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An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.
I wrote in reply to this issue about “rights” to banking, because I think it is too easy to just throw down the ideologist purist card on the table and assume that ends the matter. No so fast, Batman:
In a world of laissez faire capitalism, absent the distortions of bailouts, the central bank drug of easy credit, endless compliance regulations and so on, barriers to entry to create banks are far lower and there would be hundreds more banks. They’d be relatively small in some cases, and be fiercely competitive. With some operating not with full statutory limited liability protection (but only under the Common Law), people running these banks would be a lot less careless and more focused on building value. There’d also be fewer hiding places for a culture war phenomena to flourish in. Instead, banks would be about capitalism, period.
It is notable, however, that many of these desirable features don’t exist in the Western banking system today, although a few “challenger” banks and digital offerings are quite good, and may win business as a result of a backlash against some of the things going on. But in general, banking in the UK, and US, is intertwined with the State. Many firms have been rescued with billions of pounds, dollars and euros of taxpayers’ money. To open an account, you have to go through an increasingly severe KYC [know your client] and anti-money laundering regime, and banks that fail to comply can be fined and in extremis, lose their licences. Fines worth tens of billions have been imposed on banks over the past 20 years, for example.
Ideally, any commercial entity ought to be able to refuse to do business with people, however rational or irrational that decision should be, and we should let the brute force of free enterprise weed out bigots. Bigotry and stupidity are costs. That’s actually what tends to happen over time. A problem is that in a mixed economy, some of those competitive forces are attenuated.
When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.
In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”
And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.
I have a dilemma. I want to write a post about how creepy it is to take a photo of a stranger and put it on social media with a deniably mocking comment. The easiest way to illustrate this would be to post the tweet that caused me to write the post. But if I do that, I am guilty of the same behaviour. Then again, to have any hope of turning public opinion against this trend, people like me who object to it have to demonstrate that it actually happens.
I will compromise by linking to this tweet but not in a way that makes a picture of it show up on the page. The tweet’s already viral; any extra clicks I send its way will make little difference. The tweet says,
SHABS
@JoeShabadu
this guy reading the wetherspoons menu for 15mins on the train yesterday
The accompanying photo taken from a few feet away shows a unremarkable-looking old man. Like it says, he is sitting on a train, minding his own business and reading a Wetherspoons menu.
The picture itself doesn’t make him look stupid or anything. The thing that makes me begin to dislike Joe Shabadu, whoever they are, is that caption about the old guy reading the menu for fifteen minutes.
It being a Wetherspoons menu is relevant. For the benefit of readers overseas, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs operating in the UK and Ireland. As Wikipedia says, “Wetherspoon targets a mass-market offering of low-price food and drink.” Though I have always found them to be pretty good for the price, your local “Spoons” is not where the cognoscenti go. Some people boycott Wetherspoons because the chain’s founder, Tim Martin, was loud in his support for Brexit.
So we have it pointed out to the world that this old chap was reading a pub menu for fifteen minutes, and the pub concerned was one associated with the proletariat. I think the tweet was meant to make us laugh at the old man for being a bad reader, or for going to Wetherspoons, or both. The person who wrote the tweet tries to claim otherwise, but I was not convinced.
The general tone of the replies was heartening. A typical one was, “Let the man be. Why take a photo and post it? Doing no harm.” Another said, “Maybe he struggles to read and doesn’t want to be embarrassed when he gets there? Shame on you.” Other replies were more light-hearted. Someone speculated that he could be one of those “mystery shoppers” paid to sample the pub’s fare anonymously before reporting back to the management. I related to this one: “You’re acting like you don’t read shampoo instructions when you run out of battery on the toilet.” When I used to commute on the Victoria Line I always had a book or a newspaper with me. Mostly this was because I find it hard to go an hour without reading. Partly it was so that I could escape in spirit when a stranger’s gaze rested on me for too long.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn, the most odious public figure in Britain since Oswald Mosley, should be de-banked due to political views. Banking is a highly regulated state protected cartel, they should no more be allowed to do this than to de-bank people for being Jews or Black.
