Novelist Cory Doctorow tracks Britain’s domestic scandals back to the capital’s reliance on laundered money from overseas, and the feasting of so many professions on the proceeds
In his 2014 novel, The Peripheral, William Gibson plunges us into a far-future London: radically depopulated, quietly authoritarian and under the iron thumb of “the Klept” – a fusion of the British chumocracy with post-Soviet Eurasian kleptocracy.
The origins of this society – its neo-aristocracy, its captivity to inscrutable AIs called “the Aunties” – are lost to history. They all took place during a time called “The Jackpot” – an interregnum in which huge swathes of records simply vanished amid social breakdown, climate emergencies and cyberwar.
Gibson will be the first to tell you that he is not attempting prophecy with his work, but it cannot be denied that he has an eerie ability to reflect back our latent, inchoate fears about the future through his fiction – something he calls “predicting the present”.
When I emigrated from the UK to America in 2016, I explained my reasons for doing so in a piece called ‘Why I’m Leaving London’. The main driver was the increasing obviousness that the city existed primarily to launder vast, corrupt fortunes, and only incidentally was a place where Londoners could live and thrive.
Since then, the UK – and particularly the City of London, home of the nation’s finances – has doubled-down on its role as an enabler and concierge to the world’s filthiest money, and the psychopaths who come with it. The UK and its overseas territories consistently top the Tax Justice Network’s annual ‘Financial Secrecy Index’.
Not all corrupt money comes from the former Soviet republics of Eurasia, but these countries – and Russia – embody a special kind of corruption: kleptocracy (“a political economy dominated by a small number of people/entities with close links to the state”).
This form of corruption is closely related to the ‘chumocracy’ that dominates British politics as can be clearly seen in the ruling Conservative Party. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the UK, with its Thatcherite and New Labour emphasis on finance, and its political compatibility with kleptocracy, is a linchpin in global kleptocratic money-laundering and corruption.
The Enablers
The connections between Eurasian kleptocrats and the UK political system, its finance sector, its charities, its libel laws, its property market, and its luxury goods sector, is rigorously explored in ‘The UK’s Kleptocracy Problem‘ – a report by the Chatham House think tank.
It shows how the UK is a one-stop-shop for corrupt, wealthy public officials from Eurasian kleptocracies; how the UK’s finance sector launders their money; how the Home Office sells them citizenship via ‘golden visas’; how the country’s estate agents convert their money into multi-million-pound mansions and super-flats; how its charities launder their reputations, recasting them as philanthropists; how its billion-pound mega-law firms and ‘reputation managers’ can destroy their critics and terrorise their publishers, cleansing these people of sin with expert use of Britain’s notoriously bully-friendly libel laws. And it shows how, while this is all going on, the country’s luxury department stores will offer such individuals white glove service as they spend millions on gem-crusted, bespoke trinkets.
But not only do oligarchs buy influence with British governments and regulators, they also use their London-washed money to funnel bribes to politicians around the world. Think here of the Azerbaijani Laundromat, in which $2.9 billion was funnelled through four UK shell companies and converted, in part, into bribes paid to EU politicians.
UK politicians – both Labour and Conservative – have managed to divert interest from this influx of unsavoury plutocrats and instead focus on hard-working, everyday people who come to the UK to do hard, every-day work.
For 40 years, British politics has been dominated by a xenophobic terror of ‘economic migrants’ (a major factor in Brexit), with complaints about foreigners competing for housing and resources. Meanwhile, the issue of ultra-wealthy kleptocrats coming to Britain to buy its football teams, entire swathes of its major cities, its newspapers, and its politicians has largely gone unremarked upon.
Neoliberal economists describe the UK as a post-industrial nation focused on ‘services’ – not the ‘service sector’ (plumbers, waiters, cab drivers), but high-ticket services like wealth management, legal strategy, investment counsel, reputation management, property management, and so on. These ‘service-providers’ should more properly known as ‘enablers’.
The reputation management industry – which draws on all these services – describes its role in helping clients create ‘coherent narratives’ about their identity and wealth, helps them steer clear of ‘out of place’ investments, and identifies foundations and think tanks that they can support to be known as ‘philanthropists’.
Enablers don’t just help craft a public-facing narrative for oligarchs though – they’re just as skilled at creating an opaque bubble of secrecy around the parts of oligarchs’ lives that are less savoury. Britons are fire-hosed with information about kleptocrats’ philanthropic activities and endorsements by members of the British elite, but we almost never hear about the klepts’ private wealth, investment and assets.
Britain’s borders are