While we have been hectored and insulted by Eurocrats, our old friends in the Anglosphere have been waiting with touching patience. We let them down in 1973. Let’s not let them down again.
DANIEL HANNAN, the Telegraph,
4 November 2018
There are many different ways to buy political influence. I first encountered the most obvious method when I was young. It was sometime in the mid-1990s. I had just started secondary school, and Irish local news was dominated by a scandal involving a senior politician accused of receiving backhanders from a property developer. The politician, a government minister, denied the charges and refused to resign.
I asked my mother if she believed him. I expected her to say she did – she was usually quite trusting of authority. Instead, she solemnly shook her head. “Sure, your uncle paid him to rezone those fields he has as industrial,” she replied matter-of-factly.
My uncle was a farmer. Land classified as agriculture was worth only a fraction of industrial holdings. A few years later, construction began on a new motorway. The proposed road ran straight through my uncle’s farm. His land, freshly rezoned, was subject to a compulsory purchase order. My uncle made a fortune.
If you want to influence politics beyond a planning decision or a dodgy public contract, doling out cash to politicians is a very blunt tool. Politicians might not do what they say. They might get voted out of office or be demoted.
And besides, what if instead of getting a strip of land rezoned, you want to change the entire political culture? You could try bribing a gaggle of venal politicians to vote for, say, a single tax-lowering measure, but what if you wanted to change the whole political conversation so that low taxes across the board became the norm?
The way to do that isn’t to buy the politicians. It’s to own the ideas that dominate the political conversation. Richard Fink realised this four decades ago, and it made him one of the most influential people in modern American politics. He was the man who showed the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch how dark money could buy political control.
Fink was an unlikely Koch consigliere. He was a teenage tearaway who injured his back loading freight cars in his native New Jersey. Needing something else to occupy his time, Fink enrolled in an economics course at university. He would later say that he didn’t even know what economics was.1
Fink soon learned. He developed a particular passion for the Austrian school that underpinned most libertarian political philosophies. The state should play a minimal role, and the fewer regulations the better.
After college, Fink started a postgraduate course in New York University and was struck by the paucity of schools teaching courses in Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He decided to ask Charles Koch for money to start a programme in Rutgers, where he was teaching part-time. In the late 1970s, he flew out to Wichita, Kansas, the centre of the oil empire that the brothers had inherited from their father in 1967.2
Fink was 27 years old, with long hair, a beard and a black polyester suit with white piping that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Saturday Night Fever. Charles Koch stumped up $150,000, and Fink repaid the mogul’s faith in him.3 He developed a theory of how political change could be manufactured, just like any one of the many products that Koch Industries produced every single day.
In the mid-1990s, Fink, by then president of the Charles Koch Foundation, summed up his strategy in a paper called ‘The Structure of Social Change’.4 Behind the dry title was an ingenious three-tiered model for how to bring about a libertarian revolution.
The first stage was investing in academics who would produce “the intellectual raw materials”.5 Money poured into universities from libertarian donors. Graduate programmes in Austrian economics started opening across the United States.
Step two in Fink’s process was refining the “often unintelligible” intellectual output of these academic programmes into a “useable form”.6 Think tanks were key. Independent research institutes had existed in the United States and elsewhere since the turn of the century. Organisations such as the Brookings Institute professed to follow facts and reason to understand social problems, even if the solutions they offered almost always involved government playing a greater role in public life.7
Fink’s think tanks, by contrast, were intentionally partisan. Like the grand dame of the libertarian think tank world, the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, these institutes preached the undiluted doctrines of Hayek and Friedman. The American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and dozens of others in Washington DC are more like lobbying organisations than research centres. They push often heterodox positions – such as minimising the human role in climate change – that at times conflict with one another but chime with their sponsors’ overall libertarian aims.
The third part of Fink’s strategy was subsidising citizens’ groups that would pressure politicians to adopt particular policies, and funding fringe political movements to lobby inside the established parties. These political outriders pulled the Republican party base and their political representatives further and further to the libertarian right.
Guided by Fink’s insights, a tiny group of American plutocrats invested billions in think tanks, universities and election campaigns over the last four decades. Before this methodical and precisely targeted spending spree, libertarians had been largely thought of as cranks.8 Afterwards, the limited space within which policies are created and publicly discussed was filled with proposals that they wanted. The deregulation of Ronald Reagan and George H. and George W. Bush often came straight from blueprints drawn up by libertarian institutes. Donald Trump campaigned to “drain the swamp”; in office he rolled back roughly 85 environmental rules and regulations in his first two years.9 The US pulled out of the Paris climate accord and loosened domestic laws on toxic air pollution. These moves were applauded by the foundations and very rich activists, like the Mercer family, who backed Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Could Richard Fink’s dark money playbook travel across the Atlantic? In many ways, it already has. After Washington, London is home to the largest concentration of libertarian think tanks. The nest of institutes – mostly housed in those Tufton Street townhouses – are committed to open markets and perfect information in all areas except one: their own funding. Legally, they are not required to identify their donors, and very few do.
Centrist and left-wing think tanks, which did well under the Blair and Brown Labour governments, are often equally desperate for money but generally more transparent about where it comes from, largely because they rely more heavily on public funding and donations from trusts.
“There is definitely an asymmetry in funding of think tanks on the right and the left,” says Nick Pearce, Professor of Politics at the University of Bath and a former head of the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research. “On the left, private donations are not anywhere near as important.”
