Butler To The World: How Britian Helps The World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crime, And Get Away With Anything, by Oliver Bullough

This is not a book that is likely going to be a very popular one in Great Britain. While the British cultivate themselves both on being close friends with the United States as a matter of policy and also as being intensely civilized people of high moral standards, this book dives deep into sordid commercial matters that most people are not likely to be very familiar with, which is the way that Great Britain has been deeply involved over the last 70 years or so (since roughly the time of the Suez Crisis) in a complicated game that allows for the assistance of very evil people who exploit and take advantage of others in the name of the bank fees that result from engaging in shady financial transactions that include some of the most daring thefts in financial history. As it happens, as a traveler I have found myself visiting at least a few of the places mentioned in this book as being parts of the British world of secret business protocols that are deliberately opaque so that investigators in the countries that are being robbed cannot do anything about it, while the British remain polite but also unhelpful. One wonders if the author ever managed to get himself tangled up in any libel suits in Great Britain or if he found truth to be an absolute defense.

This particular book is about 250 pages or so long and is divided into ten chapters. The book begins with the author’s attempt to find out more about the butler business in Great Britain (1), an effort which is thwarted by the author finding himself recognized as a writer about financial matters and not domestic help. This is followed by a discussion of the British disaster in the Suez that led to Great Britain seeking a way to deal with the disaster without having to abandon its financial system (2). The author then discusses the practicality of London bankers and their willingness to do a lot of shady business for a fee (3). After this comes a discussion of the shell companies that have traditionally been based out of the British Virgin Islands (4) in the past few decades, a discussion of how Gibraltar became a haven for gambling operations (5), and how the Scottish were responsible for a particularly opaque shell company that has been used to launder money the world over (6). After this comes a discussion of an oligarch who ended up buying a tube station, presumably to keep it from being used by people who might spy on him (7), the difficulty of prosecuting people for financial crimes in Great Britain (8), as well as about the way that this sad state of affairs has led to a do-it-yourself method of bringing private charges which seems ripe for abuse by the elites (9) who can afford it. The book ends with a chapter that encourages Great Britain to end its role as a butler to the evildoers of the world, with plenty of discussions throughout about the butler Jeeves as a metaphor for British shady dealings. 

One of the more interesting aspects of this book for me was the way that it mirrors my own observations of some of the more troubling aspects of my own travels to such places as Gibraltar, Cyprus, and the Virgin Islands. Many of the little places I enjoy going to that are nestled in boundary places are also places rife with smuggling, it appears. Similarly, this book gives the lie to the claim that regulation will make taxation equal between the wealthy and the poor. This book is a pointed reminder that those with money will seek ways to make that money free of burdensome taxation and regulation and accessible to them wherever they go without causing them trouble if at all possible. Whenever a nation seeks to increase taxation to redistribute the wealth of those who have it, their natural (and understandable) response will be to move that money and possibly themselves to a place where it is better appreciated, and there are plenty of places in the world where that can be done. The author seems to recognize this in a world-weary and cynical way, and his main focus is to try to prevent Great Britain and its territories from being the sort of places where Americans in particular, as well as the evildoers of the former soviet Union and other dictators and their kin from around the world, from being a welcoming place. He seems to think that the world does not need butlers and that perhaps with enough pressure there might be no places where people are safe to hide their money that is stolen from poor nations or from others.