The FTSE 100 lie that props up britain's ruling class

The UK's flagship stock index generates 82% of its revenues abroad, yet politicians use it to claim the British economy is thriving.

The great deception

I want you to picture the FTSE 100. That supposedly quintessential British index, the one politicians on Question Time wave around like a trophy. "Look," they say, "the markets are up 12% this year. Business is confident. Britain is open for business."

It's a lie. A staggering, self-serving lie, and the fact that it survives at all tells you everything about the intellectual bankruptcy of our political class.

Here's the reality, buried in the data that nobody in Westminster wants to talk about: the FTSE 100 generates 82% of its revenues from outside the United Kingdom. Let me repeat that. Eighty-two per cent. The companies in that index — Shell, AstraZeneca, HSBC, Rio Tinto — are British in name only. They are global behemoths that happen to have their headquarters in London, paying their executives in pounds while their supply chains stretch from the Gobi Desert to the Gulf of Guinea.

The disconnect

I met a steelworker in Port Talbot last year. He'd just been told his plant was closing, 2,800 jobs gone, the community he'd known for forty years gutted. "But they keep saying the economy's strong," he said, staring at his boots. "They keep saying the FTSE is up."

He wasn't wrong to be confused. Because while the FTSE 100 was indeed rising — up roughly 8% in the first half of 2026 alone — the British economy was shrinking. GDP per capita has fallen in three of the last four quarters. Real wages for the bottom half of earners are still below where they were in 2008. Food bank usage hit 3.1 million people last year, a record.

The connection between the stock market and your life? It's been severed. Deliberately.

A club for the global rich

Let me take you inside the mechanism. The FTSE 100 isn't a British index anymore. It's a global index that happens to be denominated in sterling. When the pound falls — as it did after the Truss catastrophe in 2022, and as it has again in 2026 amid the gilt market jitters that @ReformUKWaveney accurately describes — the FTSE 100 actually goes up. Why? Because those foreign revenues are suddenly worth more in pounds.

So a weak British economy, a collapsing currency, a government borrowing £130 billion a year just to service debt — all of that makes the FTSE 100 look stronger. The index is literally inversely correlated with the nation's wellbeing.

But here's the kicker: who owns that index? Pension funds used to hold about 50% of UK equities in the 1990s. Today it's under 4%. The rest belongs to sovereign wealth funds in Abu Dhabi and Norway, to hedge funds in New York, to the billionaires who treat London as a tax haven. The FTSE 100's rise enriches people who don't live here, don't pay British taxes on their capital gains, and don't give a damn about Port Talbot.

The political cover-up

Every chancellor since Gordon Brown has known this. Every Treasury brief mentions it in passing. But they never say it out loud.

Because if they admitted that the FTSE 100 is not a barometer of British prosperity, they'd have to explain why they've spent forty years dismantling the institutions that actually did tie corporate success to national wellbeing. The removal of exchange controls in 1979. The Big Bang in 1986. The privatisations that sold off public utilities to foreign buyers. The tax regime that lets multinationals shift profits to Bermuda. The deregulation of the financial sector that turned the City into a casino, and the rest of the country into the croupier's tip jar.

The result is a grotesque inversion. Britain now has the most unequal economy in western Europe. The top 1% own more than the bottom 50% combined. Meanwhile, the Office for Budget Responsibility projects that public sector net debt will hit 100% of GDP by 2028. The interest payments alone — £130 billion a year, as the Reform supporter notes — are more than we spend on defence, policing, and prisons combined.

The alternative

What would a real British economy look like? It would start with a proper industrial strategy — not the pathetic "levelling up" slogans that Rishi Sunak invented and Keir Starmer has quietly abandoned. It would mean bringing back the strategic state: a National Investment Bank with capital of £50 billion, mandated to lend to domestic manufacturers. It would mean windfall taxes on the extractive industries that have stripped this country's assets. It would mean replacing the FTSE 100 with a genuinely British index — call it the FTSE 250 — that measures companies actually employing people here, paying taxes here, building things here.

And it would mean ending the cult of shareholder value that has turned every British company into a potential takeover target for foreign private equity. Since 2010, more than 1,200 British companies have been taken over by foreign buyers. Each one moves its profits — and its tax liabilities — offshore.

The choice

You can keep pretending. You can let the pundits on the BBC tell you the economy is "resilient" while your local hospital cancels operations and your child's school leaks. You can watch the FTSE 100 tick higher while your rent consumes 60% of your income.

Or you can see the lie for what it is. The FTSE 100 is not your friend. It is not a measure of your wellbeing. It is the scoreboard for a game you're not allowed to play, played by people who don't belong to your country, with rules written to ensure they always win.

The question is: what are you going to do about it?