Selling Britain by the Pound  

In 1973, the rock band Genesis titled their album ‘Selling England by the Pound’. They did so for various reasons. The phrase was taken from a Labour Party slogan of the time, reflecting the album’s critique of Britain’s changing identity and economic challenges in the early 1970s.

The title symbolised the loss of traditional English culture due to ‘Americanisation’, such as increasing commercialism, consumerism and materialism. It also referred to the UK’s economic struggles, including inflation, industrial disputes and debates about joining the European Economic Community. And the title used a pun on ‘pound’ as both currency and weight, emphasising the commercialisation of British identity.

Much has changed in the 52 years since that album was released. There is not much left of Britain to sell after decades of neoliberal globalisation. It has been a long journey since Thatcher’s privatisation-deindustrialisation-deregulation agenda of the 1980s.

Successive governments have continued to push through that agenda, and Kier Starmer, current prime minister and handmaiden to elite interests, is no different.

In 2023, prior to coming to power, Kier Starmer attended the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual get-together in Davos. While there, with BlackRock in attendance, he declared that Britain was open for business.

In a 2023 BBC interview, Starmer stated that he preferred Davos to parliament, explaining his preference by saying that Westminster is “too constrained” and “closed,” describing it as a “tribal shouting place”. Starmer said that at Davos he can “engage with people that you can see working with in the future”.

Starmer prefers to engage with unaccountable, unelected global elites — the Davos crowd — rather than domestic parliamentary processes.

At Davos, he stated that energy independence required an “active state”. But this does not mean nationalisation or public ownership. It involves using public money and leveraging the machinery of state to facilitate the needs of private capital. Starmer has a habit of saying all the things global capital wants to hear.

In late 2024, Starmer posted on X:

I’m determined to deliver growth, create wealth and put more money in people’s pockets. This can only be achieved by working in partnership with leading businesses, like BlackRock, to capitalize on the UK’s position as a world-leading hub for investment.”

Starmer met with Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, and expressed enthusiasm about partnering with the company. Furthermore, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds stated in a letter that Labour looks forward to working with BlackRock to “change the face of our UK”.

And how will the face of “our” UK be changed?

In December 2024, writing in the UK’s Morning Star newspaper, Claudia Webbe, former Member of Parliament, noted that BlackRock’s $10 trillion portfolio is more than the GDP of every country in the world except for the US and China.

In her piece, she quotes Labour Member of Parliament Clive Lewis’s response to Starmer’s meeting with BlackRock. Lewis stated that instead of explaining how — 40 years of atomising, neoliberal plunder, the selling-off of and destruction of public services, the undermining of democracy, the hollowing out and selling off of natural resources at the hands of companies like BlackRock and other price-gouging corporations, billionaires and financial institutions — has led us to this point, the Labour Party has become the defender of elite interests.

Webbe notes that BlackRock regards the future of the UK in terms of further cuts to welfare, more austerity and the further driving-down of wages, pensions and social security benefits.

She adds that Starmer’s gushing about the government’s “partnership” with BlackRock may have been the trigger for wider public awareness and anger, but it was only the tip that gives away the iceberg of mass privatisation and intensified austerity that the Labour government is planning.

BlackRock is a publicly owned investment manager that primarily provides its services to institutional, intermediary and rich individual investors. The firm exists to put its assets to work to make money for its clients. And it must ensure the financial system functions to secure this goal. And this is exactly what it does (see Black Rock’s War on Humanity here).

Take food and agriculture, for instance. Many farmers and rural communities are worried about the potential threat of large asset management firms buying up agricultural land, especially following the British government’s proposed changes to inheritance tax on farms, set to take effect in April 2026.

The new policy will impose a 20% inheritance tax on farms valued at more than £1 million, where they were previously exempt. The concern is that family farms in particular will be forced to sell up and get out of farming.

This would certainly suit financial investors that regard farmland as a lucrative asset class. In the last couple of decades, farmland has become a tradable commodity (see The Commodification of Farmland here).

Agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation.

The financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. Professor John Bellamy Foster, writing in 2010, stated:

Lacking an outlet in production, capital took refuge in speculation in debt-leveraged finance (a bewildering array of options, futures, derivatives, swaps etc.).”

The neoliberal agenda was the political expression of capital’s response to stagnation. With the engine of capital accumulation via production no longer firing on all cylinders, the emergency backup of financial expansion took over.

Bellamy says we have seen a shift from real capital formation in many Western economies, which increases overall economic output, towards the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output.

Farmland is being transformed from a resource that supports food production and rural stability to a financial asset and speculative commodity (once farmland is bought up, think of its role in the so-called BlackRock-driven ‘green transition’ — solar panels and wind farms throughout the countryside). An asset class where wealthy investors can park their capital to further profit from inflated land prices.

Aside from profiting from war, death and destruction, BlackRock is also heavily invested in the success of the prevailing globalised system of food and agriculture and profits from an inherently predatory food regime that is responsible for a cascade of environmental, social and health catastrophes, including poor-quality food and widespread illness.

But why should Larry Fink care about this? Poor health is good for business. Scroll through BlackRock’s website and it soon becomes clear that it sees the healthcare sector as a strong long-term bet.

Morality or conscience doesn’t come into it. Ordinary people are regarded as collateral damage or as digits on a computer screen to be rinsed for profit or plundered for gain. Hard-nosed billionaire and businessman Larry Fink, with the help of facilitator-in-chief Starmer, sees a golden opportunity to further hollow out Britain for the benefit of global finance.

The criticism that Keir Starmer lacks vision is too kind. His vision, if we can call it that, seems to be selling Britain by the pound — a metaphorical fire sale of remaining national assets and potential while struggling to articulate a compelling narrative for the future to ordinary people.

Starmer’s leadership is more about managing decline than charting a new course, despite his talk of making Britain a global leader in AI, an area in which the US and China are already well ahead.

After years of Conservative austerity and Brexit turmoil, Britain now has another unpopular prime minister who seems content to peddle its future piece by piece. When Starmer stated that he is determined to “deliver growth, create wealth and put more money in people’s pockets”, do you think he was actually referring to ordinary people?

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