BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published by Swift Press, 2025, rrp £12.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
In the 1880s, chief Concomly, of the Native American Chinook tribe, “tried [..] to develop a system of equitable and peaceful trade between tribes and white merchants. He was confounded by the necessity for profit that underlay the whites’ system of trade. And he could never fathom the reason for funnelling profits to distant owners, people who were not part of the economy”, said Barry Lopez in his monumental work, Horizon. Lopez later points out that “The hedge fund manager who amasses material wealth with no thought for the fate of the pensioner he cheats ruins lives. He is a kind of suicide bomber.”
In Vassal State, Hanton demonstrates the degree to which ‘America runs Britain’. Make no mistake, whilst two centuries past England was the world leader in exporting exceptionalist mayhem and terror for profit, America has fulfilled that role since at least 1945, and now they are coming for us, suicide-bombing our economy.
HANDS AROUND THE UK ECONOMY’S THROAT
Those who regularly read my reviews here will already know I’m a tad cynical and, as people so often do, mistake my realism for pessimism. However, this important book, which I picked up ‘knowing’ whereof it spoke, still managed to shock me. We all know American corporations carve up companies the world over, undertake large-scale mergers and acquisitions, asset-strip, and walk away with a country’s material and financial wealth in the name of ‘free’ markets, and happily back the IMF and World Bank in imposing neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ conditions on bail-outs and loans, which further hollow-out developing and failing economies.
But few are fully aware of how deeply they have plunged their hands around the UK economy’s throat, how hard they are squeezing. I have known since school in the late ‘70s the USA to be the greatest threat to world peace. Now it’s getting real for us here too, ‘ally’ or not. In essence we are owned by the USA. UK assets held by American corporations exceed the total of US assets in the whole of the rest of Europe, and the majority of taxation on their profits is evaded by registering for tax in Ireland and Luxembourg, Switzerland and Holland. Estimates are that monies shipped abroad work out at over £2100 per annum for every British household. More than a quarter of the top 350 British listed companies are US-owned. US companies’ share of ‘our’ assets is equivalent to a stonking £53,000 per UK household, a significant proportion of it acquired from 2019 onwards. By some measures it is estimated that the US share of UK assets increased by one-third in 2023 alone. The 2008 crash, Brexit, and the pandemic have all fed this beast.
The US plans long-term, the UK investor culture has a ‘very short-term focus’: basically, shareholders want money now and damn the consequences. Yes, that’s right – much of this is self-inflicted. Countries such as France and Germany have rules restricting foreign ownership, but we are having a jumble-sale. US private equity control “Morrisons, Travelodge, the AA, Alton Towers, Gatwick Airport, Biffa, Center Parcs, and Burger King”. “Our high streets are hosting many American-owned chains, such as Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, Gail’s Bakery, Majestic Wine, Taco Bell, Nike, Gap, TK Maxx, Abercrombie & Fitch, Timberland, Foot Locker, Levi’s, Costco, Subway, Hotel Chocolat, Waterstones, Ralph Lauren and Sweaty Betty,” to name but a few. Under post-2008 ‘Universal Credit’ rules, self-employed small businesses are eviscerated, and with the last tranche transferred from WTC to UC last year, many more will disappear over the next year as we hit the wall created by cynical UC rules. Only the large chains will benefit, and the US will have an eye to taking over yet more of those.
A SLAVE NATION
The book also covers ‘big tech’, subscription services, the drive on the part of Visa, Mastercard, Worldpay, PayPal and others to push all financial transactions online where American firms take a cut of every pound we spend. Every credit card machine, every cash-machine, every Amazon, eBay or AirBnB sale gives a cut of UK financial assets to America. Usuriously out-of-control credit card rates, set by companies such as Visa, are dumping our nation into ever deeper debt like never before. As Hanton puts it, we are indeed a ‘vassal state’ of the USA. Further, a slave nation. Yet still we bang on about the ‘special relationship’. In reality, we are an annoying yappy terrier running round the Big Apple’s legs, and after getting the occasional kick enthusiastically coming back for more abuse.
The idea that Starmer, and his City handler Rachel Reeves, are anything but continuity neoliberal ‘safe hands’ is deranged. As Hanton puts it, “it is clear that the invitation to buy up Britain, first extended by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and reiterated by every prime minster since, has been enthusiastically accepted by Americans”, who just loved Johnson, Sunak and Truss. The so-called (parliamentary) ‘Labour Party’ today certainly follows in their footsteps. As Cameron put it, we are ‘open for business’, and it’s a garage sale.
The much-sought unicorn, a ‘Brexit bonus’, doesn’t exist for the voters who erroneously thought they were ‘getting their country back’. Nope, only private equity, City traders, including Farage and his henchmen, the cynical rich, including Hannon and Banks and the others who paid for the Brexit they wanted, and foreign powers (principally the USA) are ‘getting our country’. Jeremy Hunt, recently knighted for his crimes against the British people, and his ‘Labour’ successor Wes Streeting, know that the NHS is ‘on the table’ in any ‘deal’ with America and both are in the pocket of US health insurance providers. Not to put too fine a point on it, these people have committed massive treason against this country and its people.
RESTRICTIONS ON PROTEST
Is there any hope? Hanton suggests a few options. Stop the sell-offs; actively support home-based innovations, especially in tech; invest in people, the opposite of government policy; increase our autonomy from these globalising tyrants; radically transform our tax regime; learn from European structures, attitudes and values – especially acting to reverse our demented ‘bonfire of the regulations’, our refusal to address monopolies, anti-competitive foreign corporate behaviours, and curbing the overweening dominance of US culture in the UK. These options may be too little. And impossible to impose without deposing our City, Establishment, and public-school elites with extreme prejudice – after-all they are the main indigenous engine of off-shoring and rule-breaking, it’s why they lied to us all and paid for the ‘Brexit’ they wanted: one in which we dodge Europe’s attempts to rein in all the ‘torrent-out’ asset-stripping, which can only impoverish the majority of us even further.
And they know we are coming for them, sooner or later, as witnessed by the entirely paranoid increasing restrictions on protest. If we are not vigilant, next it will be restrictions on unsanctioned assembly everywhere.
Vassal State is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE.
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