Brexit, Freeports and the March Towards Charter Cities: A Story of Five Prime Ministers
A successful failure
The Lady was not for trusting. That much was clear from the outset.
Appointed to do the bidding of the lobbyists that raised her, it initially seemed as though Truss would be the stooge to deliver the final few pieces of their puzzle. However, Truss was set up to fail from the start. Fail her country, fail her party and fail herself. She delivered spectacularly.
Plausible deniability unchained
In her world-beating shortest time in office, Truss moved faster and further than many expected and wreaked untold damage on the country, most of which will have considerable consequences for decades to come. Her premiership will be remembered as a brief but consequential whirlwind of chaos and will give her successor the gift of falsely appearing to have distance from think tanks and of being far more moderate than they are.
Bond-market shock and awe
Despite mostly now being reversed, her fascist-fantasy mini-budget has significantly undermined the UK economy, caused havoc in the bond markets, and importantly, raised the cost of borrowing for mortgages and any future government.
The Special Financial Operation
The fall-out from the Special Financial Operation carried out against the UK by Truss and Kwarteng has laid the groundwork for aggressive austerity, callous cuts and the sadistic shrinking of the state the Tories so desperately desire. Furthermore, there is still a very real chance that her actions have precipitated a housing market and banking crash to come in the months ahead.
Revoking half a century of laws
She furthered Johnson’s legacy of anti-democratic legislation with the Public Order Bill, seeking to criminalise merely thinking of committing the crime of protesting and introduced the Retained EU Law Bill, seeking to wipe out over 2,400 EU-derived UK laws, regulations and protections built up over more than 50 years.
Think tank-ism and deregulation, deregulation, deregulation.
Truss also furthered Johnson’s legacy through her cabinet appointments and connections to think tanks, her entire cabinet had strong links to the IEA, and most were also members of the ERG. Truss herself, has a close personal relationship with Mark Littlewood, the Director General of the IEA.
Truss introduced the Investment Zone policy, adding potentially hundreds more deregulated hellscapes to the existing Freeport sites and she fervently furthered the call for increased deregulation of the existing Freeports introduced by Johnson.
The race to the bottom
There are several ways in which Truss built upon Johnson’s legacy and the direction of his government, particularly regarding the Freeport/Investment Zone policies, anti-democratic legislation and blatantly bringing lobbying groups ever closer to the decision-making process in senior government. There are also obvious ways in which she laid the groundwork for her successor to further the Freeport/Investment Zone policies, usher in a new era of unending extreme austerity which will be combined with the bonfire of EU laws and unleash the deregulatory race to the bottom between the various Freeports and Investment Zones now littering the country.
Playing the long game
If you apply this thinking to all of the policies and contributions proposed, negotiated and formalised by all 5 Tory Prime Ministers over the past 12 years and examine how their policies and actions build upon those introduced by their predecessor while also setting the course for their successor, a pattern begins to emerge.
A pattern in which our Prime Ministers are contributing key actions and policies, enhancing or complementing those of their predecessors and guiding their successors’ paths, each delivering distinct key milestones as part of the long-term plan, before bowing out and handing over. This cleverly partitioned and constantly rolling long-term strategy has been deployed by those orchestrating our country’s demise making it harder to follow the direction of travel until it is too late, while also making it difficult to apportion blame to any specific individual along the way.
In the rest of this article, I will examine the specific policies, actions and other useful contributions of our last four Prime Ministers and the likely key policies and prior contributions of our new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (see Table), demonstrating that for at least the last 12 years (and likely a lot longer) we have been subjected to a slow-motion choreographed rolling attack that was always going to lead us to exactly this point.
David Cameron
Long before the Brexit referendum became the defining issue of Cameron’s tenure as PM, he played on EU scepticism within the Conservative party first to gain his seat in Witney in the 2001 election and then again during the 2005 party leadership contest. As party leader, he then repeatedly advocated for leaving the ECHR on the grounds that it was impeding the UK’s ability to tackle immigration.
