BBC News Lies #3: Lying about the Debanking of Farage.
Humiliated and vindicated, all within the same reporting cycle.
BBC News didn’t just lie about every part of ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s debanking, but the story behind the farce is drenched in the sheltered and privileged stink of a tiny Westminster bubble. Banking info being leaked through idle chatter at posh dinners, moral activism driving corporate decision-making, disastrous PR for a big bank, and all of it clouded by BBC News lies. It’s been a fascinating and revealing story to follow.
Nigel Farage, a love him or hate him politician, had his bank account at Coutts, an elite bank for the wealthy, unceremoniously closed. Farage took to the internet quickly to claim that he’d been effectively cancelled, something that wasn’t entirely taken seriously at first, even by conservatives. Although we’ve seen conservative and traditionalist political types get cancelled and uninvited in various ways, it felt like this was a bit of a trope. How wrong that opinion turned out to be. What followed was an entire Netflix series of mask-off moments from an elitist liberal bubble that completely exposed how ideologically captured the BBC and Coutts were. At the end of it all, Farage was vindicated; he had in fact been removed from the bank because of his political opinions, and that this had been happening to hundreds of people, from the anonymous to the famous.
One thing should be clear from the start; in my opinion, a private business like Coutts is entitled to make their own decision as to who they serve. If a bank wants to hold money only for communists for example, that’s entirely their decision. But in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority rules state that someone must not be removed because of their political views. The whole story has been covered to death, but this article is about the layers and layers of fraud, lies, and obfuscation that surrounded it, starting with decision-makers at Coutts not even having the moral character to just tell the truth as to why they were debanking Farage. It’s a slightly facetious suggestion considering they’d never want to admit they were debanking conservatives, but take a step back and consider that if you need to lie about your actions, you probably weren’t doing something that could be defended adequately. They knew this, and they chose not only to do it anyway, but to lie to the journalists and to the public as to why they’d chosen to remove Farage from their banking clientele.
>An ideologically driven backroom decision.
Deep inside the pits of Coutts, a flurry of emails and meetings taking place between the scurrying ideologically driven young graduates had began to circulate around one subject; the fact that one of their clients was Nigel Farage. As discovered by a subject access request from Farage, the ideologically captured staff had internally levied some pretty heavy, yet completely unfounded accusations against the ex-UKIP politician; that he was xenophobic, chauvinistic, and racist. Stunningly, included in those concerns about Farage’s wrongthink, they’d even had a moral panic about Farage’s friendship with Novak Djokovic, a tennis champion of champions, who made a personal decision to not take the big C vaccination. The cherry on top? Concern over a retweet about an insensitive but objectively funny joke by Ricky Gervais about our highest legal class of citizen; transgenders.
The list goes on; they had accused Farage of antisemitism, because so-called “antisemitism groups” had likened Farage’s vocal opposition to globalism as a dog whistle for antisemitism, as if this was some kind of undeniable fact. It was also clear that Coutts was bizarrely protective of BLM, an organisation responsible for stealing tens of millions of dollars in donations from kind-hearted individuals and spending it on mansions and making the BLM leader’s family very rich in the process. Any criticism of this thieving organisation run by three communists was deemed itself as racism, as if it’s not clear it was a grift all along. Also, because Farage had acknowledged NATOs role in provoking the Ukraine war, and the USA’s dedication to the forever war, Coutts branded him as “Putin’s useful idiot”. And, the classic to any socialist hatred of anything non-socialist, Coutts employees constantly labelled him with the apostate phrase “climate denier” for saying some seriously benign things regarding radical policies like Net-Zero. It was particularly funny to see that employees at Coutts, from deep within their socialist Westminster elite bubble, had labelled him as “increasingly out of touch with society”, despite the fact that Farage continues to be an extraordinarily popular politician, growing in popularity every year. It seems that these increasingly out of touch Coutts employees were taking a great deal of headlines and even Tweets at pure face value; if some leftist online sociopath calls him a racist, then that means he’s a racist, and that’s that.
Such a bizarre series of concerns from people who manage wealth might come as a shock to many; are our bankers going to be looking at our Twitter? Our friendships? And what on Earth was this bank doing spending so much time on one of their clients, discussing his views and his friendships? It definitely takes multiple Master’s degrees to be this out of touch with decent morality. Coutts internally had even been forced by their own financial metrics to downgrade Farage’s PEP (Politically Exposed Person) score from High to Low in 2022. This didn’t stop the ideologues at Coutts from continuing to pursue their cancellation of Farage. Let’s get one thing clear; whatever your opinion on Farage, the truth is his views are mild, conservative, traditionalist, and a vast chasm away from the accusations levied against him. You must understand that a great deal of the Farage furore is driven primarily by two parties; one, an elitist and ideologically captured Westminster bubble who serve “morally superior” interests, and two, a few tiny groups of extremely loud and emotionally unstable radical activists that spend all of their time on the internet in their dirty bedrooms on Twitter, tweeting between whatever perverse indoor hobbies they’re addicted to. They’d succeeded to some degree in making normal people vilify him, but bit by bit that fake Farage façade is fading.
