The UK is selling more and more of its productive industry to foreign buyers in order to balance the books. This can only end one way.

This image shows the change in the ownership of shares in the UK’s quoted companies since the early 1980s. The parcel on the left gives the data for 1981; the one on the right is for 2022. The sections in green show the percentage of shares owned by UK pension and insurance funds. This was 47% in 1981 and about 4% in 2022. The sections in blue show the percentage owned by UK private investors – 28% in 1981 and 11% in 2022.

The pink label shows the percentage of UK quoted shares that are foreign owned. This has changed from 4% in 1981 to 58% in 2022, a figure that is still rising. This does not include UK companies that have sold out entirely to foreign buyers, so that their shares are no longer individually quoted.

This image points to the way in which the UK’s productive industry is increasingly foreign-owned. A big part of the reason is that the UK consistently imports more than it exports, and it is obliged to sell its assets in order to make up the shortfall. Because all the profits due to those foreign shareholders go abroad, too, there is a further outflow of UK wealth that we have, somehow, to pay for.

This contributes to the UK’s cycle of economic decline. Instead of investing in order to produce more wealth for ourselves, we place ourselves in the hands of foreign investors whose only interest is to extract wealth from the UK economy. In the end we all (or most of us) end up poorer.