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At the end of my thread yesterday ( https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1273132740142120961), I suggested there was a lot more to be discovered about how Britain's hidden history of atrocities influences current politics. I woke up thinking about trade. Thread/
Current politicians fetishise trade. They tell poor nations it's the way to get rich. Trade deals and trade rules are used as powerful political instruments. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/09/boris-johnson-trade-deal-us-chlorinated-chicken
But the more we discover about our own history, the less the "trade" on which Britain built its wealth looks like exchange, and the more it looks like looting. It meant extracting stolen resources and the products of slavery, debt bondage and land theft from other nations.
"Trade" with poorer nations continues by similar means today. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/resources/honest-accounts-2017-how-world-profits-africas-wealth
Secret flows of money, channelled on a vast scale through the City of London and its affiliate tax havens around the world, are an even more powerful means of continued looting. Much of the elite wealth in the UK continues to be made by this means.
Britain's wealth was largely - perhaps almost entirely - based on theft, backed by force and duplicity, from other nations. Those who controlled these flows of wealth, and themselves became immensely rich, translated their economic power into political power.
The political class whose power was built first on theft from people within this nation (through serfdom, crop seizure, enclosure, clearances and coercive labour relations), then on theft from people in other nations, accompanied by slavery, torture and murder, governs us still.
"Trade" looks like theft from another perspective too: theft across time as well as space. Resources on which future generations will depend are being extracted and used today, undermining the planet's capacity to support us.
So what does this tell us about the way politicians discuss "trade" today? What does it say about another term politicians use every day: "the market"? I've long seen "the market" as a euphemism for the power of money.
When politicians say "leave it to the market", what they mean is "replace democracy with the power of money". Which means, of course, the power of those who possess it.
It's a way of transferring political power from the demos (all of us) to multi-millionaires and billionaires. The kind of people who fund the Conservative party and own the newspapers.
i.e. back to the pre-democratic elite.
i.e. back to the pre-democratic elite.
"Trade" and "the market" are terms which disguise exploitative and coercive relationships, theft, oppression and undemocratic power. Yet they are used as mantras across the political spectrum.
It's as if we have been hypnotised.
It's as if we have been hypnotised.
I have spent my adult life questioning and reassessing everything I was taught as a child, and that has surrounded me, as an adult, in the media and in politics. At the age of 57, I now realise that I have scarcely begun.