If what was done to Farage (and even people simply related to him) is allowed to stand, that’s it, we are now in China territory, an actual full-blown tyranny.
“Relatives of Nigel Farage have also been refused bank accounts, former Ukip leader reveals”, reports Gordon Rayner at the Telegraph.
Relatives and associates of Nigel Farage have been refused bank accounts after being designated as politically exposed persons, or PEPs, the former Ukip leader has disclosed.
Mr Farage said someone close to him had been the subject of a “very nasty” account closure in the past fortnight and that others had been told they could not open accounts.
He said Coutts’s decision to close his personal and business accounts had left him “screwed” because he has been turned down as a customer by 10 other banks after having to tick a box saying he has been refused an account elsewhere.
Mr Farage has also dismissed as “a fable” claims by Coutts’s parent company NatWest that he was offered personal and business accounts with NatWest after being “exited” by the private bank.
After being told his accounts were being closed and convinced the decision was politically motivated, Mr Farage submitted subject access requests to Coutts and two companies which send them press cuttings and other information on customers, Lexis Nexus and Refinitiv.
As a result of their responses, Mr Farage discovered that a number of family members and associates, thought to be more than 10, were designated by the bank as PEPs, some of whom have now found it difficult to obtain banking facilities.
None of this would be a problem if there were anything like a free market in banks. Given the public anger on this issue, it would be a great opportunity for a proudly non-woke new bank to establish itself. Unfortunately, as Johnathan Pearce pointed out in this post, “And we wonder why normal people avoid going into front-line politics”, there is nothing like a free market in banks.
Update: If you want to read the 40-page dossier that Coutts compiled on Farage that he obtained via a Subject Access Request, Guido Fawkes has it up on his site without a paywall: READ IN FULL: THE 40-PAGE COUTTS DOSSIER DEFENDING DE-BANKING “RACIST” FARAGE
Another update: Nigel Farage receives apology from Coutts after bank account row. That report from Sky News does not impress. It says, ‘Mr Farage claimed to have a 40-page document that proved Coutts “exited” him because he was regarded as “xenophobic and racist” and a former “fascist”‘ as if there were some doubt as to the document’s existence. Then it says, ‘the chief executive of the Natwest Group, Alison Rose, has apologised for “deeply inappropriate comments” made about him in documents prepared for the company’s wealth committee’, seemingly unaware that the documents prepared for the company’s wealth committee formed part of the same aforementioned 40-page dossier. When NatWest’s own chief executive has acknowledged that the document is genuine, you would think that Sky News could accept it too.
“A free society is only maintained to the extent that everyone is a dissident.”
– Jordan Peterson.
“How many environmental justice majors does it take to calculate the CO2 emissions of a light bulb? This isn’t a joke. Businesses now employ scads of college grads to do this. For years America’s political class has lamented that too many college grads are working in low-paying jobs that don’t require post-secondary degrees. The diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance industries—DEI and ESG, respectively—are solving for this problem while creating many others. In the modern progressive era, young graduates are finding remunerative employment as sustainability coordinators, DEI officers and “people partners.” Instead of serving up pumpkin soy lattes, they’re quantifying corporate greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring employers don’t transgress progressive cultural orthodoxies.”
– Allysia Finley, Wall Street Journal ($).
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story:
“Now the royal family is dragged into the n-word race row”
Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged.
And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
In the latest instance, the offensive terms are mostly used to describe people of African ancestry who appear on the jewels. The words are also included in a number of names of items in the collection.
One brooch is described in the following terms: “Head of a n**** in three-quarter profile to the right, with drop-pearl earring. This type of a n****’s head is found on several sixteenth-century cameos.”
Another item depicting a white person is accompanied by this description and slur: “Athough it uses the dark layers of the stone for the profile, the features are not n*****d’.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid.
UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article.
“If we don’t learn from the Dutch eco quagmire we might end up with Farmer Clarkson as PM”, warns the Times.
