How Britain backs up Big Oil abroad
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Adam Ramsay is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book “Abolish Westminster”, which makes the case for reform of the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution. He talks to Critical Takes on Corporate Power about the ways in which the legal system and political establishment of the UK prop up the oil industry and Shell and BP in particular. Including:
· What Shell’s move to the UK says about the English legal system (to 05:35)
· Why big corporations favour London as a legal hub (to 13:44)
· How Big Oil benefits from the UK’s tax havens (to 21:21)
· British diplomats and oil investments abroad (to 25:46)
· The British constitution, the legacy of Empire and the climate crisis.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Diarmid:
Hello. This is Critical Takes on Corporate Power, and I'm Diarmid O’Sullivan.
The worsening climate crisis is underlining the enormous power of the oil industry. Today I'm talking about the role that the United Kingdom plays in propping up that industry worldwide with Adam Ramsay, who is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book Abolish Westminster.
Adam, thanks very much for making time to talk.
Adam Ramsay:
Thanks for having me.
Diarmid:
So let's start off with “Abolish Westminster”. What is Westminster and why does it need to be abolished?
Adam Ramsay:
So when I use the word Westminster, what I really mean is the whole British constitutional system, the way that we do politics and power in the UK.
We don’t have a codified or written-down constitution in the sense that pretty much every other country in the world has. So what I mean is that we need to replace our current political system which has existed for, you might argue, more than a thousand years, with lots of retrofitted changes over that time, with a modern democratic system.
Diarmid:
Let’s talk about the way that that system interacts with the oil industry, because the establishment of the UK does prop up BP and Shell in particular through the legal system, through trade policy, through the UK's military posture and through the work of diplomats.
Let's start with a case you've written about, which is Shell moving its headquarters from the Netherlands to the UK in 2022. You’ve argued that one reason for the move was that the UK, or to be precise England and Wales, has a common law legal system which is much more favorable in practice to corporate interests than the civil law systems of European countries.
Can you explain how that difference in legal systems might have influenced Shell's decision to move to the UK?
Adam Ramsay:
Absolutely. And it's not just me who says this. Ben van Beurden, who was the chief executive of Shell at the time, said this himself as well.
Shell was an Anglo-Dutch company from the outset, basically, and for about a century it had had its headquarters in the Netherlands, but was also registered in London.
And in 2021 … the branch of Friends of the Earth in The Hague, which is the city that Shell was registered in, took them to court alongside lots of their citizens and said basically: "Because of your failure to take action on climate change, you are risking the welfare of citizens of The Hague," which courts in The Hague have a duty to protect.
And the Friends of the Earth group, Milieudefensie is their name, initially won the case . Then Shell appealed and they won on some points and lost on other points, and it's all still ongoing up to the highest courts in the Netherlands.
(Editor’s note: for the history of this case, see here. Milieudefensie brought a second case against Shell in the Dutch courts in April 2026.)
But in the meantime, in 2022, Shell left the country. They switched their jurisdiction to London. And as I said … the boss at the time has since said that this court case was one of the two main reasons why they did that.
And so the question I asked is: why does he think England is legally a safer place for them to be than the Netherlands? And there's good evidence that he's right, because after they moved, the British NGO ClientEarth also tried to sue them here [in the UK], and they were basically laughed out of court.
So whereas in the Netherlands, suing Shell because of their damage to the climate was taken seriously and is working its way through their whole court system, in Britain it didn't even get to court.
Diarmid:
On what grounds did the English court reject ClientEarth's case?
Adam Ramsay:
I can't remember the specific ruling and we'd have to go back through the paperwork to get detailed answers to that. But my reaction to reading it was that broadly speaking, in English law, there's a few factors going on, but one of them is that whereas in Dutch law and in most European jurisdictions, human rights can be read horizontally, to use the horrible technical jargon. In other words, my human rights can be infringed by a company like Shell…
In English law, only the government can infringe your human rights. Human rights don't apply between non-state actors in Britain. And I can't remember if that was the actual factor that this was ruled out on, but certainly this is one of a number of important differences between continental law in general and English law, which makes it a lot harder to hold big fossil fuel companies, and indeed any kind of big company, to account for things they do which we might perceive as crimes.
Diarmid:
It's well known that England is a favoured commercial jurisdiction for a lot of big companies [around the world] because the judges are honest and you can't bribe them. But in the case of Shell that argument doesn't really hold, does it? Because the Netherlands is also an honest jurisdiction in that sense. So the argument they were coming here because there is a better quality of judges is not plausible. It has to be something about the legal regime itself.
