Seven prime ministers have promised to change Britain in the past decade. The problem is not simply that they failed to deliver, but that each one inherited a system that keeps running whoever happens to be calling the shots in Downing Street, a system that once made its money by extracting wealth from colonies around the world and now increasingly does the same thing at home.
On July 20, standing outside 10 Downing Street as Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, Andy Burnham promised to be a “circuit-breaker” for a political system he said had stopped working. “We have not been good enough, and we need to be better,” he told the country.
But “the circuit” he promised to break was already running before he took office. Five weeks before that speech, the government he had just inherited had already committed Britain to the Iran war. On March 1, Keir Starmer authorised the US to use British military bases for what he called a “specific and limited defensive purpose.” Within days, American B-2 stealth bombers were flying strike missions out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean. Iran fired ballistic missiles back at Diego Garcia. Britain’s defence secretary, John Healey, said the country had “stepped up alongside the Americans.” Iran’s foreign minister called it “participation in aggression.” Britain, for its part, has never declared itself a party to the war. But it has authorised the use of British territory and military bases to help fight it.
The British government has framed its involvement as necessary regardless, with Starmer saying Britain was acting out of what he called “our duty to the British people.” In reality, ordinary people are the ones paying for that duty, mostly in their energy bills, and corporations are benefiting. Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest and oldest marketplace for maritime insurance, made £10.6 billion in profit last year insuring the same ships crossing the same strait that helped push those bills up, its third year running at that scale. Meanwhile, an investigation published this April by Byline Times and The Ecologist traced where oil majors are booking the profits from this war, and found Britain’s own overseas territories doing the work of hiding them. Shell runs eight companies through Bermuda alone, seven through the Cayman Islands, and declares 11 percent of its global turnover in the Bahamas, a country Britain set up as a tax shelter before granting it independence and whose highest court of appeal is still British judges sitting in London. Bermuda also houses the in-house insurer for Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company. Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, tabled a parliamentary motion within days of the investigation calling on the Foreign Office to act, and dismissed the government’s proposed windfall tax as treating symptoms rather than what he called “an industrialised tax avoidance scheme.”
None of this is new, and it doesn’t begin or end with Iran or Keir Starmer. My argument is that Britain’s revolving door of prime ministers isn’t really a political failure. It’s a classic reflection of what happens once an empire runs out of colonies to take wealth from and starts taking it from home instead, serving the interests of a narrow class of shareholders and consultants while ordinary people absorb the cost.
Before Keir Starmer and Iran, Al Yamamah, Britain’s largest arms deal in history, was signed with Saudi Arabia under Margaret Thatcher in 1985 and earned BAE Systems at least £43 billion in revenue. Investigators later found up to £6 billion of that had gone out as bribes, most of it to Prince Bandar, the Saudi royal who negotiated the deal. When the Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation into it in the 2000s, the British government shut the investigation down itself, under Tony Blair, in 2006, citing national security.
Blair’s own relationship with that money didn’t end with his premiership. His consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute, took in $121 million last year, up 49 percent, largely from advising foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. He has confirmed receiving up to $12 million from a Saudi-linked organisation directly. A former prime minister is now drawing income from the same states whose oil wealth this war is currently inflating.
The legal scholar Kojo Koram has spent his career describing this same pattern. His argument is that, contrary to popular belief, Britain’s empire did not simply end with decolonisation. It was transformed into legal and financial structures that continued to do much of the same work under different names, and Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean that remains a British territory, is one of the clearest examples. It is home to one of the most important US military bases outside the United States, including the base used by B-2 bombers to strike Iran. Britain built the base by forcibly removing its entire population between 1968 and 1973, and justified the expulsion in official correspondence by describing the islanders as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.” The International Court of Justice ruled the occupation unlawful in 2019. Chagossians are still fighting in British courts to go home. The island they were removed from is now flying bombing runs into the region their descendants are watching from exile.
So every time Britain goes to war on behalf of “British people,” the people who actually win are rarely Britain as a whole. They are Shell and BP shareholders, Lloyd’s underwriters, the offshore-services firms clustered a few miles from Downing Street, and, most recently, Tony Blair personally. And critically, those winnings do not stay in Britain long enough to be taxed. They move through the same Bermuda-and-Cayman pipeline described here, the same architecture Britain built to extract wealth from its colonies without that wealth ever having to pass through a colonial treasury. The government still has to pay for the war somehow, whether through subsidising energy bills or funding the military commitment. But if it cannot collect that money from the people who are actually profiting, it has to collect it from everyone else, through higher taxes and cuts to public spending. Those are the people who end up among the 6.8 million now counted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as living in “very deep poverty,” the highest figure on record, as Britain heads into another round of tax rises this autumn under a government that promised, just five weeks ago, to be different. It is, in other words, the same extraction the colonies knew intimately, run now on the country that built it.
But this is not uniquely British either, even though Britain is at the center of it. The 2016 Panama Papers, still probably the most widely recognised proof that this shadow financial system exists at all, showed that the largest share of the anonymous shell companies exposed were incorporated through a single jurisdiction: the British Virgin Islands. David Cameron’s own father had money invested through a fund named in that same leak. Beyond Britain, Gulf state elites use exactly the same secrecy tools that Bermuda and the Caymans offer everyone else, so this isn’t simply the West extracting from the rest of the world. It’s a piece of financial plumbing that any sufficiently powerful person, anywhere, can plug into. The Tax Justice Network estimates that Britain and its territories enable close to a quarter of all global corporate tax avoidance, roughly $300 billion a year, pulled out of whichever country’s hospitals and schools needed it and will never see it again.
As Kojo Koram argues, none of this makes sense “without confronting the aftermath of empire.” Britain will get an eighth prime minister eventually, and probably a ninth, but changing the person at the top will not change what sits underneath them: Bermuda, the Caymans and the Bahamas still doing the work they were built to do, allowing Shell, Lloyd’s and men like Tony Blair to hold wealth that never has to answer to a tax office, while the costs that wealth should have covered, from energy subsidies and public services to the basic cost of running the country, are passed on to everyone else.
Until Britain dismantles that system rather than simply replacing the person standing in front of it, Andy Burnham’s promise to be a “circuit-breaker” is just empty words.