It’s been like this from the very beginning. Madsen Pirie, the Adam Smith Institute’s dapper founder, recalled visiting “all of the main companies” soliciting donations for his new think tank in 1977. Some twenty responded with cheques. The most enthusiastic supporter was future Referendum Party leader James Goldsmith. Pirie recalled that Goldsmith “listened carefully as we outlined the project, his eyes twinkling at the audacity and scale of it. Then he had his secretary hand us a cheque for £12,000 as we left.”10
Such candour about think tank funding is rare. In Pirie’s own account of the history of the Adam Smith Institute, any references to donors cease from the early 1980s. The money just miraculously appears and keeps on coming.11
The willingness to accept anonymous funding makes think tanks the ideal vehicle for companies and business interests to quietly influence government policy. “These think tanks wouldn’t function without corporate donors,” says Pearce. Words like ‘institute’ and ‘centre’ give an appearance of academic rigour to what is essentially paid-for lobbying.
This kind of criticism has even come from within the think tanks themselves. John Blundell, former head of the influential Institute of Economic Affairs, complained that corporations were buying up these ‘research’ groups “left, right and centre”.12 David Frum, formerly a fellow at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, has said that think tanks “increasingly function as public-relations agencies”.13
In the UK, anonymous corporate money has often helped set the political agenda in ways that are subtle yet highly effective. A good example of this is the rise of the very notion of the ‘Anglosphere’. In two decades, the idea that Britain should leave the European Union, deregulate and form a new trading relationship with predominantly white English-speaking nations went from a fringe concern to a widely held political aspiration. As we shall see later, the Anglosphere’s success was the product of dedicated transatlantic networks of think tanks, politicians and media.
“Brexit is a big example of centre-right think tank success,” a former staffer at a British libertarian think tank told me. “When people like Dan Hannan were the only ones seriously talking about leaving the EU, and the Anglosphere, the think tanks were behind it, too.”
Of course, ideas have always come and gone in politics, aided by a combination of money, good timing and clever communications strategies. From Thatcher to Blair, British politicians have picked up – and often discarded – proposals generated by small cadres of highly motivated corporate, political and other players. Blair’s flirtation with Anthony Giddens’s ‘Third Way’ is a case in point.
But what’s changing is the growing role of private money in producing the ideas that are gaining traction. If anything, British politics is even more vulnerable to corporate capture than America’s.
“A little bit of money goes a long way,” says former Conservative MP Guto Bebb. “We are not America. You don’t have to spend half a billion on a general election campaign. If you are willing to put a quarter of a million into a think tank, you can get a lot of bang for your buck.” Or, as many do, you can donate directly to political parties or, increasingly, give money to individual politicians.
But before we delve into spreadsheets of political funding data and the murky history of the Anglosphere, let’s take a look at a story that encapsulates how British politics has become increasingly Americanised: the rise and fall, and rise again, of Liam Fox and his dream of the Atlantic Bridge.
*
On a clammy evening in July 2018, Liam Fox stood up to deliver the tenth annual Margaret Thatcher Freedom lecture at the Heritage Foundation in downtown Washington DC. Britain’s international trade secretary was formally dressed – blue suit, white shirt, a chequered tie the only nod to the possibility of mischief – but he looked relaxed. Fox was among friends. “Liam has been a frequent visitor to the Heritage Foundation for the last two decades,” the compère said as he handed over the lectern. Over the course of the next hour Fox, flanked by an American flag, made the case for a “trailblazing” post-Brexit free trade deal between the US and the UK.14 The applause at the end of his speech was long and warm.
At Heritage, Fox was speaking directly to some of the best-connected people in Washington. Heritage provided many of the top personnel for Trump’s transition team. The president’s commitments to slash trillions off the federal budget and bin environmental protections were lifted straight from the think tank’s policy proposals,15 which are inspired by the radical egoism of Ayn Rand, one of the most important propagandists of unfettered capitalism and a major influence on the modern American right.
Heritage is one of the biggest beasts in DC, with an annual budget approaching $100 million. Visitors talk of a cavernous office that feels more like a megachurch than a lobbying operation. The list of its funders reads like a who’s who of American libertarianism: the Coors brewing dynasty, the Kochs, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who bankrolled Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart News and Donald Trump. The Mercers were also fond of British Conservatives: in 2005, Robert funded the creation of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom inside the Heritage Foundation. A UK equivalent struggled to get off the ground amid questions about how the funds were spent.16
Heritage was also interested in Brexit. A few months after Fox’s visit, Heritage was one of more than half a dozen transatlantic think tanks that published a detailed joint blueprint for an “ideal” free trade agreement between the US and post-Brexit Britain. The paper was co-authored by Daniel Hannan and published by his own recently created think tank,17 the Initiative for Free Trade.* It was cited approvingly by members of the European Research Group. One newspaper report coyly noted that the researchers behind Hannan’s free trade paper had “exceptional access” to government ministers, including Liam Fox.18
Fox’s interest in American libertarianism was not a recent development. In 1997, as a young Conservative MP, Fox set up an educational charity to lobby against those who “would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States”. He called it the Atlantic Bridge. Margaret Thatcher was its honorary patron.
Atlantic Bridge would later become a byword for lobbying scandal, leaving a trail of dark money and influence-peddling stretching from Washington to London and around the world.19 But before that, Fox’s think tank played a key role in building links between British and American libertarians, neo-conservatives, Tea Party enthusiasts and their mutual corporate interests. Many of Atlantic Bridge’s most prominent British supporters would later play leading roles in Vote Leave and the ascendant Brexit-supporting wing of the Conservative Party, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.
