The foreign takeover of England’s vital sectors — water, housing, and infrastructure — cannot be understood apart from the complicity of the British establishment, whose institutions, ideologies, and governance structures sustain the very conditions for dispossession. What appears as external control by foreign investors is, in fact, an extension of internal culture: an establishment historically conditioned to align with global capital rather than communal welfare. The monarchy, the City of London, the Treasury, and political elites operate as domestic brokers of imperial logic, facilitating the transfer of national resources to transnational investors under the guise of economic modernity.
Within the Extractive/Relational spectrum, the British establishment exemplifies the Extractive pole — hierarchical, acquisitive, and self-legitimating. Its authority is maintained through ritual and rhetoric: the monarchy symbolizes divine order, finance symbolizes prudence, and austerity symbolizes virtue. Beneath this ceremonial surface lies an ideological continuity from empire: the belief that wealth and power naturally concentrate in the hands of a few. This is a cultural theology of extraction — the sanctification of private ownership, the erasure of collective responsibility, and the normalization of inequality.
The result is a form of internal colonialism, in which England becomes subject to the same logics of exploitation it once imposed abroad. The City of London, legally semi-autonomous and financially opaque, functions as a metropole of global capital rather than national governance. As Bhattacharyya (2018) notes, neoliberal Britain perpetuates the economic order of empire by other means: through debt, speculation, and privatization rather than conquest. The establishment thus presides over a self-inflicted recolonisation, ensuring the extraction of value from public goods into private, often foreign, hands.
In contrast, the Relational pole offers a radically different ontology — one grounded in interdependence, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. This is the logic of the commons, both in Indigenous traditions and civic governance. Elinor Ostrom’s research (1990) demonstrated that communities, when entrusted with self-governance, develop durable and equitable systems for managing shared resources. Far from chaotic or inefficient, such systems embody a collective rationality — one grounded in accountability, trust, and care.
Through this lens, England’s economic vulnerability — where foreign investors control essential utilities and housing — reveals a cultural disconnection from the commons. The Extractive establishment cannot conceive of value beyond accumulation and domination. Yet Ostrom’s work, like Indigenous ecological thought, exposes a more sustainable form of governance: one where stewardship is not a moral luxury but a structural necessity. The Relational paradigm thus reclaims what the Extractive model displaces — the understanding that life, land, and resources are not commodities, but relations to be tended.
Decolonising the English economy, therefore, requires more than policy reform or nationalization; it demands a reconfiguration of governance and culture. It entails shifting from hierarchical control to relational accountability, from private ownership to communal stewardship. Water, housing, and infrastructure must be reimagined not as instruments of capital accumulation but as commons — domains of care structured around social, ecological, and intergenerational responsibility.
The irony of post-imperial Britain is that the system it once exported — the Extractive culture of empire — has returned, consuming its own foundation. The path beyond this recursive coloniality lies in embracing the Relational paradigm: communal, regenerative, and accountable. Only through such a transformation — institutional, cultural, and spiritual — can England begin to decolonise itself from both the global capital it serves and the establishment that enables it.
