The attack on Nigel Farage, the former UKIP and Brexit Party leader (and former leader of a faction in the European Parliament) by the banks of Britain which have denied him a commercial bank account is a classic case of unaccountable, politicised, corporate power which is the hallmark of Fascism. (After complaint he has been permitted to retain his personal bank account with his bank of 40 years!). No reasons were given other than these were “commercial decisions”.
For 30 years I have been warning of the rise of corporatist fascism and EU imperialism and the appeasement of openly Nazi movements in Ukraine, Bosnia and Croatia, the Spanish attack on Catalonian democracy, the abolition of democratic sovereignty in European nation states, the unelected puppet leaders of the West and the privileged and dominant role of multi national corporations over consumers and voters.**
In 2000 I stood for the leadership of UKIP and came a close second, but only after Nigel Farage had a letter circulated to members by two Sunday Telegraph journalists accusing me of being a “conspiracy theorist” for describing the EU as corporatist fascist. Farage today openly admits that it could be a still existing EU regulation – the “politically exposed Person” rules which have condemned him. Like so many vaguely defined but potentially catastrophic laws the PEP gives enormous scope for selective application according to politics.
Well perhaps Nigel will believe me now – 23 years later!
The essence of a corporatist fascist society is:
– a combination of State socialist (victims rarely on the Left) and big business power
the dominance of state and corporate power, unresponsive to parliament and voters
– restrictions on personal and commercial freedom without knowing the cause
– and so without recourse to appeal to the courts
– arbitrary law, (applied to some but not others according to political stance)
– law applied without democratic legal authority (by corporations, banks, as here)
-punishment of relatives of the victim
All these seem to have applied to Nigel Farage who had his bank accounts closed by a bank he had been with for over 40 years and 7 other banks refused him an account. It is impossible to live in a society or conduct commercial activity (ie earn a living) without a bank account. Nigel Farage was given no reason.
He was accused in 2018 by the cowardly Labour MP for Rhondda, Chris Bryant (under parliamentary privilege so he could not be sued) of having received some half a million pounds from Russian sources. The sum was the total of Farage’s bank account flows at the time, not what he had received for two interviews on RT (Russia today) in 2016 and 2017. This was not illegal and was long before the Ukraine war and Bryant did not object to the SNP’s Alex Salmond being paid for his programme on RT.
A bit late in the day (after other Establishment-challenging figures like Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins (no bank, no home) and Toby Young had been similarly victimised) the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has warned banks they must protect free speech and not act against customers on the grounds of their political beliefs. But mere warnings are a pathetic response. Legal action and fines should be imposed and the original accounts re-instated. Otherwise the potential threat of such actions against anyone constitutes a continous oppression – typical of all totalitarian regimes.
Equally vicious of course is the removal of business accounts and the refusal to give reasons on the spurious grounds that financial institutions cannot tell customers anything to alert them about an investigation (“anti tipping off” law) but having lost their account everyone will have been “tipped off”!!! See Dominic Lawson’s account of how even the granddaughter of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer was denied an account! https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12256943/Its-not-just-Nigel-Farage-daughter-blocked-opening-bank-account.html
Having warned about the rise of corporatism (and its long history of being the basis of fascist and nazi regimes) for over 30 years – with a specific warning to the British Conservative Party in 1990 about many failed corporatised monopolistic privatisations during the 1980s – today’s events are no surprise to me.
Pity you did not wake up earlier, Nigel! The battle now will be all the harder.
** for those who cannot understand the dangerous state of our society or the Ukraine war with its hundreds of thousands of deaths these books are indispensable to understanding how Europe and the UK have embraced fascist authoritarianism and a return to the wars of the 1930s and 1940s: https://freenations.net/rodney-atkinson-publications-books/