Jeremy Clarkson is a bit too much of a Remainer for my political tastes, but we could do a lot worse. But Robert Colvile’s article is not really about Britain’s most famous petrolhead. It is about the slow but relentless growth in the scope of a law for which nobody voted, Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora, a.k.a. the “EU Habitats Directive”.
This was designed to protect and restore rare species and conservation sites. One thing they needed protecting from was nitrogen pollution.
In November 2018 the European Court of Justice ruled (after a referral from the Netherlands) that any “plans or projects” near such sites were permissible only if there was “no reasonable scientific doubt as to the lack of adverse effects”.
In other words, before you could build a house or spread fertiliser on a field, you had to prove it would not increase nitrogen emissions. Which you couldn’t.
This ruling — known as the “Dutch case” — triggered the nutrient neutrality crisis, which is blocking an estimated 145,000 new homes in England.
But in the Netherlands the results were even more dramatic. The country’s highest court quickly suspended 18,000 construction projects and ordered drastic cuts in nitrogen emissions. Given that 46 per cent came from cow dung, MPs proposed halving the number of cattle. Which led to outraged farmers blockading roads with tractors, and the formation of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement. Which is now well ahead in the polls.
As the article points out, Brexit has not prized the UK loose from these laws, although it has made it less inconceivable that one day we might be.
Above all, this story illustrates the dangers of the precautionary principle at the heart of EU law, and in particular our interpretation of it. This principle holds that before you do anything, it must be proved to be absolutely safe.
In the nitrogen ruling, the language about “no reasonable scientific doubt” set an extraordinarily high bar. One that drove Natural England to unilaterally halt the construction of 145,000 desperately needed houses across 74 council areas, because there was a risk of nitrogen from flushed lavatories running into rivers — even though planning permission had already been granted, and the homes would be responsible for only a fraction of local pollution.
What’s striking is the absolute nature of such decisions. There is no evaluation of trade-offs, no way to argue that, yes, we need to protect rivers, but also to build homes and fill bellies with crops. The Economist notes that the Netherlands’ environmental rules have imposed “wide-ranging restrictions on new economic activity”. Same here.
For many Brexit campaigners, the hostility to innovation embedded in the precautionary principle — for nitrogen emissions, read gene-editing, or AI — was a key justification for leaving. But the poison has entered our bloodstream.
…and Piers Morgan is someone who literally his entire career is now fuelled by this sort of nonsense. And as you know I have been on Good Morning Britain four times now. I have always found it to be a deeply unpleasant experience even when I’ve “won”. Because the way it happens – and most people won’t know this – but when you are backstage they keep you separate from the guests that you are supposed to be debating. They try and psych you up. They try and say “You should feel free to interrupt as much as possible” and the one time I was on with Peter Tatchell who for all his flaws I deeply respect and I didn’t want to be a dick and interrupt him all the time they actually basically had a go at me afterwards and that clip was never even put on the internet because it was not seen as being inflammatory enough. So the whole purpose of these shows is to create conflicts and create soundbites and create all this nonsense and Piers Morgan is like a parasite feeding off the carcass of civil discourse.
– about 14 mins from the beginning of a Triggernometry “RAW” live stream from c. March 2021. Piers Morgan, of course, left GMB in a row over Meghan Markle. Earlier this year he appeared on Kissin and Francis Foster’s Triggernometry podcast.
“Research finds ChatGPT & Bard headed for ‘Model Collapse'”, writes Ilkhan Ozsevim in AI Magazine:
A recent research paper titled, ‘The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget’ finds that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.
The Wall Street Journal covered the same topic, but it is behind a paywall and I have not read it: “AI Junk Is Starting to Pollute the Internet”.
They feed Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT vast amounts of data on what humans have written on the internet. They learn so well that soon AI-generated output is all over the internet. The ever-hungry LLMs eat that, and reproduce it, and what comes out is less and less like human thought.