Adam Ramsay:
Yeah. And for me to think about that, it's most helpful to go back to the start. The idea of the legal corporation was invented by the British state as a way for wealthy and powerful British people to export their power around the world without using the state directly.
Diarmid:
We're going back to the East India Company and these early companies that ran the slave trade, aren't we, here?
Adam Ramsay:
So those are companies by royal charters, so private companies are a bit more recent than that, but also an invention of English law, essentially.
You can understand the march of corporate capitalism as a march of the Anglo-British legal system around the world and common law systems through the British Empire. Obviously, America picked that up and also now has a common law system and is the main state behind that way of doing law in the world. But this was a system invented by the English as a way of exporting their power and their wealth around the world.
So there's a history there that's still very present in current legal arrangements. London is the world's second-biggest commercial legal market after New York. It’s not just Shell and BP. Huge law firms around the world have their headquarters in London and provide absolutely vital services to the oil industry. When you think about the oil industry, it's not just oil companies doing the work … There's also a huge amount of legal work going on, and much of that work is being done in tower blocks in London by lawyers based there, and usually being done in English law.
An enormous portion of the contracts signed around the world as part of the oil industry are signed under English law. One example … is that a majority of maritime contracts are signed in English law. It's standard in any kind of maritime agreement that you'll agree that it's a London court that will arbitrate if you have a dispute. And by far the biggest industry using shipping is the fossil fuel industry. Forty per cent of global maritime trade is coal, oil, or gas.
There are lots of these lawyers sitting in their towers in London and the work they're doing is on behalf of the oil industry to help get carbon out of the ground and put it into the atmosphere. And that's as much a part of the oil industry, you know, as a guy in an oil rig out in the North Sea drilling for oil.
Diarmid:
I think that's a really important point because in British political discourse, there's this common idea that the UK is doing relatively well on climate change because domestic emissions within the UK are actually falling. But what that discourse completely ignores is that the UK – it’s not even the UK, it's London, basically - is the hub not just for oil companies but for financing, for shipping, for insurance of the oil industry.
London plays this enormous role as a conduit for capital and a jurisdiction where oil companies can come to get their disputes sorted out. And that's something which is almost completely ignored in the way that we talk about it.
It's not that any particular oil company is bribing a politician, which that company might do in another country. There's more this confluence of interest of people who have a tendency to see the oil industry as a useful source of business.
Adam Ramsay:
That's exactly right. I spent a lot of time interviewing different legal experts about why the oil industry and its outriders, its assistants, are so keen on London and on English and Welsh law as a jurisdiction. And I did get quite a lot of different answers. But for me, the fundamental point is the structure of how common law versus civil law works.
Because European empires shaped the legal systems of the world, there's basically two kinds of legal system. Either you were a British colony or you were a French or Spanish colony, mostly. There's obviously places that weren't, but those are the dominant systems in the world.
In civil law systems, precedent is only set by parliaments. So judges learn from each other, but ultimately parliaments have more role in shaping the law.
If you're a British colony, you probably have a common law system, and what that means is that judges can set precedent. As one civil servant in Britain put this to me, what that means is the experience of writing legislation in Britain is that you write it as tightly as you can and then watch it be whittled down by corporate interest in court over the next decade. Because in a court, whoever has the most money is most likely to win.
Even with a progressive judge, if you're faced with, on the one hand, a massive legal team paid for by a massive bank or oil company or whatever [and] on the other hand often in reality one solicitor who works for a local council who's trying to defend the right of children not to have pollution in their playground or whatever, as one of the ten cases they've got on this week, then it's quite likely the massive legal team for the firm that's polluting the playground is going to just make technically better arguments and have more time to think about how to win that case.
But that then sets a precedent. So the next time a similar case comes along, the law has changed essentially from the intention of parliamentarians to whatever was won in the previous case. And so these laws get whittled down and whittled down and whittled down until they're more and more in the interests of big money.
Common law systems give more power to courts to shape the detail of how law actually applies, and that means it’s more open to the influence of money and therefore the law is more in a way separate from the democratic process.
In civil law systems, it's more accountable to the democratic process. If you look at what Ben van Beurden was saying specifically about the detail of the case for why Shell left the Netherlands, what's happening is that the courts were applying the Paris climate agreement into Dutch law. The reason Friends of the Earth won the initial case is the judges had said: "Our government has signed up to this agreement that's democratically agreed, so we accept that. So that means you [Shell] are failing in your duty of care to meet these agreements."
