Around the re-release of his book The Racket, Declassified UK co-founder Matt Kennard spoke to the Canary about the way the US empire works, and the role the UK plays in that.
The Racket
Kennard once worked inside the establishment media and got comments directly from people at the top of the US-dominated global economic system. He then broke away to tell people about what was going on, via his book The Racket.
After setting up Declassified UK alongside historian Mark Curtis, he dove deeper into the role of British foreign policy in the world.
And in The Racket’s updated second edition, which came out recently, he described how Britain didn’t simply pass the baton of imperialism on to the USA after World War Two. Instead, he said, it “became a “junior partner” to the US hegemon”:
The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital which spreads neoliberalism around the world, the UK’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed Britain still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.
‘Establishment journalists allow the Anglo-American empire to operate in secret’
In The Racket, Kennard spoke about his realisation in recent years that “the infrastructure of the US empire which had colonized so much of the world had also colonized my home country”. And actually, he stressed, Britain “appeared to be more completely under the control of its American ally than any country I’d looked into around the world for this book”.
He continued by asserting that “The hidden fist of the US empire which I’d seen deployed all over the developing world – the massive American military – was also occupying Britain”. In particular, he said:
I found the US Air Force (USAF) had 9,730 personnel permanently deployed throughout Britain, a number which was increasing rapidly. Britain, in fact, hosted the third highest level of USAF personnel of any country in the world, ahead of historic US military outposts like South Korea and Italy.
Kennard explained to the Canary the key role of the US military in Britain, insisting that “UK territory effectively operates as US territory”. He emphasised that:
The US military presence in Britain is extremely important for the American imperial project. Bombing missions to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, have taken off from the US bases in the UK. Over 12,000 US military personnel are permanently stationed in our country, across 11 so-called RAF sites.
But we are not allowed to know anything about what happens there, they are black sites for the US military, which is again a huge boon for it as it can operate in complete secret in a way it can’t at home.
There is also a massive US intelligence presence, from the CIA at RAF Croughton to the NSA at GCHQ Bude in Cornwall. Probably thousands of American spies are deployed in Britain and again what they do is completely secret.
It’s unclear if the UK government even knows, or asks to know, what they do. UK territory effectively operates as US territory, there is no discernable distinction between them in terms of governance of military and intelligence matters.
But perhaps more importantly, how the UK retains importance for its senior partner in this Anglo-American influence is to allow the Americans unrestricted access to its overseas bases, from Cyprus to Bahrain to Gibraltar.
The US Air Force has been using our base on Cyprus to ship weapons to Israel during the Gaza genocide, for example. But it is impossible to get any information about this. The UK government says it doesn’t comment on allies’ movements, and the Pentagon refuses to answer questions.
This goes for all Britain’s far-flung overseas bases. This is an Anglo-American empire, which is allowed to operate in secret because journalists don’t touch it.
‘The US works non-stop to keep UK politicians loyal to the empire’
In The Racket, Kennard said “The colonization by the US empire of Britain became particularly clear when the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn leader in September 2015”. Corbyn “was dangerous to the rule of the British establishment, but also the ability of the US to retain the UK as a vassal state”.
So tolerance of his popularity and power was unacceptable. As Kennard told the Canary:
The most shocking thing for me was having the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo come to London in June 2019, six months before the general election, and be recorded saying privately that the US government would “do its level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn get elected.
I’m not aware of clearer evidence of a foreign power explicitly promising to interfere in the British electoral system. We clearly don’t know what Pompeo meant when he said this, but he was director of the CIA from 2017-18, and in this role had overseen plans to “kill or capture” Julian Assange who had asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
These stories show the US sees Britain as its 51st state, and works non-stop to keep the political class loyal to the American empire. Another shocking revelation was that Ruth Smeeth (now Anderson) who was one of the most relentless public critics of Corbyn as leader of Labour was a “strictly protect” informant for the US embassy in London. This was revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010.
Most shocking of all, though, is this interference by the US in Britain is not covered at all by the British media. The Pompeo comments made the papers for a day, but there was no follow up, no investigation of what these promises meant. On the Ruth Anderson revelations, it’s never made the papers.
‘Pushing British progressives into a pro-US position’
Propaganda efforts both in the media and in politics, meanwhile, have sought to corral would-be left-wingers into pro-imperialist worldviews. Kennard mentioned in The Racket both the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the British-American Project (BAP) as organisations active in this campaign. And he explained that:
The US was integral to building a British political system that made a “different way” next to impossible.
Speaking to the Canary, he said:
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was set up in 1983 to do what the CIA had up until then done covertly—and do it overtly. The CIA had come along under a lot of pressure in the 1970s, with various scandals and revelations from the Church Committee of 1975. The NED was meant to guard against this.
So the NED in Britain acts like an overt CIA. It funds media and civil society groups, with the intention of subsuming them into the Atlantacist, pro-US empire political framework of our country. It mostly funds “liberal” or “progressive” groups and uses nice language to describe its projects, words like “freedom” and “openness” and “democracy”.
These were concepts that were grounded in the cultural Cold War, but continue today.
NED has funded groups from Index on Censorship (which was next to silent on Julian Assange) and Bellingcat (which is next to silent on US/UK crimes), so its priorities are clear.
The British-American Project was founded two years later, in 1985, and its aim was to push back against the anti-imperialist current in Labour which had actually got into the leadership during Michael Foot’s leadership from 1980 to 1983.
The aim was to cultivate the left away from these anti-imperialist positions by establishing a network, focused on progressive individuals, and putting them alongside military, corporate and intelligence figures.
It is still very much going 40 years later, and many of the most prominent critics of Corbyn were or are members, including Peter Mandelson, Trevor Phillips, Anas Sarwar, Alison McGovern, Sadiq Khan, and many more. It also focuses on signing journalists up to the American imperial project, including particularly the BBC.
The NED, as Kennard and Curtis reported in Declassified UK in 2022, had “ploughed over £2.6m into seven British independent media groups over the past five years”. Kennard also outlined in 2022 that the BAP had long “worked on recruiting dozens of influential British journalists from across the media” such as BBC “leading lights Jeremy Paxman and Jane Hill”.
Change the media, challenge the racket
In The Racket, Kennard described how the US empire has finely honed its techniques, which it applies around the world (including in the UK) to ensure subservience to elite interests. And the establishment media plays a key role in propping up this system.
Kennard explained how “liberal and left parts of the mainstream media are as compromised by corporate money and private interests as their conservative rivals, perhaps even more so”. However, the growth of independent media in the age of the internet “scares the establishment senseless”. And that’s the hope we have to wield against the powerful, intricate system of control the empire has set up.
As Kennard told the Canary:
I think Britain is one of the most interesting places in the world for independent media. We have loads of exciting and quality outlets now, from the Canary to Double Down to Electronic Intifada to Declassified UK to Middle East Eye to Alborada, which make it much easier to bypass the mainstream media which often acts as just an adjunct to British establishment power.
Building its capacity and influence is a long-term project but it is a vital task because if we ever get another leader like Corbyn who rises up we need to have an infrastructure in place that can support him and combat the inevitable lies and distortion. During the Corbyn years, the Canary came under wide-ranging attack because it was maybe the only outlet that was reaching enough people to worry the powers that be.
Corbyn was a lonely figure getting hammered by the billionaire-owned press, and the Guardian, and it was tough to fight back. Next time, we will have an arsenal of independent and rigorous independent media that tell the truth and push back against the attacks which are inevitable in our system, which is a media-sustained oligarchy.
We need a democracy.
Featured image via Bloomsbury Publishing and Politics Joe – YouTube