That Atlantic Bridge got off the ground at all is a testament to Fox’s determination. The first decade of this century was not a propitious one for British Conservatives. Out of power in Westminster, Tories also struggled to get a hearing in George W. Bush’s administration. Except for Liam Fox. Fox was briefed in the White House by the president’s senior advisor, Karl Rove.20 Henry Kissinger received Atlantic Bridge’s Margaret Thatcher Medal of Freedom. Rudy Giuliani gave the inaugural Margaret Thatcher lecture in London.
Fox’s strategy of connecting US and British conservatives echoed Richard Fink’s approach. As Fox explained to a local journalist in Pittsburgh, he wanted to create a network of individuals “in politics, and in the media, and in the military, and in academia” to push the Atlanticist message and fight off the threat of being “dragged” into European integration. The reporter’s description of Fox as “almost the Donald Rumsfeld of Great Britain”21 was more accurate than he might have realised, at least in terms of Fox’s aspirations: at the time, the shadow defence secretary’s Westminster office was decorated with a detailed map of Afghanistan and a photograph of himself with President Bush.
Fox’s transatlantic relationships were not merely personal. In 2007, Atlantic Bridge established a “special partnership” with the American Legislative Exchange Council, one of the most influential forces in US conservative politics. ALEC, whose funders have included the Kochs, the Philip Morris tobacco conglomerate, ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association, is famous for aggressively lobbying state legislators to adopt corporate-backed policies. The tactic is very successful: ALEC claims that around a thousand bills based on its drafting are introduced each year, with a fifth being enacted,22 including laws to restrict the minimum wage23 and to promote ‘stand-your-ground’ gun legislation (which has been cited in numerous vigilante killings).
As part of its tie-up with Atlantic Bridge, ALEC set up a US charity, also called Atlantic Bridge. Although legally separate, the two Atlantic Bridges effectively operated in tandem. The American arm even paid for Fox and other senior Tories to fly to America.24
Atlantic Bridge’s anonymous funding increased dramatically after its relationship with ALEC was established. The charity’s US arm hired a raft of well-connected lawyers and lobbyists with links to America’s military-industrial complex.25 Catherine Bray was brought in to run international affairs. Bray, who later worked for Daniel Hannan, had previously been employed by Tory MEPs Richard Ashworth and Roger Helmer, who later defected to UKIP. Atlantic Bridge researcher Gabby Bertin – whose post was funded by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer26 – became David Cameron’s press secretary.
In the US, Atlantic Bridge was close to central figures in the Koch-supported Tea Party insurrection that swelled after Obama became president. Its advisory board included South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, described by Jane Mayer as defining “the outermost anti-establishment fringe of the Republican Party”.27 Another US advisory board member, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, had spent years arguing that climate change was a hoax. Inhofe’s stance was supported by big oil companies, and his 2014 re-election campaign was funded by BP.28
Fox’s American connections began to prompt questions back home. David Cameron, who was attempting to detoxify the Tories, was accused of supporting privatised healthcare after another Atlantic Bridge-advising Republican senator wrote that he had concluded that Obamacare was “nuts” after Daniel Hannan told him “about the socialised medicine in Britain”. The pair had met in the green room of a Fox News studio.29 Cameron publicly admonished his MEP.30
After the Conservatives’ narrow election victory in 2010, the Atlanticists finally had a place in the British government. Liam Fox became defence secretary in the coalition administration. Atlantic Bridge had gone from a small Tory charity handing out Margaret Thatcher medals to a sophisticated network connecting the British cabinet, global corporate interests and US libertarian donors.31 Fox travelled the world spreading the neo-conservative message, almost always accompanied by his close friend and Atlantic Bridge’s £90,000-a-year chief executive, Adam Werritty.32 But Fox’s moment of triumph would be brief.
The first sign of trouble was a complaint to the Charity Commission that Atlantic Bridge was breaking the rules by adopting a pro-Conservative political stance. The regulator suspended the charity.33 Rather than change how it operated, the trustees just shut Atlantic Bridge down.
But this did not stop the questions. The press smelled a story, and homed in on Werritty. It emerged that Werritty, who did not have security clearance, had been using Fox’s office in Portcullis House as the charity’s official headquarters. Even though he worked for a private think tank, he had been handing out business cards embossed with Parliament’s logo, describing him as an “advisor to the Rt Hon Dr Fox MP”. And he had indeed been advising: Werritty accompanied Fox on over a dozen foreign visits. He even brokered a meeting in Dubai with a potential defence contractor and met the Sri Lankan president.34
Days after the charity watchdog suspended Atlantic Bridge, a new company called Pargav Ltd was created specifically to fund Werritty’s first-class travel around the world. The firm’s sole director was an employee of British-Australian hedge fund manager and major Tory donor Michael Hintze.35 The money came from four high-profile businessmen who were also donors to the Conservatives,† and from an international investigation outfit staffed by ex-MI6 agents.36 Fox arranged for one of the funders, a secretive organisation called the Iraq Research Group, to meet with junior Minister of Defence Gerald Howarth.37
Fox was forced to resign amid mounting inconsistencies in his statements about Atlantic Bridge and his relationship with Werritty. An official report found that Werritty was not a lobbyist himself, but that he was used by defence lobbyists to gain access to the minister.38
Atlantic Bridge showed how a US-style think tank, funded by anonymous private donors, could gain influence in the centre of British politics. Despite ending in disgrace, Fox’s outfit played a crucial role in building relationships between British Conservatives and American political and corporate elites that continued long after the Atlantic Bridge had crumbled into the sea.
