Martin: I have no evidence that anyone is particularly worried by my ideas, which is a further underlining of my irrelevance really. I wish that the powerful were more aware of what I write, but I don't think I am on a watch list.
Gary: In the US corpocracy, its few thousand members of the power elite rule, seeking ever more profit and power. The corporate power elite tell the government power elite what to spend, what to do and what to say. Then there are hundreds of thousands of functionaries, or water carriers, who carry out the power elite's orders and expectations. Do you have a similar corpocracy with a small number of power elite and a large number of water carriers in the UK?
Martin: Britain has always been a class-based society, in which particular schools and universities feed into certain professions and positions of political power. We need to add to this that one of the features of British capitalism since the 1970s is that it has been becoming more unequal. This is exemplified in terms of the divides between the relatively wealthy south of the country and a much poorer north which was largely the dynamic that drove the Brexit vote. So yes, I live in a country in which corporations are one element, but only one, in a coalition that runs the country for their own benefit. But then they have been doing that for a few hundred years now.
Gary: In some of my writings I have described in excruciating detail the toll the US corpocracy takes on its citizens and people in other lands; from our war-related industries, our health and pharmaceutical industries, our agriculture and food industries, our financial industry, etc. [6] To give you just two nauseating examples, the US committed an unbelievable destructive and deadly carnage on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Then there are the endless and brutal regime changes in which the US military ousts a popularly elected leader and implants a brutal, sycophant dictator who allows the US power elite to plunder the nation's valuable resources. [7] Is there a similar toll exacted by the UK's domestic and foreign policy and actions, notwithstanding the earlier history of UK warfare?
Martin: Whilst our military influence has been on the wane since the second world war, that hasn't prevented various small-scale forms of adventurism, as well as often providing support to US imperialism. Don't forget that we have a huge arms industry too, and we have never been shy about selling weapons to a wide variety of repressive regimes. I think that our colonial history means that our politicians are also nostalgic for a time when we mattered, and this drives a foreign policy which is often based on the assumed superiority of British Civilization to everyone else on the globe. The sooner we realize just how insignificant these wet islands are, the more realistic we can be about our influence.
Gary: I see that the UK is second only to the US in the number of military outposts in other lands. That is just one index of the UK's militancy. You know, of course, that the US was born in the womb of war involving a dispute with the invading oligarchy from a Kingdom that never saw a war it didn't start, be part of or tolerate. My question is this, does the UK have a similar military, industrial, political triumvirate today that is "trigger happy," so to speak?
Martin: Margaret Thatcher's government was saved by the Falklands War, a small-scale dispute over some islands off the coast of Argentina. There has been fairly regular participation in foreign wars ever since, but I think the interests of global finance are probably more significant than the military in the UK nowadays. We are a fading military power, but still a key player in flows of international capital through London, one of the global financial centres for washing dirty money and inventing new ways for the rich to become richer.
Gary: I read in your biography that one of your new interests is "business activism." In the US there are a few teacher-activist organizations seeking reforms that would give teachers more say in important, broad decisions, but I can find none aimed at business schools. Are there any in the UK, and where might your new interest take you?
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