The Fight Against Socialism Is And Always Will Be Transatlantic

Facing an ever more extreme Democratic Party, I understand the temptation among American conservatives to focus on domestic issues. But socialism’s lack of respect for borders extends beyond keeping them open. For years now, the Left on both sides of the Atlantic has fed off one another, swapping ideas and experimenting in better ways to exert control over the rest of us.

In particular, it seems that the American Left has treated Britain as an offshore laboratory, where ideas too toxic to clear Congress are piloted before being sold back to you as “proven.” And lately it has become a battlefield: the place to win the fights the Left keeps losing at home.

For example, windfall profits taxes were a Carter-era failure, repealed and mostly forgotten, until Britain revived one on our own North Sea oil and gas producers that made “excessive profits” during COVID and the Ukraine war. Investment duly collapsed, and the UK the most expensive energy in the world. But this didn’t stop Congressman Ro Khanna and others from calling for the same to be implemented in America.

Other taxes in Britain are having the same effect. Road congestion charging, pioneered in London and creeping across British cities (with no discernible improvement in congestion), arrived in New York last year, copied more or less line for line. Soda taxes have been in place in Britain for years, too, known as a “soft drinks levy.” It is cited as the gold standard wherever campaigners gather to make groceries dearer.

Then there is speech. Our Online Safety Act requires Britons to show their papers before reading what the state deems “harmful,” and the American censors, who the First Amendment keeps muzzled, watch it with open envy. Police now routinely knock on family homes where they know that no crime has been committed in order to “remind” (read: warn) people tweeting things about the negative impact of their speech. Don’t be surprised if Dems try to institute something similar.

And now, progressive American companies have started funding class action lawsuits in Britain, just as American states are starting to wise up to the harm these third-party litigation funders are causing.

In “Bleak House,” Charles Dickens gave the English language its great monument to legal futility: Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case that ground on for generations until the entire estate had been devoured in costs. “The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” Dickens meant it as satire, but progressive, ESG-obsessed American trial lawyers must have taken it as inspiration.

We Brits long watched your courtroom culture with horrified smugness, confident it could never happen here.

But now it is happening here, and it is bankrolled with American capital. In 2015, Britain quietly created an American-style “opt-out” class action regime. Combined claims now exceed £160 billion; nearly half of all class actions filed in Europe between 2018 and 2022 were filed here, fed by a third-party litigation funding industry.

The largest such deal in British history is a £450 million partnership between Gramercy, a Connecticut hedge fund, and the activist law firm Pogust Goodhead (which, the Financial Times reports, has faced complaints from its own lawyers that the funder effectively controls it). That money is financing the largest group action Britain has ever seen, bizarrely on an issue that happened in Brazil. A claim for up to £36 billion on behalf of 600,000 Brazilians against the mining company BHP over a dam collapse is being argued under Brazilian law in an English court. Whatever that is, it is not English justice.

Concerningly, these lawsuits are being exported to Britain, draped in ESG and “climate justice,” precisely as that agenda is being routed across the United States. So I hate to have to say that rumors of ESG’s death have been greatly exaggerated, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Last month, North Carolina became the first state to ban third-party litigation funding outright, by a vote of 112 to 0 in its House. But just as America begins shutting the door, another is opened in Britain. How long before American companies are sued in London for ESG reasons, outside U.S. jurisdiction?

As Cicero would ask, who benefits? Not the victims. When Britain’s postmasters, wrongly prosecuted by the state-owned Post Office in our worst modern miscarriage of justice, finally won damages in their original group action, roughly 80% went to the funders and lawyers. Sir Alan Bates, the hero of that campaign, put it plainly: “The lawyers are making all the money in this and not the victims.” Dickens would recognize the unfairness.

And I’m afraid to say that, as Britain is about to swap a Left-wing leader for an even more Left-wing leader, more of this trend will follow. Andy Burnham is talking up nationalization of key industries, building more state-owned housing and less private, and so there will be no shortage of fresh ideas for your activists to borrow.

So while it may be tempting to write off Britain and Western Europe more broadly as a lost cause, as diminishing economic and military powers, that would be a mistake. As before, the new world cannot let bad ideas fester in the old world, lest they eventually be transmitted. Western civilization on both sides of the Atlantic will ultimately hang together, or it will surely hang separately.

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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.