Sanctions Solutions, James Gillespie, Adam Smith Institute, London, February 2025

The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) likes to pretend it champions free markets and limited government. In reality, it has spent decades refining the machinery of state oppression, making government not smaller, but more efficient at extracting wealth and controlling its subjects. The ASI helped push the Poll Tax, a scheme to squeeze the poor while streamlining tax collection. It championed the Private Finance Initiative, which funnelled billions of public money into corporate hands while saddling future generations with the bill. Now, with Sanctions Solutions, it turns its attention to foreign policy, offering a blueprint for expanding government power under the guise of “economic statecraft.”

This is not a report about protecting Britain. It is a report about turning British foreign policy into an elaborate sanctions machine, with new bureaucracies, more surveillance, and deeper government coordination—all to ensure that foreign states bend to Britain’s economic will. The fact that Britain barely controls its own economic destiny anymore seems lost on the authors. The idea that a country reliant on foreign imports for everything from food to energy can cripple global adversaries by cutting them off from British financial markets is laughable.

If Sanctions Solutions is to be believed, Britain is an economic titan, able to reshape world affairs through the force of its banking system. The authors seem unaware that Britain’s ruling class has spent the last 40 years hollowing out the country’s real industries, and selling off national infrastructure. What remains is an economy driven by finance and services, a bloated state sector, and an elite that thinks pressing buttons in the City of London is the same as running an empire.

The real parallel here is the Qing Dynasty’s attempt to sanction Britain in the First Opium War by banning the export of rhubarb. The Chinese believed Britain was so dependent on rhubarb as a digestive aid that cutting off supplies would bring it to its knees. It did not. And yet, the ASI is pushing the same delusion today—imagining that Britain, a country that cannot even keep its own lights on without importing energy, can bring Russia or China to heel by restricting financial transactions.

It is pure fantasy. Russia has already adapted to Western sanctions, shifting its economy towards domestic production and new trade partners. China holds the world’s supply chains in its grip. The idea that British financial penalties could deter either country from pursuing its national interests is absurd.

The most sinister aspect of this report is its obsession with making the British state more coordinated and effective. The authors want a new subcommittee of the National Security Council to oversee sanctions. They want intelligence agencies working more closely with financial regulators. They want entire government departments realigned to enforce Britain’s economic dictates.

This is madness. The only reason Britain is not already a full-blown police state is that the government is too corrupt and too inefficient and fragmented to enforce all of its own laws. If every department responsible for taxation, policing, and financial enforcement ever started working seamlessly together, Britain would be unlivable.

The ASI sees bureaucratic dysfunction as a problem. In reality, it is the only thing stopping the British government from exercising total control over its citizens. Every additional layer of efficiency is a step towards greater state power. The fact that the ASI is promoting this agenda should tell you everything you need to know about what it really stands for.

Sanctions Solutions talks a great deal about punishing kleptocrats, deterring adversaries, and upholding “liberal democracy.” What it does not mention is that economic sanctions have become a business model for Britain’s ruling elite. London is a financial hub for the global oligarchy. British banks, law firms, and real estate brokers have spent decades laundering money for the very kleptocrats the ASI says it should oppose.

The people who profit from these policies are not ordinary Britons. They are the same financial elites who make fortunes moving money around while producing nothing of real value. These people do not care about democracy or national security. They care about ensuring that global wealth remains concentrated in their hands.

And so, instead of pursuing a foreign policy that protects the lives, liberty, and property of the British people, we get reports like this—proposals to turn Britain into an enforcer for a global economic order that serves only the interests of a tiny elite.

With Sanctions Solutions, the Adam Smith Institute has proven once again that it is not a libertarian think tank, but an apologist for state expansion. It speaks the language of free markets, but its actual role has been to refine and legitimise state power. It did it with the Poll Tax. It did it with PFI. Now it is doing it with foreign policy, pushing for more surveillance, more economic intervention, and more centralised control.

If there is to be a sanctions regime at all, it should begin with the Adam Smith Institute.