It’s the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable. But I doubt that one in 10 British people has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works. This could be about to change. Alongside the Church of England, the Corporation is seeking to evict the protesters camped outside St Paul’s cathedral. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that it submit to national oversight and control.
What is this thing? Ostensibly it’s the equivalent of a local council, responsible for a small area of London known as the Square Mile. But, as its website boasts, “among local authorities the City of London is unique”. You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It’s not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who “appoint” the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.
There are four layers of elected representatives in the Corporation: common councilmen, aldermen, sheriffs and the Lord Mayor. To qualify for any of these offices, you must be a freeman of the City of London. To become a freeman you must be approved by the aldermen. You’re most likely to qualify if you belong to one of the City livery companies: medieval guilds such as the worshipful company of costermongers, cutpurses and safecrackers. To become a sheriff, you must be elected from among the aldermen by the Livery. How do you join a livery company? Don’t even ask.
To become Lord Mayor you must first have served as an alderman and sheriff, and you “must command the support of, and have the endorsement of, the Court of Aldermen and the Livery”. You should also be stinking rich, as the Lord Mayor is expected to make a “contribution from his/her private resources towards the costs of the mayoral year.” This is, in other words, an official old boys’ network. Think of all that Tory huffing and puffing about democratic failings within the trade unions. Then think of their resounding silence about democracy within the City of London.
The current Lord Mayor, Michael Bear, came to prominence within the City as chief executive of the Spitalfields development group, which oversaw a controversial business venture in which the Corporation had a major stake, even though the project lies outside the boundaries of its authority. This illustrates another of the Corporation’s unique features. It possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks.
The Lord Mayor’s role, the Corporation’s website tells us, is to “open doors at the highest levels” for business, in the course of which he “expounds the values of liberalisation”. Liberalisation is what bankers call deregulation: the process that caused the financial crash. The Corporation boasts that it “handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City”, such as banking reform and financial services regulation. It also conducts “extensive partnership work with think tanks … vigorously promoting the views and needs of financial services.” But this isn’t the half of it.
As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London’s mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other.
Several governments have tried to democratise the City of London but all, threatened by its financial might, have failed. As Clement Attlee lamented, “over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster.” The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”. It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.
It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government. AIG’s wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn’t get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead. No wonder priests are resigning over the plans to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it’s colluding with Babylon.
If you’ve ever dithered over the question of whether the UK needs a written constitution, dither no longer. Imagine the clauses required to preserve the status of the Corporation. “The City of London will remain outside the authority of parliament. Domestic and foreign banks will be permitted to vote as if they were human beings, and their votes will outnumber those cast by real people. Its elected officials will be chosen from people deemed acceptable by a group of medieval guilds …”.
The Corporation’s privileges could not withstand such public scrutiny. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons why a written constitution in the United Kingdom remains a distant dream. Its power also helps to explain why regulation of the banks is scarcely better than it was before the crash, why there are no effective curbs on executive pay and bonuses and why successive governments fail to act against the UK’s dependent tax havens.
But now at last we begin to see it. It happens that the Lord Mayor’s Show, in which the Corporation flaunts its ancient wealth and power, takes place on 12 November. If ever there were a pageant that cries out for peaceful protest and dissent, here it is. Expect fireworks – and not just those laid on by the Lord Mayor.
Article: corporation-london-city-medieval
Now, when you think of “an Empire” and you may think America is the Empire of today, think again. Britain “lost” it’s Empire didn’t it?
Well maybe or….. Maybe not.
I go with the latter. You see, it does NOT take an army to ensure an Empire. What size if the Commonwealth? The Commonwealth is THE largest group of human beings (and resources) in the world. What is the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government of the United States? What controls them? What if it were that the City of London and Bank of England controlled them? So many (the majority) people believe this is just a “flight of fancy”. It isn’t.
Watch this next movie (very enlightening) and consider the following Telegraph article (which I have blogged about elsewhere on this blog):
The United States becoming an “Associate Member” of the Commonwealth? Now WHY would they “need” to do that? And what about Brexit? What’s that all about?