Austerity 1.0
During the coalition years, Cameron began the era of austerity, ultimately serving to fuel dissatisfaction with life in the UK among the working classes. This decision would play a key role in influencing many working-class voters to believe that Brexit could offer them an alternative to falling living standards in the UK.
Euroscepticism unleashed
He began to let think tanks lead the debate around EU membership and to promote EU scepticism within his own party long before the referendum. It was also under Cameron in 2015 that then backbench MP, Rishi Sunak, produced his report advocating for the introduction of Freeports in post-Brexit Britain for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).
Cameron faced several rebellions over the EU issue during his time as Prime Minister and instead of confronting his backbenchers and offering them an alternative vision as their young and enthusiastic leader, in January 2013, he gave them exactly what they wanted and pledged to hold the in/out referendum.
Radicalising the right
Rather than quell the growing discontent around the EU issue in his party, this move predictably served to pour fuel on the fire that Cameron had not only allowed to take hold but had repeatedly stoked during his time as party leader. The pledge to hold a referendum and the continued focus on immigration as a central issue for the Conservatives around this time also began to bring UKIP voters to the Conservative party, starting to move the party’s base further right.
Steve Bannon and SCL/Cambridge Analytica
Cameron then went on to reject calls for “blue on blue” attacks against Leave campaigners and effectively neutered the Conservative Remain campaign while the Leave groups colluded, overspent, met with Steve Bannon and deployed Cambridge Analytica’s military psyops technology against an unwitting British public.
Predictably, like any arsonist, rather than trying to douse the flames that had now spread from the Conservative party and had begun engulfing the rest of the country, Cameron ran away and handed over the baton to the next stooge to build upon his work.
Theresa May
Like Cameron, May had been advocating for leaving the ECHR under the pretence of being able to better deal with immigration for years before the referendum. May did campaign for Remain but shackled by Cameron’s unofficial policy of not contesting Conservative Leave campaigner’s claims, her efforts were half-hearted at best.
Shanker Singham and the Legatum Institute
Once in office May built on Cameron’s surrender to the think tanks by letting them now directly dictate the direction of government policy. She platformed work carried out by the Legatum Institute in the House of Commons and appointed Shanker Singham to a government role as a Trade Advisor.
At the behest of Legatum and Singham, May prematurely triggered Article 50, which officially started the process of leaving the EU before many of the basic options had been discussed.
Snap election and self-sabotage
Seemingly riding high on the back of this imagined show of strength, she then called an ill-advised snap election expecting to strengthen her majority to force through her Brexit deal but she was left leading a minority government, severely weakening her own position. This act of self-sabotage opened the door for the ERG to begin their takeover of the party and immediately put Boris Johnson, whom May had brought back to frontline politics, on standby, ready to assume control.
The restoration of Henry VIII powers
Having made an informal deal with the DUP, May was able to pass several Brexit-related bills with little or no substance on actual policy while providing ministers with sweeping new anti-democratic powers to amend legislation without proper parliamentary scrutiny, known as Henry VIII clauses.
The Russia Report
While the Conservative party was accepting huge sums of money in donations from individuals with close links to the Russian state and Vladimir Putin’s circle, May repeatedly rejected calls to publish the Russia Report in full and to officially investigate the possibility of foreign interference in the referendum vote. Something Johnson was more than happy to continue with when his time came.
Cambridge Analytica Revisited
It was also under May that the story first broke about Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the referendum and rather than move quickly to secure any evidence, Cambridge Analytica were afforded a whole week to get their house in order before a warrant was issued and their premises were raided.
Selling peerages to party donors has been a long-established tradition in the UK, one which Theresa May enthusiastically continued with her resignation honours list. She handed out peerages and Knighthoods to several prominent donors, such as Ehud Sheleg and David Brownlow, and key aides, including her advisors Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. This too was something Johnson would dramatically escalate.
