The UK is now running on a new set of corrupt rules that are part and parcel of Zone Fever
Did you know businesses in the City of London can vote in elections?
Rishi Sunak's mentor at Stanford University was Prof. Paul Romer, he lectured on a neocolonial return to an occupying form of governance by establishing deregulated SEZs and charter cities. At their last Investment Summit in 2024, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner announced more deregulation and more SEZs to come. Do you see what’s happening here?
‘Prof. Paul Romer's plan calls for two countries – a ‘host’ and a ‘guarantor’ – to form a mutually beneficial partnership in what he called a charter city. The host provides the land and a guaranteed influx of its citizens seeking employment opportunities. The guarantor, in exchange, provides the capital to build the city and create new jobs. The charter governing the city would set healthy rules and regulations to encourage growth, bypassing corrupt, poorly designed, and time-consuming ones that hamper development. These new rules combined with incoming foreign capital and a steady supply of labor, Romer argues, would be a tinderbox for growth and development.’
Did you know businesses in the City of London can vote in elections?
The City of London has a private police force and private courts, it is exempt from numerous laws from the rest of the country, and its political system derives from the Middle Ages. The City's electorate is dominated not by its residents but by the private businesses operating within the City it is a state within a state, it has an unelected representative called the Remembrancer who reports to the City of London Corporation, which shapes British policy.
Clement Atlee criticised the City of London for bypassing the laws that apply to ordinary people in order to permanently ensure that the finance sector remains a monopoly power structure for a select few.
Watch The Spiders Web: Britain's Second Empire. The Charter of the City of London dates back to 1075 when William the Conqueror granted residents of London specific rights and powers.
In the old days they used to be called ‘company towns’
Back to Prof. Paul Romer, installing a charter city is about handing over the host country’s powers of governance to a corporation, a charter city is a private entity, and everything contained within is owned by the administering corporation.
Economists and think tankers like Tyler Cowen (The Heritage Foundation, Liz Truss’s second home) and Mark Lutter (IEA, London) continue to pursue this libertarian ideology as an expansionist market-based solution to the ‘failures of social democracy.’
But in the past decade, Romer has put his theory to practice in both Honduras and Madagascar. Both projects, after several years of effort, eventually failed. The Honduran Govt is now being sued by Prospera in an Investor-State Dispute Settlement claim for $11 billion, nearly two thirds of the Honduran economy, despite The Honduran Supreme Court shutting down Prospera's charter city for violating the sovereignty of Honduran's citizens. All of England's 48 SEZs and 8 Freeports have an equivalent ISDS mechanism in place called the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) which allows foreign corporations to bypass domestic courts and sue the UK Govt. Did you know that ISDS is written into the UK's post-Brexit CPTPP free trade deals? 3rd country UK is now a deregulated cesspit of opportunity for oligarchs. Sunak and Starmer have installed 74 SEZs and 12 Freeports that contravene EU laws on State aid and hundreds of regulations that prohibit corporations from monopolizing territories for profit motives, without contributing anything back to local communities and infrastructures.
The UK is now running on a new set of corrupt rules.