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Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain [Paperback]

George Monbiot (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Pan Books, London; 3 edition (7 Sep 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330369431
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330369435
  • Product Dimensions: 13.4 x 3 x 20.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 26,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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George Monbiot
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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

If both George Monbiot's Captive State and Naomi Klein's No Logo are the two Zeitgeist books of the beginning of the 21st century, then it is good old-fashioned late-20th century capitalism that has put them there. While Klein investigates how the counter-culture has been bought out by big business, Monbiot takes a close look at how this green and pleasant isle has been delivered into unaccountable corporate control with disastrous results for local communities and for democracy itself. The project of investigating this process is vast and strewn with problems, not least that a great deal of the material Monbiot needed was not in the public domain. Thus, the book itself is the result of "stargazing on a cloudy night": an impassioned attempt to understand what stellar corporate influence is brought to bear on which governmental constellation before the clouds close over again. Depressingly, he demonstrates how New Labour has smoothly transitioned from anti-corporate opposition to big business bedfellow. Like Klein, Monbiot celebrates grassroots action, but his local heroes are more likely to be drawing up battle lines in Skye, rather than Seattle. In his evocative dealings with those at the rump end of corporate mismanagement and greed, the sense of betrayal is palpable, and Captive State can be seen as a warning shot across New Labour's bows. The devil, though, is in the details. Anonymous brown paper parcels arrive full of classified documents and Monbiot is to be applauded for bringing together a wealth of material and rendering it intelligible and intelligent, if sometimes he doesn't shy away from big theatrical deliveries, especially at the end of chapters. Ironically, it seems from reading Captive State that one of the victims of the corporate infiltration of the government is choice as well as voice. Whereas some resistance has come from consumer power--for, as Monbiot reminds us, the things that join us together are the things we are sold, he goes on to make the pertinent point that consumer power is diluted when choice is restricted to a local superstore or one hospital on the edge of town. Monbiot asks the right questions, but his answers remain elusive and caught up in a foggy democratic rhetoric that is less effective and inspiring than the tales of local activists clogging up the system that was supposed to work for them in the first place. Captive State is the first big ideas book of this decade. Let's hope it goes out of date before the next. --Fiona Buckland --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

New Labour's 'business friendly' policies are nothing short of a capitulation to the bug corporations says Monbiot in this trenchantly argued new book. The corporations are now taking over control of public assets on an unprecedented scale through such schemes as the PFI (Private Finance Initiative) while the provision of roads, prisons and hospitals is now deliberatley tailored to meet corporate demands, not public need. The rebranding of our national emblems goes on remorselessly as business logos appear on everything from street signs to the saddles used by the City of London mounted police. Planning pemissions are now routinely brought and sold, he claims; air-traffic control systems used threatened with privatization and Tony Blair boasts of Britain as having 'the most lightly regulated labour market of any in the developed world'. Never mind the cost in terms of falling health, safety, environment and labour protection standards. The obvious riposte to all this is to say that globalization and the new freedom it gives to corporations to relocate or move money around at will means that governments everywhere have lost for ever their power to control big business. Yet books like this one are necessary to mobilize political support for where the real battles now need to be fought - in the world Trade Organization where the future shape of the world economy and the lives of ordinary people at the most everyday level are at stake as never before. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

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4.1 out of 5 stars (29 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A book everyone in the country should read, 10 Dec 2002
This review is from: Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (Hardcover)
Essential reading for residents of the UK. Using real life examples of exploitation and deception, Monbiot unsparingly illustrates how the government is by-and-large more interested in serving its own needs and those of the corporations that support it than those of the British people and environment. The stories he uncovers are truly shocking and disturbing, and detail very worrying levels of corruption, apathy and corporate control in politics today.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars They did it in broad daylight!, 8 Mar 2006
This review is from: Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (Paperback)
The Dome, the lottery, the Scottish Parliament, the Manchester tram scam, the destruction of the railways and London Underground: these are all scandals we know about and which make us think the lunatics are running the asylum. We feel bewildered disempowered, ripped off and plain scared for the future of our country and the world.

None of these episodes is covered in this book. Yet through its coverage of the Skye Bridge, the Coventry hospitals, the “regeneration” of Southampton, genetic engineering in agriculture and medicine, the takeover of our universities - and much, much more it explains everything about the decline in quality of life, accelerating gap between rich and poor, and the total destruction of anything remotely resembling “democracy” which is going on all around us while we sit there swigging Special Brew and watching reality tv.

If Monbiot never wrote another thing he would have entirely justified his existence with this book which is quite simply THE most important book on politics in Britain this century. In reading it you realise that you are not mad after all and neither are “they”!

Quick! We have only a few months to save the world. The single most useful thing each of us can do is to buy TWO COPIES of this book right now. Send one to your local MP with a note saying you are waiting for her/his response before casting another vote.

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46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Good grief . . ., 8 Aug 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (Paperback)
I read this book in one sitting, completely transfixed - not so much at the greed of the businesses and corporations concerned (which one takes as a given) as the complicity of government officials in nuturing it. Having read it as I did a day after going through Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" I found myself slowly losing the will to live...

"Captive State," throroughly researched, well-written, and engaging, leads me to conclude that we are not far off the sort of lifestyle grimly portrayed by the likes of Orwell - only it won't be the State whose control we're under, but rather the multinationals. Everything needs to make a profit - our taxes, it seems, are not intended to enhance our quality of life but to assist in "driving commerce forward", "expanding into new markets" and other supercilious corporate-speak. For shame!

I held back one star because I was expecting a bit more from Monbiot as to how we, the Great Unwashed, can turn this horrible juggernaut around. There seems little point in voting for a change in government (he points out that New Labour has actually lowered the corporate tax rate - Maggie Thatcher would no doubt approve), and changing our habits as consumers means in most cases merely shifting our credit card bills from one set of greedy ogres to another.

Corporations certainly have an important role to play in a modern society, and are a necessary evil of any free enterprise system; it would seem governments have taken advantage of voter apathy and couch-potato behaviour to let them ride roughshod over the world.

I hope Mr. Monbiot will continue to enlighten us with further relevations in future books.

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