The EconomistJune 9th 2018 Britain 4712 seek treatment. Following conversations
with Grenfell United, theNHSrebranded
its “mental health” services as “health and
well-being”, to avoid stigma—which is par-
ticularly common among first-generation
migrants, says Lydia Giblin, a psychothera-
pist working with bereaved families. At the
Al-Manaar mosque, imams lacked training
to deal with traumatised people, so the
mosque brought in counsellors used to
dealing with Muslim clients, says Abdu-
rahman Sayed, head of the trust that runs
the mosque. The Curve, a support-centre
led by the council, provides knitting
groups, yoga and English-language classes,
as well as therapy. It has had to overcome
antipathy from locals, many of whom
hold the council responsible for the fire.
The anniversary, along with the memo-
ries stirred up by the inquiry, is proving to
be particularly anxious. The government
has assured locals they will have the final
say over what happens to the site of the
fire, with a memorial the most likely op-
tion. For now, the blackened tower juts
against the skyline, sheathed in white plas-
tic. It is, says Mike Long, the minister at Not-
ting Hill Methodist Church, “a visible scar”.
There are manymore invisible ones. 7
S
TAMFORD BRIDGE, home to Chelsea
football club, is hardly a slum. But it has
fallen behind the glitzy new stadiums of its
nearest rivals in England’s Premier League.
And that is how things are likely to remain,
for on May 31st Chelsea announced that it
had shelved a £1bn ($1.3bn) scheme to rede-
velop its west London stadium. The club’s
billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich,
has not had his British visa renewed; this, it
seems, was his response. The club pointed-
ly cited the “current unfavourable invest-
ment climate” for its decision.
Mr Abramovich appears to be a casual-
ty of Britain’s deteriorating relationship
with Russia, which has worsened since the
poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former KGB
agent, in March. As Britain’s most famous
oligarch, Mr Abramovich was an obvious
target for the government to demonstrate a
tougher attitude to those with ties to Rus-
sia’s president. He has since acquired citi-
zenship of Israel, and is reportedly plan-
ning to move there. Many Londoners
wonder what would happen if more rich
Russians were to follow suit.
There are around 65,000 Russians in
Britain, mostly in the capital. Only a smallpercentage are very rich, says Katia Niki-
tina, thepublisherofZima, a magazine for
Russians in London. Last year 48 Russians
came to Britain on Tier 1 visas, which allow
holders and their families to stay for three
years and four months if they invest £2m in
government bonds or companies. Only
the Chinese were more numerous.
But the number of visas has dropped
sharply since the minimum investment
sum was raised and money-laundering
checks tightened in 2015. In the eight years
before that—which Transparency Interna-
tional, an anti-corruptionwatchdog, calls
the “blind faith”period—705 Russians ar-
rived, making up 23% of the total. Accord-
ing toTI, Russians have invested more than
£700m under the scheme.
Some of those with most to lose from a
Russian exodus may be lawyers. Oligarchs’
big deals and bigger personal bust-ups
have brought in business over the years for
home-grown law firms and the London of-
fices of American ones. Last month Linkla-
ters was ticked off byMPs for its work on
deals involving Russian companies, after it
refused to answer questions about the flo-
tation of En+, a holding company for Oleg
Deripaska, a businessman under Ameri-
can sanctions. Figures from Dealogic, a
data provider, show that Britain’s “Magic
Circle” of law firms have advised on 25 list-
ings of Russian companies on London’s ex-
changes in the past two decades, a tenth of
the total listings they oversaw.
London lawyers have also helped oli-
garchs embroiled in litigation. Russian liti-
gants accounted for a tenth of cases heard
in the London Commercial Courts be-
tween March 2017 and April 2018. Six years
ago Mr Abramovich was unsuccessfully
sued by a fellow oligarch, Boris Berezov-
sky, for breach of contract. Fees were esti-
mated to have come to £100m.
Yet the high profile of London’s high-
rolling Russiansbelies the relatively small
role that their money plays in the widereconomy. Foreigners hold roughly £10trn
of British assets. Russia’s share of that is
just 0.25%, a smaller proportion than that
of Finland and South Korea.
Parts of west London have acquired
many new Russian residents, and shops to
serve them (including an outfitter of ar-
moured luxury cars). Yet even in “prime”
London—that is, the top 5-10% of the mar-
ket—buyers from eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union account for only
around 5% of sales, according to data from
Savills, a property firm. Outside the capi-
tal’s swankiest districts, Russians’ influ-
ence is minuscule. The departure of oli-
garchs might affect prices on some streets
in Kensington, but not beyond.
The same is true of Britain’s private
schools. Some have done well out of Rus-
sian parents. But of the 53,678 foreign pu-
pils who attend schools that belong to the
Independent Schools Council, only 2,806
are Russian. China, by contrast, sends
9,008 pupils from its mainland, and a fur-
ther 5,188 from Hong Kong.
In all, if more oligarchs like Mr Abra-
movich decide to leave, the impact might
be less than widely thought—at least out-
side Chelsea. 7Russian wealth in LondonOffski?
Departing oligarchs may not leave as
big a hole as many thinkRoman’s amphitheatreM
OST diplomats hoped that the Brexit
vote in June 2016 would not impinge
on security. After all, the issue had hardly
featured in the campaign. All sides have a
strong interest in continuing to work to-
gether. And European defence co-opera-
tion makes little sense without Britain, the
biggest spender and one of Europe’s only
two global military powers. Yet a row over
Britain’s participation in the Galileo satel-
lite positioning system could now upset all
such calculations.
The British were for years hostile to Ga-
lileo, which they saw as unnecessarily
(and expensively) duplicating America’s
global positioning system (GPS). But once
work on Galileo began, Britain became
more enthusiastic, not least because its
firms secured some of the juiciest con-
tracts. The British are paying some 12% of
the total cost of Galileo, which is expected
to exceed €10bn ($12bn) by its completion
in 2020. British-based firms have won back
around 15% of this. Indeed, Galileo has be-
come a driver of the thriving British space
industry, which has an annual turnover of
£14bn ($19bn)—half of it accounted for by
satellite broadcasting companies—and en-Brexit and securityGalileo’s middle
finger
A row over a satellite project could
damage wider co-operation on defence