In 1994, I joined a march protesting against how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – backed by the US – were forcing governments in the global south to follow what was called the “Washington consensus”.

We argued that privatising state assets, deregulating markets, and liberalising financial services to attract external investment was leaving countries more unstable, more unequal and more dependent on foreign actors. Decades on, I am horrified that an approach that wreaked havoc in the global south is still being pursued in the UK.

Britain was of course the trailblazer for privatising infrastructure in the Thatcher years, and subsequent UK governments went on to use public-private partnerships to fund new schools, hospitals, roads and prisons, with much of the capital being raised overseas. While many countries in the global south have been coerced into selling off their assets, successive UK governments have done so enthusiastically, watering down our regulations and lowering tax barriers – known as “de-risking” in today’s parlance – to attract foreign entities seeking to buy up British assets.

And buy up they have. According to the latest count by the Office for National Statistics, 38% of all turnover of non-financial businesses in Britain went through foreign owned companies. US businesses have been the primary beneficiaries of Britain’s mass sell-off of its assets, with the value of (known) holdings domiciled in the US rising from £242bn to £708bn in the decade to 2023 (likely to be far greater if we knew how much they also have of the £630bn or so of further holdings being routed through low-tax regimes like Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK’s own crown dependencies).

I don’t think even Thatcher would have imagined that a quarter of British GDP would today be made up of sales of US multinationals like Amazon, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Uber. What that means is that key decisions are........

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