Just weeks after the Brexit vote, Liam Fox was brought back into the cabinet by Theresa May, as international trade secretary. One of his first visits was to Heritage in Washington, where he met the foundation’s president, former Atlantic Bridge board member Jim DeMint. Afterwards, Fox wrote to DeMint, saying how much he was looking forward to working with Heritage. During his three years in post, Fox, a vocal supporter of leaving the European customs union and the single market, frequently shuttled to Washington to meet lobbyists inside and outside the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon recalled that when Theresa May visited Donald Trump for the first time, in February 2017, Liam Fox was in attendance, too. “I got [Fox] in a room with Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, and said ‘we will make a deal with you in 90 days. Trump has given us the order. Let’s get on with it,’” Bannon told me. The former Trump advisor complained that his British interlocutors “just kinda mumbled and said they had to check the rules”.
Bannon was not impressed by the calibre of the British contingent. “Trump was giving Theresa May negotiating tips. You could tell they weren’t focused. They weren’t engaged. They didn’t have a plan. I thought the team was extremely mediocre,” said Bannon.
One of Boris Johnson’s first acts as prime minister in July 2019 was to sack Fox. But Fox’s libertarian friends on Capitol Hill remained firm supporters of Brexit. In August 2019, less than two weeks after Johnson had succeeded Theresa May, 45 Republican senators signed a letter to the new prime minister pledging unconditional support for a free trade deal with Britain after a no-deal Brexit. The letter quoted Winston Churchill’s over-familiar lines about finest hours and Britons possessing the hearts of lions. Among the signatories were senators James Inhofe and Lindsey Graham.39 Both had been US advisors to Atlantic Bridge.
Through the early 2000s, Atlantic Bridge had worked behind the scenes to shift Britain’s horizons away from Europe and towards a new special relationship with the United States based on deregulation and free trade. They were not the only ones. Quietly, with little fanfare, a small network of corporate-funded think tanks, politicians and media commentators on both sides of the Atlantic had a similar goal. Their project even had its own catchy name: the Anglosphere.
*
In December 1999, Margaret Thatcher arrived at the English-Speaking Union in Midtown Manhattan amid a cloud of controversy. A few months earlier the former prime minister had thrown the Conservative conference in Blackpool into chaos by declaring that the US and Britain were responsible for the world’s greatest achievements. “In my lifetime, all the problems”, Thatcher told the faithful at a Tory fringe event, “have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.”40 Now, on the eve of the new millennium, Thatcher was expanding her transatlantic thesis. She outlined for her American audience a vision for “a new international alliance”, a union of English-speaking people as a bulwark against “the ambitions of bureaucrats in Brussels”.41 The Anglosphere, an idea that first emerged in the dog days of the British empire, was back.
Thatcher was not on a solo run. A few months earlier, the historian Robert Conquest, chronicler of Stalin’s purges and famines, told the English-Speaking Union that the European project was an “anti-American” scheme born of “extreme regulationism”. The only solution, he said, was to replace the “grotesque rigours of the European Union” with a new Anglophone alignment:
It hardly needs saying that what comes to mind is some form of unity between countries of the same legal and political – and linguistic and cultural – traditions: which is to say an Association of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – as well as, it is to be hoped, Ireland and the peoples of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.
Conquest’s arguments were not new. In his iconic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill presented the idea of the Anglosphere to a mass audience. Britain, the wartime leader wrote, should retain a special bond with its former territories, even as it moved closer to Europe. A distinct undercurrent of imperial nostalgia has long run through the modern Conservative Party.
But at the start of the 21st century, there was little popular support for such flights of fancy. Tony Blair was a vocal proponent of the ‘special relationship’ but had no intention of leaving the EU. Even among British Eurosceptics, Conquest’s racially tinged Anglosphere was very much a fringe idea. There was little interest in America, even among the incoming Bush administration. But a small, well-connected network of journalists, politicians and intellectuals were starting to talk about a realignment of Anglophone nations. As had happened in US politics since the 1970s, libertarian-minded universities and think tanks were helping to nurture an outsider idea that would later come to prominence during the Brexit referendum and, especially, in its aftermath.
As might be expected, the Anglosphere had support from the dispensers of American libertarian dark money. Conquest was a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford at the time of his New York speech. The Hoover Institution’s main funders include major conservative donors such as the Mellon Scaife oil dynasty. Conquest’s speech mentioned support for his ideas from the American Enterprise Institute. One of the oldest and richest conservative think tanks in Washington, the AEI provided senior staff to Bush’s government, including Dick Cheney, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz. The AEI’s funding is opaque, but it has received money from a range of corporate and wealthy libertarian donors including Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, the Kochs and the Scaifes.
In 1999 and 2000, the Hudson Institute, a think tank whose funders also included Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers, organised two conferences in Washington and Berkshire to bring together leading figures in British and American conservatism.42 As authors Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce note in their history of the Anglosphere, the Hudson conferences proved crucial to the idea’s revival. Among the delegates were Thatcher, future Brexit minister David Davis, the influential Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black, and prominent commentators such as James C. Bennett, John O’Sullivan and Francis Fukuyama, the neo-conservative historian who had prematurely prophesied the “the end of history” after the fall of communism.
