The Atlantic Conveyor Belt Slows
How British careers, capital and ideology came to flow from American institutions – and what happens when that flow weakens.
Grüezi!
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation carries warm surface water from the tropics up past Britain and northwards, where it cools, sinks, and flows back south along the ocean floor.
It runs because the gradient between warm and cold is maintained at both ends. Now, it is collapsing, slowing to its weakest state in a millennium, threatening to destabilise.
Britain’s political economy runs on a similar current, and it’s in the same parlous state.
British companies, once large enough, head west, re-domiciling in Delaware or re-listing in New York.
British elite careers flow faux-west – into the London satellite offices of American banks, consultancies and tech firms.
Meanwhile, the eastward flow is of American software, ideology and capital – heading into the City, Whitehall and the defence industrial base.
Both are now weakening.
1. The Gradient, Set Twice
Two things got the Anglo-American current flowing. Both times it was Britain that took the terms Washington offered.
The first was Britain’s post-war punishment in the 1940s. Technically, Britain had been on the winning side. In reality, at its weakest moment, years earlier, it had summoned up a stronger maritime rival whose ultimate intention was not to protect it but to prey upon it.
Six days after Japan surrendered, in August 1945, Truman ended US war supplies — the Lend-Lease programme that had kept Britain fed, fuelled and supplied in the war.
Keynes negotiated through that autumn for a replacement loan, and signed for $3.75bn at 2 per cent over fifty years.
Conditions were punitive. Sterling had to become freely convertible into dollars within a year. Imperial Preference — the trading system that gave Empire goods privileged access to the British market — was to end.
Sterling became convertible in July 1947 but the arrangement collapsed after thirty-seven days. Dollar holders had dumped their pounds for dollars.
Marshall Aid the next April reinstated American supplies but on American terms – Britain took the largest share, $2.7bn, and the terms that came with it. The North Atlantic Treaty locked down security a year later. Britain’s Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary-General, summarised its purpose: to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
Alongside financial punishment came technological exclusion. British scientists had contributed to the American-led nuclear weapons project at Los Alamos. The McMahon Act of August 1946 cut Britain out.
In January 1947, the British decided to build their own bomb. Ernest Bevin reportedly told his Cabinet colleagues that Britain had to have the thing whatever it cost, “with the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” It was hubris, born of humiliation.
The second moment was Suez. Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt in November 1956 to retake the Suez Canal that Nasser had nationalised.
As sterling reserves drained, Anthony Eden discovered that the US Treasury was watching the British position week by week and blocking financial relief until Britain withdrew.
He withdrew. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey then released a rescue package worth $1.2bn.
Eden resigned. Harold Macmillan, who had gone from Eton to the trenches of the First World War, became Prime Minister.
2. What Kept The Current Flowing
By the early 1960s, nothing in Britain ran without American permission.
At Nassau in December 1962, Macmillan had to ask Kennedy for America’s new submarine-launched missile, Polaris. The reason for the request?
The US had just cancelled Skybolt, an air-launched missile, the means by which Britain’s V-bombers were supposed to deliver the British bomb. Without Skybolt the Royal Air Force’s bombers were a costly irrelevance.
Kennedy agreed to supply Polaris, but with strings attached. British submarines carrying it had to be under NATO command.
Three weeks later, in January 1963, France’s President de Gaulle vetoed British membership of the European Economic Community.
Britain, de Gaulle said, was an island, maritime, bound by its trade to diverse and distant countries; its nature and habits profoundly different from those of the continentals. Nassau had just proved his point.
A fortnight before Macmillan went to plead with Kennedy, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told a West Point audience that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role.
The post-imperial role on offer was American auxiliary. Macmillan took it. Britons were “the Greeks in the American empire.” A classics scholar, he might have recalled Plutarch’s advice to aspiring Greek politicians in the Roman Empire – “remember the boots above your head.”
Reserve-currency status became dollar dependency. Nuclear deterrence became a leased platform. Intelligence was gathered from US-run installations on British soil; RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, run by the US National Security Agency, the largest electronic monitoring station on earth.
America’s post-war settlement disciplined a British state still capable of imagining its own preferences.
Then it started picking off the businesses too.
3. The City Back Office
In 1986, Britain opened its financial services industry to foreign ownership. “Big Bang” that October deregulated the London Stock Exchange.
