BlackRock gobbles up more of the failing UK
Published in the Edinburgh Evening News and The National, April 30, 2025.
The Times reported today that US-based BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with assets worth $11.58 trillion, is buying up more ‘undervalued’ UK assets. These include Gatwick airport, farmland across the UK, homes, and renewable energy projects such as wind farms in Grimsby and solar power production in Pembrokeshire, controlling energy and energy prices to millions of homes in the poorest regions of the UK.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have cosied up to BlackRock’s Larry Fink, whose surname appropriately means “an unpleasant person”.
An FOI request was filed today asking the Cabinet Office to release information about meetings between Starmer and Fink, which it has so far refused to do.
But it’s not just Westminster pols getting together with BlackRock. In October 2022 Nicola Sturgeon met with BlackRock’s head of Europe, ME and Africa, Stephen Cohen.
Thanks to an FOI request, we can read the briefing note UK civil servants prepared for Sturgeon ahead of that meeting. Notice the key message she was expected to deliver to Mr Cohen: “Welcome the significant commitment BlackRock has made to Scotland through their operations in Edinburgh and investment in the wider Scottish economy.”
Note the ‘advice’ given in Annex A below, asking Sturgeon to focus on “the role BlackRock can play as a key enabler, employer and investor.”
So far, BlackRock’s Scottish assets include:
Unknown quantities of Scottish farmland purchased through a £100m hedge fund set up in 2007
A 30% stake in private Peel Ports which owns and operates several Scottish ports through its Clydeport division (King George V Dock in Glasgow, Greenock Ocean Terminal, Hunterston Port and Recreation Centre (PARC) and Ardrossan). Check out this Holyrood public petition to renationalise Clydeport which has gone nowhere.
£30bn in Scottish Widows pension assets
The Tormywheel wind farm in West Lothian; the Glens of Foudland wind farm in Aberdeenshire; Whitelee Wind Farm through BlackRock’s stake in Iberdrola which owns Scottish Power.
Let’s be clear about what this means. All of BlackRock’s profits are repatriated abroad - nothing is retained for the Scottish People and BlackRock has no incentive to invest in and improve these assets. Its only interest is to milk them dry.
BlackRock’s presence in Scotland goes back to 1995 when it acquired PNC’s asset management business on Castle Street in Edinburgh, its first international acquisition.
In 2011, John Swinney welcomed BlackRock’s growing presence in Edinburgh.
In December 2022, BlackRock signed a lease on 140,000 sq ft of office space at Dundas House in central Edinburgh. Staff are moving in this year and the site can accommodate up to 1,400.
The incessant and willing surrender of Scotland to vulture capitalists like Larry Fink by feckless, devolutionist, careerist politicians like Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney and Kate Forbes is a crime against the Scottish People.
Nothing short of a revolution can stop it.
Brilliant as ever Leah but sucking depressing.
Land, sea, property, governments, institutions, debt, secrecy, health services, care services, emergency services - everything has a price. Democracy, citizenship, even statehood are commodified and up for sale. Our world is a shop where even the fundamentals of life can be bought and sold by ruthless, criminal, insatiable psychopaths addicted to the accumulation of personal wealth.
Astonished to learn that BlackRock's first international acquisition was in Edinburgh - four years before the Scottish Parliament was restored. Yet given the supine behaviour of SNP Ministers it wouldn't have mattered when it happened.