Many of the main contributors subsequently wrote books and articles proselytising for the Anglosphere, which often appeared in outlets owned by Black and Rupert Murdoch.43 In Washington, John Hulsman, a policy analyst at Heritage, called on “Britain to join an alternate future path, one that recognises that its natural economic and political partner remains the US, and not the European Union”.44
Somewhat ironically, it was the global financial meltdown from 2008 that propelled the Anglosphere into the centre of the conservative imagination. The crash was largely a product of deregulatory Anglo-American capitalism, but it triggered a run of sovereign debt crises across the eurozone. As the very future of the European Union came into sharp focus, British Euroscepticism enjoyed a resurgence. The imperial yearnings of those committed to the Anglosphere became a major plank in the case for Brexit among small but influential sections of British conservatism. Prominent supporters included Gove, Fox, John Redwood, Norman Lamont, Michael Howard and conservative leaders in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
As in the United States, corporate-funded think tanks played a key role in pushing the idea of the unique identity of the English-speaking peoples. The Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Henry Jackson Society and Policy Exchange and their transatlantic cousins in the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute reimagined the UK as ‘Global Britain’ striking deals around the Anglophone world. At the root of this shared vision was a heavily deregulated economic model with low taxes and minimal state intervention.
In 2017, Matthew Elliott wrote a blog post reflecting on the lessons of Brexit for the Atlas Network, an umbrella group for more than 450 libertarian think tanks and campaigns around the world which has its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.45
“Major policy changes are never impossible,” declared the founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Vote Leave. “Who would have thought that a coalition of people working over two decades could convince a country to leave a major international organisation? But with a lot of perseverance, we managed to make history.”46
*
The Young Britons’ Foundation exemplified the growing American influence on the Eurosceptic fringes of the David Cameron-era of ‘compassionate Conservatism’. Lawyer Donal Blaney set up the Young Britons in 2003 after visiting the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC. The Young Britons was badged as an educational think tank, but the real aim was to “import American political techniques into the UK”.47 Like Richard Fink, Blaney realised the importance of spreading libertarian ideas through grassroots activists. The YBF sought to place “young radical free-market Anglosphere Conservatives in public life”, Blaney said. “Some might become Members of Parliament, some might become councillors, some might become journalists and some might go and earn a packet of money in the City.”48
At times the YBF looked more like a Tea Party offshoot than a Tory think tank during Cameron’s attempted detoxification of the Conservative brand. Global warming was a “scam”; waterboarding prisoners wasn’t all that bad; environmental protesters who trespass should be “shot down” by the police. “We have been described as a Conservative madrasa,” Blaney once said. “We bring the next generation out to the States and bring them back radicalised.”49
These Young Britons’ strident politics started to get an audience. Ahead of the 2010 general election, around a dozen Tory parliamentary candidates attended YBF training courses. In the last days of the campaign, its activists delivered over half a million leaflets in Liberal Democrat/Conservative marginals warning of the dangers of a hung parliament.50
As in America, regular conferences were a central part of the YBF strategy for building a grassroots following. Youthful delegates heard talks from influential conservatives from both sides of the Atlantic. The Young Britons’ tenth anniversary conference, at Churchill College, Cambridge, in December 2013, featured appearances from soon-to-be influential Eurosceptic Tory MPs: Douglas Carswell, Steve Baker, Robert Halfon, Conor Burns. Among the speakers was future Trump advisor Steve Bannon. “I knew something big was going to happen in the UK,” Bannon told me. “It was the same driving force I could see in the United States.”
Bannon began travelling to Britain regularly from the start of 2013, meeting Nigel Farage and others around UKIP such as future Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, lawyer Matthew Richardson and journalist James Delingpole. “I came over and spoke to the Young Britons,” Bannon said. “I started speaking to all those groups.” For Bannon, the Tea Party insurrection that propelled Donald Trump into the White House and Brexit were “absolutely aligned”.
The source of the very American-inflected Young Britons’ funding was unclear. When the organisation opened offices on Regent Street in the centre of London, many Conservatives asked where the cash was coming from.51 The Young Britons received large donations from an obscure unincorporated association called Healthgear Contracts. Blaney insisted that most of the funds came from him.
There were rumours of American financial involvement, too. The YBF’s US sister organisation, the Young America’s Foundation, is based at the Ronald Reagan Ranch in California and has received funding from the Koch brothers, the Mercers and Amway billionaires Richard and Helen DeVos, whose daughter-in-law, Betsy, became Donald Trump’s education secretary in 2017. The Young Britons’ advisory board drew heavily on the same world of US dark money-funded think tanks. The board featured the founder of the Leadership Institute and had representatives from Heritage, the American Conservative Union and the Henry Jackson Society. Vote Leave founder Matthew Elliott was an advisor. The novelist Frederick Forsyth was a patron.