There's no equivalent mechanism to read that kind of democratic agreement into English law because it's judges that set precedent. Of course, you know, ultimately Parliament writes legislation …
Diarmid:
… Parliament could pass a law saying that judges must take [the Paris agreement] into account. But Parliament is a herd of cats at the best of times and is influenced by lobbying and by unconscious views about the need to defer to private capital…
Adam Ramsay:
… and so on and so on. In the book I get into all the problems of Parliament as well. But I think it’s fascinating to think specifically about the way that the English legal system also protects corporate power.
And that sits alongside all the other things that you talked about. It’s also true that a huge portion of military strategy in the UK is about protecting oil trade routes.
And so of course there's a clear advantage to Shell and BP from being based In the UK. Shell pays less tax to the UK than it does to Norway, but which navy is it which is policing trade routes through the sea out of the Middle East in both directions, towards China and this way? Who is it that has the British Indian Ocean Territory? Who is it that has air force bases on Cyprus, essentially there to protect trade routes largely for oil tankers?
It's Britain, and if you're a British headquartered company, even if you're paying more tax in Norway, you still get the protection of that more than, say, Exxon does. And so there's multiple clear advantages to being a British company with the support of the British state if you're an oil company trying to extract profit from around the world.
The legal system is one of them, The tax system is another one.
Diarmid:
Of course, the Netherlands was one of the favorite tax havens for multinationals, but then in recent years they slightly tightened things up. You mentioned a Dutch dividend tax as being a motive for Shell not to want to be domiciled in the Netherlands.
Adam Ramsay:
Yeah, so Ben van Beurden, in the same interview, gave two reasons. One was this court case. The other was that the Netherlands was talking about bringing in a thing called the dividend withholding tax. It basically means when a company in your jurisdiction pays out dividends, there's direct tax at that point. And Britain doesn't have one of those taxes It's very unusual. So in that sense, Britain is just a tax haven. Most countries have some kind of dividend withholding tax.
Often the way that corporate structures work, companies are paying dividends within themselves. Shell isn't one legal entity, it's hundreds of legal entities, all of which are owned by the central body in London, and it's generally the case globally that if one company owns 100 per cent of another company then it won't pay a dividend withholding tax on dividends it's paying to itself because it's basically just transferring money … and again, Britain has a very favorable set of rules around how that works compared to many other countries, and so that's another reason essentially Britain's a tax haven.
But for me, the most fascinating thing that I discovered digging through the tax reports of all these companies is that from a tax perspective, the important thing isn't really Britain itself, it's our network of overseas territories. Britain has the world's biggest network of offshore spaces and in a sense provides the wiring for liquid global capital through those.
Diarmid:
… We're talking about the Channel Islands and the little islands in the Caribbean, the Caymans, and the British Virgin Islands and so on …
Adam Ramsay:
Yes, the Channel Islands are a Crown dependency, and the Isle of Man, and then also the overseas territories, so Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, et cetera.
And so I spent a lot of time just going through lots of different bits of the oil industry and seeing where they're registered, and what it turned out was that Bermuda is a global hub of oil industry tax dodging.
I might get this the wrong way round, and people can read my essay to get the exact figures, but it's something like two out of the top ten oil tanker companies in the world are registered in Bermuda, three out of the top ten oil drilling contractors in the world are registered in Bermuda. There's a place called Shell House in Bermuda, which has got a large kind of clump of shell companies. There's a place called Chevron House in Bermuda. Saudi Aramco, the world's biggest oil company, has its in-house insurance company registered in Bermuda, etcetera, etcetera
And so you can go to this essay on my Substack, but I produced this Google map of Hamilton, which has a population of 1,000, the kind of capital village of Bermuda, and how you can walk around in a 20-minute walk and go through many of the most important offices in the global oil industry. Presumably these are mostly just little post boxes. I don't imagine there's many people working in them, and Bermuda is a British territory.
Diarmid:
I know insurance is a big part of that because it's been quite common for multinationals to have in-house insurance companies and operating companieswill pay a premium to the insurance company in Bermuda, and it's incredibly difficult to know whether that premium reflects a genuine risk. I suppose the oil industry is basically about shipping stuff around the place so the insurance is huge.
Adam Ramsay:
Yeah ... it's a high risk industry, so there's a lot of scope to shift profits to Bermuda through insurance. For insurance, Guernsey's the other crucial place. So BP's in-house insurance company, a firm called Jupiter, if I remember rightly, is registered in Guernsey. …
… For me, what’s important for us as British people about this is that these territories are protected by the British military, they're protected by British judges.
I went to Gibraltar when I was writing the book and I interviewed a couple of the senior politicians there, the deputy chief minister and the business minister, who are both very senior figures … The business minister is a KC [King’s Counsel, a senior lawyer] He was bragging to me about his role in shaping Gibraltar as a tax haven and so on, and one of the things that he talked about is how important it is to their clients, to people who come to Gibraltar, that they are British, that they're ultimately overseen by British courts.
