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With Arsenal the latest institution to fall to foreigners... is there such a country as Britain any more?
By Stephen Glover
When in 1985 the former Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan described Margaret Thatcher’s policy of privatisation as ‘selling the family silver’, he was widely, and probably rightly, derided.
It seemed idiotic to regard the sale of inefficient state-run monopolies as getting rid of something precious. Much better to subject those creaking behemoths to the disciplines of the market, and deliver an improved service to consumers.
However, a quarter of a century later it can’t be denied that an enormous amount of ‘family silver’ has been flogged off to foreign buyers over recent years. The latest famous asset to go under the hammer is Arsenal Football Club, which is being acquired by the American billionaire Stan Kroenke in a deal valuing the club at £731 million.
Many will say it is only a football team, and we should not get too worked up. If Arsenal were the only club to be snapped up by a foreign buyer, they would be right. As it is, nine out of 20 teams in the Premier League are already foreign-owned. The top ones — Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester City — all belong to super-rich foreigners.
And now Arsenal. Ironically, it is the most old-fashioned of clubs, with an old Etonian chairman in Peter Hill-Wood, and a conservative, prudent approach. Even fans of other teams might concede that Arsenal has shown a degree of probity unusual in the world of football.
But now this club, too, one which still harks back a little to the days when football was a gentlemanly amateur game, is succumbing to the power of international capital, and going the way of other leading English football clubs. In part, of course, all these deals testify to the riches of the Premier League. Foreign owners want to get their hands on the juiciest assets.
Can anything be done to stop them? The answer to that question reaches far wider than Arsenal and the Premier League. It has to do with whether the whole of Great Britain plc should be up for grabs, as it appears to be, or whether there should be any limits to what foreigners can pocket. It also has to do with our sense of nationhood, and what defines us as a people.
Spain’s leading football clubs, Real Madrid and Barcelona, could not conceivably be acquired by American billionaires or Middle-Eastern potentates. The same is true of the biggest Italian clubs. In both countries, home-grown wealthy men or companies would step in to save their clubs from falling into foreign hands.
Not here, alas. Where are the British entrepreneurs or leisure companies prepared to take on a profitable club such as Arsenal, which is probably worth owning if it is valued at £731 million? The answer is that they seem not to exist.
The Premier League might be a success story, but it has become a show for wealthy foreigners in the absence of British businessmen with funds, know-how and commitment. The dominance of foreign owners is an indictment of our entrepreneurial spirit.
But the problem goes much further than that. The last Labour government seemed eager to facilitate the sale of British companies to foreign owners even when, arguably, they had vital strategic significance.
We have handed over four of our six biggest energy companies to overseas giants so that we no longer have ultimate control of our energy supplies. Labour rubber-stamped the sale of our major airports to the Spanish group Ferrovial, though that has been partly reversed. Even so, Ferrovial still owns Heathrow, recently ranked the 99th airport in the world in a global table of customer satisfaction.
All our ports — which control most of our trade abroad — are now owned by foreign companies which put their interests above those of British consumers.
And that is the point about all foreign-owned groups in Britain, whether Jaguar Land Rover (now owned by the Indian engineering giant Tata) or Cadbury (acquired by the American multi-national Kraft last year) or the Spanish Santander Bank (once Abbey National) and many others. However efficient or inefficient these foreign-owned companies might be, the important decisions about their products and workforces are no longer made in this country.
The free market is the best system for maximising productivity. But it must be directed and regulated. Countries such as France and the United States would never allow foreign companies to control their ports or dominate their supply of power — in fact, in one recent case American politicians successfully blocked a proposed foreign takeover of some of their ports — yet British governments seem blithely unconcerned.
Those whose fate is increasingly in the hands of foreign companies might believe they are free and independent, but they will discover, when their factory is closed, or some other decision imposed from on high, that they are really regarded as a slave people.
If the football teams with which we identify are stripped of any quality of Englishness, and if more and more of our major enterprises are internationalised, our sense of nationhood is bound to diminish. On one level, uncontrolled immigration over the past decade or so has served to chip away at our national identity. Now, on another level, the effects of global capitalism are having a similar and no less subversive effect.
What makes us feel British is partly vested in our institutions, and if those institutions are globalised, we will lose our sense of identity. The Arsenal fan who has already got used to having few, if any, English players in what he regards as ‘his’ team must now accept that crucial matters affecting the club will not be considered by recognisable people in London but by faceless executives running Kroenke Sports Enterprises in the United States. In no meaningful sense is Arsenal any longer his team.
London itself has become a living symbol of what we have become as a nation. Far more than New York or Tokyo or any other capital, it is an international melting pot in which Russian oligarchs and rich American bankers and Arab sheiks and many others increasingly push up the price of relatively ordinary houses beyond the means of the home-grown population.
For them, no doubt, it is an agreeable international, polyglot transit house. Whereas many poorer immigrants strive to integrate in order to survive and prosper, hoping to become part of the identity of their adopted country, these global international capitalists can, and do, occupy a supranational world all of their own.
Britain is a great trading nation, and I’m certainly not in favour of protectionist barriers. But I am very much in favour of fighting to retain control over precious assets which help define our sense of national identity and are important to our security.
We need more imaginative entrepreneurs, and a government far more robust than Labour ever was in seeing off carpetbaggers who have no interest in our history and institutions. If nothing is done, we will all of us end up by dancing to someone else’s tune.
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