By Anton Chaitkin
[Anton Chaitkin wrote this article in 2016-2017. It conveys his discoveries regarding the history of the imperial power misruling global society. Though it thus has universal significance, it was intended in some respects for a British audience, e.g. certain British spelling conventions, or referring to the regulation of British commercial banks. Note that the capitalized term City, or City of London, means the special self-governing financial district within the regular London city limits. Also, some trivial aspects of the article are out of date — for example Part 2 mentions “Prince Charles” — today he is called “King Charles III.”
But we are posting it here, unchanged, hoping to give readers substantial food for thought about how leading Western institutions are sharply antagonistic to Western interests and ideals.
Part 1, published January 22, 2024, concerns the Bank of England as the prime sponsor of world fascism, and its post-World War II transition to creating the casino economy. Part 2, which will be published January 29, 2024, follows the Bank’s organization of the offshore financial system that is dedicated to criminal activity, to crimes against humanity.
The Bank of England: A Criminal Enterprise – Part 1
By Anton Chaitkin
Copyright Anton Chaitkin – originally published on Substack
A banking system with entirely criminal aims now dominates global finances, from its base in the United Kingdom and satellite locations in New York and offshore centres.
The Crown-led Privy Council and the City of London bankers have put the present system in place step by step since the mid-20th century. Their basic premises, lawless financial speculation and economic austerity, have led to depopulation, deindustrialization and endless war.
They imposed the present arrangements largely through the Bank of England. We shall see here how that Bank has guided the political changes and ushered in the policies which now rule and ruin mankind.
Today’s banking-from-Hell may be traced to a distinct origin in the work of the legendary Bank of England governor from 1920 to 1944, Montagu Norman.
“Legendary” (i.e. epic), because City men repute him the greatest, wisest leader despite common knowledge that he, more than any other individual, sponsored the rise of Hitler Nazism. And “legendary” (i.e. untrue), because historians have preferred to avert their eyes from any searching look inside the private realm, the power relationships through which this secretive man and his feudalistic associates guided world affairs.
Our limited resources allow us to provide only a concise outline of the continuum in policy and practice from Norman’s era to today, but one which may aid those seeking to replace the current, extravagantly destructive system.
Section 1. Top-Down Fascism
Montagu Norman’s Austrian Economics
Montagu Collet Norman was born into Britain’s imperial power structure in 1871. From 1894 to 1915 he served in both ends of his grandfather Mark Collet’s transatlantic merchant bank, called Brown Shipley in London and Brown Brothers in New York. Pro-Union Americans reviled the firm as the shipper of three quarters of all the slave cotton exported to Liverpool, and Mark Collet had himself opened its London office during the U.S. Civil War. Grandfather Mark had been a director of the Bank of England from 1866 until his death in 1905, and its Governor from 1887 to 1889.
Montagu Norman became a Bank of England director in 1907. In World War One, the American republic was suddenly allied to its longtime enemy, imperial Britain. Norman’s close relations with Wall Street’s pro-imperialists helped his elevation in 1917 to Deputy Governor. The war ended with Britain bankrupt and Europe in chaos, and he was made the Governor, tasked with saving the imperial system.
Post-war Europe was burdened with poverty and inflationary pressure. Theoretically, these problems might have been solved as America had solved them under the leadership of Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt: guide public and private investment into new infrastructure and productive industry.
Montagu Norman and his imperial sponsors chose the darker path. Working with the City of London grandees on his Court of Directors, employing an array of state powers and the leverage of the allied armed forces, Montagu Norman steered much of Europe into a new ruling system known as fascism. An alternate name is eugenics: to solve poverty and inflation by crushing out the existence of the poor and the weak.
The opening scene of action was Austria, a defeated British enemy. Habsburg monarch Charles I was driven from power, but had not abdicated. His young son Otto remained the crown Prince, hoping to restore the undead feudalist family’s power.
Austria was the first political laboratory for Montagu Norman as Dr. Frankenstein. Demanding the country surrender its sovereignty under shock austerity, he pulled the strings in Vienna through the League of Nations Finance Committee, led by UK Treasury official Otto Niemeyer and British economist Arthur Salter.
