Morning Wire - The Existential Threat of De-Banking | Saturday Extra

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

Debanking is a growing trend that cancels a person’s access to money based on their viewpoints. In this episode we discuss the intricate issue of de-banking and its implications for individual freedoms both in the UK and the US. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Brexit, claimed his bank canceled his accounts last month over his political views. Farage is the latest in a long list of people, famous and not so famous, who've had their accounts closed over what appears to be viewpoint discrimination. In this episode, we talked to the director of research at a London-based think tank about the growing debanking trend and how it's already affecting both the UK and U.S. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, August 26th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the issue of debanking in the UK and how it affects the U.S. as well is Radamir Taalcoat, Director of Research at the London-based Legatum Institute. Radha, thanks for joining us. The debanking story has become very big in the UK. First, could you recap for us what has happened with Farage and others? Right, so last month, Nigel Farage, who was one of the leading figures in the campaign to leave the European Union, claimed that Coots Bank had cancelled his accounts for political reasons.

Now, despite Coots' claim that Farage simply had insufficient funds, and that is a claim the BBC regurgitated without question, it turns out this was untrue. He was effectively debanked for having views that Coots and its new woke directors didn't like. But there has been a flood of similar stories, actually, and one is Richard Fothergill, a Church of England vicar, who is debanked by the good old Yorkshire Building Society for responding to a customer survey by complaining about their use of a trans flag. So all very Maoist.

Now, actually, there were rumblings of this a few years ago as well when PayPal denied service to the campaigning organisation, the Free Speech Union, and PayPal relented in the end when they were threatened in Parliament with having their license revoked. So Parliament really forcing that reversal there. Have there been equivalence of this kind of debanking in the US? Yeah, it seems there have been some similar problems in the US. For example, according to former Senator Sam Brownback, three weeks after he opened an account for his religious freedom charity with J.P. Morgan Chase, the bank closed it. And like Nigel Farage, he got no explanation. He was just told the decision was at a corporate level, as if on high. Now, as you said in a recent program, actually, a former Chase

director did have something to say about this, because Cleo McDougald, who worked at Chase for 15 years, described an internal process called red dotting. And what that means is a flag on an internal record tells other divisions of the bank to avoid a client. But of course, that could happen because of so-called reputational risk, such as perhaps critical media coverage, let's say from other left-wing organizations. So it feels like a similar problem. Right. What are people starting to do about this threat to their freedoms?

For us, we think this is a very serious attack on our liberties. So at our think tank, the Lagartam Institute in London, we're working with a conservative former minister, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, who dealt with PayPal, for example, and he has tabled legislation for the parliamentary session next month to tackle this problem. Sir Jacob's legislation is going to do broadly two things. First, it will create a legal requirement for banks to respect their customers' right to lawful free speech, and second, an obligation for

transparency. And so the point is that banks will not be able to deny customers' accounts for saying or writing things that our new, politically correct business and media establishment doesn't really like. And then, latterly, if a customer does have services removed, he can demand the bank explains why. Overall, we're calling this a financial habeas corpus. Why is that? Because we think this is like the shared common law principle, which we have in both our countries, that someone must be present to be tried. And likewise, people have to have due process on this. But the counter argument here is that banks are private companies. Isn't it up to them, they do business with? I think it's an interesting question and there's no question that this will mean

another burden for banks and that is a shame because government has created too many burdens on business already. But that said, this simply is a threat to our freedoms. This is a failure to respect the free speech that our people took for granted for centuries. It's also because banking is now actually an essential service. It's a kind of a public utility. So we think it should be available to all credit worthy people. And that's why ideological decisions have to be prescribed. For instance, what if a water company turned off the water supply if they don't like Republicans? And so that needs to apply to banking services too, by the way, that principle of freedom. It needs to apply to services like transfers and mortgages. For us, in the UK, the government isn't yet doing

very much about the problem. It's announced that it's going to scrap laws imposed on Britain while we were in the European Union on so-called politically exposed persons or PEPs. And these seem to have helped banks cancel famous people that they don't like, but they would likely carry on regardless. We also intend to work with allies in the U.S., by the way, because it's pretty clear in both our countries now, whether it's in the White House or 10 Downing Street, that the left-wing blob tends to get its way. So we're not going to sit back and let that happen. Has there been any equivalent to red-dodding in the U.K. like we've seen in the U.S.? Well, this reminds me of a fairly sinister scheme in both the UK and US called a B-Corp.

And becoming a B-Corp is a sort of woke certificate for companies that sign up to the scheme's ideology. It looks like this is really turbocharged, the purging of conservatives. But banks in the UK have also signed up to the guidelines dreamed up by a hard left charity called Stonewall, which began life as a campaign group for equality for gay people, but now busies itself enforcing things like dangerous trans ideology on schools and corporates. That said, I have to say, I think much of this would have happened anyway, because it's a product of the ESG, the environmental, social and corporate governance movement, which is now so far gone, frankly, that, for instance, some defense sector startups say they find it hard to get funding. So this is actually disarming our

country now. But I think this is the whole creation, actually, of a left-wing establishment that's fighting a kind of rearguard action against conservatives, against Brexit, and against the many people that it thinks, I'm afraid, are deplorable. Yeah. Why is this such a big deal for both of our countries? Well, let's ask what is at stake here. First, being debanked means being unpersoned. It means you cannot transact in our effectively cashless society anymore. You need a bank account to have a job. And so this is about enforcing a kind of serfdom. Second, this is a version of China's social credit system, and that will kill our prosperity.

Why is that? Because economic growth demands innovation, and that requires the ability to challenge the status quo. So if financial institutions, which are really the joints and sinews of our economy, build their own social credit system, they are going to destroy our prosperity, I think it's deeply dangerous, actually, what these left-wing corporate commissars are doing, because ultimately everything depends on that free speech. So that's why this feels like an early phase of totalitarianism, in my view. And if we don't fight back, we're going to a pretty dark place.

My final question here, how has this worked out for banks like Coots? Right. It's a good question. It's nice to end sunny side up, actually. Coots has relented. They've offered Nigel Farage's accounts back, a number of their direct. directors have had to resign. And so I think the message is that if these ideas can only exist in the shadows, then we'll surely win in the end. Well, thank you for shedding light on all this and for coming on. Thank you very much. That was Radimir Taukote, Director of Research at the Logottom

Institute. And this has been an extra edition of Morningwire.