.
"The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes.
England’s
establishment is not what it was; the old imperial elite has become
crude and mercenary.
On Monday, a British civil servant was photographed
arriving in Downing Street for a national security council meeting with
an open document in his hand. We could read for ourselves lines from a
confidential report on how Prime Minister David Cameron’s government
should respond to the Crimea crisis. It recommended that Britain should
“not support, for now, trade sanctions,” nor should it “close London’s
financial center to Russians.”
The White House has imposed visa restrictions on some Russian officials, and President Obama has issued an executive order enabling further sanctions. But Britain has already undermined any unified action by putting profit first.
It
boils down to this: Britain is ready to betray the United States to
protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget
about Ukraine.
Britain,
open for business, no longer has a “mission.” Any moralizing remnant of
the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of
Sir Walter Raleigh. Britain’s ruling class has decayed to the point
where its first priority is protecting its cut of Russian money — even
as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of
Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that, in the 21st century,
what matters are banks, not tanks.
The
Russians also understand this. They know that London is a center of
Russian corruption, that their loot plunges into Britain’s empire of tax
havens — from Gibraltar to Jersey, from the Cayman Islands to the
British Virgin Islands — on which the sun never sets.
British
residency is up for sale. “Investor visas” can be purchased, starting
at £1 million ($1.6 million). London lawyers in the Commercial Court now
get 60 percent
of their work from Russian and Eastern European clients. More than 50
Russia-based companies swell the trade at London’s Stock Exchange. The
planning regulations have been scrapped, and along the Thames, up go
spires of steel and glass for the hedge-funding class.
Britain’s
bright young things now become consultants, art dealers, private banker
and hedge funders. Or, to put it another way, the oligarchs’ valets.
Russia’s
president, Vladimir V. Putin, gets it: you pay them, you own them. Mr.
Putin was absolutely certain that Britain’s managers — shuttling through
the revolving door between cabinet posts and financial boards — would
never give up their fees and commissions from the oligarchs’ billions.
He was right.
In
the austerity years of zero growth that followed the 2008 financial
crash, this new source of vast wealth could not be resisted. Tony Blair
is the latter-day embodiment of pirate Britain’s Sir Walter Raleigh. The
former prime minister now advises
the Kazakh ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev on his image in the West. Mr.
Blair is handsomely paid to tutor his patron on how to be evasive about
the crackdowns and the mine shootings that are facts of life in
Kazakhstan.
This is Britain’s growth business today: laundering oligarchs’ dirty billions, laundering their dirty reputations.
It
could be otherwise. Banking sanctions could turn off the financial
pipelines through which corrupt officials channel Russian money. Visa
restrictions could cut Kremlin ministers off from their mansions. The
tax havens that rob the national budget of billions could be forced to
be accountable. Britain has the power to bankrupt the Putin clique.
But
London has changed. And the Shard — the Qatari-owned, 72-floor
skyscraper above the grotty Southwark riverside — is a symbol of that
change.
The
Shard encapsulates the new hierarchy of the city. On the top floors,
“ultra high net worth individuals” entertain escorts in luxury
apartments. By day, on floors below, investment bankers trade
incomprehensible derivatives.
Come
nightfall, the elevators are full of African cleaners, paid next to
nothing and treated as nonexistent. The acres of glass windows are
scrubbed by Polish laborers, who sleep four to a room in bedsit slums.
And near the Shard are the immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, who
broke their backs on construction sites, but are now destitute and
whiling away their hours along the banks of the Thames.
The
Shard is London, a symbol of a city where oligarchs are celebrated and
migrants are exploited but that pretends to be a multicultural utopia.
Here, in their capital city, the English are no longer calling the
shots. They are hirelings."
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3/7/14, UK PM David Cameron mocked for attempting to appear serious using his phone: "Cameron looked stern and
serious on Wednesday during his phone call with Obama. Comedian Rob
Delaney (center) and Sir Patrick Stewart (right) mocked the Prime
Minister's pose."
.
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3/7/14, "David Cameron poses with Bill Clinton after ridiculed 'serious selfie' of Obama call," NY Daily News, Leslie Larson
"David Cameron tried to deflect the mockery he endured for the intense shot of him discussing the Ukraine crisis with Obama on the phone."...image NY Daily News
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