Wages were cut across the board, one hundred thousand government workers were fired, and hundreds of thousands of others lost their jobs, while consumer prices rose sharply. On this program, Chancellor Ignaz Seipel signed the League of Nations Protocol in exchange for loans managed by the Bank of England and set up a newly “independent” National Bank of Austria as a satellite of the Bank of England, for “monetary stability.” Seipel enforced this nightmare with public lies about whose interest was being served — and with backing from wealthy financiers, the anti-Semitic Greater German People’s Party and the paramilitary Home Guard.
It was in this regime that the so-called Austrian School of Economics first became a significant factor in history, as an instrument to enforce London’s will. Over the next half century its leaders Mises and Hayek concocted what became Thatcherism in Britain.
Ludwig von Mises (assisted by his young protégé Friedrich von Hayek) was the counsellor to Herr Seipel, afterwards boasting that he had convinced the Chancellor to accept Montagu Norman’s savage austerity program:
“As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was, with the help of Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, able to slow down Austrian inflation.” [*Mises Institute; wiki.mises.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises].
Mises went on to advise both the austro-fascist Engelbert Dollfuss (Chancellor 1932-34) and Otto von Habsburg, the pro-Dark Ages crown prince.
Montagu Norman’s triumphed on October 4, 1922, when Ignaz Seipel signed the Geneva Protocol. This agreement to implement the British program made plain to Europe that fascism was the wave of the future. Two days later, on October 6, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party gave an ultimatum to the Italian government that the parliament must be dissolved. [*New York Times, Oct. 7, “Fascisti Prepare to Control Italy”] Thirteen days afterward Mussolini and his armed followers marched on Rome and began their famous coup d’état.
At that time, the City of London maintained an official link to Italy, called the British-Italian Corporation. It had the form of a bank, created during World War One by the UK government, with capital supplied by Lloyds Bank, London County and Westminster Bank, several British empire banks in Africa, Asia and Canada, and some Italian interests. After fascism had solidified control in Italy, this Corporation’s chairman (Lloyds Bank Chairman J. W. Beaumont Pease) spoke out, praising Mussolini and urging him to go farther.
Whatever explanations for London’s policy were offered later, after the World War II Blitz bombing of England made fascism unpopular among common people there, it is useful to see what was reported at the time.
The following article is from the New York Times, April 15 1923:
LONDON BANK SAYS ITALY IS REVIVING
Only Country Except England Which Is Putting Its House In Order.
MUSSOLINI IS APPROVED
Doubt Expressed as to Procuring Capital for Sale of Public Enterprises to Private Managers.
Reporting to the London shareholders of the British-Italian Corporation, at its annual meeting, the Chairman made the emphatic statement that “Italy is the one country apart from England which is making a real effort toward putting its house in order.” The report approved unqualifiedly of the policy pursued by Mussolini in shaping the economic program for Italy. It went on to say:
“What he has achieved for the welfare of his country in a few months of constitutional dictatorship is remarkable. The profound skepticism which had invaded the gallant nation and the despondency noticeable in some quarters as a consequence of the many disappointments due to the unsettled conditions of [an] after-war period have entirely disappeared.
“You find now a country where every man you come across is permeated buy a new faith, by the certainty that they will pull through by the renewed sense of civic duty. Where this the only result of Signor Mussolini’s advent to power he would already have rendered the greatest service to his country. Everywhere in Italy you now get the sensation of discipline, that order prevails or that it would be made to prevail; the railways keep their time; all public services are run smoothly and with greater civility to the public and strict observation of rules and by-laws.
The atmosphere is, therefore, as favorable as it could be for Signor Mussolini’s ponderous Government program.
“His general policy can be summarized as follows: Order at home at any cost, and peace in Europe; assertion of Italy’s international position; the balancing of the budget in the shortest possible time, not by further taxation, but by economies and revision of taxation, and devolution to private enterprise of the public services now run by the State. For the latter purposes he has acquired a free hand, the Chambers having given him full powers until March 31, 1924.”
One measure already taken is “the reduction in the personnel of the State railways; 40,000 men are being dismissed, and a sensible [sic] interpretation of the eight-hour day is being introduced. The handing over of the railways to private enterprise, as well as other public services — as, for instance, the telephones – may prove more difficult, at least with regard to the former.
