Over at Law & Liberty, the critical doctor calls out the former woke CEO of National Westminster Bank, Alison Rose, for having her staff compile a 40-page dossier on Nigel Farage before unceremoniously tossing him out of the bank. Thankfully, she has since resigned over this incident, which incidentally caused the bank’s value to fall by over $1 billion. Hope springs eternal.
Still, the tendency to moral grandiosity combined with a lack of elementary scruples, as illustrated in this episode, is worrying. Would one trust such people if the political wind changed direction? Their views would change, but the iron moral certainty and self-belief would remain the same, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. How many meetings have I sat through in which some apparatchik has claimed to be passionately committed to a policy, only to be just as passionately committed to the precise opposite when his own masters demand a change of direction?! The Coutts story is one of how totalitarianism can flourish.
Actually I think the “40-page dossier” was only made when Nigel Farage submitted a request to the bank under the Freedom of Information act or some other law. So the bank cannot be criticized for compiling that. But they can be criticized for closing Farage’s account because they don’t like his political views – and it is reassuring that everyone criticized them and they acknowledged it was wrong.
Dalrymple didn’t mention the funniest part of the 40-page document:
It is very likely that the client would “go public” if we exited him.
And that is exactly what happened.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12314423/The-Coutts-Farage-dossier-bank-admitted-ex-Ukip-leader-DID-meet-commercial-criteria-used-tweet-Ricky-Gervais-trans-joke-Novak-Djokovic-ties-decide-odds-position-inclusive-organisation.html
Thank you for running this blog. I had not read it for a few years and it is great to come back to it.
Hi, Ed. Thank you for your comment. And welcome back! Cheers.
P.S.: You can subscribe to receive each and every blog post via email: http://www.skepticaldoctor.com/subscription/
A very good article, as usual, from TD, however this debanking has been happening for a long time now and nobody spoke up about it. For example, to Tommy Robinson, Mark Collett, Laura Towler, and now Paul Weston (also a writer at The Salisbury Review). I’m not sure Nigel Farage had anything to say about it either before it happened to him.
“For example, to Tommy Robinson, Mark Collett, Laura Towler, and now Paul Weston”
Collett and Towler are literal neo-Nazis. Tommy Robinson is violent, far-right thug with multiple criminal convictions. I’m not familiar with Paul Weston, but a quick search shows that he’s as bad as the other names you’ve mentioned.
It looks like you missed the point of TD’s article.