‘I’ll keep watching you …”

 

The Silly Season is coming to an inglorious end, with our ever so glorious Westminster MSM happily plastering their front pages – print, online: no difference – with stuff about Putin or Trump rather than asking questions such as what the government is doing to ensure our food and energy security. See for yourselves, e.g. this compilation: “Newspaper headlines: ‘Putin breaks silence’ and ‘bomb blew up jet’.“ (link), and the front pages of the DT and The Times – at the time of writing, this, that is.

So instead, after delving into the bowels of our Broadsheets, I found a report which demonstrates the utter hypocrisy of bank managers and indeed our society which has given rise to attitudes allowing some middle managers to decide on who is and isn’t ‘worthy’ of their service.

This is about the serial killer Rose West, about the ‘ethical’ Co-Op bank, and about their hypocrisy. In the wake of the Coutts scandal cancelling Nigel Farage’s accounts the cancellation ‘policies’ of banks have come under scrutiny. The DT reports that the Co-Op bank was ‘cleaning up’ their books, cancelling accounts of drug dealers and criminals in 2014, but decided to keep Ms West’s account (all emphases are mine):

“Bosses at the Co-op, which has the slogan “Ethical then, now and always”, deemed keeping West as a customer carried little risk to the bank’s reputation, it is understood, while drug dealers and gang members were stripped of their accounts.” (paywalled link)

A bit further down we read that these bosses thought it was more damaging to their reputation if the ‘general public’ were to find out they had Ms West on their books, that “it was decided that closing West’s account would cause problems for her daughter, who was the main user” (paywalled link). So far so good – but then yon bosses went ahead and did the following, “because: ‘ethics’!”:

“The bank’s boycott of the unnamed feminist group was revealed in its 2017 “Values and Ethics Report”. It said: ‘We declined banking services to…’ and then lists organisations it deemed to be unacceptable and which it had turned down. The feminist group was top of its list, ahead of organisations listed under “oppressive regimes” and the “fur trade”.” (paywalled link)

Oh, willya look at the virtue signalling! Still, it’s fair enough, you might say. After all a bank can decide whom they want as customers, especially when they need to signal their virtue. However, the reason why the Co-Op bosses refused their banking facilities for this feminist group is chilling: “The bank claimed the group had actively declined the rights of members of the transgender community”. (paywalled link). I was horrified when reading next:

“At the time Co-Op Bank said: “We gave the organisation an opportunity to provide clarification on their position relating to diversity and equality and how they comply with the UK Equality Act.” (paywalled link)

The hypocrisy which allows a mass murderer to keep an account because it would be worse for the bank’s reputation if ‘the public knew’ about it while  demanding a group to explain why they are not bending their knees to the ‘transgender community’ is simply stunning. This hypocrisy is promoted by an incessant virtue signalling which this bank displays by publishing a “Values and Ethics Report”.

Furthermore, I am astonished that these bank bosses, just like the NatWest ones, seem to think that they will be judged by what accounts they hold. Have they never heard of confidentiality? Why should the ‘general public’ of which they are so scared, even know whose accounts they hold? Hands up all who read such ‘Values and ethics reports’!

The final piece of hypocrisy is this: on the one hand ‘vested interests’, i.e. pressure groups mostly tending to the Left, have preached to us for decades that it is wrong to judge. On the other hand they judge us to their hearts’ content, even unto interfering with the lives of people whose accounts are cancelled because they are ‘not worthy’. 

This means that judging mass killers is bad but judging those who reject the transgender ideology is ‘virtuous’. Furthermore, those who prepare such ‘virtue dossiers’ and those who decide, blindly, on the basis of those dossiers, are as faceless as the public service bureaucrats or the NHS Trust managers, able to ruin lives without being held to account.

That’s all I have for today. The Silly Season might come to an end but I suspect the ‘news’ we’ll be presented with will be as fluffy and gossipy as they are now, with pertinent questions remaining unasked and not investigated. Have a good day.