The emergence of Freeports: the Teesside blueprint
During May’s tenure, talk of Freeports first started to surface among senior government figures. Rishi Sunak’s report had been published before the referendum in 2015, however, it wasn’t until May was in office that the idea started to publicly gain more traction. Several think tanks including CPS and the IEA began lobbying May to adopt the proposals laid out in Sunak’s report as she and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis, both visited the proposed Teesside Freeport site and began engaging in discussions with the local Mayor Ben Houchen.
The Brexit Party blues
May’s self-inflicted electoral defeat would ultimately be her undoing. The wounded May repeatedly failed to get a deal for leaving the EU, facilitating the rise of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party which not only pulled the Conservatives further to the right but also gave them an ally to collude with come the 2019 election. Consequently, her repeated failure to get a deal agreed upon gave May her excuse to tearily bow out and hand over the poisoned chalice to the next stooge in waiting, Boris Johnson.
Boris Johnson
The propagandist
Prior to the referendum, Boris Johnson was working for the Kremlin-funded Telegraph newspaper and Spectator magazine writing a series of xenophobic, inflammatory and misleading columns, manipulating opinion on immigration and exaggerating the alleged over-reach of the EU into UK domestic affairs.
Vote Leave
He was the figurehead for the Leave campaign and played a key role in swaying the vote. The platforming of his bogus bumbling Boris persona by every media outlet in the country along with his infamous lies about an extra £350 million a week for the NHS and “taking back control” were undoubtedly crucial in swaying the vote.
Prior to the 2019 election, Farage’s Brexit Party, born from May’s failure to agree on a deal, had been pulling the Conservative Party rhetoric further right on Brexit and immigration. Not one to miss an opportunity, Boris Johnson appears to have had a pact with Farage, in which the Brexit party would not contest Conservative seats. Not only did this hand Johnson as much as half of his majority but it again assimilated a fresh group of radicalised far-right voters into the Conservative Party base as they moved to keep up with the rhetoric coming from Farage and the Brexit Party.
Unlawful prorogation
Once in office, Johnson moved quickly to unlawfully prorogue parliament, giving minimal opportunity for Parliament to block a no-deal Brexit.
General Election 2019
When Parliament returned, Johnson suffered an embarrassing rebellion over an opposition motion to block a no-deal Brexit, so he promptly removed the whip from all 21 MPs who voted with the opposition and subsequently called a general election.
Having now gained his thumping majority, Johnson supercharged May and Cameron’s work of bringing think tanks ever closer to the heart of government and stacked his cabinet with members of the ERG and former members of the IEA.
The return of Shanker Singham
Crucially he also brought back Shanker Singham, who had previously been dismissed following a conflict of interest, at a crucial time in the Brexit negotiations. Singham openly boasted of enjoying “unparalleled access” to the Brexit process and senior ministers and likely played a key role in pushing the ERG-hijacked government towards a hard Brexit.
With Shanker Singham whispering in his ear and the ERG now effectively holding the government to ransom, Johnson gleefully condemned the UK to a hard Brexit. This was a pivotal moment for the introduction of Freeports and Investment Zones to the UK. The deal had to leave the UK outside of the customs union and the single market to ensure the sites could eventually be fully deregulated.
The creeping advance of Freeports
Rishi Sunak had now ascended from the backbenches to become Johnson’s Chancellor and with him came a manifesto pledge to introduce Freeports across the UK. Every subsequent step of the process has been shrouded in mystery, with Freedom of Information (FoI) requests routinely blocked on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. Under the Johnson government, the bidding process, selection of sites and the first steps towards implementing the zones all occurred with little or no scrutiny from the media or the opposition parties.
Anti-democratic legislation
The prorogation of parliament and the dubious denial of FoI requests were not the only ways in which Johnson furthered May’s anti-democratic legacy. He introduced the Elections Bill, providing the ruling party with direct oversight of the electoral commission, removing limits on foreign donations to political parties and introducing mandatory voter ID. He introduced the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, criminalising noisy protests and he introduced the Judicial Review Bill, allowing ministers to overrule judicial verdicts that they did not agree with.
