A group of takeover men grew up who began to break up the old paternalist world that had dominated British industry. The social centre for the takeover men was the Clermont Club, a gambling club in Berkeley Square in Mayfair. It was run by a right-wing aristocrat called John Aspinall; he was ferocious professional gambler, and those he admired and let into his club were those he described as risk takers. ibid.
Goldsmith now became a close friend of Slater’s. Goldsmith’s specialised in targeting food companies. ibid.
To the establishment the Clermont set were a group of destructive gamblers. They were tearing up British industry and fuelling a dangerous boom in the stock market … ibid.
But Jim Slater was to stop being a despised outsider. Politicians were going to turn to him for help and make him an influential force in British politics. ibid.
In 1964 a Labour government had been elected. They came to power promising to create a modern prosperous Britain. But almost immediately they were faced with a crisis: the boom the Tories had begun five years before had gone out of control. British industry simply couldn’t cope with the demand created by the boom. A new government faced growing inflation and a balance of payments crisis. They had to cancel many of their election promises and cut spending. ibid.
What Slater argued was that he was using the stock market as a tool to reshape industry. He sold off any part of a company that didn’t make a healthy profit. What remained automatically became more efficient. And he pointed to his phenomenal growth in profits to prove this. ibid.
The Labour government copied Slater’s methods. Under Tony Benn’s guidance they masterminded massive takeovers and mergers in British industry. Old companies were forced together to make new conglomerates. Upper Clyde shipbuilders was created on Clydeside. And in the process, as with Slater’s takeovers, thousands of workers were sacked. It wasn’t just shipbuilding. Britain Leyland was formed by the forced merger of old car companies. ibid.
Slater and the other takeover men were not the saviours of industry they pretended to be. ibid.
The wave of takeovers created by the Labour government had little or no effect on productivity. The British economy stubbornly refused to grow. But the takeovers were having a hidden revolutionary effect on the structure of power in Britain. Both Slater and now the politicians were liquidating many of the assets of industry. They were feeding them as cash into an ever booming stock market. In future it would be the millions of small shareholders who would decided where that money would go. The market was now increasingly shaping the future of the economy, not the politicians. ibid.
Tiny Rowland now became a close friend of Jim Slater and the other takeover tycoons. They dined together at the Clermont and sold each other companies. All of these new tycoons were making fortunes by tearing up an old system of industrial power that had dominated Britain and its empire for over 100 years. ibid.
The government would assert control over the economy. Heath now went to other extreme: he poured money into the economy. He increased government spending and relaxed borrowing. It was called the Dash for Growth: but much of the money went into making a stock market bubble that did nothing to make industry more efficient. Above all, it was invested in the new companies of the takeover men. And Jim Slater’s share price soared to astounding heights. Using the power of his extraordinary share price Jim Slater now became the dominant force in the City of London. He set up his own banking operation and a network of satellite companies each of which set about asset-stripping British industry. He gave thousands of pounds to the Tory Party, while his former partner Peter Walker became a Cabinet minister. Jim Slater was now all powerful. ibid.
The takeover tycoons had finally supplanted the old captains of industry. They had forged a new partnership with politicians. But what few people realised was that their success was based on a facade. They were doing nothing to reconstruct British industry. They were merely profiting from its decline. But drunk on this moment of power they portrayed themselves as the inheritors of the great industrialists of Britain’s past. They also forced the captains of industry to bow down to them. ibid.
But the tycoons’ brief moment of power was about to be destroyed. By 1973 it was clear that Heath’s Dash for Growth had failed. It had created rampant inflation, and when the government tried to hold down wages, it led to violent strikes. ibid.
Edward Heath publicly called him [Rowland] ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. ibid.
No-one controlled the market. In 1973 the Arab vs Israeli war broke out. One of the consequences was that the Arabs put up the price of oil by 400%: the effect on the western economies was disastrous. In Britain the stock market was pushed over the edge to a catastrophic crash. It finally made the politicians realise they had no control over the economy. ibid.
The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest on record. Berkeley Square in Mayfair became infested by a plague of caterpillars. They got everywhere even inside the Clermont Club. One of the few Clermont members left in London that summer was James Goldsmith … Goldsmith was suing the satirical magazine Private Eye. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set III: Destroy the Technostructure
Goldsmith’s belief that he was powerful was a fantasy. The men who really had the power were the bankers. The men who really had the power were the bankers. They were using Goldsmith’s bullying nature as a weapon to break down the corporations. But the banks themselves were about to fall from grace. And Goldsmith would be left helpless and exposed. ibid.
The New York attorney [Giuliani] revealed that the takeover movement was riddled with corruption … ‘a substantial systemic problem in the financial community was revealed and revealed in a way that moved us to try to make changes.’ ibid.
Boesky’s arrest came as a shattering blow of James Goldsmith … But the revelations of corruption started by Boesky kept growing. They now spread to Britain. As in America, the Guinness scandal exposed a network of illegal share-dealing, but unlike America, only four men were convicted. Evidence of a much wider system of corruption was quietly buried. ibid.
5,000 miles away in the Mexican jungle … He was Tiny Rowland and he too had been marginalised by the on-rush of the economy. Rowland believed that the Conservative Party had been corrupted by the boom. Both these men [Rowland and Goldsmith] wanted vengeance for their loss of power. And both now set out to destroy the Conservative Party. And they would be joined by a third vengeful tycoon who had been cast aside: Mohamed al-Fayed. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set IV: Twilight of the Dogs
Tiny Rowland was doing the same in Africa: he was taking over the old British-owned companies that had once dominated the empire. Rowland used ruthless methods to build a vast industrial empire; this included bribing the new rulers of independent Africa. They were methods that shocked the merchant banks in London. ibid.
The Conservatives’ boom had turned sour. It had led to inflation and industrial violence. And in November the Arab oil price rise pushed the market over the edge. It fell further than in the crash of 1929. The politicians now turned on the tycoons. When Rowland’s corrupt methods were revealed, Edward Heath publicly called him ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. And Goldsmith was now seen as a greedy spiv who had torn British industry apart to make himself a fortune. ibid.
The bankers not the politicians would change Britain. ibid.
Rowland knew that he had been stopped because of his corrupt past. He was furious because to him it was the height of hypocrisy. Rowland knew that underneath the new shiny enterprise culture there was a growing mass of corruption, corruption on a far grander scale than anything he had indulged in. ibid.
Fayed paid MPs to defend him in Parliament … The lobbyists found it easy to buy MPs, not just because politicians were greedy but because increasingly they were disillusioned. They knew that power had shifted from parliament to the City of London. ibid.
Currency markets decided to take on the British government. They deliberately set out to force John Major to devalue and to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It was to be a defining battle over who now really controlled Britain’s economy – the markets or the government. ibid.
‘There’s a divorce between the interests of major corporations and of society,’ ibid. James Goldsmith, television interview
1997: The Labour government gave away its power and the markets rewarded them. Money did not flee from London as it had done when previous Labour governments had been elected, and the boom continued. ibid.
He [Bernays] was about to help create a vision of the Utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if it was unleashed. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany. His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite … They knew that many of those in charge of the country had been senior members of the Nazi party. But no-one talked about it and they wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge. A student movement was astonished at the violent reaction of the German government. And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think the problem was far deeper than just individual Nazis. That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism. They argued that the very system of industrial rationality and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state so efficient had simply mutated. It had been taken up by the victors, above all by America, and was now being used to run the new global capitalism and the multinational corporations that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World. Anything that stood in the system’s way was bombed or burnt. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, BBC 1999