“This and other large needs of capital for investment (such as hydro-electric development) have probably prompted legislation authorizing the Government in certain cases to exempt foreign capital from the Ricchezza mobile (the Italian income tax). Even admitting that in addition to exemption of tax sufficiently attractive conditions could be offered, I am afraid the time is still too recent when foreign investors were disappointed by sudden changes of legislation in the matter of taxation and contractual stipulations as to payment of arrears in gold.
“However much such changes of legislation may be justifiable from the point of view of the borrowers, they are remembered by the lenders as breaches of solemnly contracted obligations. Very strongly worded pledges will have to be given to remove diffidence.”
[END – New York Times 1923 article]
On November 8-9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and 2,000 fascist followers staged an unsuccessful attempted coup d’état in Munich, Germany. Immediately afterward, the British imposed on Germany a financial dictator who would prepare the way for Hitler’s accession to power a decade later.
On November 20, 1923, under extreme pressure from Montagu Norman, German’s leaders announced that Norman’s nominee, Hjalmar Schacht, would be made president of the Germany’s central bank, the Reichsbank. Before taking office in January, 1924, Schacht flew to London. Montagu Norman introduced his protégé to City financiers, and Schacht arranged to conduct the Reichsbank as a satellite of the Bank of England, with Germany’s currency pegged to the British pound. [*Laquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, 2009, p. 196. ; New York Times, January 5, 1924 “Schacht Busy in London”] As Reichsbank president from then until 1930, Schacht conferred on policy almost daily with Norman.
In 1926, Montagu Norman, backed by the transatlantic House of Morgan (J.P. Morgan and Company in New York, Morgan Grenfell in London), prevailed upon the Mussolini regime to establish a new Italian central bank, to be overseen by the Bank of England.
In his 1927 book, Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises explained that unpleasant measures are sometime necessary:
“It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.” [* Mises Institute mises.org/library/foundations-liberal-policy]
Here is the credo of “neo-liberalism”: that unaccountable rulers, elected or unelected, may use brutal force and outrageous deceit – that is, fascism — to protect the unregulated private interests of financiers.
At the time of that writing, Ludwig von Mises worked for the Montagu Norman/Arthur Salter League of Nations apparatus running the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. Mises and Hayek meanwhile served the Seipel/Norman regime’s Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in Vienna. These Swiss and Austrian units were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as was Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.
Montagu Norman’s 1920s protection of uncontrolled speculators was accomplished through deceit — calculated gross lying that helped prevent the world from acting to avoid the catastrophe of the Great Depression. John Garrett, now a University of Tennessee economics professor, used archival materials to penetrate a part of Norman’s operations, reporting:
The Bank of England depleted its open-market portfolio by secretly sterilizing large gold inflows. Thereafter interest rates were influenced by manipulating reported gold flows …. Montagu Norman … engaged in a large scale deception that greatly overstated the size of the effective open market portfolio, understated the size of the gold stock, and misstated the size and even the direction of gold flows. Hiding the strength of the pound from the public, the government, the Bank of England governing bodies, and the financial markets was necessary but not sufficient for the enactment of Norman’s policy scenario. To maintain his grip on interest rates, Montague Norman temporized in an extraordinary fashion: he developed the false reporting of gold flows into a new channel of monetary policy…. [which] was an attempt to manipulate market expectations directly….
[*John R. Garrett (1995). “Monetary Policy and Expectations: Market-Control Techniques and the Bank of England, 1925–1931.” The Journal of Economic History, 55, pp 612-636.]
During 1929 and early 1930, Hjalmar Schacht worked out with Montagu Norman details of a new global institution to be run by central bank governors under Norman’s leadership, called the Bank for International Settlements.
When a global crash of unregulated finance took place, Schacht resigned the Reichsbank presidency and proceeded to organize Germany’s wealthy and powerful men behind a Hitler takeover.
Hitler’s main fundraiser, Fritz Thyssen, then had a fund of millions of dollars in a New York unit (“Union Banking Corporation”) of Montagu Norman’s own firm (renamed Brown Brothers Harriman at the end of 1930). It was in an office which Norman as Bank of England Governor regularly visited on trips to New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Among Norman’s other closest allies in Wall Street were J.P. Morgan, Jr.; John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; and the Warburg family, who ran Kuhn Loeb Bank.
Hitler took power in January 1933, made Schacht the economics minister, and tasked him with building up Nazi war-making capability in a bankrupt country.
