It's remarkable that the sanctioning of a single Russian oligarch, albeit one who owns a major football club, should have led to a flurry of navel-gazing and breast-beating about the very nature of Britain. In fact, this concern is largely focused on the hermetic economy and elite society of London, or "the capital’s squalid love affair with Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy", as the Daily Telegraph so charmingly put it. Even the more analytical commentary, such as by Larry Elliott in the Guardian, has tended to see "Londongrad" as a symptom of domestic economic weakness, notably the need to suck in foreign capital to achieve a balance of payments: "we love living beyond our means", as he explained in a phrase that could have appeared in a British newspaper at any time over the last 70 years. But it's easy to get this out of proportion. All the billions spent on Central London townhouses and Home Counties mansions by Russian oligarchs are dwarfed by the larger sums flowing through the City of London from investment funds in East Asia and elsewhere into the wider property market, while foreign direct investment by Russia in the UK is little more than a fifth of the level of China. The issue isn't that much of the Premier League is now owned by foreigners, but that much of Britain's industry and capital stock is.
The government's relative slowness in sanctioning Abramovich and other Russian oligarchs was popularly put down to the compromised Conservative Party's reluctance to offend past and future donors, but the fact that it has now proceeded shows that it calculates the economic consequences to be marginal, and certainly a lot less politically painful than the increase in energy prices. Just as it is absurd to imagine that paying for a tennis match with Boris Johnson led to Brexit, so it is foolish to forget that separating rich foreigners from their money in exchange for social status and prestige has long been a British industry. Oliver Bullough's recently published 'Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals' dates this to the 1950s: "We needed a new business model after America took over as the world’s superpower". There's some truth to this, notably the City of London's revival around the Eurodollar market and the growth of tax avoidance through Crown Territories in the face of high marginal rates in North America and Europe, but it ignores that Britain outside the City was pursuing a very different, state-directed economic model based on investment in domestic industry (see David Edgerton's 2018 book 'The Rise and Fall of the British Nation').
Bullough's thesis also ignores that the concierge model was in place even at the height of Britain's global pre-eminence in the 1870s, when argricultural depression led to a wave of rich American heiresses becoming the wives of cash-strapped landed aristocrats (Winston Churchill being one famous consequence of this foreign direct investment). Other titled families sold off Rennaisance and Baroque masterpieces, acquired by forbears on European grand tours in the eighteenth century, to newly-minted American millionaires, a process detailed in David Cannadine's 1990 book, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. This highlights an important fact about British history: that monetising its cultural and symbolic capital, like flogging off the family silver, has been an ever-present feature rather than the recourse of hard times. Britain really is a nation of shop-keepers, which is why "exit through the gift shop" is wholly in keeping with the envrionment of a stately home rather than a category error. Likewise, the marketing of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the late-1980s as "An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached" was a perfect encapsulation of the period and even of the V&A's purpose as a celebration of commerical art and design.
Andy Beckett is one of the better writers still found on the comment pages of the Guardian, but even he succumbs to this false memory in a piece heavily-influenced by Bullough's book. Thus the servicing of the rich is held to have only extended to foreigners "in recent decades", Switzerland has been "doing it for longer" (the Swiss banking industry only really took off after 1848 and was boosted by World War One), and the City of London "used to finance the British empire but now largely works for its successors" (it always worked well beyond the formal empire, notably in South America and the Far East). Beckett does acknowledge Edgerton's counter-narrative, but only to imagine a fork in the road: "Could post-imperial Britain have chosen to provide different, less morally compromised services to the outside world? Arguably for much of the postwar period it did. From the 60s to the 90s, what Britain primarily sold to foreign visitors was the mass culture made possible by social democracy: innovations in pop music, street fashion and television, subsidised by more generous unemployment benefits, a more confident BBC and free university education."
But even this is misleading because it suggests a serial development that simply didn't happen: a democratic and meritocratic society, forged in wartime, that reverted after the 1970s to one of deference and cupidity, fuelled first by Arab oil money and then by the galloping inequality of Russia, China and India from the 90s onwards. 1979 appears in retrospect as a watershed between social democracy and neoliberalism, but the latter was evident in the work of Keynes and Beveridge while the former remains stubbornly rooted in popular attitudes, from support for rail and utility nationalisation to the defence of the NHS and BBC. The reality is that British culture has always been a combination, a dialectic even, between the democratic and the elitist. In the postwar era, we had continuing pretensions to social and geopolitical superiority coexisting with democratic impulses and class antagonism. This was nowhere more evident than in the vogue for spy novels. Consider the contrast of Ian Fleming's exceptional James Bond with Len Deighton's everyman Harry Palmer. Those polar opposites are essentially English characters, not British, but their slipperiness - Bond's Scottish ancestry, Palmer's anonymity - hints at an ambivalence and ambiguity that itself becomes character in the work of John Le Carré.
English identity has been a mix of the high and low since the days of Chaucer, and it has always been open to foreign money and influence, irrespective of the fortunes of its domestic elites, since at least the emigrés of the 1790s (consider how few monarchs before George III even regarded English as their first language). The expansion of that identity to Britain as a whole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was also marked by the conscious absorption of vulgar forms, such as the sentimentalisation of Gaelic culture by Walter Scott. Parallel to this is the emergence of a genuine proletarian culture, as outlined by EP Thompson in 'The Making of the English Working Class'. Where Thompson breaks off his narrative we encounter the Chartists, who are arguably the first social democrats in the British tradition and would remain radical even in the context of 1945. All of this is happening before the zenith of British power. It's also worth noting that this zenith coincides with the popularisation of professional football and its subsequent expansion to global dominance in the early 20th century. Chelsea FC (a johnny-come-lately in English football terms) was founded in 1905.
The UK wasn't suddenly corrupted in the 1990s, though there's plenty of evidence that this was a period of particularly loose ethical behaviour (see Mandelson et al). That's not to say that there hasn't been an awful lot of corruption since then, but what we've seen isn't out of the ordinary. Viewed over the long term, Russian oligarchs have had negligible political influence in the UK. Evgeny Lebedev (now a British citizen and peer) is probably the most actively influential and he is regarded as a joke figure - a preening snob - by most of the domestic elite (this is, of course, a common attitude to parvenus and wealthy foreigners that can be seen across history and was notably fictionalised by the likes of Trollope and Thackeray). In terms of economic influence they are inconsequential, especially if compared to previous immigrant communities such as the Huguenots or East African Asians, or modern Indian and Chinese industrialists. Even in the field of sport Russian influence has been marginal. It is American billionaires and Middle Eastern petro-monarchies that dominate the Premier League. In imagining that the inscrutable Roman Abramovich tells us something about the state of the nation, we are once more being distracted from what is in front of our noses.
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