Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

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I found the author’s tone throughout insufferably priggish, e.g. ~‘all innovations in finance are just to rob people’ and the book as a whole is a one-sided diatribe against the British government. Nevertheless, it had some interesting discussions and history. For example, I wasn’t aware of the Eurodollar or its role in possibly ending the Bretton-Woods agreement (not sure this is necessarily a bad thing like the author suggests…), the recent history of Gibraltar and the BVI, or the 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas dispute. Much has changed since Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed on their own vision in 1941, but one thing clearly remained constant: the strength of the bond between the two English-speaking nations. As early as 1907, records show debates in London using the excuse that Britain would simply lose money if other jurisdictions taxed less than London did, and that there was no point in tightening laws until other countries did so as well. This twin excuse has succeeded everywhere, all over the world, every time the issue comes up. The result is this totally amoral race - to the bottom. And the UK is pretty much there now. In his forceful follow-up to Moneyland, Oliver Bullough unravels the dark secret of how Britain placed itself at the center of the global offshore economy and at the service of the worst people in the world.

If like me you've ever wondered what all those university graduate schemes were ultimately about, Bullough outlines it here...Timely and revealing.” —Lucy Prebble, writer and executive producer of Succession The Biden administration is putting corruption at the heart of its foreign policy, and that means it needs to confront Britain's role as the foremost enabler of financial crime and ill behavior. This audiobook lays bare how London has deliberately undercut U.S. regulations for decades, and calls into question the extent to which Britain can be considered a reliable ally. From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to the offshore tax havens, meet Butler Britain...The rot set in when Britain lost its empire and was forced to cast around for a new part to play on the world stage. It found one by pimping out the City and the Caribbean tax havens that fly the union flag. But in turning a blind eye to the source of trillions of dollars pouring into London’s markets or held off-shore in overseas territories, we have become a nation of fawning servants “at the elbow of the worst people on Earth”. Despite the noises made about values of fair play and the rule of law, few countries do more to frustrate global anti-corruption efforts.

In sum, “Britain has essentially outsourced responsibility for stopping money laundering to the money launderers, and is failing to stop dirty money as a result. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’ financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’ membership fees to keep solvent.” It is business as usual in the UK. Royal historian Tessa Dunlop’s incisive, crisply written book, subtitled “A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy”, uses oral history techniques to help give the familiar tale of the relationship between the youthful Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip context and texture. By contrasting verbatim testimonies of ordinary people with the rarefied life of the royal couple, Dunlop gives the narrative greater immediacy and relevance than it might otherwise have possessed, while elegantly conveying a kaleidoscopic vision of 40s Britain on the verge of change. Now She Is Witch

Daniloff, Nicholas. (2012). Review of the book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus. Journal of Cold War Studies 14(3), 220-222.

He dates the shift to the Suez crisis in 1956, the year that Britain’s imperial apparatus finally collapsed, and the establishment cast around for another source of wealth to keep it in the style to which it had long become accustomed. The philosophy of the new venture went by the name of “light touch regulation”. The unmatched financial and legal infrastructure that had allowed the UK to conquer a quarter of the world was quietly repurposed to do the bidding of individuals from dubious regimes that it had sometimes fostered, and others who had seized control of their nation’s resources and needed a place to hide what they creamed off. In his punchy follow-up to Moneyland, Oliver Bullough's Butler to the World unravels the dark secret of how Britain placed itself at the centre of the global offshore economy and at the service of the worst people in the world… There was no concerted law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering, I told him, so there was no investigator who could talk to him about it. There have been essentially no prosecutions so none for him to look into, and there is almost no research into where the money has been going, how it’s been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is.The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain's twentieth-century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 'Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.' But the funny thing was, Britain had already found a role. It even had the costume. The leaders of the world just hadn't noticed it yet. Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the defiant people of the Caucasus". The Orwell Foundation . Retrieved 20 March 2022. Nixon, Simon. "Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough review — how Britain became a dirty paradise for kleptocrats". thetimes.co.uk . Retrieved 20 March 2022. It is hard to spend time in Kyiv without falling in love with it. The location of the city, on a hill above the Dnieper, is extraordinary. And its residents, with their deep-rooted and apparently unconscious bilingualism, and their absurd sense of humour, have a unique culture all of their own. Only Kyiv would overthrow a kleptocrat, then put his vulgar swag on display in the art museum as immersive conceptual art. I don’t know of any book that perfectly captures the wonder of the Ukrainian capital, but Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, a gloriously odd novel about a penguin employed to go to mafia funerals, first introduced me to it, and for that I adore it.

What first drew my attention to this book was its beginning with descriptions of Britain's acquisition of the Suez Canal and post-WWII period as its Empire collapsed, which are both historical periods I have studied so it was interesting to have another in-depth look at them in this book. Happy Christmas, David,” he said, before getting down to business. “We feel a bit under threat here, so I’ve told my liaison to your office that should there be catastrophic loss at Fort Meade, we are turning the functioning of the American SIGINT system over to GCHQ … it’s just a precaution, but if we go down, you run the show.” There was then, according to an account he later gave in a book promotional event, “a long pause.” I would like to write more books one day but, at the moment, I’m concentrating on my day job as Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. I also write freelance articles and worry about the Welsh rugby team. That provoked me into writing my second book, The Last Man in Russia, which describes the struggle of a Russian to live in freedom and the efforts of Soviet officials to stop him. The life story of Father Dmitry, the Orthodox priest I chose as my central figure, seems to me to mirror the life of his whole nation, which is beset by depression and alcoholism.

Jones, Adam (June 2011). "Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus". Journal of Genocide Research. 13 (1–2): 199–202. doi: 10.1080/14623528.2011.554083. Oliver Bullough’s illuminating study of the dirty money coursing through Britain has the slogan “the book the billionaires don’t want you to read”. Bullough’s angry, fascinating study of corruption and power in modern-day geopolitics has the pace of an airport thriller and the righteous zeal of a prosecuting barrister. Not that most of the malefactors featured will ever see the inside of a court; the complicity of a system that has made them wealthy means that prosecution, while deserved, is out of the question. It’s not just that Britain isn’t investigating the crooks, it’s helping them too. Moving and investing their money is of course central to what the UK does, but that’s only the start: it’s also educating their children, solving their legal disputes, easing their passage into global high society, hiding their crimes and generally letting them dodge the consequences of their actions. When I left Russia in 2006, I was exhausted by it, however. I had seen too much misery and never wanted to write about Chechnya again. But I had promised to give a talk to a society in London. After the talk, I was asked if I would ever write a book about what I had seen. I wrote down a few thoughts, took them to a friend who knew about books, and she introduced me to a publisher.