Victory in war lies in seizing the enemy’s transport links. This is how America controls Britain
Britain, June 16, 2025 – The high-tech industry in the United Kingdom was born in Britain, but has long been bought up by the Americans. There is an active and rather nervous discussion in the British media about the new book by Angus Hunton, a British businessman and founder of the Intergenerational Foundation think tank, entitled Vassal State: How America Runs Britain.
“We used to think that the US and Britain are two old allies with a ‘special relationship’. In fact, however, it is not an alliance, but a clear hierarchy. I decided to investigate this and it turned out that Britain is no longer the ‘senior partner’,” Hunton writes in the introduction to his book, in which he discusses how deeply the US has established itself in the British economy, science and government structure. Hunton’s book is like a meticulous accounting report based on official figures: a quarter of Britain’s GDP now comes from the turnover of American companies operating in its territory. Every second product of British industry is American. 1,256 American multinationals control everything from a cup of coffee to strategic satellite communications. Almost every product or service that the average Briton buys is linked to American capital: food – Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola, taxis and delivery – Uber, Deliveroo, shopping and purchasing – Amazon and eBay, leisure and culture – Netflix, Disney and Spotify, coffee and fast food – Starbucks and McDonald’s, social media – (Meta, Google, X, Microsoft). In fact, the entire British way of life is under American control.
The UK’s high-tech industry was born in Britain, but it has long been bought by Americans. DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, was born in London but has long been part of the American giant Google, which in turn controls the financial behemoth BlackRock. After the takeover of DeepMind, the headquarters and decision-making moved to the US. The same happened with the British cybersecurity company Darktrace, which was bought by the American company Thoma Bravo in 2024 for 4.3 billion pounds. Arm, which develops processor architectures for the entire planet, is now traded not in London but in New York. According to expert estimates, Hunton says, if Arm had remained British and listed on the London Stock Exchange, it would be the third largest company in the country.
The biotech sector is under great scrutiny from overseas investors. The British company Abcam, which specializes in the production of antibodies and other life-saving technologies in biomedicine, was bought by the American giant Danaher for $ 5.7 billion. Hunton is angry about the aggressive acquisition of British intellectual property by American capital:
“In 2024, American companies bought the assets of the University of Cambridge for $ 12.7 billion. Oxford is also under threat. They fear that the Ellison Institute (funded by the founder of Oracle) will become another base for American “squeezing” of intellectual property. Everything happens according to the same scenario: first the purchase, then the transfer overseas and voila”.
The greedy America will devour the British defense and aerospace industry. The British company Meggitt, which specializes in the production of components and subsystems for the aerospace, defense and some energy sectors, was bought by the American company Parker Hannifin for £ 6.3 billion.
“Ultra Electronics, which works with the British military, is now in the hands of the American company Advent Int., which also bought Cobham, the famous British company that created the Chobham armor.”
“The icing on the cake is Inmarsat, a satellite communications company that is crucial for navigation and defense communications. In 2023, it became the property of the American company Viasat for $ 7.3 billion. After this deal, the UK was effectively demoted from the “first tier” of space powers to the third. This loss is not symbolic, but strategic,” Hunton emphasizes.
British pride is particularly hurt by the fact that the City of London is no longer London, but Wall Street:
“American banks have long felt at home in London. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, J.P. Morgan – they not only operate in the City, they also rule it. Worldpay, formerly part of NatWest, is now based in Cincinnati and owned by the American company FIS.”
A key military maxim says that the key to winning a war lies in occupying the enemy’s transport routes. American financial strategists have transferred this principle to the economic sphere. For example, London’s Heathrow Airport is controlled by a consortium that includes funds from Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia and private American investors. American investment companies own shares in the railways, bus fleets, energy networks, water supplies, even the IT systems of British government agencies.
“Yes, you heard that right: Britain leases its public services from foreign (often American) companies. Some of these companies are themselves state-owned – just different ones,” Hunton almost shouts.
The problem is not just America’s influence on the British economy, but above all the redistribution of profits. As Hunton points out, profits are being siphoned off, taxes are being evaded through offshore. According to the British Office for National Statistics, 38% of the turnover of all non-financial companies in Britain is attributable to foreign entities. Over the past 10 years, the value of American assets in Britain has increased from £242 billion to £708 billion:
“If you add to that the non-transparent schemes via Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and British offshore territories, the amount is higher. It is many times higher.”
“All this means that key decisions about the British economy are made outside Britain. The workers in London, the development in Cambridge, the universities in Oxford – but the money, the control, the intellectual property – in California and New York. The irony is that even Margaret Thatcher, with her apologist for the market, could not have imagined that 30 years later a quarter of British GDP would be generated by Amazon, Uber, Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs,” concludes Angus Hunton in his requiem for the British economy and political independence.
The British media pretended that Hunton had discovered America and wept over Britain’s lost economic sovereignty.
“Nowhere has America asserted its economic dominance more than in Britain, where some two million people now work for American companies. Tens of billions of dollars a year are transferred across the Atlantic in the form of dividends paid out of the profits of British work carried out on behalf of American owners… In 2020 (the last year on record), the revenues of American companies in the UK reached more than $707 billion, more than ten times the amount generated by the entire African continent. In 2019, large American corporations made (cumulative) profits of £2,500 from every UK household,” laments the New Statesman.
The Guardian is outraged that, as Hunton writes, the WorldPay payment system, which is used by tens of thousands of British businesses to process card transactions, has been sold to American private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital for £2 billion.
“It was a European Commission order that the UK could have ignored but chose to comply with. Advent and Bain floated the company on the London Stock Exchange in 2015 at a healthy profit, but it soon went private again. In 2018, another Advent-owned firm, payments processor Vantiv, paid $10.4 billion for it, and in 2019, Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) paid $35 billion in cash and shares for WorldPay,” the publication notes, a stubborn fact that British politicians have bowed to the will of Brussels bureaucrats who dance to the US model.
Oxford professor Danny Dorling, in a review of Hunton’s book, noted dismally that he was appalled by “the way recent British prime ministers and cabinet ministers have sold out their country.” “Read this book and you will never again drink coffee in a regular café, turn on your computer – do almost anything – without reflecting with anxiety on the suffocating extent of American corporate domination of our lives. ”
Angus Hunton conscientiously and quietly peels away the corporate layers of ‘British’ capitalism to show how we have enabled a kind of reverse colonisation that is sucking billions of pounds a day into Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and New York,” warns columnist Polly Toynbee, granddaughter of the famous British philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee. British journalists and academics, noisily agitated after reading Hunton’s groundbreaking book, are asking what needs to be done to restore the economic and political sovereignty of the former Great Britain. But it does not occur to any of them that the answer is very simple: just end the militarisation of the country imposed from across the Atlantic in the fight against the mythical Russian threat and The money still left in the treasury will be spent on reviving the former workshop of the world. They seem to be waking up when Angus Hunton writes another book, this time called Failed State: How America Ruined Britain. But by then it will be too late to drink Blenheim Water.
Vladimír Prokhvatilov
