Britain's political crisis is obvious across the world. The world's assumption that British political stability was the norm was more than a quaint anachronism. For instance the attraction of London as an international finance centre was rooted, first in Empire and latterly in the famous 'stability' of Britain's main state institutions. An impeccable civil service, a parliamentary system organised to produce one party government (but beyond the reach of any really big financial decisions since the 1950s) and an incorruptible financial network, all combined to provide safety and profit to large (rich) parts of a very uncertain world.
But the City of London and Britain's 'super banks' - the Royal Bank of Scotland was the world's biggest bank in 2007 - turned out to be at the leading edge of international financial corruption and wild practise, despite their noble titles. Britain's civil service no longer attracted the ruling classes' intelligentsia. Poor and insecure salaries are no competition compared with the possibilities of the property market, or international stock market operations. Now the parliamentary system has also gone decidedly wrong. The electorate are not taking their proper turn. Offered referendums and General Elections they vote, desperate to find anything that looks like a better life, but unable to gather what they want and need, in the choices being offered. The House of Lords has reduced itself to an international laughing stock and since 2010, successive governments in the House of Commons, that only win by finger-nail margins, are rapidly using up their political leaderships in a series of failures.
The overblown structure of Britain's economy in a medium sized country, with one of the largest service sectors among all OECD countries, which comes fifth on productivity among the G7 countries (behind Italy) which has at its centre an epic, global, finance centre, is shaking to bits.
One example demonstrates how dangerously lopsided British economics are. In September 2015, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that non-British owners of shares in companies registered on the British Stock Exchange amounted to 54% of the £935 billion total. (The value of all shares on the British Stock exchange on September 4 in 2015 was £1.76 trillion, owned by individuals, companies, hedge funds, banks etc.) UK share owners held 10.7% of the £935 billion that was owned by individuals. (In 1963 it had been 54%.) US owners held nearly 50%, Europeans outside the UK, 26%, and Asian owners, 10.6%. Outside the individual owner sector, UK based organisations owned even less of the overall £1.76 trillion worth of company shares in the UK market. The UK public sector (the government) owned 2.5%. British Pension funds and Insurance (which owned 50% of total UK shares in 1992) now own below 10% - the lowest proportion ever.
Slick-talkers and would-be financial wiz kids tell us that all this just represents the globalisation of investment. It could be London; it could be New York; it could be Tokyo. Not so. London's pattern of international ownership, like its constantly rising proportion of service industry versus manufacture, like its poor and declining productivity, is a unique combination. The US stock exchange has only 16% of its shares owned outside the US and Japan only 32%. Britain is a low wage, service driven, internationally owned economy, crowned by a tottering, out of control, now deserting, finance sector. These economic realities are the submerged nine tenths of the iceberg - where all that can be seen above the waves is the melting tip - as the UK's traditional, mainstream politics dissolves its traditional shape. Meanwhile the vast forces underneath heave and crack.
Share ownership is only one example of the catastrophic mess that is evolving in the heart of British capitalism. Fake elections, between right wing Blairites and liberal Tories up to 2010, a half-baked referendum in 2016 on whether Britain's future is best served inside or outside the EU, did not answer the questions which are increasingly agitating and enervating the mass of ordinary people. Aware that something is going very wrong in British society, people reach for bolder and bolder possibilities, only to find that up to the last General Election, the responses offered by their political leaderships turned out not to be answers at all. In the EU referendum many were caught in the right's racist explanation of low wages and the sinking of the welfare state. But others sought for sovereignty in their vote, only to find that Brexit by itself solves nothing regarding who owns and controls the country.
But now an alternative, a real alternative to the various offerings made by the fraying political status quo, is taking shape. A new and youthful enthusiasm has created its own direction against the traditional media, against both the liberal and increasingly illiberal Tories, against Blarite Labour, in favour of a previously marginal, longstanding, radical-left politician, who begins at last to face up to the real questions of who holds the wealth and power in Britain. And the people, led by the youth, some major unions, by the Britons of colour, by the ordinary people who will not accept injustice anymore, have at last the sense that they are beginning to tackle the real roots of the real wrongs in their society.
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