While May boosted the cash for Honours racket, Johnson predictably strapped rockets to her system and provided a whole new level of access for donors. Not content to simply reward donors, media barons and possible foreign intelligence agents with peerages and Knighthoods, Johnson formed a “second cabinet” known as the Advisory Board comprising the most generous party donors, such as Lord Anthony Bamford (the founder of JCB and a member of the Midlands Industrial Council) and Lubov Chernukhin (the wife of Vladimir Putin’s former Finance Minister), who were incredibly able to directly influence the senior government decision-making process during the early stages of the pandemic and beyond.
Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill
Cameron’s austerity had already proved useful at priming discontent during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, however, it also set the course for Johnson’s euphemistic levelling up agenda and the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. Johnson threw around the phrase levelling up so much that it was widely and mistakenly taken to be empty rhetoric, just another meaningless Johnson lie. Yet, it was all leading to the introduction of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. I intend to dissect this Bill in full in a separate article, but in short, it seeks to divide the country by combining groups of 3 existing Local Council Authorities into new Combined Council Authorities (CCAs) that will be overseen by regional Mayors with near-dictatorial powers.
Party-gate, chaos and a never-ending conveyor belt of scandals came to define the final few months of the Johnson government and despite his best efforts to go rogue, the intensifying pressure proved to be too much for this particular stooge to endure and he too bowed out, passing on the insurmountable challenge to the supreme stooge, Liz Truss.
Liz Truss
Prior to the referendum Truss co-authored Britannia Unchained with fellow fascists Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Priti Patel and Kwasi Kwarteng. At the time of publication, the book was largely dismissed as out of touch and misguided, yet 10 years on and with Truss briefly occupying the highest office in the land, the central tenets of this pseudo-intellectual epic have come to be the guiding light of the modern Conservative party ideology.
Throughout the leadership campaign, both Truss and her mentors at the IEA made no secret of their connections and openly revelled in their coup. Building on Johnson’s platform of think tank integration, Truss directly handed the keys to Number 10 and our democracy to the lobbyists and told them to do as they please. Everything was so blatantly corrupt and not only were no efforts made to hide the corruption but it was banded around like a badge of honour for 6 long weeks.
Over-reach
We are now to believe that the lobbyists have overreached and that their policies have all imploded spectacularly, consigning themselves and Truss to a brief, shameful footnote of history. While many of their policies have already been reversed, amid the whirlwind of chaos, one key policy is still standing, the introduction of potentially hundreds of Investment Zones up and down the country.
Deregulation, deregulation, deregulation.
Truss repeatedly advocated for further deregulation of the existing Freeport sites and tabled plans for up to 200 Investment Zones to be added to the existing 8 Freeports in England and the 3 yet to be announced in Scotland and Wales.
Her main functions have been to sow as much chaos as possible, destabilise the economy and precipitate housing market and banking crashes, introduce the Investment Zones policy, shine a bright spotlight on the IEA as the route of all evil and then spectacularly implode, allegedly taking the influence of the overreaching lobbyists with her.
But make no mistake, while Truss was ideologically for sale, a weather-cock in a hurricane, Sunak is far more dangerous, he is a true believer and a deluded ideologue at heart. He wrote the report for the CPS that the current government Freeport policy is based on, he studied under Paul Romer (the original proponent of Charter Cities) at Stanford and has his own history of connections to lobbying groups posing as charities.
Rishi Sunak
Centre for Policy Studies
Before the referendum, Sunak authored the Centre for Policy Studies report on how Freeports could reignite the UK economy once it was freed from the shackles of European democracy. He also co-authored a report for Policy Exchange in 2014 titled “A Portrait of Modern Britain”, which sought to define, classify and map the targeting of ethnic minority voters in the UK.
Given the chaos we have been subjected to under Truss, Sunak now has the gift of falsely appearing to be a moderate and more distant from the influence of opaquely funded lobbyists. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Austerity 2.0
During the original leadership contest, Sunak campaigned on a platform of extreme austerity, boasting of having funnelled money from deprived areas to affluent ones and, lest we forget, forcibly re-educating those that disagree with his vision for Britain.
