BRENDAN O’NEILL: From Farage to corrupt migration lawyers, the Left’s dismissal of stories they don’t like is a grave threat to free and open debate
So even when the BBC is in the wrong, its pompous hosts still fancy themselves as the moral conscience of the nation. How else to explain Nick Robinson’s arrogant clash with Nigel Farage on the Today programme yesterday?
Mr Farage was on air to discuss his outrageous mistreatment by Coutts bank.
Coutts closed Farage’s account after drawing up a sinister 40-page dossier documenting his apparently controversial political views.
This Brexit-supporting, Trump-friendly, Net Zero-criticising public figure does not ‘align’ with our values, so let’s give him the boot, Coutts decided.
The BBC was implicated in this shocking act of political persecution. For not long after Farage first went public about his account closure, the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack, wrote an article and took to Twitter to report that Coutts only gave him the heave-ho for commercial reasons.
It wasn’t a political move, he said — it’s just that Farage ‘fell below the financial threshold required to hold an account at Coutts’.
The Farage-hating Twitterati lapped it up. The godfather of Brexit poses as a victim of woke oppression but really he’s just not rich enough for that posh bank, they chortled.
Coutts closed Farage’s account after drawing up a sinister 40-page dossier documenting his apparently controversial political views
READ MORE: NatWest carnage as shares plunge 3% after boss Alison Rose is forced to quit over Nigel Farage ‘de-banking’ scandal – with calls for the rest of the board to go – while ministers read the riot act to other banks on ‘woke’ culture
NatWest is engulfed in a full-blown crisis today after its chief executive Dame Alison Rose (pictured) was forced to quit over briefing the BBC about Nigel Farage’s ‘debanking’
We now know not only that Jack’s story was wrong but that he got it from the very top of the NatWest Group, which owns Coutts.
It was Dame Alison Rose, NatWest’s chief executive, who was the source of Jack’s erroneous article. She blabbed to him at a posh charity dinner.
Rose has now resigned in disgrace and admits she made a ‘serious error of judgment’ when she breezily gossiped with a reporter about the confidential financial standing of one of her bank’s clients.
The BBC itself has written to Farage to apologise for its promotion of ‘incomplete and inaccurate’ information. In short, fake news. Given all this, given the Beeb’s cack-handed and biased handling of this important story, you might have expected the hosts of Today to show a little humility.
Not a bit of it. Robinson badgered Farage. He ‘teased’ him for failing to become an MP. ‘You’ve run seven times and lost seven times’, he sneered.
Farage wasn’t having it. ‘I’m sick to death of your condescending tone,’ he shot back.
Aren’t we all, Nigel?
It was a revealing moment. Robinson’s conceited haran-guing of Farage tells us a bigger story about political life in the 2020s.
It confirms there is a woke sector of the Establishment that truly thinks it is infallible. Which carries on assuming its perfect and virtuous status — even after getting it wrong.
Worse, this privileged cabal does everything in its power to scupper news stories it finds inconvenient or embarrassing.
Robinson’s attempt to make Farage the laughing stock of the Coutts story speaks to this elite’s sinister urge to control the narrative by downplaying stories they don’t like and dismissing certain facts and revelations.
In truth, this is a scandal of epic proportions.
A democratic political figure being ‘de-banked’ over his political views? The bank’s chief executive whispering inaccurate claims to the public broadcaster? The BBC then having to apologise for its hawking of faulty information?
It all adds up to a borderline Orwellian effort to control public opinion.
And yet, from the Left, all we’ve had is shoulder-shrugging. When Labour’s Shadow International Trade Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, was asked about the Coutts affair, he could only erm and ahh.
The Government should not have intervened and put pressure on Dame Alison Rose to step down, he mumbled. Labour is meant to be a party that is sceptical of excessive corporate power and yet it refuses to take a clear line on Coutts’ political dumping of Farage.
When Labour’s Shadow International Trade Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, was asked about the Coutts affair, he could only erm and ahh
The Government should not have intervened and put pressure on Dame Alison Rose to step down, he mumbled
These are the people who have been bashing the banks for years. ‘Greedy, evil capitalists!’ they once cried.
Now they look the other way. Partly, this is down to Farage-phobia and a moralistic loathing of populism more broadly.
Yet there’s more to it. This is just the latest episode in a series of incidents where the Leftist elite has simply refused to tolerate reportage that questions the moral standing of its friends and allies.
Consider, for example, the response to the Mail’s stellar investigative reporting this week on bent immigration solicitors and legal advisers, who’ve been charging up to £10,000 to make up bogus asylum claims.
This story is categorically in the public interest. It raises explosive questions about illegal immigration and the possible inflaming of it by legal bigshots here in the UK.
And yet the Left’s kneejerk response has been to diminish this story.
When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted about the Mail’s investigation, criticising the ‘subset of lawyers’, the Labour Party and people-smuggling criminal gangs, who either assist or turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, he was slammed by the Bar Council.
Their spokesperson accused him of ‘playing politics with the legal profession’. Sunak should cut out ‘this damaging rhetoric’, the council decreed.
When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tweeted about the Mail’s investigation, criticising the ‘subset of lawyers’, the Labour Party and people-smuggling criminal gangs, who either assist or turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, he was slammed by the Bar Council
Yet again, the Left is trying to change the narrative. To shift the focus from the scandal of lawyers charging big bucks to falsify asylum claims to the Prime Minister’s allegedly inflammatory tweets.
It looks like they will have their work cut out: the Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has ordered the solicitors’ watchdog to investigate the Mail’s revelations about lawyers making bogus asylum claims.
Then there was the Huw Edwards story. To most people, it was clearly in the public interest for the media to investigate reports that a key figure at the BBC allegedly paid thousands of pounds to a crack addict in exchange for revealing photographs.
And yet the Left tried to shut this story down, too. From former BBC staffers Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis to political foghorn Alastair Campbell, the cry went up: ‘This is a non-story, stop talking about it!’
That’s right: actual journalists saying there should be no journalism on the Huw Edwards affair.
For the tabloid press to dig for ‘new dirt’ on Edwards is a disgrace, thundered Sopel, seeming not to understand that finding information is the point of his profession.
When Edwards’ wife released a statement saying Huw had been hospitalised for mental-health reasons, the chattering class demanded a complete cessation of reporting.
That’s right: actual journalists saying there should be no journalism on the Huw Edwards affair.
If you keep talking about this, Huw will suffer, they said. It felt like emotional blackmail disguised as a critique of the ‘low press’.
We shouldn’t be surprised —it’s the Left-wing establishment’s favourite tactic when trying to manipulate the political narrative.
It surely won’t be long before they’re presenting Dame Alison Rose as a victim of media misogyny and Faragist bullying.
This constant spinning of events to suit a Left-wing agenda poses a grave threat to free, frank and open debate — and it should worry us all.
Their authoritarian urge to elevate certain stories and diminish others robs ordinary people of the right to know what is really happening in this country.
There is nothing ‘virtuous’ about it. On the contrary: these are the despotic antics of people who think they should have the power to control the flow of information itself.
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