You’d think a £3 billion sweep of British tech companies in a single day might trigger concern. Alphawave IP—a chipmaker with the sort of name that sounds like it belongs in a Silicon Valley garage, not a London HQ—was just swallowed whole by Qualcomm. Meanwhile, a pair of other takeovers made the headlines for about five minutes before being buried under waffle about “market confidence.” The spotty fatboys who work in the usual “free market” policy institutes have wasted no time to cry this up as evidence that Britain is “open for business.”

No doubt. Open for business. Open like a boarded-up shop on a street of pawnbrokers. The truth—easily observable to anyone not on the take from a hedge fund—is that British firms are being bought up not because foreigners want to share in their potential, but because foreigners want to stop them from actualising their potential. American vultures are circling overhead, buying British innovation not to scale it up, but to shut it down.

What’s happening here isn’t a “vote of confidence in British tech.” It’s a hostile extraction. These aren’t strategic investments. They are acts of industrial sabotage carried out under the banner of the free market.

Let’s talk about capital. In theory, it’s supposed to flow to its most productive use. That’s the cheerful myth sold in economics textbooks and parroted by the smelly cretins who quote Hayek without reading him. In practice, capital flows to the most extractive use—where monopolies can be secured, competition eliminated, and labour atomised.

This is what American firms are doing in Britain. They’re not buying our tech firms to help them grow. They’re buying them to carve them up and absorb their patents into the Borg cube of American IP holdings. Alphawave was snapped up because it was promising—and that promise needed to be neutralised. We’ve seen this before. ARM, a world leader in chip design, sold off like scrap metal. DeepMind, a British AI pioneer, quietly absorbed by Google. Each time, we were told to be proud. “Look, the Americans want our stuff!” Yes, they do want it—just like they wanted the nuclear technology that drunken grifter Churchill gave them in the 1940s; just like the German patents they looted in 1945.

Here’s a proposal. Let’s amend the Companies Act so that only shareholders who are both British citizens and resident in the UK can vote in shareholder meetings of companies registered here. This won’t fix everything. Foreign firms will still try to use nominee shareholders and shell vehicles. But it’s a start. It would at least reintroduce the idea that British companies might serve British interests, rather than being international vending machines for rentier capital.

Will it hinder capital flows? Almost certainly. Will it hurt “efficiency”? I expect so. But I don’t care. What I care about is the survival of this country—not just the territory, but the idea of it. I want a Britain where industrial strategy isn’t a synonym for rolling over and hoping Jeff Bezos sends us a thank-you card.

I repeat: the people celebrating these takeovers aren’t free-marketeers. They’re managerialist ideologues who worship freedom for artificial entities—multinational corporations with no loyalty, no face. These entities have more rights than you do. They can cross borders freely, enforce their property claims with help from the police, and use intellectual property law to shut down competitors and criminalise innovation.

Their prosperity is bought at the cost of national decline. Every British company they absorb is one less source of domestic income, one less pole of local influence, one more licence agreement controlled by lawyers in California.

You’ll often hear them say that competition is the driver of innovation. True enough. But that isn’t what they want. What they want is monopoly—preferably a monopoly enforced by global treaties and upheld by foreign courts. This is how capitalism now works. Not as the free play of productive forces, but as an elaborate game of enclosure. Enclose the land, enclose the patents, enclose the codebase. Extract rent. Call it a free market.

There is a class of men—mostly educated at Oxbridge, usually obese and bald before thirty—who get aroused by spreadsheets. They believe that the disappearance of Britain’s industrial base was “inevitable,” that high-value-added services are the future, and that anyone still talking about manufacturing must be some kind of cloth-capped Luddite. These men have colonised Whitehall. They have infiltrated the newspapers. They have entire think tanks named after economists they’ve never read. And they have turned Britain into a husk.

We are a nation of outsourced call centres and dodgy fintech schemes We import food. We import energy. We import electronics. Our armed forces are a joke. Our border is a rumour. And the only thing we reliably export is ownership of our remaining productive capacity.

Taking our country back isn’t a matter of throwing out a few bad laws. It means building again. Not just roads and railways—but industries, factories, power stations, foundries. We need a modern industrial base. We need semiconductor plants, not sandwich shops. We need domestic robotics companies, not “exciting” start-ups that build lifestyle apps for people with no lives. We need to train our own engineers, not import them on temporary visas and then act surprised when they leave.

This means capital controls. This means protection for strategic sectors. This means repealing laws that protect intellectual property more than they protect actual productivity. It also means treating finance—not as the master of the economy—but as its servant. A tool to build, not a cudgel to extract.

What we are seeing is not freedom. It’s fire-sale capitalism. It’s the hollowing-out of a nation by foreign capital, cheered on by people who mistake their Adam Smith ties for serious thought.

To those still clinging to the delusion that this is just “how free trade works,” I say this: wake up. You’re not defending liberty. You’re defending asset-stripping. You’re defending a system in which British teenagers will grow up to find that every serious job, every innovative firm, every important decision is somewhere else, in someone else’s hands.

Let’s take it back. Or die trying.

Related posts:

Britain the Colony: How Global Capital Looted a Nation With Its Leaders’ Consent Free Trade and Protection: Why the Economic Case Doesn’t Matter A Rotten System: How Britain’s Banks Became Instruments of Theft

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