DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - BUTLER TO THE WORLD by Oliver Bullough

Yeah, I mentioned this book in the Tax Haven Ireland review, and so it was only a matter of time before it got its own entry.

Time for me to be a cliche, I do like my panel shows, they're my 'remember to resurface and breathe' brain-off telly. Even then, I'll admit I'm a bit picky, and so the usual suspects for me are 'Would I Lie To You'?, 'QI', and 'Taskmaster'. (I was a fan of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown before Sean Lock died, and before we found out what kind of person Rachel Riley was and before Jimmy Carr started doing the Joe Rogan 'Oh no cancel culture is coming for me, won't someone cry for the rich tax dodging white man' bit, which, in hindsight, I guess Jimmy was always destined for). One of the reasons I'm fond of WILTY is, of course, David Mitchell. One of the more memorable breakdowns Mr Mitchell had ended with him shouting, 'We used to make steel here for God's sake'! Of course, a quick tour of the former red wall (now thoroughly destroyed by Mr Starmer) and one can see throughout the decay of Lancashire and Yorkshire especially why one might want to cry out 'We used to make steel here, for God's sake'!

Of course, we still make steel, but between frequent ownership changes and the increasing level of automation, mixed with Thatcherite union busting and privatisation, steel is no longer a viable life-blood for the north, which has been waiting through successive Tory and Labour governments to become a 'powerhouse', with the most recent proposal being an AI powered northern powerhouse, as proposed by people who still haven't a clue what AI is, just that it's the exciting new buzzword that has become favourable amongst business majors and management types, and it's real for sure because Microsoft added a button and several intrusive features to Microsoft 365 that may or may not be Microsoft Office, even Microsoft isn't sure any more.

Nobel-prize winning St Lucian economist Arthur Lewis argued in his Nobel-prize winning paper that the way to examine an economy and help develop it is through sectoral analysis, and therefore pushing for a sectoral shift. Lewis wrote this paper in 1953, and was therefore and unsurprisingly a Keynesian. Being a Keynesian, like Attlee and, well, Keynes, Lewis started with the understanding that the role of a modern government was to push for full employment, that employment was more than a status, but a fundamental human right. An assumption the neo-liberals quietly took out back and shot, as unemployment is good for wage suppression (scared workers accept less). Sectoral analysis works thusly: in Lewis' initial version there are two sectors, agriculture/primary and manufacturing/secondary. The idea being that the primary sector produces raw materials and the secondary sector processes said raw materials into a more consumer friendly good. If we were to symbolise 'value added' in the old Trip Advisor system of 'currency symbols = more or less dosh spent', Primary £ -> Secondary ££. In the decades since Lewis, we've added a third sector into our analysis, the 'services/tertiary' sector, again with the understanding that now Primary £ -> Secondary ££ -> Tertiary £££. There are a few critiques of this new third sector, first, of course, that it becomes a 'catch all', every industry that doesn't fit into the first two sectors, we stick in the third. The second main critique is that 'services' being such a broad catch-all becomes less economically useful from a development stand point, especially if you're a labour economist (like me) and so you're caught up on pesky questions like 'quality of life and wages for workers within an economy' questions. The workers of the tertiary sector might on average be compensated better than their counterparts in the primary and secondary sectors, but there's also considerably more variance as the tertiary sector includes your banker, yes, but it also includes your barista. As someone who formerly worked as a barista I can assure you, they don't get paid enough for that shit.

Here's also a keen bit of highly technical economics jargon, for the purposes of this there is no 'banking sector' or 'tech sector', rather the banking industry and the tech industry as they both fit into the services/tertiary sector. Just adding that quickly, as it is often a point of confusion for my students.

The idea of Lewis' original work was that the reason, he argued, that the Caribbean nations were poor was because they were dominated by agriculture, or primary, production, the £. If they could shift the surplus agricultural labour from primary to secondary production, like Britain had, then they would become rich like Britain, and get ££ instead of £. In Lewis' defence, it was 1953, Attlee's Labour was in power in Britain, and everyone thought the UK and US wanted the Caribbean to develop as equals because there was still enough of that post-war optimism. It is 2026, and I can assure you that optimism has long since died, at least for me. Someday in a Marx and the Death of the Author post I'll return to Lewis as he lives 'rent free' in my mind.