In July 1933, the Bank of England convened Germany’s creditors at London’s Baring Bank office to see how to help the new Hitler regime. The meeting pivoted around Schroders Bank partner Henry Tiarks, son of Bank of England senior director Frank Tiarks.
[*Montagu Norman’s problem was that many bondholders and short-term lenders to Germany were angry with the idea of reducing their income to help Nazi Germany. The meeting was part of the Bank’s campaign to massage these creditors and sell the deal. Neil Forbes, “The City, British Policy and the Rise of the Third Reich, 1931-1937”; in The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century; Cambridge, 2004, Cambridge University Press; page 247.]
We shall meet this Henry Tiarks again a quarter century later, acting in a far different arena: binding American organized crime to London banking.
Montagu Norman used the Bank of England’s Council of Foreign Bondholders, and his close Wall Street allies, to negotiate debt relief for the Nazis, fending off their unpaid creditors. Henry’s father Frank Tiarks would spend much of the 1930s in Nazi Germany as Montagu Norman’s intermediary, handling Schacht and promoting his reputation abroad.
Two new Bank of England staffers, Cameron Cobbold and George Bolton, came aboard in 1933 to help Montagu Norman coordinate this Nazi-British axis. Cobbold and Bolton will also appear later, leading the Bank to shape criminalization of London finance in the 1950s and beyond.
The Bank of England and Nazi officials in Berlin conducted staff exchanges to coordinate their operations. [*Forbes, page 251] Montagu Norman and his representatives met regularly with Schacht at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, where Nazi-British collaboration would continue all through World War II.
In those days, Siegmund Warburg worked in conjunction with Montagu Norman as an advisor to Schacht – before leaving Germany in 1934. After World War II, Siegmund Warburg would work with Cobbold and Bolton to create a new global system for lawless speculators.
Montagu Norman and his pro-Hitler set had to reckon with the countervailing influence of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal and anti-fascist policies gained overwhelming popular support around the world. In 1944 George Bolton was a senior member of the British team negotiating the post-war world monetary arrangements in a direct clash with President Roosevelt and his aide, Harry Dexter White. The British oligarchs failed to prevent the establishment in of what became known as the Bretton Woods System – a design for fixed exchange rates and inter-governmental cooperation to guide investment in productive channels.
After Roosevelt’s untimely death months later, Cameron Cobbold and George Bolton steered the Bank and the UK so as to outflank, undermine and eventually destroy the Bretton Woods system, bringing in a limitless “offshore” casino economy.
Section 2. Imperial London, Restored
The Bank and Mont Pelerin
On February 28, 1944, at a Political Society meeting in King’s College, Cambridge, Friedrich von Hayek publicly proposed that, after the end of the war, an international strategy group should be set up to break the world away from government regulation, thus freeing private financiers to be creative.
Indeed, in The Road to Serfdom, published the following month, Hayek called for international mechanisms to forcibly prevent individual nations from protecting their citizens in the global marketplace.
Sir John Clapham chaired that Cambridge meeting and introduced Hayek’s speech. Sir John had then already been stipended for six years by Montagu Norman’s Bank of England. Hayek was then living at King’s College, where Clapham was vice provost. Clapham’s work was revered by Hayek’s radical neo-liberals at the London School of Economics. [*Clapham had been, since 1938, writing a history of the Bank from its founding, and the normally secrecy-obsessed Montagu Norman had given him free access to records. Not surprisingly, Clapham’s finished, published Bank history never got up to the 20th century; see Charles Goodhart, “The Commissioned Historians of the Bank of England,” an essay in Monetary and Banking History, Oxon, 2011, Routledge.]
Hayek’s initiative came in response to a potential crisis for the financier oligarchy. Soon after Germany’s 1945 surrender, the British Labour Party began campaigning for a Labour government to replace the wartime austerity-enforcing coalition under Churchill. The British public backed Labour’s Clement Attlee by a wide margin over Churchill’s Conservatives.
