Brexit:
Securing a New English-speaking Union?
By F.
William Engdahl
April 05,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- It’s
becoming clear that there is a far more
ambitious strategy behind Great Britain’s exit
from the European Union, the so-called Brexit.
Far from a reluctant government led by Prime
Minister Theresa May, forced to listen to the
Vox Populi of the majority of voters in 2016 who
voted to exit the European Union, signs emerge
of a far more devious well-planned strategy at
the highest levels of British power, including
the House of Windsor and the powers of the
formidable City of London financial
institutions. Britain is ditching the EU as a
failed option, and seems to be intent on
building a new English-speaking Union together
with the United States and with the nations of
the Commonwealth–the former colonies of the
British Empire prior to 1914.
The
British have a long and varied history, emerging
from their surprising defeat of the mighty
Spanish Armada in 1588 to go on over the course
of three centuries to become the most powerful
empire on earth, until a Great Depression of
1873 followed by two devastating world wars in
the 20th Century, forced her patriarchs to
swallow hard and accept a junior partner role
with the 1945 dominant power, the United States.
Their
decision to join the European Monetary Union in
1992 went against that tradition of staying
outside the Continental European fray, a
tradition of remaining an Atlantic power,
utilizing their Anglo-American “special
relationship” that had been built during the war
years by Churchill with Roosevelt. When the US
circles deliberately destroyed the British
possibility to join the emerging Euro through
the agency of a “lone assassin” hedge fund
operator named George Soros in 1992, it was a
clear signal that Wall Street and Washington
would not permit the enormous financial power of
the City of London, fused with that of Germany,
France and the Continental economies, to
challenge the hegemony of the US dollar and of
Wall Street.
Now the
Brexit negotiations between the EU Commission
and the British government have taken on an air
of bitter acrimony from the side of the EU, if
not outright sabotage. Not the least because the
British precedent is giving others the notion
that an exit might be an option. However it
seems that Brussels smells a deeper agenda afoot
from London, one that could easily spell the end
of the misbegotten Euro project and with it, the
EU as we know it pre-Brexit.
Stock
Exchange Merger Dead
On March 29,
symbolically the same day that Prime Minister
Therese May formally presented her government’s
plan for Brexit, the European Commission in
Brussels announced that the planned $31 billion
merger of Frankfurt’s Deutsche Boerse and the
London Stock Exchange was dead. There is a huge
power struggle here as well. The real issue in
the merger was where the ultimate control would
lie—London or Frankfurt– of what in trading
volumes would become a financial trading goliath
of a world dimension. The merger would have
created a mega-exchange. The Global Financial
Centres Index (GFCI), which is produced twice a
year on behalf of the Qatar Financial Centre
Authority, currently ranks London as number one,
ahead of New York. Frankfurt is the largest EU
financial center on the
Continent.
The
proposed merger collapsed in effect when the EU
put severe conditions for London in order to
allow approval, terms which London refused. The
real issue, however, was not that London sell
off part of its business in France. It was where
the control would reside, and London insisted it
be clearly based in London.
Whether by
coincidence, the same day Brussels vetoed the
London-Frankfurt merger, Britain formally
presented its Brexit plan. The EU is making it
clear they will make it as onerous for Britain
as possible. EU officials suggest Britain may be
forced to pay as much as 60 billion Euros on
leaving the EU and will be forced to continue
accepting EU tax, environmental and labor laws
if it wants to have an eventual free trade pact
with the EU. The combined volume of the other EU
economies comprise by far Britain’s largest
trade partner, taking 46% of British exports
last year.
I want to
suggest there is a far more threatening
geopolitical background to the Brexit that’s not
being talked about, and that that’s what is
really behind a de facto guerilla war going on
between Britain and the remaining EU, a war
which could decide the future of the Euro single
currency itself in the next several years as
well as the shape of our geopolitical world
power “balance” to use a favored British
expression.
English-speaking Union?
The German online
newspaper, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
(DWN), presents an intriguing argument that the
Brexit was not only pure democracy at work.
