by MATT KENNARD
So-called RAF bases filled with US military personnel are a tell-tale sign of Britain’s key role in US imperialism, writes Matt Kennard.
Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before – the consequences of US imperialism around the world – because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.
Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the US after World War Two and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a ‘junior partner’ to the US hegemon. London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, Britain’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed the country still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.
But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often weak states. But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country, the country where I had lived nearly all my life. Britain, in fact, appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world in The Racket.
The similarities did not stop there. Like the mainstream media could never mention the term ‘US empire’ or explain its real role in world affairs, those same establishment journalists did not touch US influence in Britain. This was, again, an invisible empire, hiding in plain sight. The work I began doing would have never made it into the pages of my old employer, the Financial Times, like so many truths in The Racket never could.
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