Has Britain finally become America’s 51st state?

It’s impossible for a Briton to live entirely free from the influence of America. And this can be a great thing. We spend entire days consuming or benefitting from American-owned products and businesses. For breakfast, we might have a bowl of Corn Flakes (Chicago), which over six million of us consume each year. During the day, we might order books or clothes or any other essential items through Amazon (Seattle): 30 per cent of all online commerce in Britain is done through the company. In the evening, around 19 million of us have the option of watching films and TV shows on Amazon Prime or, if that doesn’t take our fancy, switching to Netflix (California) or Apple TV (California). And while watching, we can distract ourselves with another Apple product, such as the mobile phones with which, in the UK, they have over half the market share.

The list of American services could go on practically forever, as Angus Hanton writes in his excellent new book Vassal State: “Airbnb for accommodation, Ebay for second-hand goods, Etsy for handmade products, Tinder or Bumble for dating, and Amazon Marketplace for everything else.” And, in a sense, it’s no surprise that Britons consume so many American goods and services. America is an economic behemoth. The nation constitutes less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, but 39 out of the 100 biggest publicly traded companies come from there, as do more than a quarter of the world’s billionaires. 

That American companies are doing well globally and in the UK will surprise few readers. But Hanton’s argument is more precise: he contends that American companies are doing well specifically at the expense of British ones (and ordinary Britons). Indeed, many of the brands and businesses we think of as quintessentially British are owned by Americans. Cadbury, though founded by the local Quaker John Cadbury in 1824, has since 2010 been the property of Mondelez of Chicago. One of England’s greatest football clubs, Liverpool FC, is owned by the Fenway Sports Group, based in Massachusetts. American companies, as Hanton writes, also “supply 50 per cent of the British farm machinery market”, while firms such as BP, Shell, Aviva and HSBC are around “a quarter US-owned”. 

Isn’t this a kind of colonialism? Hanton quotes the American author Denny Ludwell’s 1930 book America Conquers Britain: “We were Britain’s colony once, she will be our colony before she’s done. Not in name, but in fact. But we shan’t make Britain’s mistake: too wise to govern the world, we shall merely own it.” I don’t think many Liverpool fans would complain about the recent state of their club, and I still adore Cadbury’s chocolate. Yet in general, America is clearly protecting its own business interests at Britain’s expense.