For now, I bring sectoral analysis to the front fold because it is a good way to academically assess both Bullough's work and Mitchell's British existential crisis. If we do indeed still make steel here, as both the data and I assert, why doesn't it feel like we do? Why is my beloved Yorkshire feeling like a pale imitation of its former self, descending into Reform madness and why do Starmer et al feel the need to unleash the largely unrealised AI beast on the poor unsuspecting people of Yorkshire? Or renationalise British Steel after finally realising they've entirely lost the plot but aren't sure how to get it back?

British economic history, as both Marx and Lewis understood it, does lend easily to the narrative that 'Britain is rich because it went agriculture -> manufacturing', and in the days since Marx and Lewis, it has further moved manufacturing -> services, especially under the watchful gaze of Thatcher and her followers from both Labour and Conservative alike. A final critique of the 'services' sector is that it really only popped into existence in the 1980s, and was almost immediately filled by the kind of useless middlemen and corporate raiders that loved the Thatcher/Reagan 'revolution'.

Britain doesn't feel like it makes steel any more because by both percentage of employment and percentage of GDP (someday I'll write about why GDP is useless, but for now go with me) the financial industry by itself overtook the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, off-shored manufacturing to get around unions and shipping costs, and pushed everyone who had formerly worked in manufacturing into other services jobs, most of them poorly paying. If China was to replace Britain and America as the world's factory, then Britain was going to become the world's financial middle man. Gone are the days of a 'nation of shop keepers' as Napoleon derisively referred to us before nearly freezing to death in Russia, (dying needlessly in Russia and Ukraine and fascism, name a more iconic duo) no, thanks to Thatcher and Co, Britain is now to be a nation of bankers!

Of course, it went terribly right from the bat, because like most fervent believers in capitalism who so fervently believe in it that they dare not read the heretical texts like Marx's Capital or anything written by 'leftists' like, erm, Stiglitz, Thatcher and Co didn't understand capitalism and its tendency to destroy itself when left to its own devices, and so Black Monday came in the early 1990s, followed by the Baring Bank crisis when a coked-up Londoner in Kuala Lumpur decided he could just lie about how much money he had brought one of the oldest banks in British history to non-existence in a month. (Sorry, not cocaine, he swore up and down the white powder was from fruit pastilles, how careless of me to accuse the man convicted of financial fraud of also indulging in another past time that bankers of his generation were notorious for).

Despite these set backs, and the later 2007/08 Financial Crisis doing far more damage to the British economy than the OPEC embargo had done, neither Labour nor the Conservatives have once questioned neo-liberal dogma the way that they had discarded Keynesianism so quickly. Largely because the capitalist class remains staunchly behind neoliberalism, and leftists are relearning how to organise, and frankly, we're being beat, the Your Party fiasco showing that throwing an egoist and a geriatric at the problem isn't going to net positive results.

Regardless, Britain's ridiculously overgrown financial industry has moved banking from where it should be, a simple ends-to-a-means for transferring and storing currency, to the centre of the modern British economy, believing, as capitalists always do, that capital for capital's sake is inherently valuable, even when it fails to deliver discernable social value added, as long as line and numbers go up everything is good, even if the numbers abandon any meaning, and have no physical backing to them. As such, it is imperative that the government be concerned primarily with keeping line going up, even if everything around it crumbles into nothing. As such, Britain defends oligarchs from across the planets, even ones it swears it is sanctioning, because it is kapital uber alles for the good of the economy, regardless of whether or not the economy is producing any good for the vast majority of the people in the country.

Frankfurt and Paris never stood a chance, London, especially 'the City' was purpose built to help the ultra-rich shuffle around their finances without the EU, US, or even the UK government ever catching wind of it. Why pay taxes when the World Bank recognises every single British Overseas Territory and quite a few Commonwealth countries as tax havens. Or as The Economist puts it, places with a high score on the 'ease of doing business' index.

Bullough does a fantastic job of outlining how Thatcher Britain quickly becomes middleman for the planet, and how much of it was done at the expense of not only the British people, but citizenry across the planet. Further, this 'cheat code' for building wealth was sold to Commonwealth countries, Ireland, and others as a way to develop themselves, and frankly didn't work. Buy it, and then if you're a British citizen move your current account to a building society instead of trusting the bastards at Barclays et al, of course after you do your research.