The Cambridge anniversary that Steve Bannon attended was the Young Britons’ high-water mark. The organisation was abruptly disbanded in 2015, following a bullying scandal in the wake of the suicide of a 21-year-old activist, Elliott Johnson. His father described the organisation as a “cult”. The Conservative Party launched an investigation. Six cabinet ministers who were due to speak at a forthcoming YBF conference pulled out, and it shut down shortly afterwards.52
Nevertheless, the ideas – and the transatlantic relationships – that undergirded the Young Britons became even more influential. Many of those involved became key players in British politics, particularly in the European Research Group. Steve Bannon would develop a friendship with Boris Johnson, even claiming that he helped compose the foreign secretary’s resignation speech in July 2018.53 Writing on the Young America’s Foundation website in January 2019, Donal Blaney claimed that “treacherous ‘Conservatives’” were preventing Brexit and warned of the prospect of violence on the streets.54
The demise of the Young Britons did little to temper the growing transatlantic influence on sections of the Conservative Party. In 2012, a quintet of rising Tory stars including future cabinet ministers Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Priti Patel laid out their neo-imperial vision of a “buccaneering” Britain in a polemical anthology, Britannia Unchained. As with their US counterparts, these young libertarians saw government regulations as shackles that had left “the British… among the worst idlers in the world”.55 Once the chains had been slipped, Britain could once again ride the global high seas to prosperity. As historian Robert Saunders noted, “The use of ‘trade’ as a euphemism for ‘empire’ became a staple of Brexit ideology.”56
After the Leave vote, the Anglosphere became an argument for putting clear blue water between Britain and Europe, on both patriotic and practical grounds. Daniel Hannan wrote enthusiastic columns in the Daily Telegraph about the coming of a gilded age of the English-speaking nations. A private company was set up to lobby for Canzuk, a union between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Conservative historian Andrew Roberts, declared that “of all the many splendid opportunities provided by the British people’s heroic Brexit vote, perhaps the greatest is the resuscitation of the idea of a Canzuk Union”.57 Commentator James C. Bennett wrote curious science fiction set in a future Canzuk where carefree office workers shuttle between London and yet-to-be-built cities on the Australian littoral.
In 2017, a cadre of Conservative MPs called the Free Enterprise Group published a paper advocating “reconnecting with the Commonwealth”. The group, which included Raab and Patel, was administered by the Institute of Economic Affairs. Tony Abbott wrote the foreword to the Commonwealth paper – the former conservative Australian prime minister had become a frequent pro-Brexit guest on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. Abbott’s calls for Britain to leave the European Union’s customs union and single market and form a new alliance with the Anglophone world based on mutual recognition of standards were regularly picked up by the European Research Group and its supporters.
Considerable scepticism about the promise of the Anglosphere was expressed by people who actually understood world trade. Economists pointed out the problem of ‘trade gravity’. We do a lot more business with our neighbours – like Europe – than with those thousands of miles away. Waggish Whitehall officials dubbed trade secretary Liam Fox’s plans “Empire 2.0”.58
But these were minority voices in government, experts in a political culture that had come to denigrate expertise. Senior ministers continually talked up the prospect of free trade deals around the world, even after India – one of the top targets for a new post-Brexit deal – gave a decidedly lukewarm response to Britain’s trade proposals. “I don’t think India is in a rush,” the country’s high commissioner in London said ahead of bilateral talks in April 2018.59
Time has borne out the Indian diplomat’s words. Liam Fox’s promise that Britain would be able to sign 40 trade deals “the second after Brexit” proved misguided.60 By the end of 2019, Britain had rolled over around twenty trade deals, many with very small territories including the Faroe Islands, the Palestinian Authority and Liechtenstein.61 Japan, whose extensive free trade deal with the European Union began in early 2019, said that the UK could not expect the same favourable terms as the much larger EU bloc.
Nevertheless, the Anglosphere, and the radical deregulation that would have to go with it, particularly if Trump’s US were to be attracted by it, became an accepted part of British political debate. Speaking on a visit to Australia as foreign secretary in 2017, Boris Johnson echoed his idol Winston Churchill’s praise for “the special genius of the English-speaking people”. Talk of ‘Global Britain’ increased markedly after Johnson became prime minister. Fox’s successor as international trade secretary, Liz Truss, toured the world with a red, white and blue umbrella (and a personal photographer at the taxpayer’s expense62). John Bew was appointed to the influential Downing Street Policy Unit. Bew, a distinguished historian, had previously led a project called Britain in the World at Policy Exchange, another London think tank funded by anonymous corporate donors.63
Even the reality that London would be subservient to Washington in a post-Brexit union was blithely accepted. “Britain will be better off as junior partner of the United States than an EU vassal,” historian Andrew Roberts, like Johnson a Churchill biographer, wrote in August 2019.64 A strange psychology flourished in which equal participation in European affairs was seen as ‘vassalage’, but further subordination to the US became ‘liberation’.
The revival of the idea of the Anglosphere was, says political scientist Nick Pearce, “a product of the extensive links between the UK and the US right” through the early years of the 21st century. As Richard Fink and his acolytes had done so often in the US, a fringe policy nurtured by a small band of corporate-funded Atlanticists had become mainstream.
British politics is starting to look more and more American in other ways, too. A small group of (often very) wealthy individuals have come to dominate the way in which British politics is funded – and to influence what policies make it onto the political agenda.
*
When it comes to political funding, Britain sits somewhere between the United States and Europe. Unlike in many European states, there is little public funding available for British parties. Parties, and even individual politicians, have to finance themselves through private donations.
Unlike in the US, the amount of money involved in British politics is pretty meagre. The 2018 US midterm elections cost almost $6 billion. In the UK, just about anyone with £50,000 burning a hole in their back pocket can join the Conservative Leader’s Group and have an off-the-record dinner with the prime minister and leading cabinet figures.
Britain’s largest parties have long relied on funding from sectional interests. Labour, which often raises more money than any other party, is heavily backed by the trade unions. The Conservatives largely rely on private sector funders.
Across the political spectrum, ‘cash for access’ scandals have been a fixture of British politics. In 2006, Labour peer Lord Levy was arrested but not charged during the ‘cash for honours’ scandal, in which businessmen who gave loans to the party were subsequently recommended for peerages.65 Levy denied wrongdoing.
