”… After having his own accounts at Coutts closed because his political views were deemed not to align with the bank’s values, Mr Farage last week welcomed the resignations of Dame Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest, which owns Coutts, and Peter Flavel, the Coutts chief executive.
He wants to significantly widen his campaign with AccountClosed.org, saying he decided to launch the website because “at the moment we don’t quite know the scale of the problem”.
He said he had been “overwhelmed” by members of the public sending him their own cases since revealing how his account was closed.
“I start work at four o’clock in the morning looking at all this stuff,” he added. “I’m beginning to have the impression this is much, much bigger than any of us could have contemplated.”
The website will try to establish in detail the various reasons why customers are having services withdrawn, with people invited to submit their own experiences along with the banks involved to help identify the “worst offenders”.
‘We don’t want cash’
Based on what he has heard to date, Mr Farage’s “biggest worry” relates to small and medium-sized businesses – including banks allegedly threatening to close the accounts of enterprises reliant on cash.
“There are clearly a couple of things that have emerged,” he says. “Number one, a concerted attempt to drive out cash.
“You’re running a fish store? Well get a credit card machine – we don’t want cash. You’re a window cleaner? Sorry, we don’t want cash. A lot of that.
“I’ve got dozens of accounts of people saying to me that their bank is saying they are putting in too much cash, where’s the cash coming from, do they have the receipts to back up the cash?” He said accounts being closed on this basis has “happened to plenty of people”.
Investors in cryptocurrencies have also been affected, he added. “I had a 19-year-old today, telling me that he puts 50 quid a month into crypto. And the bank have said ‘nope, sorry, we don’t want your business’. So they’re even limiting how people spend money, which I find quite a shock.”
…“This is about the right to free speech,” he said. “About having a country where people are treated fairly in an age when you frankly can’t function on a personal level, let alone a business level, without a bank account.”
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