As Prime Minister, Atlee raised living standards and used government for the general welfare. But his 1946 Bank of England “nationalisation” changed only the Bank’s nominal ownership from private to public. Though a clause in Attlee’s law allowed the government to issue directions to the Bank, it was never used, by tacit agreement of British leaders. [www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/Pages/history/timeline.aspx]
It was Montagu Norman’s John Clapham who planned out with Hayek a new global propaganda unit aiming to crush labor, destroy high-wage industry, privatise public services and deregulate banks. But Clapham died in 1946, just after Attlee’s Bank of England Act took effect. Hayek, his mentor Ludwig von Mises and their close supporters met without Clapham the following year, to create the planned group, named the Mont Pelerin Society for the Swiss location of the founding meeting. [*On Clapham, see Hayek’s 1947 speech at Mont Pelerin, in Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism, Vol. IV, Oxon, 1992, Routledge]
After Norman’s retirement, his men continued to run the post-war Bank. This was with the active consent of the Monarchy, which had been given the power to appoint governors and directors in the Atlee law. [*www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/Pages/history/timeline.aspx]
Cameron Cobbold became the Deputy Governor in 1945, and was Governor from 1949 to 1961. Director George Bolton, never much in the public view, guided the foreign exchange operations of the Bank and of the City of London, and steered much of the UK’s international financial policy.
The Mont Pelerin Society successfully arranged with the Bank of England to have the Bank itself fund the travel of the British participants to the Society’s 1949 second general meeting in Seelisberg, Switzerland. [*Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983, London, Fontana Press, 1995, p. 108; and Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen, “Between Network and Complex Organization,” in Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique, 2006, Routledge, http://www.forba.at/data/downloads/file/300-Plehwe-Walpen.pdf]
In Their View, Civilization is the Enemy
President Roosevelt had organized a post-war world aimed at higher living standards, and his goal of eliminating the old British Empire was largely accomplished by the 1950s. A half century after King Edward VII, the City of London had quietly shrunk from being the epicentre of universal finance. It was in these circumstances that George Bolton and Cameron Cobbold at the Bank of England, aided by certain associated financiers – notably Siegmund Warburg and the Monarchy’s banker Harley Drayton – drove forward a radical new objective. We shall briefly sum it up here.
Britain itself need no longer be maintained as a great industrial centre; nor should the weight and global usage of the British pound sterling currency be of any concern. Instead, foreign capital fleeing from taxation or regulation, underworld proceeds, “hot money” of all kinds, should be lured into and sheltered in London and London-ruled offshore jurisdictions. Other countries would then open their doors to criminal money flows out of Britain. Most of the world would be a mafia zone, in which London financiers and their friends (many monarchs included) would be Lords of the Universe.
Success would require government to be “tough,” “practical,” to crush labor . . . and perhaps to manage geopolitics with war.
Under this system, oceans of cash flow into hidden accounts, or through magical accounting channels, to be arbitraged and leveraged and wagered and re-hidden.
And when coal-mining disappears, or the space program dies, or plague consumes powerless Africa, it is, after all, “better for the environment; Man is ruining the world by having children and striving for advancement.”
Friedrich von Hayek argued for this bestial approach in his 1955 book, The Counter-Revolution of Science. Ridiculing the humanist scientists who gave mankind new powers that lifted them to dignity and better lives, Hayek attacked the
“general spirit of exuberance which they engendered, with the feeling which they created that there were no limits to the powers of the human mind and to the extent to which man could hope to harness and control all the forces which so far had threatened and intimidated him.”
This spirit he condemned as “hubris” and a “metaphysical fiction. [*archive.org/stream/counterrevolutio030197mbp/counterrevolutio030197mbp_djvu.txt]
In the same spirit Julian Huxley worked to redeem the eugenics movement – largely the creation of his family — from the bad reputation that Hitler’s genocide had given it; to make the unthinkably brutal policies somehow acceptable. He was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, and would counterattack President John F. Kennedy’s optimistic program by creating the World Wildlife Fund, led by the British Royal Family with their commitment to savage population reduction. This was the consensus notion of the financial oligarchy.
The Bank of England was a prime mover in implementing this system.
When the Conservative Party government succeeded Labour in 1951, they sought to stop the drain of gold reserves from the weak British economy while simultaneously overturning the “expensive” commitment to full employment policies. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rab Butler was an old partisan of the Montagu Norman faction’s 1930s alliance with Hitler, and Butler now took his cue from George Bolton, Norman’s protégé.