David Cameron agreed to release lists of Leader’s Group donors in 2012, after it emerged that the then prime minister was hosting private parties for funders at his Downing Street flat.66 (The Conservatives have since stopped publishing details of these gatherings.) A fifth of the top Conservative donors have received honours, including knighthoods and seats in the House of Lords.67 “You have always been able to buy access in British politics,” says Alistair Clark, a political scientist at the University of Newcastle. “What has changed is that more people now realise that you can buy access.”
British political donors have changed as Britain has changed. The early 1970s asset-strippers who championed Ted Heath’s Conservative leadership were very different from the privatisation-focused City of London millionaires who bankrolled Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Those were the days when the late Lord McAlpine revolutionised Tory fundraising, reputedly turning up in the City with a large sack and asking for bundles of cash to fill it – something that would have been entirely legal at the time. By 2011, with the Conservatives back in power after thirteen years in opposition, fully half of the party’s funding came from donors involved in the City of London. Six years previously, it had been a quarter.68
Many of the Conservatives’ growing ranks of City funders supported David Cameron’s Brexit referendum strategy. Big business heavily backed Remain, including Goldman Sachs, Citi Group and The City of London Corporation.69 Pro-Brexit funding came from the City too, but unlike the stockbrokers and captains of industry that lined up behind Cameron, most of the Leave money came from a small number of individual donors with a background in the high-stakes world of hedge funds.
Veteran fund manager and long-time Conservative funder Jeremy Hosking was a major Vote Leave donor. Numerous other Tory ‘hedgies’ put money behind a Brexit vote: former Conservative Party treasurer Peter Cruddas, Atlantic Bridge acolyte Michael Hintze, metals fund manager David Lilley. The most infamous hedge fund Brexiter was Crispin Odey, a former UKIP donor and one-time son-in-law to Rupert Murdoch who made £220 million on referendum night betting that sterling would collapse if Leave won – despite donating almost £900,000 to pro-Brexit campaigns. Odey said that the next morning the day broke with “gold in its mouth”.70
After June 2016, the Conservatives’ already narrow funding pool contracted sharply. The pro-European business elite fled the party as factions such as the European Research Group became increasingly powerful. Around two-thirds of existing Tory donors reduced their contributions after the EU referendum, or stopped giving at all. Dislocated from their traditional support, the Conservatives were now largely dependent on funding from a small number of overwhelmingly pro-Leave donors who wanted to cut ties with the EU. These funders’ contributions fluctuated in direct correlation with the party’s Brexit policy. In the first three months of 2019, as Theresa May tried to force her withdrawal agreement through Westminster, donations to the Conservatives fell by half on the same period the previous year, to £3.7 million. When Boris Johnson took over, promising a hard Brexit, donations increased sharply.
During the subsequent general election, the Tories broke records for the most funds raised in a British campaign.71 The party raised more than £37 million from large donations for the election. Much of this money came from super-rich donors, many connected to the world of hedge funds and private equity. These speculators often saw themselves as iconoclasts fighting against the establishment. As in the US, Britain’s traditional party of government has become increasingly reliant on a handful of very wealthy donors – who only need to spend a fraction of the money the Kochs or the Scaifes spread around in order to wield huge influence.
“The Tory party is now wholly unrepresentative in any way of the UK population. Its source of funds is so restricted,” says economist Frances Coppola. “And because they are so dependent on this small group of donors, Tory party policy is going to be skewed.”
The Conservatives have close ties to Russian donors who have been given British citizenship. Ahead of the 2019 general election, Johnson was heavily criticised for blocking the release of a report into Russian interference in British politics that reportedly named high-profile Conservative Party donors with links to Russia.72
The Conservatives’ growing dependence on decentralised private capital, and particularly hedge funds, did not go unnoticed. In September 2019, former chancellor Philip Hammond declared that Boris Johnson was in league with financiers who stood to profit handsomely from a no-deal Brexit. The prime minister’s own sister, Rachel, agreed.
But there was a problem with this theory. Hedge funds rely on rapid, largely unforeseen market changes. Johnson’s supposed desire to leave the EU on the toughest of terms was widely telegraphed. Instead of a great conspiracy to make a killing on a depreciation of sterling, the most successful party in the history of British politics was being captured by a small group of donors with a professional interest in the buccaneering, free trading Britain envisaged by the cottage industry of libertarian think tanks clustered around Tufton Street. “These are all people who want to see a bonfire of regulation, a Singapore-on-Thames,” said Coppola. “They want to dismantle all state regulation, lower taxes to zero.”
Their views were not a secret. Months before the referendum, Crispin Odey, Peter Cruddas and over a hundred City executives signed an open letter that called for a slashing of red tape and radical divergence from EU standards after a Brexit vote.
That massive political shocks can be used to push through radical economic change is well documented. Canadian writer Naomi Klein calls it “disaster capitalism”.73 After the Brexit vote, the language of disaster was often used by British politicians and commentators, although often in a positive sense, as an opportunity for collective renewal through suffering. Forgotten in the evocations of Dunkirk and the Blitz were the spivs of the 1940s who made a fortune on the black market. Even at the height of adversity, there is money to be made, especially for speculators. Where factory owners or entrepreneurs generate profits through the productive use of capital – making goods or services – speculators make money from money.