The terms had been agreed three years earlier — Sir Nicholas Goodison for the Exchange, Cecil Parkinson for Thatcher’s government.
Within a decade, merchant banks that had defined the City of London since the nineteenth century had vanished into American or continental balance sheets.
Morgan Grenfell went to Deutsche Bank in 1989 for £950m. Warburg to Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995 for £860m. Barings, brought down by Nick Leeson’s trading, sold to Dutch bank ING for a nominal £1. Schroders’ investment arm went to Citigroup in early 2000 for $2.2bn. That April, Chase Manhattan snapped up Robert Fleming for $7.7bn.
Since 1955, London banks had been booking dollar deposits without converting them into sterling. This “Eurodollar” market grew because London let American banks lend dollars without American reserve requirements or interest-rate caps — something that New York regulation forbade them to do at home. By 1986 the City was already an offshore terminal of American finance. The “Big Bang” formalised what the Eurodollar market had already produced.
More recently, the listings have begun to leave. Arm Holdings chose Nasdaq for its 2023 IPO, the largest of that year. CRH moved its primary listing to New York’s Stock Exchange the same year. Flutter Entertainment followed in 2024. Ashtead that December. Wise PLC received shareholder approval in July 2025 to redomicile to the United States.
London’s Stock Exchange reported that 88 companies delisted or moved their primary listing away from its main market in 2024, the largest net outflow since 2009, a combined market value of about £280bn – 14 per cent of the current FTSE 100.
UK-listed equities had accounted for 11 per cent of the MSCI World Index at the millennium; by 2024 that share was 4 per cent.
Today’s London owners are mostly American now. BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street are among the largest shareholders in most of the FTSE 100.
British defined-benefit pension funds, the savings of private-sector workers, held 61 per cent of their assets in shares in 2006; 18 per cent by 2023, of which UK-listed shares now account for about 1 per cent.
The British pension system has stopped funding British companies. American private equity owns much of what the City sold. The Australian infrastructure fund Macquarie, owner of Thames Water from 2006 to 2017, raised the company’s debt from £3.4bn to £10.8bn whilst extracting £2.7bn in dividends for its investors.
In 2014, Labour legislator Margaret Hodge chaired the public accounts committee investigation into the flotation of Britain’s postal service, the Royal Mail.
Lazard had advised the British government on the share price. Goldman and UBS had placed the shares, and shares rocketed 38 per cent on the first day of trading.
Her parliamentary inquiry found that there had been a £750m undervaluation. Hodge called the flotation set-up an “institutional masonic lodge.”
4. The Leased Deterrent
The same dependency runs through defence.
The US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement of July 1958 reopened what the McMahon Act had closed, sharing American nuclear weapons design data with Britain. It was renewed indefinitely in November 2024.
The Polaris Sales Agreement of April 1963 — which implemented the Nassau deal — was succeeded by Trident in March 1982, and by the Dreadnought submarine programme from July 2016.
A new British warhead, A21/Astraea, was announced by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace in February 2020. It is being designed in parallel with the American W93; Britain will have to buy its outer casing under existing nuclear treaty arrangements.
Does Britain have its own leverage? BAE Systems at Samlesbury in Lancashire builds 13-15 per cent of every F-35 airframe. But the onboard software that flies the plane — around 8 million lines of code — remains under American export control.
When the British government chose to suspend arms exports to Israel in September 2024, F-35 components were exempt.
Britain makes small parts, it can’t make big decisions.
AUKUS, the three-way security pact with the United States and Australia was announced in September 2021. A former Australian PM called it “a huge wealth transfer from the Australian government to the US and the UK.”
It locks the next generation of Royal Navy attack submarines into the same arrangement through a £15bn programme, which is the largest single spending commitment of the Starmer government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review.
That review had been chaired by Lord Robertson, a former NATO Secretary-General, whilst he took time out from his role at The Cohen Group, an advisory firm founded by a US Defence Secretary. Its co-author was Fiona Hill, the British-American historian who served on Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
European elite careers are made in Brussels. In Britain, it’s inside the Beltway.
Or at least it was.
5. The American Comintern
Exporting free-market American thought began in April 1947 in Switzerland with the Mont Pelerin Society. American participants were flown in by the Volker Fund.
Its fractious star was Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who had moved to Britain in the 1930s but left for Chicago in 1950 and never returned.
