THE world is turned upside down when a Tory Prime Minister boasts to the House of Commons that he has sanctioned a bundle of banks and billionaires.
In setting this precedent Boris Johnson has the full support of Sir Keir Starmer.
In truth, in targeting just a handful of capitalist Russia’s financial institutions and just a few of its billionaire oligarchs the Prime Minister has to exercise an uncharacteristic discrimination.
Encroach too far on the City of London’s famously welcoming culture of confidential banking and the word’s billionaires might find a more secure location for the wealth they are so anxious to conceal from the prying eyes of regulators and the angry grasp of the people from whose labour they have profited.
Boris might even tread too closely to the bank accounts and property portfolios of the Russian billionaires upon whom “golden” visas and coveted British passports have been showered and whose gratitude for the safe haven the City provides is reflected in generous donations to the Tory Party.
Russian billionaires fall broadly into two categories. Close confidantes and political allies of Putin and those who have fallen from favour. What unites them is a morbid fear that the Russian people will finally decide to reappropriate the collective property which these gangster capitalists have stolen and put them in jail where they belong.
A City bigwig spoke up on the BBC’s World at One programme today to point out that “these people” (he means the Russian versions of our own bloated elite) are expert at hiding their assets in a corporate undergrowth of shell companies with ownership distributed among their relatives.
He pointed out that there are 95,000 properties in Britain whose ownership is hidden in offshore accounts and he worries that any more searching investigations into ownership, or a Boris-bonanza of banking seizures, would fatally injure the City of London’s prized deregulated regime and scare capital flows to somewhere with, in his words, a “less regulated entire business model.”
For the moment Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has confined its criticism of the government to a complaint that sanctions against the Russian regime are inadequate to deter Putin from invading all of Ukraine.
The only basis for resolving the present crisis is Ukraine’s neutrality and collective guarantees for its sovereignty within its present borders. Bellicose bullshit from all sides gets in the way of a rational resolution and Labour should be arguing for an alternative to our government’s grandstanding that might consolidate the stalled efforts of Germany and France to resolve the issue in Europe’s interest rather than that of US energy corporations.
Bank of England boss Andrew Bailey has told the Treasury committee that the effects of the energy-led rise in the cost of living would hurt the less well-off and lead to higher interest rates and warned that the fastest slump in living standards on record was coming our way.
Inflation is at its highest level for nearly three decades at 5.5 per cent and the Bank predicts it will reach 7.25 per cent when, in April, the energy price cap is lifted.
This means a £700 hit on every household in Britain. Factor in the knock-on effects of unresolved tension in Ukraine on energy prices and the case for a substantial wage increase for every worker becomes unanswerable.
Unless you are a bank boss for whom workers should not demand higher wages in order to contain inflation.
Who can doubt that both the British and Russian peoples would be better off without bankers?