That makes removing him for his views much more fascinating; these rather unwise and clearly inexperienced colleagues at Coutts were spending a great deal of their time, salaried by the profits made from investing their own customers funds (including Farage’s), discussing Farage’s political views. It’s a bit bizarre to imagine that not only was this happening, but it seemed to be happening without question, as if this was business as usual at Coutts. Without a single eyebrow being raised or concern being flagged that we know of, staff were talking about how Farage was friends with a tennis player, and wasn’t a socialist in his beliefs, and to remove him for these counter-revolutionary crimes. It’s hardly a discussion about debanking someone accused of war crimes or sex trafficking.
>Caught red handed, the mask is removed.
Coutts, in the embarrassing position of being exposed, immediately got into damage control mode. Their tool of choice? Lying. Initially, they claimed that Farage’s accounts had been closed due to “commercial reasons”. After that failed, instead of insisting what the reasons were, they spent a great deal on what they weren’t: a debanking due to political views. They knew it was more important to deny this actual crime than it was for a believable truth to be out there. Coutts then lied about trying to invite Farage to discuss “moving forward”. They continued their untruth tirade in lying about a risk analysis they took on him. And they lied about discussing his political views as part of the reason they debanked him, and that any discussion about his politics in meetings may have been cursory or irrelevant to the conversation. Farage put in a Subject Access Request, a type of data request that carries legal weight, about what the bank had been saying about him. Below this paragraph is a link to the full SAR, and it is big. The first thing you’ll note is that this is an excessive amount of constant and regular discussion spanning years about one singular aspect of Nigel Farage; his political views.
Link: SRA on all things Farage from Coutts internal discussions.
The final mask off moment for the whole Westminster bubble was when they finally admitted that the decision was based on their own political views; Farage didn’t align with their views on socialism. He wasn’t “inclusive”, so they excluded him. Farage also had diverse opinions, so they removed him on the basis of increasing diversity. The Financial Ombudsman Service, which is supposed to prevent exactly this from happening to people, investigated the breach and found that Farage had not been discriminated against by Coutts for his political views. This, funnily enough, is likely a politically motivated decision; socialist ideologues working at the FOS are politically aligned with the same type of socialist ideologues that decided to debank Farage for his political views, and yet ruled that it wasn’t politically motivated to remove Farage. They don’t want to admit that their own radical political ideologies are political; to them, they’re in so deep to this ideology, that they mistake it for their own moralistic supremacy. It’s a fraud and a sham, clear as day.
>BBC News played cover for Coutts, out of an agreed hatred of Farage’s political ideology.
Remember what BBC News reported on the scandal? They’d falsely reported that Farage was debanked because he’d fallen below the wealth threshold. Where did this information come from? Simon Jack, the BBC Business Editor, had gone for a fancy dinner with Alison Rose, the Chief Executive of NatWest Group, which owns Coutts. During this dinner, they must have had a little chat about this small scandal, and in it, Rose lied to Jack about why they debanked Farage. Either that, or they agreed the story; either way, Jack had been given some very sensitive information about one of the banks clients, something that they’d ordinarily get in a lot of trouble for. So not only was the story a lie, but the discussion had seemingly breached many financial rules around privacy. It was so clearly a lie that the FOS didn’t even flag this as a concern; that bankers were idly chatting about highly personal information on their clients.
Don’t forget, this was after Farage had already found out during the Subject Access Request that Coutts had spent an immense amount of their time and their clients money in investigating Farage’s political views, and spending a great deal of time being offended over fairly benign and pretty centre-right viewpoints. It’s raised a great deal of concerns over the already shaky BBC News reputation; why were they running such cover for Coutts? Why were they going so far out of their way to portray the story in one very narrow and unsophisticated light? Wouldn’t a journalist with some integrity at least be open to the possibility of Farage being debanked for his political views? Shouldn’t a journalist challenge the bank for what was clearly a complete and utter breakdown in the protections that individuals should have from political persecution? The results were itself a disgusting reflection of that ugly murky swamp of Westminster; they’d decided to get it wrong, lie, and then apologise, even still without ever beginning to address the clear evidence that a concerted effort was made by political ideologues to debank Farage for his political views.
It’s the Westminster bubble playing out again and again and again; locked in its own cycle of telling lies and believing its own lies, locked in an echo chamber that demands total political obedience to the ideology monopoly.
As I said before, I am of the opinion that banks and private institutions should be completely entitled to choose who they want to do business with. I think it’s wrong that the government, with their monopoly on violence, forces you to do business with people you don’t like. If a bank wants to hold communist money, and expel those that are not communist, that should be their prerogative. In this world, Coutts could have just admitted up front that this was entirely politically motivated; in turn, in this world, we could have banks for conservatives and banks for liberals. It would be a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff; and we all know which banks would work. In the real world, political discrimination is against the law for banks, but political ideologues only play by their own rules, and laws be damned.
That should tell you everything you need to know. Ideologically captured individuals making elitist morality driven decisions to carry out their political activism, while working at a bank of all places. They then lied and lied and lied some more. BBC News, Coutts, and the Financial Ombudsman, all of them are goose stepping together; where they can claim that socialist ideologies are not “political”, they can then prosecute and persecute political dissent in a manner similar to dealing with criminals. It is this moral supremacy that has taken such hold of the lazy and elitist Westminster bubble that they never needed to have a formal conspiracy with each other to persecute Farage; in fact, it was all just ideological supremacists looking out for each other, goose stepping towards the socialist utopia. That socialist utopia is only ever one lie, one crime, one atrocity away, and you are their obstacle.