Cuts, cuts, cuts
Under the guise of returning to Treasury orthodoxy, Sunak will now instigate a brutal program of austerity far worse than Osborne’s, which will mean severe cuts to essential public services including the NHS, the welfare state and anything else that can be privatised in search of profit or simply eradicated as an unnecessary expenditure no matter the human cost.
Gove back to level up
In his early moves, Sunak sought to cobble together every wing of the fractured Conservative party into his cabinet, yet each appointment is a clear sign of intent. The appointment of Michael Gove is a clear signal that the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill will proceed unimpeded.
Braverman back for the bonfire
Suella Braverman returning as Home Secretary for the second time in a week is a clear signal that human rights are not protected under Sunak and that the bonfire of EU laws is indeed still on. Hunt remaining as Chancellor is a clear signal that overdriven austerity will be dialled up to eleven.
Badenoch and Barclay
The appointment of Kemi Badenoch as Equalities Minister is a clear signal that the culture wars are still top of the agenda, and the reappointment of Steve Barclay as Health Secretary is a clear signal the NHS is still up for sale.
Freeports, Investment Zones and now Charter Cities?
Most importantly, however, is that we have a Freeports/Investment Zones/Charter Cities true believer now sitting in Number 10. Many of these appointments and the agendas that come with them will facilitate the process of Freeports becoming Charter Cities. Braverman delivering the bonfire of >2,400 EU Laws (workers’ rights, environmental protections etc) and our withdrawal from the ECHR will be key pieces of legislation that enable the slide from Freeports to Charter Cities. Gove’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill and the creation of CCAs with regional dictators is another key piece of legislation to enable this change. The campaign of extreme austerity will also serve to further this agenda by both driving private investment to these areas as the rest of the country collapses and providing exploitable citizens with the motivation to accept these Zones may just present them with an opportunity for a better life.
Enablement and the non-competing opposition
I expect there will be more Freeport to Charter City enabling legislation tabled and passed by Sunak’s government, that we will see Investment Zones properly opened and significant steps taken to unleash the Freeport and Investment Zones race to the bottom. His extreme cuts to public spending will further undermine the UK economy and likely raise the cost of borrowing for future governments. Sunak will likely hang on long enough to deliver these final key pieces of the puzzle and to contest the next election against Keir Starmer, possibly calling it early when the final pieces are all in place.
Sunak will appear dull, visionless, and as a multi-millionaire holding wealth in tax havens, more than slightly out of touch with the starving people of Great Brexit. With the charisma of a block of wood, he will be an incredibly weak campaigner at the next general election, handing Labour a massive majority without them ever having challenged the rise of fascism or offered an alternative vision for our future.
This will be Sunak and the Conservative party’s final gift to the country, to leave Labour with an economy in tatters, unable to borrow and spend their way out of the destruction the Conservatives have created and with the country littered with Freeports, Investment Zones and divided into CCAs.
How Labour is likely to deal with this situation deserves to be the subject of another article and is one which I am still planning. But what this article demonstrates is that for 12 long years of Conservative rule, and likely a lot longer, we have been marching in a singular direction that was always going to lead us to this point.
Collective responsibility
Each of our former four Prime Ministers and our new incumbent Prime Minister have all been and will be systematically building on the policies of their predecessors, not always in a linear manner, while setting the tracks for their successors.
This is not a system that they could have implemented themselves, it is not even a system the lobbying groups could have orchestrated, particularly as some of them are now being thrown under the bus as we move towards the final stages of the plans. The presence of this strategy is further evidence of a long-term plan for Freeports/Charter Cities in the UK and suggests that a group of extremely powerful individuals, possibly even beyond Koch, Mercer and the other billionaire family empires and insidious industries funding the lobbyists, have been orchestrating this for a very long time.
Cormack Lawson