Well, this is what it may well all be about:
From U.S. Congressional Archives 1940:
Mr. Speaker, In order that the American people may have a clearer understanding of those who over a period of years have been undermining this Re-public, in order to return it to the British Empire, I have inserted in the RECORD a number of articles to prove this point. These articles are entitled “Steps Toward British Union, a World State, and International Strife.” This is part I, and in this I include a hope expressed by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in his book entitled “Triumphant Democracy.”
In this he expresses himself in this manner:
“Let men say what they will, I say that as surely as the sun in the heavens once shone upon Britain and America united, so surely is it one morning to rise, to shine upon, to greet again the reunited states—the British-American Union.”
“Now the people of this country are not going to allow anybody— any Congress, any government, any President—to break the good faith which they have pledged to the mother country. In making this statement, Mr. Choate takes the position that Great Britain or England is our mother country; the same position that was taken by Cecil Rhodes over 50 years ago and by Andrew Carnegie in 1893, when he wrote a book entitled, “Triumphant Democracy.” I want you to note particularly that this was in 1913, and that 1913 was the very year we changed our Government from a republic to a semidemocracy; the year in which we destroyed constitutional government, international security, and paved the road for us to become a colony of the British Empire. It was also the same year in which we, by adopting the Federal Reserve Act, placed our Treasury under the control and domination of the Bank of England and the international banking groups that are now financing the British-Israel movement in the United States. It was also the year preceding the World War; a war in which we became involved, as everyone knows, in 1917, but what everyone does not know is that we were committed to this war in 1910, and were to all intents and purposes in the war in 1914, when J. P. Morgan & Co. began to finance the Triple Entente. This statement is borne out by Mr. J. P. Morgan’s own testimony before the Senate committee investigating the munitions industry. Mr. Choate was, therefore, right, because nothing has stopped, not even Congress, the destruction of this Republic and its gradual incorporation into the British Empire through the efforts of the many subversive and pro-English groups, led and directed, as I have said, by the British- Israel movement.”
Please note that the following movie (and other such movies) will NEVER mention jewish control of the banks or banking system, so don’t be looking for it. But bear this in mind while watching.
NOW, IF YOU WANT A LIST OF THE ORIGINAL JEWISH HOLDERS OF STOCK IN THE BANK OF ENGLAND, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING:
https://earthlinggb.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/the-jew-bank-of-england/
I hope you notice the myriad of Spanish and non jewish sounding names in that list. This list, as I know, is not available anywhere else in blogs throughout the internet. I may be wrong.
All of the above can then lead me into tying this up to what is happening in China and Hong Kong today but that would have me simply regurgitating my blog “CAPITALIZING CHINA”. How has the City of London then taken significant control in China?
Enter the concept of the “Legal Person” – a British legal basic jurisprudence term: https://earthlinggb.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/capitalizing-china/
Am I a “Conspiracy theorist”? YES….. indefatigably YES! Why?
Because I’ve researched, done my homework and I have found that the entire globe is shaped by events which are entirely linked. So yes, there IS one umbrella conspiracy. Not to say there are not factions within it who play on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Grand Chessboard”, BUT they all use you and I as pawns in this big game.
Let the naysayers in media and elsewhere scoff as they will but they are entirely ignorant; generally, have never fully immersed themselves into research and know that to do so and then speak of it, they would lose their well paid positions.
A couple of things to ponder over:
LEGITIMACY BILL
With all deference to the most reverend Primate, that is not what the court is 338 asked to declare. The court is asked to declare that the child was born in lawful wedlock between Mrs. X and Y. Otherwise, by the laws of legitimacy as understood in this country, it could not be a legitimate child. It is that which personally I find so shocking.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, seemed to think—at least so I understood—that there was no material difference between the situation which I have just described and the situation which was dealt with by the Act of 1926, under which both the parents were unmarried at the time of the birth of the child and they merely, as it were, anticipated the ceremony. But to me at any rate, there is all the difference in the world between the two cases. In one case both were free to marry each other; in the other one or both was solemnly linked at the time in wedlock to another man or another woman. How is it possible for the court to ignore that fact? If I may say so with all deference—and this is a great impertinence—some lawyers always seem to think that by adding the adjective “legal” to the word “fiction” it makes it much more respectable, just as in politics when a Government wants to do something which is manifestly unjust to some section of the community it thinks it makes it sound better by calling it “social” justice. In both cases, the addition of the adjective is intended to produce a different and more agreeable atmosphere. But to the ordinary man, such as most of us in this House are, a fiction remains a fiction, whatever adjective is attached to it; a lie remains a lie even though it is condoned by the law.
