'Nigel Farage fiasco is all about Rishi Sunak running scared of party right'
I had to marvel at the speed and commitment with which our government acted this week to right a wrong. According to impeccable sources, a “stunned and furious” Prime Minister and a “shocked and flabbergasted” Chancellor, aided by “outraged” ministers, adopted a “pincer movement” to sort out a banking travesty.
Was it the agony mortgage holders are suffering, much of it down to a disastrous Tory budget? The brutal closure of branches? The brazen refusal to put up interest rates for savers? A reversal of the £7billion tax break the Chancellor gave them last year after seeing the size of their profits?
No. The pincer movement was to bring down a bank’s CEO, after Coutts decided a customer’s political activity left them exposed so they were closing his account and offering him one with NatWest. And the CEO wrongly briefed a BBC reporter on the story The customer had clearly been wronged and the NatWest CEO had good reason to resign. But what prompted a PM and Chancellor, during a crippling cost-of-living crisis, European war and a burning planet, to so swiftly intervene?
How strange that a government, having shown zero concern for the thousands of people “de-banked” with no explanation in recent years (many of them British Muslims), should work through the night to remove a distinguished CEO. All to keep one man happy. But then not every man is Nigel Farage. That master self-publicist, who seven years after he bounced the Tories into a disastrous referendum which has cost this country billions, still has them wetting their Savile Row trousers.
How petrified of upsetting its own extremists must this government be that it drops everything to rush to the aid of a Yesterday Man who spends his days on Kent beaches shouting at dinghies and his nights attacking “wokeness” on a little-watched TV channel?
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As Darren Jones, chair of the Commons Business Select Committee, put it, the CEO of P&O Ferries illegally sacked nearly 800 workers but was any definitive action taken? No. The CEO is still in post. It’s the power Farage seems to have over the Tories.
Banks should not be freezing out customers because of their politics. Although, if one of my teachers had claimed I’d “marched through a village shouting Hitler Youth songs” and I’d unveiled a poster showing thousands of dark-skinned refugees purportedly heading to Britain days before Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing terrorist, I wouldn’t complain if a company told me I was harming their image. Especially if I had dubious links to Russia.
As for Farage spinning his triumph as a landmark victory for the little guy? Well, that’s laughable. In fact, it has exposed the deceit at the heart of this “Man of the People”, who claimed his Brexit crusade had left him skint, when all the time he belonged to an exclusive bank where you have to “maintain at least £1million in investments or borrowing, or £3m in savings”.
This is about the Tory elite helping an elitist take on the banking elite to fend off fire from right-wing elitists in the media and on their benches. It actually says to the little guy you have no power unless those with real power fear you. And it’s yet another reason for voters to take that power off them.
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