COULD Nigel Farage be on to something? The erstwhile Brexit Party leader has told a home truth about British banks.
They exist, he wrote, “To make vast profits. They want people to think they are nicey-nicey but they know this isn’t how corporate life in a capitalist society really works.”
Correct. The row about the attempt by Natwest, in which the state has a big stake inherited from the emergency public ownership of the Royal Bank of Scotland at the time of the 2008 crash, to close Farage’s accounts because it found his views objectionable is an exercise in obfuscation.
Of course banks should not be closing customer accounts because of their political views — the left would be the main victim were it otherwise, and indeed campaigning organisations have often been the victim of “bank politics” in this respect.
Nor should they be discussing customers’ financial details with journalists. Natwest has breached both these simple expectations in relation to the Farage affair, and as a result, its chief executive Alison Rose has been forced into resignation.
Other heads may roll, since government ministers are backing Farage in his campaign for their own demagogic purposes.
Most, including this newspaper, will find some or all of Farage’s opinions objectionable. That is not a good enough reason for endorsing the bank’s conduct. London’s financial institutions have long been central to profitably laundering the cash of far more disreputable figures in any case.
And Farage, himself a figure in the City in its more louche days before the Big Bang of 1986, is right that banks like Natwest, posing as friends of progress by embracing social liberalism, merely distracts from their greed.
They are presently exploiting rising interest rates to lend money dear, while keeping rates paid to savers on their deposit accounts low.
Natwest itself made profits of £5.1 billion in 2022, more than a third up on the previous year. In the first quarter of this year, it made a further £1.9bn in profits.
Much of this was accounted for by the difference between what it pays savers and charges to borrowers. That figure — called net interest income — went up 43 per cent. There is no economic crisis for Natwest and its shareholders, just for its customers.
This bank is only alive thanks to taxpayer bailouts after “the greed and stupidity of executives crashed the system,” to quote Farage again.
In this context, its sniping at Farage was not intended as a blow for social justice but as a PR attempt to turn highway robbers into good Samaritans in the eyes of the gullible.
So it behoves us to remember that the threat to social progress from Nigel Farage is by several orders of magnitude less than that posed by monopoly capitalist banking, whatever its pseudo-enlightened rhetoric.
Spanish far right stalls
THE shape of the next government in Spain is unclear and will only emerge from parliamentary horse trading after last weekend’s general election gave no party or block a majority.
However, we can already rejoice that the hard-right Vox party lost votes and seats and is now less likely to enter government. As so often the case, this prospect only arose because the centre-right People’s Party was prepared to countenance deals with the heirs to Franco.
The barriers against far-right entry into government are eroding across Europe. There can be no complacency — the beast is undead yet.
Only the mass mobilisation of working people behind a positive agenda of social change, of the kind championed by the Sumar alliance in Spain, can ensure that it does not pass.
