What a Wunch of Bankers

What the Nigel Farage banking scandal tells us about ESG, Net Zero and the emerging Social Credit System

Introduction

You would have to have been living under a rock not to have seen that Coutts Bank has closed Nigel Farage’s bank account and subsequent revelations that the bank closed his account because his “commentary and behaviours do not align to the bank’s purpose and values.” The purpose of this article is to explore the reasons given for Farage’s exit and the links to the Net Zero agenda and the chilling social credit system that seems to be emerging in the UK.

Reasons for closing Nigel Farage’s Bank Account with Coutts

The redacted paper does not explicitly mention Farage’s support for Brexit as a reason for closing his account. However, Brexit is mentioned dozens of times in the report indicating Brexit was certainly on Coutts’ collective mind when compiling their dossier on him, especially as they said, “Farage’s hard-right faction won Brexit.” It is worth reminding readers that the Brexit vote was won by 52% to 48% meaning support for Brexit was a majority position of those who voted and is certainly not a fringe or extreme position. It is certainly odd to describe more than half of the voting public as hard-right.

Coutts also took issue with Nigel Farage’s reporting of the illegal immigrants crossing the channel in small boats. However, a recent survey in Unherd  found that 57% of people agreed that “immigration levels are too high.” Again, Mr. Farage is highlighting an issue where the majority of the population agree with him. It appears that Lord Waldegrave, the chairman of Coutts, even has some sympathy with Nigel Farage’s point of view. He may even fall foul of his own Risk Committee because he voted with the Government on an amendment to the Illegal Migration Bill in the House of Lords on 5^th July 2023.

The bank also expressed concern that Nigel Farage was campaigning for a referendum on the Government’s Net Zero policy to decarbonise the economy by 2050. Again, a survey in the Telegraph found that 44% support vs 27% oppose a referendum on Net Zero. Excluding Don’t Knows, the support climbs to 62%, up from 58% in the prior year.

Coutts even notes that Mr Farage has not been formally charged of any wrongdoing and is not subject to any regulatory censure.

It seems Nigel Farage has an uncanny ability to tap into issues that concern most of the public and make perfectly legal statements about them. Yet, perfectly legal mainstream opinions are apparently out of step with the purpose and values of Coutts.

NatWest Group Background and Values

Coutts is part of the NatWest Group and in turn the Group is still 39% owned by the Government after its taxpayer funded bailout in 2008, when it was called the RBS Group.

NatWest Group puts significant emphasis on its Purpose. As a result, it puts Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the heart of its values. According to their ESG Disclosures Report (p45), 36,000 colleagues signed up in 2022 “to learn how to confront non-inclusive behaviours.” It seems this training did not stretch to confronting the very non-inclusive behaviour of closing the accounts of people who hold opinions that are held by vast swathes of the public. Nat West Group boasts of having 19m customers. Many of these customers must hold similar views to Mr. Farage. How many of them are now living in fear of having their accounts closed because they hold opinions not approved by the bank?

NatWest is also enormously proud of its climate change credentials. Indeed an entire section of its Annual Report is dedicated to Climate and Risk and they passed Resolution 28 at their last AGM called “Say on Climate” with an overwhelming majority. The vote was passed with 92.58% approval, meaning that the votes associated with the Government stake must have been cast in favour of the resolution. Excuse me, but shouldn’t the primary objective of those overseeing our investment be to maximise returns rather than pander to the latest ESG fad?

NatWest Group Chequered History

Despite its lofty values and hectoring on morals, NatWest Group has a very chequered history when it comes to its own compliance with the law. A quick Google search reveals a lengthy list of fines for several types of wrongdoing.

• Nat West was fined nearly £265m for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) failures in 2021.

• It has been reported that RBS (another part of NatWest Group) has paid $27bn in legal penalties for its crisis-era misdeeds, it has also been fined £42m for IT failures and a £250K fine was levied on an RBS trader because he “acted recklessly and lacks integrity.”

• Coutts itself has been fined $27.9m relating to clients evading tax in offshore accounts in addition to an earlier $78.5m fine. It also incurred an £8m fine for inadequate AML systems and the Swiss regulator also ordered Coutts to pay back CHF6.5m in unlawful profits for violating money-laundering rules.

In addition, Sir Howard Davies, the current chairman of NatWest Group stepped down from his earlier role at the London School of Economics following concern that the institution had accepted money from Colonel Gadaffi’s son.

It does seem a bit rich that an organisation with such a history of rule-breaking should be lecturing its customers about values.

