Author: Descant Deb

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire is Michael Oswald’s newest revelatory feature documentary – one which is as important to Britain as Ava Du Vernay’s 13th (2016) is to Americans. Both place national history into a disturbing modern context! It parallels Du Vernay’s deduction that in giving up overt slavery, American elites subverted the 13th Constitution of the United States to utilise the judicial system to funnel unpaid prison inmate labour into the business sector, thereby subsidising rising production costs and preserve the  lost profits. It also restricted the power of white society’s ‘unwanted elements’ through incarceration. Spider’s Web exposes similar practices up to a point. It is narrated by actor Andrew Piper and features contributions from leading experts, academics, former insiders (including one financial investigator who went undercover for 10 years!) and campaigners for social justice, to tell our story. Oswald uses stylized b-roll, archive and contemporaneous footage to illustrate their points as they discuss how the irretrievable decline of the British Empire (at its height one of the largest in history) led to an increasing loss of income for the City of London. The City, responsible for the UK’s financial services industry and representing its own interests, was incited to compensate itself by creating a whole new monetary system – the Eurodollar; a new market for a new investment system – the London Euromarket; and a safe, regulation-free zone in which...