Rather, they point out that the most powerful
factions within the British establishment were
quietly exercising their influence via British
media and elsewhere to shape that Brexit vote.
They argue, convincingly, that British leading
circles had reached a consensus before Brexit to
exit the failing EU that was forcing Britain,
once the world hegemon, to become an
inconsequential player in a drama being shaped
in Brussels. Now, argues DWN, Britain will seek
to rebuild itself anew as a World Power using
its historical British Commonwealth network of
nations to be the
foundation.
It’s not as
far-fetched as it sounds. Britain’s Royal
Commonwealth Society is planning to open a
branch in the United States, with a view to one
day bringing America into the multi-nation group
as an “associate member.” According to a report
on February 23 in the conservative British
Telegraph newspaper, Michael Lake, Director of
the Royal Commonwealth Society said he had
written a formal letter last December to
then-President-elect Trump, hand-delivered by
British Brexit leading voice, Nigel Farage,
former leader of the UKIP party. Lake told the
Telegraph that opening a branch in the US,
“would further Britain’s ties with America,
developing new connections between two countries
who already share a common language.” Lake said
that Britain seeks to reinvigorate the British
Commonwealth as an alternative to the top-down,
supranational EU structure. The aim of the
Commonwealth is to promote “mutually
advantageous” links with “reliable friends”
around the world on everything from business to
defense.
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By leaving
the EU, Britain is free to negotiate bilateral
free trade agreements with Commonwealth partners
such as Australia or the USA free from the
constraints of agreements approved by the 28
(then) member states of the EU.
With this
new freedom of maneuver, British banks will not
be bound by the EU bank legislation such as the
onerous bank “Bail-in” law passed last year that
could require bank depositors and shareholders
rather than taxpayers to bear costs of a new
(and inevitable) new EU banking crisis. Further,
the British Pound, which is a member of the
select IMF Five of major reserve currencies
along with the US dollar and Euro, Japan Yen and
China Renminbi, will be free to join efforts of
Washington and Wall Street to attack and
ultimately bring down the highly-vulnerable
Euro. Britain’s Pound is the third largest
global payments currency after the dollar and
the Euro. If Britain, free from the restraints
can bring down the Euro, the Pound could become
a major gainer–currency war with Britain on the
side of Washington against the fragile Eurozone
with their Italian, Greek, Spanish and other
problems.
Britain,
in collusion with the United States, formally or
informal, could well present a formidable
challenge to world peace. Britain is a nuclear
power with full intelligence-sharing cooperation
with Washington, something denied Germany.
Britain deploys its military around the world in
concert with the USA. Britain is historically
the geopolitical opponent, in two world wars, of
Germany and of Russia and of China going back to
the 1840s Opium Wars.
The
current machinations of Britain call to mind
their project, put forward by one of the more
strategic thinkers of the British Empire prior
to outbreak of World War II, H.G. Wells. In the
late 1930s when the smell of world war was
unavoidable, Wells and his friends in the highly
influential British Round Table, notably Lord
Lothian who went on to become Britain’s
Ambassador to Washington, put forward a radical
strategy. Wells termed it, an order dominated by
a “great English-speaking English-thinking
synthesis, leading mankind by sheer force of
numbers, wealth, equipment and scope.”
Agreeing
with Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Round
Table’s fraternity, H.G. Wells stressed that the
coming world order must be based on cooperation,
“between all the western peoples and, more
particularly, between all the Nordic peoples,”
by which he meant Anglo-Saxon and racially
kindred peoples. He insisted that “The British
Empire had to be the precursor of a world-state
or nothing,” and that that world state must also
be one in which, “Britain must draw the United
States into a closer accord,” into a new great
English-speaking union. Will it work in 2017?
Not likely given the hollowed-out state of both
the British and US economies, the hollowed-out
quality of the respective national politicians.
That doesn’t mean the British won’t give it a
go. Maybe boosting US designs in Yemen with SAS
and other special UK forces as an appetizer,
then on to Putin’s Russia and China?
F. William
Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and
lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from
Princeton University and is a best-selling
author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for
the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook.”
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
