Does Albion Eat Its Children?

By William Harris Keys

Author of “Perfidious Albion – The Crown, the City, and the Cult of Deception”

We live in an age of polite deceit. Nations lie with a smile; institutions posture as moral guardians even while trading in duplicity. Yet no country has perfected that art quite like Britain. For more than three centuries, Albion has cultivated the illusion of fairness while practising the craft of advantage. What the world sees is a polite kingdom of law and liberty — the Crown, Parliament, the courts, the red buses and royal weddings. What it rarely sees is the other Britain: the invisible empire of the City of London, whose reach extends from colonial India to modern Wall Street, from the slave ships of the eighteenth century to the offshore havens of today.

This is the theme of my new book, Perfidious Albion. It argues that Britain’s genius was not merely in conquest or commerce, but in creating a system of dual authority — a moral Crown and an amoral City — that worked in concert to sustain power long after the empire’s flags were lowered. The one projected virtue, the other practised vice. Together they made Britain what it became: a nation that could betray with conviction and profit with conscience.

Every empire has its mythology. Rome had its Senate and its Caesars, Venice its Doges and merchants. Britain’s mythology was subtler. It presented itself as a civilisation of law — of Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and fair play. Yet behind that façade was a second government: the financial government of the City. Its lord mayor, its guilds, and its mercantile courts were as powerful as the ministers at Westminster.

The partnership was implicit. The Crown lent legitimacy; the City generated wealth. When the Crown needed funds to fight France, it turned not to Parliament but to a consortium of merchants — the men who would found the Bank of England in 1694. From that moment, the nation’s sovereignty and its solvency became intertwined. The Crown’s wars became the City’s business. Credit became a weapon, debt an empire.

The Bank was not simply a lender; it was the machinery through which perfidy became policy. Britain could now finance wars it could not afford, manipulate currencies it did not control, and cloak private speculation in patriotic duty. The City learned to turn catastrophe into opportunity — and it never forgot the lesson.

To understand Albion’s perfidy, one must appreciate its politeness. The English did not conquer as the Mongols did, by brute force alone. They conquered by contract, by charter, and by law. The East India Company did not storm continents; it signed them into submission. The Bank of England did not rob nations; it simply “stabilised” their currencies.

Each new colony was both a moral project and commercial venture — the Bible in one hand, the bond certificate in the other. The genius of the system lay in its duality: the Crown claimed it was spreading civilisation, while the City quietly harvested profit. When conscience stirred, the two faces of Albion looked at each other and found absolution.

This double act was not accidental. It was the architecture of Britain’s endurance. When empires collapsed, Britain adapted. When colonies gained independence, they remained tethered to London through debt, law, and language. The machinery of control had changed shape but not substance.

In Perfidious Albion, I argue that perfidy in Britain was not an aberration but an evolution. It began as expediency — the bending of rules for national survival — and matured into character. The English learned to moralise their duplicity. “For Queen and Country” became not just a slogan but a shield behind which the City could do anything so long as it wore the Crown’s colours.

During the Napoleonic wars, British financiers funded both sides. In the Victorian age, British banks underwrote the slave trade long after abolition. In the twentieth century, British diplomacy wrapped economic coercion in the language of democracy. And in the modern era, the same pattern persists: the offshore tax havens, the Euro-Dollar market, the convenient blindness to corruption when it serves investment — all of it is Albion in modern dress.

This is not to say Britain is alone in hypocrisy. But no nation has institutionalised it so elegantly. In the rituals of Westminster and the secrecy of the Square Mile, perfidy became culture. It was the unwritten law of survival — the doctrine that the appearance of virtue is more useful than virtue itself.

Every great deception needs a respectable home. The Bank of England became that home. It was both church and temple — a sanctum where moral purpose and financial manipulation met without embarrassment. It was there that Britain learned the modern art of laundering conscience: the transformation of exploitation into enterprise.

When the gold of empire began to fade, the Bank helped invent new alchemies — paper credit, foreign exchange, offshore subsidiaries. The profits of the slave plantations reappeared as City loans; the proceeds of colonial mines returned as “capital inflows.” The circle was perfect. The plunderer became investor, the debtor became dependent, and the British state remained, as ever, the benevolent overseer.

This system did not end with decolonisation. It merely relocated. The same bankers who once financed empire now manage global capital from the Cayman Islands and Jersey. The same Crown that once governed subjects now governs narratives — the myth of British fairness still powerful enough to disguise its opposite.

For those of us who lived in Africa, this perfidy was not abstract. It was personal. Rhodesia was a case study in Albion’s moral duplicity. The colony paid for its own development — every mile of railway, every school, every institution built at its own expense under the Crown’s constitutional promise of self-government. Yet when politics turned inconvenient, Britain tore up its own agreements and cast the colony out.

The Rhodesian story is the microcosm of Perfidious Albion. A loyal dominion punished for its loyalty, sacrificed to maintain Britain’s moral posture before the world. London’s conscience was appeased; its obligations were annulled. The pattern was as old as the empire itself — betrayal in the name of principle, profit disguised as virtue.