Here is a foretaste of one possible future from Euronews: “AI-generated ‘Heidi’ trailer goes viral and is the stuff of nightmares” – even if I do have a suspicion that to place a video so perfectly in the uncanny valley of AI-generated content still requires a human hand.
Today Moscow repeats its crime by invading Ukraine, by denying the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Think also of Russia’s accomplices in the West — those monstrous liars and accessories after the fact, who say that Ukraine and NATO are responsible for the war in Ukraine, or say that we must (for our own sake) allow the Ukrainian people to be butchered and oppressed again. It was shameful enough that the world stood by and believed the lies and tolerated Stalin’s genocide against Ukraine. But now, today, it unfolds again! And the dictator in Moscow finds no shortage of apologists and helpers in the West. They misrepresent those, like myself, who think Ukraine should be assisted, by calling us warmongers — as if we are advocating war with Russia. But there is no such advocacy. Ukrainians are already fighting because they have been invaded. It is their war, not ours. But we do have a moral obligation to help them. Furthermore, the evil they are fighting also wants to destroy us.
– J.R.Nyquist
A new film is out, called The Sound of Freedom, and it is about the horrible topic of child sex trafficking, and based on the experiences of people, such as former US government agent, Tim Ballard, who tried to shut this trade down. The film has become a hit already in the US, overtaking the new and lame Indiana Jones film (starring an aging Harrison Ford).
The Critical Drinker – my favourite film reviewer – gives his verdict here.
I want to focus on a different angle here, because I can imagine some of the “whataboutery” sort of responses from those who, for example, dislike the emphatic Christian convictions of the actor who plays Tim Ballard – Jim Caviezel. The film has already provoked sniffy responses from certain quarters.
There is, as readers know, a gap between rhetoric and performance when it comes to Christian churches and other faiths’ groups in terms of the treatment of children in some cases, while Christians and those of no faith are also to be found in seeking to protect children, too. I hope and generally imagine that the benign consequences of religion, when it comes to care for children, outweigh the negatives (full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican). I recall reading, with horror, about the child abuse allegations that were sweeping through the Catholic church a few years ago in cities such as Boston. I recall there was a film about this, such as about the situation in Boston, a few years ago. On the flip side, consider the work of evangelical Christians, Quakers and others on issues such as building a moral storm against the slave trade, or the encouragement of prison reform, and so on. It is hard to contemplate the US civil rights movement and not see the importance of Christianity in the US. (For a fascinating account of how different Christian denominations have shaped American culture to this day, read Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer.)
So why the hostility to this film now? This seems driven more by political partisanship and point scoring between the Left and Right than an ability to view stories on the facts.
Even the most secular person can and should be appalled, and want to tackle the matter of sex trafficking and coercion of minors. This is why issues such as money laundering, for example, are such a big deal for banks (and why it is all the more important to get that sort of issue right.)
It is true that these issues can get out of hand when it comes to fear and panic about what is going on. In the UK and other places about 40 years ago there was a “satantic abuse” problem, in parts of the north of the UK, I think, and there were miscarriages of justice, and a serious concern about the errors and oversight of various government agencies.
Even so, on the face of it, there is a problem. Slavery today is, in numerical terms, a major issue. The United Nations said, in a report last year, that there are millions of people in a condition of slavery, and a number of them will be children. (The usual health warnings apply to official figures, but even with that, these are non-trivial numbers.)
I can understand the reason for some people, maybe from good intentions, to either play down the issue or hope it goes away because they don’t want specific groups to be portrayed in a negative light, or fear this will cause specific groups to be persecuted. Centuries ago, Jews were attacked for wanting to kill Christian babies, and other such nonsense. But the problem is that our politeness, even our desire not to “rock the boat”, creates a breeding ground for trouble.
Unfortunately, in today’s always-offended culture, and its myriad hypocrisies, blind spots and desire to wish things were different than they are, the chances that there will be a rational, realistic discussion on how to prevent abuses, deal with criminals, and so on are not great. But we have to try.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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