Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [45]
For much of the last century the Labour Party, the party of Britain’s working class, had a pledge into its manifesto to abolish the Corporation of London and fold it into a unified London government. The pledge would remain in place, unfulfilled, until Labour Leader Tony Blair undid it in the early 1990s. In exchange for the City’s support in his successful bid for power in 1997, he agreed to remove the pledge to abolish the Corporation and replace it with one to “reform” it instead. The reform he eventually delivered reinforced the corporate vote, further diluting the humans.33
Today the City has an official named the Remembrancer, the world’s oldest institutional lobbyist, who is the only nonparliamentary person working in the parliamentary chamber. Currently a man named Paul Double, the Remembrancer is charged “with maintaining and enhancing the City’s status and ensuring that its established rights are safeguarded,”34 and he monitors, and lobbies on, anything in parliament that might touch on the City’s rights.35 At the time of writing in 2010 its most recent public memoranda included one arguing stridently against efforts to rein in hedge funds,36 and another largely seeking to absolve over-the-counter derivatives of helping cause the financial crisis, and arguing against restricting them.37 The City of London Corporation also has a pot of money at its disposal named City Cash, which it says is “a private fund built up over the last eight centuries,” earning income from “property, supplemented by investment earnings.”38 City Cash funds many things, including monuments and ceremonies, stakes in the property developments39 outside the City boundaries, free-market think tanks, and permanently staffed lobbying offices from Brussels to Bombay to Beijing.40 The City will not provide a detailed list of its assets and holdings: some, but not all, are available on the public record. It admits to owning some of the most valuable part of London’s West End bordering the world famous Regent and Oxford Streets.41 The City’s Cash is exempted from British Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, so we cannot find out what it owns. Jason Beattie, a reporter who sought to investigate this money pot, found it to be completely different from any other local authority fund he had ever encountered. “I FOI’d them to hell—and I got nowhere,” he remembers. Does it own property around Wall Street, as Glasman suspects? There is no obvious way to find out.42
Some law made in the British parliament does apply to the Corporation, but some Acts of Parliament specifically exempt it, either fully or in part. The City is connected to the British nation-state, but it remains a constitutional elsewhere. In this the City resembles Jersey or the Cayman islands, the offshore jurisdictions that are its satellites—each of which, as I will show, has also been entirely captured by the interests of global finance.
For skittish global capital, the City’s constitutional foundation matters absolutely. Finance knows that any serious challenge to the City would face the mystique of time immemorial and the extravagant skills and powers of the many servants of finance. This globe-encompassing financial services center, whose influence reaches silently into people’s homes from Baltimore to Birmingham to Borneo, is founded upon an ancient constitutional platform that is unique and rather impregnable.
This detour through British constitutional