What astonishes, when one studies the record, is how continuous the system has been. The techniques of control never vanish; they mutate. The Royal Charter became the International Monetary Fund agreement. The colonial governor became the “consultant.” The City’s banks no longer collect tariffs on tea and cotton; they collect interest on sovereign debt.

Africa, Asia, the Caribbean — all remain bound by invisible threads spun in London. The same financial instruments that once funded empire now enforce dependency. Debt is the new dominion. And just as in the old days, it is sanctified by the rhetoric of progress and partnership.

This is not conspiracy but continuity. The men who created the Bank of England in the seventeenth century built more than an institution; they built a culture. That culture teaches that survival depends on duality — a moral mask and a mercantile face. Britain has worn it ever since.

In developing this thesis, I owe intellectual debts. Writers such as Niall Ferguson, Nicholas Shaxson, and David Kynaston have each mapped fragments of this story. Ferguson described the splendour of empire; Shaxson dissected the modern offshore system; Kynaston chronicled the City’s evolution. Yet none fused the moral, political, and financial dimensions into one continuous anatomy.

Perfidious Albion attempts that synthesis. It is less a history than a moral autopsy — an examination of how institutions built to preserve virtue learned instead to weaponise it. Where Ferguson saw empire’s pragmatism, I see its pathology. Where Shaxson exposed secrecy, I trace its genealogy. And where Kynaston documented the City’s rise, I ask what conscience it cost.

This, I believe, is what makes the book unique. It tells a story long known but never spoken — the story of how deceit became the organising principle of British power.

What, then, is “perfidy”? It is not mere dishonesty; it is a philosophy — the conviction that ends justify means so long as the performance of virtue is maintained. Albion made this its national creed. It exported law but practised exemption. It preached free trade but maintained monopolies. It spoke of liberty while perfecting surveillance.

Even today, Britain lectures the world on transparency while presiding over the most complex network of offshore secrecy jurisdictions on Earth. The Crown remains the symbol of moral constancy; the City remains the engine of selective blindness. The partnership endures because it works.

Yet, like all great hypocrisies, it cannot last forever. The contradictions are catching up. The moral capital built over centuries is being spent faster than it can be replenished. The world is noticing that the mother of parliaments has become the aunt of loopholes.

Why does this matter now? Because the story of Britain is not just Britain’s story. The financial structures it built still govern the global economy. The moral frameworks it exported still shape the thinking of its former colonies. To understand why the modern world feels both ordered and unjust, one must understand the machinery of Albion.

Perfidious Albion is not written in anger but in reckoning. I served under British institutions. I was educated in their virtues, disciplined by their rules, and disillusioned by their betrayals. This book is the product of that lifetime — a reflection on how good men are trapped in bad systems when those systems mistake respectability for righteousness.

It asks a simple question: Can a civilisation built on polite deceit redeem itself?

For the readers of Africa Unauthorised — readers who have lived the consequences of London’s decisions — this history is not academic, it is a lived experience. The borders, currencies, and constitutions of Africa still bear the watermark of British perfidy. Yet this is not an anti-British book; it is an anti-hypocrisy book. It calls for intellectual honesty — for Britain to be judged not by its slogans but by its structures.

Critical thinkers will find in these pages an argument that connects centuries into a single pattern: that the same mentality that justified empire now justifies financial domination; that the instruments have changed but the ethics have not. The perfidy of yesterday’s empire lives on in today’s balance sheets.

History, like law, depends on precedent. The precedents of Albion are clear. From the oaths sworn on bridges to the signatures on bank charters, from the treaties with tribes to the treaties with traders, the story is the same: promise, profit, and betrayal.

To expose this is not bitterness but duty. Civilisations decline not when they are defeated but when they forget their moral origins. Britain’s greatness was real, but so were its lies. Only by reconciling the two can it reclaim integrity.

In writing Perfidious Albion, I have tried to hold up a mirror — not to condemn, but to remind. The City and the Crown, those twin pillars of respectability, must one day account for the human cost of their success.

Every accountant knows the truth of ledgers: one side records assets, the other liabilities. The same applies to nations. For centuries Britain has recorded its virtues in bold ink — courage, law, order, civilisation. On the other side, faintly written, are the costs: betrayal, manipulation, and the quiet suffering of those who trusted her word.

The time has come to balance that ledger.

Perfidious Albion is my contribution to that reckoning — a work of history, philosophy, and conscience. It tells the story no one else dared to tell: how the moral mask of the Crown and the financial machinery of the City became one organism, feeding on faith, sustained by illusion, and thriving on the world’s belief in its decency.

That belief is fading. What replaces it will depend on whether Albion can finally look at herself without disguise.

William Harris Keys served in the British South Africa Police, later practised law in Australia, and has spent a lifetime studying the intersection of empire, finance, and moral philosophy. His new book, Perfidious Albion – The Crown, the City, and the Cult of Deception, is available on Amazon Kindle.