People trust these places ... because they are overseen by British judges, they're protected by the British Constitution, but they're essentially unaccountable to the British people. They're not charging tax in a meaningful way. If you were to poll most British people on the question of should we let, for example, the British Virgin Islands be the global center for criminal money, they'd probably say no.
Each of these places has a specialism … The Cayman Islands is remarkably clean in a sense. So the Cayman Islands very carefully regulates to allow American and Japanese banks to put their more risky business [there] so despite what Hollywood would have you believe, very little criminal money is believed to be in the Cayman Islands.
Diarmid:
Yeah, there’s a lot of complex financial structures. Special purpose vehicles and so on.
Adam Ramsay:
It’s the things that the American regulators let their banks do in other countries. And similarly, they send people to Japan to understand Japanese laws, so Japanese banks can set up their more risky wings that wouldn't get the bank themselves shut down in the Cayman Islands. So very carefully legislated there.
Sorry, we’re off the subject of oil now but a lot of the reason the 2008 crash happened was hedge funds going broke and something like 90 per cent of the world's hedge funds at the time were registered in the Cayman Islands. Now, this is a British jurisdiction.
This is possible because Britain doesn't have a codified constitution which is accountable to people of the country. They've got this flexible way of doing politics that allows the ruling class to create these jurisdictions around the world where magic money can appear and the super-rich can protect their own global power.
Diarmid:
If you ask most people in the UK about all of the things that you've described - the way in which the oil industry benefits from the offshore system, from the legal system and so on - half of them would probably shrug and say: "Well, I don't know anything about that." But the other half would say: "No, this is wrong."
But there's a disconnect. This is not something which gets very much talked about in elite discourse in the UK. There's this studied vagueness, and you see that with the dealings with the overseas territories: are we in charge of them or are we not? It depends …
It’s this bizarre obfuscation which is very British, where you allude to all these powers which must be deferred to and are very important to keep the world in balance ... It’s this sort of studied vagueness and ambiguity about how all of this works, because if you're on the inside, you're supposed to “know”. It shouldn’t be explained to you why Shell matters.
And something else that you’ve mentioned is the way that British diplomats routinely go into bat for British oil companies around the world. It's accepted that it's part of their duties to help out the oil companies.
Adam Ramsay:
So to set a bit of context on this conversation, I wrote this book, Abolish Westminster, and it comes out on the 5th of November, so very soon now …
Diarmid:
… for non-British listeners, the 5th of November was when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament in 1605.
Adam Ramsay:
Entirely up to my publisher and I understand the day is coincidental, but it's an entertaining coincidence.
While I was writing this book, I had this consistent thought, which is: this is a story about power in Britain but every chapter I wrote, I thought: “This is also a story about climate change.” It’s a story about oil and how the British state uses the powers I'm describing to protect the oil industry.
[Editor: Adam explained at this point that he is going to publish an essay shortly on his site about how British diplomats are backing up Shell and BP around the world. Readers are encouraged to read this essay for more details when it comes out].
… I spent about a year sending Freedom of Information requests back and forth to the Foreign Office trying to extract this information because they're incredibly untransparent … They hate telling you these things and it takes a lot of time to get this information … But the conclusion is basically that while quite rightly the British government has a moratorium on [new] drilling for oil in the North Sea, they at the same time are promoting BP, particularly in countries where it's trying to get contracts to drill for new oil and gas elsewhere.
The climate implications of that are terrifying. You know, there's far more carbon in the reserves of fossil fuel companies than the atmosphere can cope with. If they choose to go and get more carbon from new wells, then the implications for human civilization are devastating. We have spent the last few thousand years being able to build civilization because of the stable climatic system that the Earth depends upon. And putting radical quantities of carbon dioxide into that is, as we all know, a very, very foolish and dangerous thing to do …
The other thing that is quite common is what you might call reputation laundering. So Shell or BP, in a country where they're trying to get an oil contract, sponsoring an event at the [British] embassy that then all the important figures are invited to, et cetera. The kind of soft power of introductions and the logo in the right place that shows this is a socially respectable company: "You might have read all these horrendous stories about awful things this company's done around the world, but we're nice people and we're having a party with them, and look, they paid for these canapes," et cetera. And certainly there's lots of evidence of that, and that's definitely true.
And I think having spent a lot of time looking at this, while the Foreign Office is reticent to share details, it's very clear what they're doing … Shell isn't expanding as much at the moment. But in countries where BP's trying to expand into new oil and gas fields, the diplomats in those countries are clearly working hand-in-hand with them to help them get those contracts.
