Thread by @EuropeanPowell

🧵on post-Brexit 'municipal mercantilism', which translates as venture capitalists queuing up for stakes in and around Sunak's Freeports and his recently resurrected investment zones. A Brexit-obsessed duopoly is effectively disenfranchising millions of voters to cement the zone.

Truss’s Investment zones have been quietly picked up by Jeremy Hunt, it's worth taking a historical look at Thatcher’s previous efforts to create a Hong Kong-on-Thames in the context of post-Brexit and the Govt’s resurrection of deregulated economic enclaves via Sunak’s Freeports

The Square Mile of the City of London is a zone that's survived since medieval times, known as the Vatican of Capitalism, like Hong Kong it enjoys the peculiar status of political independence as it is governed by different rules, and in its elections, businesses have ballots too

The City of London post-war years became a place to hold off-shore Dollars or Euro Dollars beyond the reach of US regulators. As the British Empire crumbled, libertarians sought out new ways to secret away wealth and avoid taxation. Step forward a new Second British Empire.

London was and still is Butler to the World, protecting oligarchs, oil tycoons, property magnates, foreign-owned banks, individuals, and professional criminals even more so when their capital is threatened by the rising tide of public dissent and outrage during the CoL crisis.

Thatcher deregulated financial services in 86 (Big Bang) up came Canary Wharf dotted with glass and steel skyscrapers, soulless monuments to capital greed stood in stark contrast to the needs of its ordinary residents. #

The Docklands zone was birthed in a nearby pub, The Waterman’s Arms, its Conservative attendees were rapt with attention to their speaker Geoffrey Howe who was championing free market ideas of Enoch Powell (Rivers of Blood, 1968) that formed the basis of Thatcherism.

Concerns from right-wing libertarians centered on trying to keep up with the Joneses who were ‘Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea’. Britain saw that 1 of its former colonies was teaching them about the intricacies of separating capitalism from any democratic oversight

Howe was quick to point out Hong Kong was the ‘child of 2 parents’, UK and China. Tories took heed of Hong Kong’s coastal experiments in capital accumulation by framing it within SEZs and demonstrating that you didn’t need to create new nations, you could just carve up old ones.

Ring-fencing zones from the host country allayed any misgivings venture capitalist's may have had about Govt interference. Tories anti-governance is once again ensuring that democracy is ritually blocked at every opportunity to secure post Brexit goal of total economic liberty.

Back to the pub with Howe who cited geographer Peter Hall’s observations on Hong Kong’s SEZs that’ they practiced an ‘imperfect version of democracy, but this helped to explain their success”…

Howe’s enthusiasm for Hall’s authoritarian dystopia could be implemented by transforming inner cities into ‘Crown colonies’ where people who opted in would lose their national citizenship and protections but would enjoy individual liberty unimpeded by taxation or regulation.

The zones would leave the EEC and recreate Hong Kong-on-Thames in Liverpool or Glasgow. The 'innovation' was to short-circuit local Govt and hand control (or take it back) to hostile capitalist developers. The audience in the pub broke into rapturous applause. Grassroots commerce

The IEA (est.1955) proudly boasted about incubating Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, know that her investment zones are resurrections of outright attacks on fair redistributionism of GDP, she said this recently at Heritage.

By testing socialism in one zone and laissez-faire in another, competition becomes totally unbalanced. Thatcher’s Canary Wharf pierced holes in the economic fabric, the results were stark bolstered by Govt ad campaign with headlines like ‘How to Build a Tax Haven’.

Thatcher’s advisor Alan Walters from Mont Pelerin said they’d like to turn Britain into ‘one big enterprise zone’, fine for the capitalists but hell for the neighbouring communities who would become an unwilling supply of subjugated workers, both migrant and domestic.

So who would pay subsidies to allow these zones to flourish, the Govt admitted that only some areas would get priority. An engineered crisis to breed entrepreneurs in a Social Darwinist hellscape where poverty sits cheek-by-jowl with extreme capital accumulation. The zone awaits.

Is any of this switching a light on for you guys out there? Put Sunak’s Freeports and the +75km investments zones into the mix and what do you get? A plan for post-Brexit Britain that is being stealthily and methodically installed behind the headlines.

The zones are experiments libertarian Tom Bell stated with a smile that ‘some may work, others may not’. Howe's buddy Alan Walters was quizzed by statistician Angus Maddison over Hong Kong saying ‘they didn’t even have elections’, Walters replied ‘Yes, that’s just what I meant’.

Remember that these investment zones are handed absolute administrative authority, residents in the zones are mere observers of their own fate. Financial businesses, property developers, and so-called green hydrogen energy companies are being handed extra-territorial powers.

Allowing corporate powers to bypass local councils, forgo planning permission, and ignore the social housing of residents by pricing them out of the market, where do they go? Foisted off Into one of the zones that wasn't t given priority for subsidies of course.

Local Clerical workers mobilized to have the medieval feudal system of the City of London abolished, a Peoples Plan Center was set up to gather alternative visions of reviving the docks with grass-roots outreach, a wonderful antidote to the bulldozing tactics of the Tories.

This is happening right now with Teesside, developers are being given deals on public land for £1 an acre safe in the knowledge that the land is worth hundreds of millions. Underhand land-grabbing deals will repeat across every one of Sunak's Freeports.

https://twitter.com/EuropeanPowell/status/1648698818399969281?s=20

A lesson. In the 80’s the GLC managed to successfully block developers from land-grabbing entire areas of inner city London, instead turning them into diverse communities so local residents could decide themselves what kind of neighbourhoods they wanted.

The results were a proposal to restore small scale manufacturing where people were not lavatory attendants or porters for businessmen but were self-empowering jobs that contributed to the region that fostered fair capital within an egalitarian economic structure.

Thatcher and Tebbit were seething and abolished the GLC saying that ‘it was a monster that had to be killed’. So the patterns of dismantling the unions also include hobbling local councils, effectively eviscerating the social fabric of society.

The Tories and their cohorts of lobbying corporations and property developers set about subjugating the populous to meaningless lives of below-minimum wage toil, a know-thy-place punishment and put-up-or-shut-up humiliation.

The centre-left switched to the centre-right, but now the centre-right has switched to the far right. A ‘municipal mercantilism’ where our representative parties form a convenient duopoly that is forcibly enabling Brexit to permanently occupy the zone.
theguardian.com/business/2022/…

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