SOME intriguing thoughts arise from the strange case of Nigel Farage versus Coutts Bank. Mr Farage, a right-wing political agitator, had his account cancelled by the elite financial institution because, they insisted, the quantum of his gathered poppy didn’t meet the threshold required to bank at Coutts. 

You don’t need to like Mr Farage to realise that something not quite right is happening here. He has since had an apology from the head of NatWest, which owns Coutts. Something eerily similar has befallen individuals at the opposite end of the political spectrum from other institutions.

We’ve also discovered a new verb. It seems that when the banking fraternity don’t like the look of one of their customers they will “exit” them. 

Mr Farage claims that another reason the bank exited him was that they simply didn’t like what he stands for. He claims to have a letter from Coutts which accuses him of being “xenophobic and racist” and a former “fascist” and that his values didn’t “align” with the Bank’s. 

This came as a surprise to those of us who had previously assumed that banks don’t have any values, or at least not in terms of how they’re commonly understood by the law-abiding sector of the population.

Rather, their sole purpose is to make as much money as possible from their customers using a bewildering suite of measures and regulations often invisible to the naked eye on first inspection of your agreement with them.

Perversely, the worst of their predations occur during periods of acute financial uncertainty for their customers. These are often wrought by circumstances beyond their control. 

Thus, when people are in most need of a bank’s help they find that the institution with whom they’d entrusted their cash during the good times, now wants to destroy their lives. They remove them from their homes and halt their ability to pay for essential goods and services. 

We no longer practice capital punishment in the UK, but the High Street banking cartel are permitted to operate a virtual version of it. 

Poor attitude
NOR are they satisfied merely with making their poorest customers destitute. They then seek to make lepers out of them. 

Recovering customers find that that their old bank has helpfully provided its fellow cartel members and others with intimate financial details of their lives when they were at their most vulnerable. 

They might as well force people to have a bell around their necks alerting shops and businesses to their financial distress while shouting “unclean, unclean”. 

This then allows them to increase the rate of interest on any loans required to get financially vulnerable people back on their feet. 

The Pirates of the Caribbean are like Captain Birdseye compared with these cutthroats.

The Herald:  

A fine idea
AN intriguing exercise in financial accountability would be to allow customers to issue fines and other penalties to their personal banking providers. 

Thus banks would be obliged by law to answer a stiff annual questionnaire on their probity and transparency. A sliding scale of fines would attach to its malfeasances throughout the previous calendar year. 

The Financial Conduct Authority currently collects fines for wrongdoing by the banks. Presumably, they then invest them once more with the institutions they’ve just investigated. 

I’d force them to turn the money over to those customers who have been terrorised for decades by these High Street assassins.

I’d start by asking them how many criminal undertakings they’ve helped to finance both in the UK and abroad. Do they hold accounts originating in well-known gangster states that are often drawn upon to purchase superior goods?

Are any of their investments in countries which support the brutal suppression of women and gay people? 

Did they facilitate transactions involving the transport of heavy weaponry to corrupt regimes and individuals?

Bank 'hit squad'
IT’S always helpful to familiarise oneself with some of the banks’ ‘previous’ in this area. Just so that we know what we’re dealing with. 

In the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis RBS effectively set up a hit-squad to target businesses with the purpose of bringing them down by withdrawing overdraft facilities.

They would then purchase these distressed assets for far below the market rate and boost their own business portfolios. 

In 2019, Bank of Scotland was fined £45.5m for failing to disclose information about a £245m fraud scandal at the bank’s Reading branch. This had resulted in six people going to jail.

Then there was the LIBOR scandal. This was when several major banks colluded with each other for more than a decade from 2003 to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). 

Collusion in this context is basically a polite word for piracy. It resulted in fines and lawsuits etc. But, of course, no jail terms. 

I’d be surprised if any of those who are permitted licences to operate as banks have values that “align” fully with law-abiding British citizens.