Bolton proposed to float the pound sterling: let speculators determine the pound’s value, while ending controls on currency exchange. A speculator-devalued pound would make imports, food and raw materials more expensive, reduce demand and so perhaps increase unemployment – thus puncturing workers’ dangerous expectations of a better life. Bolton thought of it as a step towards the necessary full reform. Bank Governor Cobbold supported the plan. But the UK Cabinet rejected it as too radical. [* The failed currency scheme became known as Operation ROBOT, after its advocates Sir Leslie ROwan, Sir George Bolton and OTto Clarke.]
In June of 1955 Bank of England officials became aware that the Midland Bank was soliciting and paying interest on deposits of U.S. dollars, for Midland’s own lending or speculative use rather than just accepting them to accomplish commercial transactions. This was contrary to UK currency exchange controls, which were supposed to prevent the use of foreign currency to acquire British pounds and thus bid up their price. It was also an attack on the American system of tight exchange controls and other national protection which sustained U.S. post-war prosperity.
But on the grounds that the $49 million in Midland’s June deposits countered the fall of UK currency foreign reserves, the Bank of England averted their eyes – and moved London towards “offshore.” Economic historian Catherine Schenk cites a Bank official’s sophistical comment that
‘‘it is impossible to say to a London bank that it may accept dollar deposits but may not seek for them. We would be wise, I believe, not to press the Midland any further.’’
[*Minute by Parsons on a Note by LTG Preston to Menzies, 15 July 1955. BE C43/111; cited in Catherine R. Schenk, “The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London: 1955–1963,” page 227, Explorations in Economic History 35, (1998)]
The IEA, Fisher and Drayton
In 1955, the financial-political apparatus linking the Crown, the Bank of England and the City of London, gave birth to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a lobbying group or “think-tank” representing the views of Hayek and Mises. Let us shine a little light into its obfuscated creation.
IEA’s founder Antony Fisher had been a merchant banker and a Hayek follower in the late 1940s. After meeting with Hayek in 1947 Fisher published The Case for Freedom, a fervent attack on fixed exchange rates.
Fisher was then picked up by Harley Drayton, the overseer of covert interlocking trusts and co-owner of United Newspapers. Drayton’s control of Lonrho (or the London and Rhodesia Mining Company) put him at the heart of strategic African interests in which the Royal Family had long had direct interest. Drayton’s company (entitled the 117 Old Broad Street Group, located a block and a half from the Bank of England) invested the funds of the Monarchy and of the Church of England. Several aristocratic Royal servants were Drayton’s employees.
Antony Fisher began writing radical free-market articles for Harley Drayton’s paper, City Press, the propaganda organ for the City of London financiers. Fisher’s political group was established in 1955 in the tiny office of a Drayton political agent named Oliver Smedley, who suggested the name Institute for Economic Affairs. IEA was just one of several nominally-separate political entities Smedley managed in that office, at 24 Austin Friars, 100 feet from the Drayton Group.
Fisher was chiefly counseled in IEA’s founding by S.W. Alexander, a radical free trade operative who was editor of the City Press which Drayton had owned since 1948. [*Cockett., p. 122 ff.] S.W. Alexander did not blush as a spokesman for money-making financiers per se. He scorned the “sentimentalists” who were concerned to protect society, and attacked their “deep prejudice…against anyone they believed represented `City of London’ opinion.” [*Cockett, p. 70]
Once the IEA was in motion, Fisher brought in Ralph Harris, a college lecturer and Conservative Party activist, to run the new group. Harris was certainly no sentimentalist. As a member of British Eugenics Society, [*https://www.scribd.com/doc/97123506/Eugenics-Society-Members-A-Z-2012] Harris was eager to take those unpleasant measures which von Mises had explained were sometimes necessary.
Ralph Harris was general director of the IEA from 1957 to 1988. He was simultaneously the Secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society beginning in 1967, and was the MPS president from 1982 to 1984 after Margaret Thatcher ennobled him as Baron Harris of High Cross.
But above the realm of opinions, Harley Drayton wielded heavy imperial financial interests, giving him membership on the Bank of England’s Council of Foreign Bondholders. The Drayton-sponsored IEA was an important new component of the field of action overseen by Cameron Cobbold and George Bolton. Not surprisingly, the IEA’s first publication was The Free Convertibility of Sterling, a 1955 book demanding the floating exchange rates that Bolton had tried to push through three years earlier.
END PART 1 of “The Bank of England: A Criminal Enterprise”
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