Impact of the “Say on Climate” Resolution

The resolution commits the bank to “halving the climate impact of their financing activity by 2030 and to be net zero by 2050” as well as publishing a climate transition plan and annual updates on progress.

We can already see the impact of this, with their Chief Data and Analytics Officer explaining how, in partnership with CoGo, they can track their customers’ CO₂ emissions and help them to reduce their carbon footprint as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - NatWest partnering with CoGo to monitor CO2 emissions of customers

It is only a small step from where they are to change the messages customers receive to barring transactions if they have exceeded their CO₂ limits for the month. This may sound far-fetched, but they already have a target to limit the number of mortgages they give to properties with EPC ratings below C.  Of course, they present it as an ambition that 50% of their mortgages will be to properties in Band C or above as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - NatWest plans to limit mortgages to properties with EPC ratings below Band C

They also want a to provide £100bn of “climate and sustainable funding and financing” by the end of 2025. It is getting easier to see why the bank was so frightened of Nigel Farage launching a campaign for a referendum on Net Zero.

Emerging Social Credit System

I think Nigel Farage’s experience and NatWest Group’s climate transition plan is sufficient evidence to demonstrate we are at the initial stages of a Social Credit System. That this is happening when the Government is the bank’s largest shareholder is doubly worrying. Indeed, Mussolini himself described fascism as the merger of state and corporate power.

It is worth looking at where this maybe going by looking at Refinitiv, a data company owned by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). They provide services to a wide range of banks and other financial institutions. One of their products is a managed service for “fast and effective risk management.” The product description says customers can outsource their screening tasks to Refinitiv if they “need to re-screen the entire customer base despite insufficient resources” or need to “screen a large volume of new customers on [an] ongoing basis.”

A quick look at their privacy statement shows the types of information they may collect about people that could of course be used in bank screening programmes (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 - Refinitiv Privacy Statement and Personal Data Collected About You

They can collect data from law enforcement (does this include non-crime hate incidents?), government websites and databases, political websites, news media, your own website, blog or any social media application. They can collect data about your philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, health data and information about your sex life.

They do have a link in their privacy notice to enable data subjects to exercise their rights, including a subject access request.

I am retired now and it has been a while since I had to consider data protection legislation as part of my day job. But my layman’s understanding of GDPR is that the practice of combining data about people from various sources and using the data without explicit consent for a different purpose to that which it was given is contrary to the regulations. If there are any lawyers reading this, I would be interested in your opinions in the comments.

We are not many steps away from banks refusing service because you hold perfectly legal opinions,  your carbon footprint is larger than they think it ought to be, your home is too drafty, you expressed unapproved thoughts about Net Zero or illegal immigration on social media, you are a member of a union, you haven’t had all your mandated vaccinations or you had sex with an unapproved person. And just what are they going to do with the genetic data? Control access to financial services based on “genetic privilege?” This has got overtones of eugenics.

If you think “that cannot happen here,” then remember cuddly Canada froze the bank accounts of truckers protesting against vaccine mandates.

In fact we may be already there because there’s a “NatWest Closed Down My Account” Facebook page with over 10,000 members. This site is littered with stories of people having their accounts blocked or closed without explanation and no recourse. This is truly totalitarian stuff.

Conclusions

While the Nigel Farage banking scandal has no doubt been very painful for him, it has also opened a can of worms concerning the behaviour of banks towards their customers. There is plenty of evidence that we are already some way down the slippery slope to a social credit system. The fact that NatWest Group is part-owned by the Government means this is pretty much a state-sponsored social credit system.

This must stop now. This behaviour is totally alien to the history and traditions of Britain. This is not in line with our values. We are supposed to be a freedom-loving democracy where we celebrate differences of opinion, not a tin-pot totalitarian state where essential financial services can be withdrawn on a whim because we are in breach of thoughtcrimes dreamt up in the corridors of a tyrannical bank that was bailed out by the same taxpayers it is now persecuting. NatWest Group are the outliers, not their customers.

Hopefully, we are arriving at our own Berlin Wall moment where this damaging Woke, ESG, DEI and Net Zero ideology is about to crumble into the intellectually vacuous sand it came from and the people promoting it are removed from power.

It is therefore necessary for heads to roll in NatWest Group HQ, Coutts and UKGI, the body overseeing the public investment in the bank. We also need a drastic overhaul of the regulatory agencies. Personally, I would also like to see the business practices of companies like Refinitiv tested in the courts. The Government needs to make it clear in statements, actions and legislation that we will not have a social-credit system in the UK and everyone has a right to a bank account.

In fact, a petition has been started to require banks to give a specific, contestable reason before closing an account. The more people that sign it, the greater chance we will see action in Parliament.

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