Diarmid:
They [the UK’s foreign ministry] would probably say that BP is a British company and they’re obliged to do it … They will obviously say "We're there, you know, because we're there to promote British investment."
Adam Ramsay:
… And so the government's job to tell them “you shouldn't be promoting oil and gas companies drilling into the hull of the planet”.
Diarmid:
Absolutely. That's the obvious point, isn't it? That you can't claim to be a climate leader while also encouraging the production of more fossil fuels elsewhere.
This [conversation] has been absolutely fascinating. There’s this this particularly British characteristic – I mean, political capture is everywhere - but the particular British flavour of it is the wigs and the obscure bits of history and the studied silences when they say: " Old chap, do you realize this is all terribly important, and I can't tell you..."
Adam Ramsay:
There's this famous quote ... the Cabinet Secretary is the senior civil servant in the UK and was famously asked a few years ago what the British Constitution was, and he said: "It's something we make up as we go along."
And by we, he didn't mean the ordinary people of the country. He meant a very small group of people at the top of the country, and that's how they get away with allowing the Cayman Islands to become a global financial centre that then crashes the global economy.
In most democratic countries, the theory is that the people own the country, the people are sovereign, and obviously you can't get all the people in the country in a room together to make a decision, so they have a constitution, which is like, how are we going to work out how we use this thing called a country?
And so in Germany, you have the basic law. In, you know, America has the American Constitution. Some of those systems work well. America's got the oldest constitution in the world, and we can all talk about how it's a bit of a disaster, and so on. But most countries have that basic concept that people of the country own the country and have a constitution, and they normally elect a parliament. Parliament elects the government, or the president's elected directly, and that's where the line of accountability works.
In Britain, we have this split model which goes back to the 17th century, where on the one hand, we elect Parliament, and they appoint a Prime Minister. That's true. On the other hand, half of the power of the government comes from the King, who in theory – and we don’t talk about this - in theory gets it from God. You know, the King is appointed by God and there by right and has this power.
Of course the King himself doesn't wield it. There's this historical body called the Privy Council which is like the King's advisors, and the Privy Council has an executive committee called the Cabinet. And so the power of the British government resides half from Parliament electing a Prime Minister, and half because the Cabinet itself has inherited the powers of the King.
Huge amounts of things that our government departments are doing are not accountable to Parliament. They're done through the Privy Council. So when international treaties are signed by the British government, they don't go before Parliament, they're barely accountable to Parliament, they are agreed by the Privy Council.
And what that means in practice really is the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and a few others, and the King does go along and nod and say, "Yes, I agree," but he can't not. He can't not do what the Prime Minister says. And so they have this huge chunk of power that every government inherits from the monarch, which is, it has very little accountability to Parliament day to day …
Diarmid:
So let's round off then by coming back to this question of the way in which this system supports British oil industries and the oil industry in general in the ways that you've described, in the, the way that the legal system works, the way that diplomacy works, the way that the offshore tax havens work, trade also.
What would it take, do you think, to reduce the influence of the oil industry over the political establishment in the UK? Given how entrenched it is …
Adam Ramsay:
The way I see this is that these are all an inheritance from empire. So another way of asking your question is: how does Britain step away from empire? Climate change means we have to do that urgently. There's obviously lots of other reasons to do that, but the way that we embed carbon capital around the world through protecting vestigial empire means that we're propping up a system which is driving climate change, and that makes this an urgent task rather than a slow one to unfold over generations.
And I think at the heart of that is our state system. You know, the consequence of the huge centralization of power in the British state, in the executive branch, as the Americans would describe it, that's relatively unaccountable to us, is that that power is then captured by corporate lobbyists.
One way I like to think about it is this power is placed on a buffet table that's too high for ordinary people to reach, but exactly the right height for people with lots of money and power to reach, and so it's influenced by that ruling class. And that includes the oil industry and also the financial services industry, which is very closely bound up with the oil industry.
What would it take? It would take us having a proper democracy. What you need is a state system that is genuinely accountable to the people of the country so that it's not constantly captured by those with money and power who stand to profit from the current system, which is destroying the planet.
Diarmid:
So that's been a really good overview. Thanks very much for making time to talk and good luck with the book. I hope it has metaphorically a similar impact to Guy Fawkes on November the 5th. In the sense of being remembered, not in the sense of actually blowing people up.
Adam Ramsay:
Yeah, indeed. We should emphasize that: peacefully. Really good chat. Thanks very much.
The transcript ends here.