I wrote this more than ten years ago (with minor changes to tenses to suit the new context):
Feral capitalism is the unfettered, wild form of capitalism that we have suffered for thirty years: a form where people are constrained but money is allowed to roam free whence it will with consequences now all too clear.
Tax havens are fundamental to this form of capitalism - they let the money flow unhindered and unaccountable; they are in effect the aircraft carriers from which assaults on major democratic states and their policies can be launched.
Today we have this story in the Guardian:
The government's failure to tackle Russian kleptocrats laundering “dirty money” through the UK has led millions of pounds used to finance Putin's invasion of Ukraine to flow through London, a powerful committee of MPs has warned.
The commons foreign affairs committee said ministers' complacency over “morally bankrupt billionaires using the UK as a safe deposit box” had led to “assets laundered through the UK … financing President Putin's war in Ukraine”.
I did issue an appropriate warning - and repeated it many times. But the Tories - who control the Committee that issued the report I note - would not listen. The question to ask now is why was that?
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There is a sense in which, if money is not free, it never reaches the people who need it most to survive. It seems to me the turn to tax havens and similar “aircraft carriers from which assaults on major democratic states and their policies can be launched” (I love the metaphor), is the point at which it is ‘rentierised’. It is instantly turned back into credit at a rate of return owed to the rentier, which facilitates a blur of accounting entries that grow exponentially around the globe, in the transfer to an aircraft carrier, where it is easily spirited away, to who knows where, for who knows what purpose.
‘Aircraft Carrier’ – a catchy image. Well before Ukraine, apparently it was raids from the carrier which funded the Leave disinformation campaign and also provided funds for the ‘f…k business’ party – both of which have helped to send us well on our way to the one party state.
What is significant for me is that the committee’s response and feedback seems to to strongly tri-angulate with the many (and sometimes superb) books that I have read on this subject explaining what has been happening.
It’s no wonder the Tories are so desperate to stay in power – to avoid the reckoning they are due. And it is due – there’s no doubt about that.
In fact, a proper public enquiry could actually destroy them as a party. I think they’d be finished. And they know it.
That is why I hope we get one.
And good luck to Carole Cadwalladr in that appeal trial. What an ordeal.