The Crown Estate case is the thin end of the wedge

Published: 1 October, 2010

• THAT an investment company whose identity we’re not allowed to know is moving in on the Crown Estate is dismaying, though not surprising, given the determination of successive administrations to turn London into the tax haven of choice for the rich (Crown’s ‘lies’ over estate sell-off plan, September 24). 

What is happening to the Crown Estate is only the thin end of the wedge. 

Sooner or later everything will be “outsourced” and everyone will be in the firing line as a tsunami of global capital crashes around the world, gaining strength by sucking up wealth wherever it lands and turning everywhere in its wake into the medieval American model of a wasteland of impoverished and bewildered humanity pocked with tiny communities of terrified billionaires cowering behind armed gates. 

This will be extraordinarily similar – ironically – to the benighted wasteland that was the old communist bloc behind the iron curtain. 

When international financiers come to regard the Inland Revenue (that is, the state) as the source of all bounty they are no different from and as equally destructive as fanatical communists. Why should we be forced to support this tiny enclave of parasitic billionaires in our midst on the specious grounds that it is somehow to our benefit?

MARTIN KENNEDY
Brewer Street, W1