Inspired by Hayek, British businessman Antony Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1955. The Centre for Policy Studies followed in 1974, and the Adam Smith Institute in 1977.
These were the intellectual antecedents of “Thatcherism” – the de-industrialisation of Britain, the sale of its most important companies, and the breaking of its labour movement, all fortuitously enabled by revenues from North Sea oil.
Whilst Labour ran Britain, American money found other ways to nudge Britain’s political conversation.
Policy Exchange, founded by Conservative MPs Francis Maude, Archie Norman and Nick Boles in 2002, has attracted nearly $4m from American donors.
The Henry Jackson Society, named for an American Cold War senator, was founded in Cambridge in 2005, with neoconservatives Richard Perle, William Kristol and Robert Kagan as patrons.
American money walks both sides of the aisle, and circulates both ends of the spectrum.
For elite influence, it’s hard to beat the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. It has received hundreds of millions from Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
The return on investment? It shaped the AI Opportunities Action Plan that the Starmer government adopted wholesale in January 2025.
On the populist far-right, professional agitator “Tommy Robinson” has relied on American money from figures like Robert Shillman, and platform support from Elon Musk, to wage a culture war on immigration and the British state.
None of these formations is American. All of them get funding from America.
6. The Unexceptional Isle
The usual defence for this orientation is that Britain is culturally Atlantic — language, common law, the war — and the conveyor is the consequence of an underlying affinity rather than the cause of it.
Two recent British Chancellors and two recent prime ministers have moved through American banks. Sunak returned to Goldman Sachs in July 2025, after a one-year grace period after leaving office.
George Osborne sat at the American asset manager BlackRock on £650k a year from January 2017 before joining Robey Warshaw, and then Evercore when it bought the company in July 2025.
Sajid Javid joined JPMorgan as a senior adviser in 2021. Tony Blair had paved the way, taking a JPMorgan retainer at a reported £2.5m a year from 2008.
Gordon Brown chairs the global advisory board of the Californian asset manager PIMCO. David Cameron took $1m a year, $4.5m in shares and a $700,000 bonus from Anglo-Australian firm Greensill Capital before returning to government as Foreign Secretary in November 2023.
Across fourteen recent ex-leaders in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden, only Gerhard Schröder took an equivalent path. He went to the Russian state energy companies Gazprom and Rosneft in 2005. The Bundestag censured him, stripped his publicly funded office, and made his name a synonym for venality.
Merkel has refused major board roles. Letta chaired the European Union’s Single Market review. Draghi wrote the EU’s September 2024 competitiveness report. Rutte became NATO Secretary-General. Europe makes its ex-leaders work harder. Britain doesn’t.
There is no written constitution to constrain the rotation, no German-style party-finance regulation, no equivalent of the French Conseil d’État, which keeps former ministers inside the state.
The British exception is the absence of friction. The current runs faster because there is nothing to slow it.
7. Collapse
When Keir Starmer took over, he tried to keep the current going. Economic historian David Edgerton called Britain’s establishment “pro-tech giants, the US, and privatisation” in an excoriating editorial titled “The Labour Party is dead, Starmer killed it.”
Increasingly, the current only flowed one way.
The Trump-Starmer “Economic Prosperity Deal” of May 2025 gave Britain a 100,000-vehicle annual quota at a 10 per cent American tariff on car exports, in return for opening British agricultural markets.
That same week, the Trump administration rescinded the AI Diffusion Rule, redirecting American AI capital towards the Gulf.
Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee concluded that Britain now traded with its largest partner on worse terms than before.
September’s “Tech Prosperity Deal,” signed at Chequers during Trump’s second state visit, boasted £250bn of pledges flowing in both directions across the Atlantic.
Britain’s “tech prosperity” was the promise of data centres, backed by Oracle and Blackstone. The biggest was on a site in Northumberland. Brownfield land bought out of bankruptcy after the British battery gigafactory it was meant to host went bust.
It was a small graveyard for another failed British industrial policy, destined to become offshore American AI infrastructure, its only local inputs water, electricity and security guards.
Britain is taking worse American terms than before. American capital is heading elsewhere.
Britain’s importance to the American project is dwindling. The current is slowing, and the only thing rising is instability.
Thanks for reading!
Bis bald,
Adrian
I've decided to only stay on your good side because whew, you have a way with words Adrian!🫡💗