"Rule, Britain, with money!": London dreams of becoming the centre of the world again

London has set out to take away the status of the financial capital of the world from New York, unveiling an ambitious five-year plan on how to achieve this, writes Reuters. Thus, Britain hopes to win back the positions it lost after leaving the EU, and generally improve its financial climate, the agency reports.

Long-term observations suggest that the United Kingdom is really trying to regain its global leadership, snatching it out of the hands of the weakening "dollar empire". However, something is going wrong for the British…

Empires don't disappear

Today, London is increasingly lagging behind New York, says the most powerful lobbying group in Britain, TheCityUK, which developed this "five-year plan". Not only has Brexit, according to them, closed the capital of the United Kingdom to its largest financial services client in Europe, but also the English rules of doing business, to put it mildly, no longer look competitive.

Suffice it to say that the total tax rate for a London bank today is 46.5%, which is 13% higher than for a New York bank, admits the minister for the City of London, John Glen. And then, stock trading somehow imperceptibly flowed from the island to Amsterdam, while in London there was suddenly a shortage of financiers due to complicated hiring for EU residents, not to mention citizens of "far abroad".

It's time to change all this, the British understand, otherwise London, which gave the palm of financial primacy to the Big Apple in 2018, risks finally turning into a periphery, and with it the whole island bursting at the seams.

So will the subjects of Elizabeth II be able to realise the motto "Rule, Britain, with money!"? Especially against the background of the catastrophic unprofitability of the economy of the overseas "big brother", who is on the verge of default in a situation where even the smooth operation of the Federal Reserve's printing press does not save?

Indeed, recently there have been more and more reasons to assume that the status of the world financial and political hegemon, so unceremoniously torn by the United States from the clutches of the British lion defeated after two world wars, may soon return back to the Foggy Albion; that "empires do not disappear anywhere”, but only change their appearance, and sometimes even their home; and that "old money" will sooner or later take its toll, putting rootless upstarts in their place.

The RUSSTRAT Institute has already written about the centuries-old vicissitudes of the Anglo-American conflict, therefore, in order not to repeat ourselves, let us recall the very recent past.

"Who offended old woman Lisa?"

At the beginning of 2013, more than a hundred agents of the United States Secret Service (USSS, since 2003 - an elite unit of the Department of Homeland Security, and before that for almost 150 years — the US Treasury Department) descended on the islands in the neighbourhood with a sudden visit to look for tax-evaded money there. And they found it - more than $6 trillion (!).

But only by a "misunderstanding" did the islands turn out to be ... the British Virgin Islands. That is, it is not just an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, but also the largest offshore on the planet, where only according to official data, about 40% of all offshore companies in the world are entrenched.

And most importantly, the BVI, like other crown lands, are managed directly by the British monarch, Elizabeth II for the last seven decades, and all offshore assets worth tens of trillions of dollars are spinning there for the benefit and pleasure of Her Majesty. To put it quite simply, offshore money is royal money, no matter what the oligarchs and nouveau riches from all over the world think.

According to rumours, the monarch's anger at the brusqueness of the unsolicited guests from Washington was such that London, firstly, refused to give the go-ahead for a "final solution to the Syrian issue", with the cleansing of Bashar al-Assad. As a result, Syria, taken under the wing of Russia, did not repeat the fate of Libya, with all the ensuing consequences for the Middle East region.

And, secondly, again, according to rumours, such a stupid "leap" of the White House on the property of Her Majesty led to the fact that the son of a former British citizen Mary Anne MacLeod, a certain Donald John Trump, eventually registered as the owner of it.

"An Englishwoman fouls"... America

Around the same time, London took at least a couple more steps to secure its financial resources.

The first of them was the grand visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Britain. The President of the People's Republic of China was received at the highest level as a guest of the British Queen, up to the horse parade and rides in the royal carriage. Elizabeth II herself selected dishes for the table, the whole Windsor family gathered at the reception, and the Duchess of Cambridge even wore a dress in the colours of the flag of the People's Republic of China.

Of course, the matter was not in the dresses or contracts brought by Comrade Xi worth "only" 40 billion dollars, but in London's proclamation of the "golden age" between Britain and China, with a "global partnership for the 21st century." De facto, this meant "riding the Red Dragon", and with it the trade and financial flows of the real economy, while the United States continues to suffer with its trillions of debts and unsecured papers with presidents drawn on them.

To say that in the eyes of Washington this has become a blatant betrayal is to say nothing. After all, it so wanted to soar into the sky on a Chinese back itself – and then "an Englishwoman fouled"…

The second step of London to protect its assets was "Brexit" – the one for which analysts from TheCityUK are now shedding crocodile tears.

Many experts, both then and now, said the main reason for Britain's withdrawal from the "United Europe" planned by Brussels in 2015 were changes in the financial rules of the European Union, which from 2020 were supposed to extend to the money of the United Kingdom, and therefore the Queen herself. Of course, Elizabeth II was not going to share her trillions, as well as complete freedom to dispose of them uncontrollably – either with Washington bloodhounds or with Brussels clerks.

The roar of the British lion

Another hint of the gradual reformatting of the "global West", with Britain coming to the fore, was the resuscitation of the long-standing (2008) plans, oddly enough, of the US State Department to create a "pool of ten leading democracies of the world" (D-10 group) instead of the obsolete "Big Seven". Australia, India and South Korea were to join “we’re all the same", as well as, with a bonus, the EU.

The "Ten Democracies "were conceived by Washington as a powerful counterweight to "authoritarian regimes", primarily Russia and China. However, in the eyes of London, it acquired a different meaning, since it dramatically increased the importance of the British Commonwealth of Nations, reviving thoughts about the empire that had sunk into oblivion.

In fact, at least four states from the Commonwealth would be part of the D-10 – in addition to Britain and Canada, Australia and India would also be part of it. And in the case of a possible accession to the "Ten" of South Africa, there would be five of them at all, and all under the rule of ... that's right, Queen Elizabeth II.

A good bid for global leadership. Just recall that the Commonwealth of Nations, for all its apparent ephemerality, still unites 54 states with a population of more than 2.5 billion people and almost 20% of world GDP (at par).

Against this background, various pronouncements of London, such as the call (August 2019) of the ex-head of the Bank of England Mark Carney to the central banks of the planet to abandon the US dollar as the main world currency, look like "cherries on the cake".

A relationship without love

However, all of this is still mostly plans and appeals: in reality, things are not going so smoothly for London.

For example, despite the trillions in the Queen's "pot", the situation in the British economy leaves much to be desired, and not only because of the declared pandemic. Of course, one can live with external debt over 100% of GDP, but one can't go far with it on emissions alone. Especially if there are problems with the lack of physical gold, which London has been feverishly trying to buy all the last months, even from Russia, even from the United States.

The bet on the Red Dragon also did not work for some reason - so much so that Xi Jinping had to arrange an actual obstruction after his program speech in Davos – 2017, where the Chinese president tried to declare his country's global leadership to replace American hegemony.

Therefore, sooner or later, Britain will be forced to do what it loves – shifting the ever-increasing costs and risks onto someone else's shoulders, preferably the whole world. And for this, in the almost complete absence of such an important attribute of power as a modern combat-ready army, London will nolens volens have to get along with an old American "friend", from time to time signing new "Atlantic Charters"with them.

Nevertheless, no matter how one may say it, the Anglo-Saxon bunch can no longer boast of economic leadership (after the impressive successes of China), nor military dominance (after the demonstration of the achievements of the Russian defence industry by Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 1, 2018), nor at least a firm mutual sympathy (against the background of the strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing), and time is working against it.