We watched the BBC News at Ten last night as we usually do. The top item was a long one about the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's warning that the planet has left global warming behind and is now entering an "era of global boiling". It's hard to imagine a greater crisis for life on Earth. The second item you might think would be something only slightly less important, the brutal war in Ukraine or refugees fleeing persecution for example, but no. Instead, it was about a failed politician being refused an account by a private bank used by the aristocracy and the Royal Family.
I don't know what it is about Farage, except to say he's a very dangerous demagogue.
We have now seen the CEOs of both Natwest and Coutts (Natwest owns Coutts and are 40% owned themselves by the taxpayer) effectively forced out by government pressure because they wanted Farage's account switched from Coutts to Natwest.
The problem is that the dossier that Farage obtained from Coutts (and then made public) essentially contains two reasons for closing his account. They were (a) Commercial, the bank wasn't making money from him after he paid off his mortgage, and (b) Reputational, they were worried that they would lose customers and potential new clients if others knew he banked with them - and he had publicly revealed that fact.
His supporters all dwell on (b) and claim the decision was wholly political while his detractors point to (a) and defend it as being wholly commercial. It's clear from the dossier that it was both. While he was profitable Coutts was happy to put up with his controversial (Let's put it that way) views but as soon as he wasn't, they closed his account - as they were perfectly entitled to do.
Farage is just miffed that an elite private bank doesn't want him as a client, but honestly, who can blame them? Heads have rolled but he isn't going to get his Coutts account back and I don't believe any other bank - apart from Natwest - will offer him facilities. He's high maintenance and high risk as events have shown. Farage will just have to put up with a bank that the Hoi Polloi use. What a comedown.
Anyway, all this has prompted an attack on capitalism, or 'woke capitalism' to be more accurate from the right, surely quite a novel phenomenon for Britain. Allister Heath at the Telegraph, not a man who can be accused of ever thinking anything through, penned an article yesterday that was originally titled: Cut out the cancer of woke capitalism before it obliterates Britain, but has now been hastily retitled: NatWest has exposed the decadence of our second-rate new elite.
This is how it looked originally:
This prompted Lord Frost to write another article on the same topic: Woke capitalism is a monster of the state’s own making. This takes Heath's idea and amplifies it to suggest that UK politicians believe they can "use companies to enact social change."
The idea that companies do ethical things because the public expects it and it's good for business seems to have been lost on them.
The son of former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev, Yevgeny then weighed in with an article of his own in his own newspaper: Russophobia is now the secret weapon of corporate hypocrites and tweeted about it:
What’s happening with Coutts is, I think, bigger than a state-sponsored reprimand, more the start of an overdue reckoning— Evening Standard (@standardnews) July 27, 2023
Lebedev Junior accuses the British corporate establishment of weaponising "Russophobia" and says:
"Among all the absurdities of the Coutts-Farage case, perhaps the most disquieting is the complete lack of evidence in the 40-page dossier the bank compiled to justify itself. The former Ukip leader is a racist and a xenophobe, it claimed, a grifter who may have ties with Russia. None of which, oddly, could be named."
Aside from the fact that nobody needs to 'weaponise' Russophobia since Putin is doing a magnificent job of that in Ukraine, there is plenty of evidence that Farage has defended Putin's actions in the past and met with the Russian ambassador to the UK on more than one occasion.
Lebedev makes the point for me. Why is he - a man with the clearest possible connections to the Kremlin - defending Farage, a private citizen who has merely been asked to accept banking facilities that 95% of the population are perfectly happy with?
Why do it?
Trump
You will I'm sure be interested to read about the latest indictment of former US president Donald J Trump, also a friend of Farage who has in the past helped to campaign for the orange baboon in America.
The DoJ's special prosecutor Jack Smith has published a 60-page indictment listing 40 charges in total against Trump and a couple of aides relating to the classified documents that he illegally removed from The White House in January 2021. Believe me, they have him bang to rights.
The BBC covered it HERE. They also have a nice summary of all the other criminal and civil cases coming up, HERE.
I am sure he is going to wind up behind bars although perhaps not in a regular jail, but prison somewhere is where he is headed. Trust me.