BRITISH NATIONALITY BILL. [H.L.]
Every person who under this Act is a British subject of the United Kingdom and 993 Colonies or who under any enactment for the time being in force in any country mentioned in subsection (3) of this section is a British subject or citizen of that country shall thereby have the status of a British subject.The noble Lord said: Since this is a complicated and very far-reaching Bill, it may be desirable that I should begin by explaining the purpose and effect of my Amendment…………
Apart from that, however, it is obviously a term that is quite applicable for the purposes for which it has been used by Canada and may be used by other Dominions. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are, after all, single geographical entities under one system of government, under which every member of the community has equal rights and responsibilities. But citizenship in that sense is obviously entirely inapplicable to a vast range of territories such as we have to deal with in the Colonial Empire and to an immense variety of peoples who 996 range in their standard of civilisation and of civic responsibility from the head-hunters of Borneo to noble Lords opposite. There is a very wide range within this single term of “citizenship,” and obviously there are great differences in that range in the sense of civic rights and civic responsibilities. There are also immense varieties of Governments and of rights and responsibilities, varying from universal adult franchise, as we have it here, to no franchise at all. All those variations would be brought together under the term “citizenship.” In fact, to cover the Colonial Empire the term “citizenship” must be wrenched from its proper significance. It can be defended, if it is to be defended—and this is what we dislike and wish to avoid—only as a convenient legal fiction. We dislike the fiction and we see no good reason for it. For that reason alone—the history and the proper meaning of the term—we would like to see it altered in the Bill so far as the United Kingdom and Colonies are concerned.
§ In the second place, we believe that the use of this term for the United Kingdom and Colonies may have very undesirable political repercussions. Although this Parliament is, of course, still supreme throughout the Colonial Empire, nevertheless, as everybody who has lived and lives in the Colonial Empire knows, there is in the Colonial Empire a universal dislike of Whitehall government. There is a universal desire to feel that they are not dominated by a distant Legislature and administration but that, in fact, they are able more or less to conduct their own affairs without remote control. That has always been the history of the Dominions since the days when an early settler in New Zealand said that he would rather be governed by Nero on the spot than by a committee of archangels in Downing Street. That feeling is just as strong in the Colonial Empire. We have been trying to recognise that in every respect. In various ways we have been preparing and even carrying out systems of decentralisation and of regional organisation which will give more authority to those who are responsible on the spot. While, of course, there are in the Colonial Empire at the present time old Colonies with ancient Legislatures—and do not let us forget that—to whom this term will appear curiously inappropriate, the Colonies are all moving the same way. 997 Therefore, while this term “citizenship” when used in the Dominions will have an increasing significance as the Dominions grew in stature and in power, in the United Kingdom and Colonies it would have a steadily decreasing and ultimately shing significance.
§ There is no such difficulty if we remain faithful to the old term of “British subject.” That term has covered every variety of subject under every variety of Government. In is appropriate to them all, and they are proud of it. We would much prefer that no suggestion were made in this. Bill or in any other way that we are seeking to tie the Colonial Empire more closely to this country, to make it more dependent upon this country or in any way to interfere with the individual development of Colonies or groups of Colonies.
§ In the third place, there is another objection which is also deeply felt upon these Benches, and that is that the establishment of the term “citizenship” in many Colonies would be a fertile ground for political agitators. Our effort now, certainly in the African Colonies and elsewhere, is to try to give priority and emphasis to economic development and to avoid the danger that that development may be outstripped and impeded by premature political agitation. The noble Lord, Lord Milverton, called attention to that danger in a remarkable speech not many weeks ago. “Citizenship,” after all, ought to mean, and in its proper sense does mean, equal rights and responsibilities. Do noble Lords opposite really suppose that, if that term is used in regard to the Colonial Empire, it will not be exploited against us by every malcontent, by every political agitator? It is a poor answer to say that after all the term is merely a legal fiction. That would be the truth but, as I say, it would be a poor answer. I am afraid that it would furnish the Soviets, in their propaganda against the Empire, with another text for their constant theme of the “crude and callous insincerity of British Imperialism.”
Earthling 
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