Speculators struggled in the wake of the financial crash. In an era of negative interest rates and low inflation, easy money is much harder to make. A sudden shock to the system, like Brexit, can create volatility, which creates new opportunities for profit. The British sociologist Will Davies describes Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as “kindred spirits in the project of injecting a bit of chaos into the liberal economic system”.74
It is striking, too, that many of the most fervent Brexiters in the business world have few or no ties to the British economy. In 2018, an investment fund co-founded by the European Research Group’s Jacob Rees-Mogg opened an office in Dublin, to guard against “considerable uncertainty” as Britain left the EU.75 Vacuum-cleaner tycoon and Leave backer Sir James Dyson no longer produces his machines in the UK. Ineos billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe moved to Monaco despite his vocal support for Brexit. The owners of a number of pro-Brexit newspapers are foreign, like Rupert Murdoch, or often control their media holdings through offshore companies, like the Barclay brothers.
Meanwhile, in Britain the productive core of the national economy, largely foreign-owned, is no longer tied to British party politics. Where once the Conservatives represented business interests – and were funded by them – now the party is reliant on speculators and hedge funders. David Edgerton, Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London, wrote that the Conservatives were taken over by the hard right and its financial backers “because it was no longer stabilised by a powerful organic connection to capital, either nationally or locally”.76
Business? “Fuck business,” Boris Johnson declared.
So, what happens when the party of government is captured by a small group of donors? We can look across the Atlantic to get a rough idea. “A federal election in the US is supposed to be decided by 150 million voters, and yet the policy preferences are being determined by literally 20 people, 20 major donors,” says Adav Noti, a US election lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington DC.
Something similar is happening in the UK. “We should be worried that a major party in Britain is struggling to raise funds,” says Frances Coppola. “As that continues they will have to dance ever more to the tune of the cranks who fund it.” This will likely mean growing numbers of policies that benefit particular niche interests. Already there are signs of obscure deregulatory projects making their way onto the political agenda.
During the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, Boris Johnson promised to “take back control of our regulatory framework”, echoing Vote Leave’s referendum slogan. He pledged to review a levy on sugar (designed to curb obesity and other diseases) and backed the quixotic idea of turning almost a dozen UK sites into free ports. The sudden enthusiasm for this fringe proposal was particularly strange. Free ports, which charge no taxes or tariffs, are a money launderer’s dream. The EU has been trying to phase them out. So why were they suddenly the future for Britain’s post-industrial cities?
Johnson’s support followed a well-funded campaign in favour of free ports run by a public affairs consultancy headquartered in Westminster. It is not clear who paid for this lobbying effort, but it had the backing of newspaper commentators and influential, corporate-funded think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and others.
Two days before Britain left the EU, at the end of January 2020, the Department for International Trade tweeted that it would be “developing ambitious new #Freeports to ensure that towns and cities across the UK can begin to benefit from the trade opportunities that Brexit brings.” Free ports were now government policy.
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In 2017, Vote Leave founder Matthew Elliott co-authored a report about post-Brexit public opinion for the Legatum think tank. British voters, Elliott found, were far less enamoured with the free market than he might have expected. The report is worth quoting at length:
On almost every issue, the public tends to favour non-free market ideals rather than those of the free market. Instead of an unregulated economy, the public favours regulation. Instead of companies striving for profit above all else, they want businesses to make less profit and be more socially responsible. Instead of privatised water, electricity, gas and railway sectors, they want public ownership. They favour CEO wage caps, workers at senior executive and board level and for government to rein in big business. They want zero hours contracts to be abolished.77
Fewer than one in ten people thought taxes or public spending should be cut.
Yet the very same positions that Elliott identified as publicly unpopular, and which he supports, came to dominate British political debate after June 2016. Free trade and deregulation – issues largely absent during the Brexit referendum – were held up as totemic of the “will of the people”. Prominent Leave voices, from Nigel Farage to the ERG, declared that anything less than leaving the European Union’s single market and customs union would be Brino: Brexit in Name Only. Donald Trump and senior Republicans in Washington agreed. Britain could simply replace the EU with the Anglosphere, and all would be well.
During the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson pushed a message that was markedly different from his leadership stump speeches. The prime minister-in-waiting promised public investment and state aid for struggling English regions. Voters’ concerns would be listened to.
A few weeks after the Conservatives’ sweeping victory, I interviewed Steve Bannon. He refused to say whether he was still in contact with Johnson but said that he expected the triumphant prime minister “to adapt his policies to become more populist”. Although Johnson was “an elitist” and “a globalist” who had “opportunistically jumped” on Brexit, “he has more economic nationalistic tendencies and he is more populist than he was,” Bannon said.
Johnson has shown a populist touch. In his first speech after the general election win, made in Tony Blair’s former Sedgefield constituency, the prime minister promised to deliver a “people’s government” and thanked former Labour supporters who had “lent” their vote to the Conservatives.
But shortly after his election victory, Johnson reiterated his commitment to ensuring that the UK would be free to deregulate and diverge from EU standards. Global Britain would finally be unchained. Whatever the eventual shape of Britain’s new relationship with the European Union, for corporate lobbyists and think tanks, the transatlantic “Brexit influencing game” had already begun.
* Daniel Hannan’s think tank, which was launched by Boris Johnson on Foreign Office premises in 2017, was initially called the Institute of Free Trade but was forced to change its name as it did not have permission to call itself an institute. The word ‘institute’ is protected in British law and can only be used by organisations “that typically undertake research at the highest level, or are professional bodies of the highest standing”.
† Venture capitalist Jon Moulton, who gave Pargay £35,000 believing it was for “back office” costs, said he felt “mugged”. “If you look at the dictionary, the definition of ‘foxed’ is ‘discoloured with yellowish brown staining’, and I fear it might be reasonably appropriate,” he said. Moulton later donated to Vote Leave.