marmalade-dropping eyebrow-raiser. The IRS had listed the total sales made by the big US corporations to every country around the world, together with their profits and any tax they paid. And it included sales to the UK and how these compared with the American footprint in other European countries. It also listed the enormous sums US multinationals were routing through tax havens such as Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Ireland.1

These revelations led me to the idea that other useful statistics might be ‘Made in the USA’, suggesting that it would be sensible to check a range of US sources to see if the UK has been singled out for economic capture. Sure enough, Washington’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) showed something that the British statisticians cannot. The BEA proves that Britain has been overwhelmingly the preferred hunting ground for US multinationals buying up businesses abroad.2 The figures imply that the US has placed 30 per cent of all its overseas investments into the UK. In summary, it is clear that the invitation to buy up Britain, first extended by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and reiterated by every prime minister since, has been enthusiastically accepted by Americans. What are the consequences?

One answer comes day by day from the British media. Much of the key writing has been done by journalists like Alex Brummer (the ), Ben Marlow (the ) and Phillip Inman (), who describe the consequences of the sell-off of large UK companies. The has been a close follower of the exploits of US private equity in Britain, with implicit warnings contained in articles by Daniel Thomas, Peggy Hollinger, Harriet Agnew and Kaye Wiggins. And Stephen Glover (the ) has asked the essential question about what happens when critical authority over strategic assets is placed into the hands of billionaire tech titans – as is the case with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet provision in Ukraine. What’s striking is that the concerns about US economic power over the UK and the world cut right across many domestic political differences.

The rest of us can see the outlines of the problem: our high streets and small businesses are under pressure, crushed by slick, US-dominated online competition and a tax regime which makes far greater claims on domestic businesses than on US corporations. Most of our digital infrastructure and even our principal system of exchange – card payments – are overwhelmingly US-owned. And, increasingly, British consumers are paying a royalty to US businesses on most transactions, moving from one-off purchasers to renters and subscribers, who slog away on payment treadmills for the benefit of shareholders on the other side of the Atlantic. The consequences could not be graver: impoverishment, loss of autonomy, and a drain on talent and treasure.

The shape and extent of US economic power in the UK is, for all this, something Britain avoids discussing in the round. The term ‘big tech’ is usually used to describe ‘US tech’. When reference is made to ‘private equity’ there is a strong chance it really means US private equity. Talk of a ‘multinational’ means, more often than not, a US multinational. But we do not discuss the US hold over us in economic terms even if we sense we are constantly dealing with US companies. Politicians rarely discuss it save to talk about a ‘special relationship’ and a ‘partnership’, but, as we shall see, the facts are routinely misrepresented in British political statements about Anglo-US relations. There could be a reason for that: after all, what does a ‘partnership’ really look like when one side is the mightiest superpower in the history of the world and holds an overwhelming stake in the other’s economy?

Perhaps the answer is not to look too closely – and Whitehall does not. There comes a point, though, when you have to. I think we are past that point, for obvious reasons: if the companies that control Britain’s growth and success are ultimately accountable to a much greater authority than Parliament, the actions of London politicians will be increasingly irrelevant. A totally subordinate Britain will make a poorer and more irrelevant partner for the US, as well as Europe, something that will matter most of all in the coming century, when the challenges we face require global action, be they climate change or, more immediately, the defence of democracy against authoritarianism in Russia, China and elsewhere.

The essential case of this book is not a rejection of all American values or of democracy or of the carefully negotiated and sustained alliances that defeated fascism in the 1940s and secured peace in Europe and in many other places in the aftermath. It is...