How Britain became America’s lapdog

Our politicians, argues Angus Hanton, have left us with a secondhand culture, economy and values

VASSAL STATE by Angus Hanton

304pp, Swift, T £18.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£25, ebook £11.99

It’s impossible for a Briton to live free from the influence of America. We spend entire days consuming or benefiting from Americanowned products and businesses. For breakfast, we might have a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (Chicago), which more than six million of us consume each year. During the day, we might order books or clothes or any other essential items through Amazon (Seattle): 30 per cent of all online commerce in Britain is done

through the company. In the evening, about 19 million of us have the option of watching films and television shows on Amazon Prime or, if that doesn’t take our fancy, switching to Netflix (California) or Apple TV (California). And while watching, we can distract ourselves with another Apple product, such as its phones with which, in the UK, it has more than half the market share.

The list could go on, as Angus Hanton writes in his excellent new book Vassal State: “Airbnb for accommodation, eBay for secondhand goods, Etsy for handmade products, Tinder or Bumble for dating, and Amazon Marketplace for everything else.” And, in a sense, it’s no surprise that Britons consume so many American goods and services. America is an economic behemoth.

The nation constitutes less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, but 39 out of the 100 biggest publicly traded companies come from there, as do more than a quarter of the world’s billionaires.

That American companies are doing well globally and in the UK will surprise few readers. But Hanton’s argument is more precise: he contends that US companies are doing well specifically at the expense of British ones (and ordinary Britons). Indeed, many of the brands and businesses we think of as quintessentially British are owned by Americans.

Cadbury, though founded by the English Quaker John Cadbury in 1824, has since 2010 been the property of Mondelez of Chicago. One of England’s greatest football clubs,

Liverpool FC, is owned by the Fenway Sports Group, based in Massachusetts. American companies, as Hanton writes, also “supply 50 per cent of the British farm machinery market”, while firms such as BP, Shell, Aviva and HSBC are about “a quarter US-owned”.

Isn’t this a kind of colonialism? Consider taxation. Many American companies doing business in the UK base themselves in European tax havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. We cannot, and don’t, tax them fully on the revenue they make from British consumers. Yet “as soon as the barely taxed revenue of US corporations leaves UK shores”, Hanton writes, the IRS “intercepts the cash and demands its share. The result is that the

profits which were not taxed by the British are then taxed by the Americans – effectively creating an ongoing transfer of wealth from the UK government to its US counterpart.”

Hanton’s book is more a criticism of Britain than a condemnation of America. His argument, he claims, is “not anti-American; rather, it is pro-British: it is not arguing for nationalism but against abject dependency. It is about cultivating our strengths and building our independence.” He laments the fact that, even taking into account demographics and size, America is a much richer country than Britain. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union, but, “if the UK were the 51st state, it would be, by some estimates, poorer… and certainly among the poorest five or six”.

America is also more technologically innovative. All three British entries in the world’s top 100 public trading companies – HSBC, Unilever and GSK – were founded in the 19th century. We are still in the shadow of Victorian Britain and the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, consider all the buzzing postSecond World War US companies and dot-com boom industries.

When many talk about Britain’s obeisance to America, the Left is often blamed for this: they have imported “wokeness” to our shores. Yet the affiliation of the former prime minister Liz Truss with libertarian think-tanks equally speaks to a naivety on the British Right. Truss’s heroine, Margaret Thatcher, made Britain open to privatisation and foreign direct investment without implementing the necessary checks to protect the UK’s financial interests. As Hanton explains, in Thatcher’s “second full year in office, 1981, only 3.6 per cent of UK shares were owned overseas. By 2020, that number was more than 56 per cent.”

Hanton argues that the British government needs to “overturn three core beliefs that have formed the bedrock of recent policy and led them astray so disastrously”. It needs to reduce the number of British businesses sold to foreign owners, support technological innovation in Britain and invest more in British communities.

In other words, we should learn more from our continental neighbours: France and Germany are more actively resistant to the influence of American companies. Politicians like to go on about the “special relationship” between Britain and America, but this is not a “partnership” in any fair sense of the term: America dominates, Britain acquiesces. And unlike many asymmetric relationships, we have willingly and happily prostrated ourselves – in some ways for good, but clearly also for ill.

Though Mississippi is the poorest US state, ‘if the UK were a state, it might be poorer’