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Nigel Farage will continue to campaign on behalf of people whose bank accounts have been shut with a new website launched to tackle de-banking in the UK. It comes as former UK prime minister Liz Truss said she was ‘appalled’ at the treatment of the former Ukip leader, whose bank account closure by Coutts sparked a crisis at its parent company NatWest Group PLC. Launching his campaign, Farage said he wants to ‘fight back against the big banks that have let us down’. The AccountClosed.org website currently asks visitors: ‘A major scandal is emerging banks are unfairly closing accounts, do you think it is time to stop this?’ In a six-minute video on Twitter, now known as X, Farage said: ‘We will build together, I believe, if you engage, a very, very significant and powerful group of people. ‘And Parliament will listen, ministers will listen, prime ministers and leaders of the opposition will listen.’ Farage’s crusade against NatWest has led to the resignation of chief executive Alison Rose and Coutts’s boss Peter Flavel, with the campaign on account closures winning the backing of ministers and Tory MPs. Rose quit after admitting being the source of a BBC report suggesting Farage fell below the financial threshold to hold an account with high-net-worth bank Coutts, triggering concerns she breached confidentiality rules. NatWest Chair Howard Davies, though, has resisted pressure from Farage and others to quit, insisting it is important for the bank’s stability that he stays on the board. On Friday, City minister Andrew Griffith, who led the government response to the issue, said Davies should remain in post. Truss added her voice to defenders of Farage, writing in The Sunday Telegraph that ‘heads have rightly rolled’ in the wake of the row. She took aim at rules and risk tests for politically exposed persons, which she said have made ‘elected representatives automatically subject to added suspicion’. ‘Not being able to get a mortgage or open a new bank account& is hardly going to draw many new aspiring candidates into the pool of potential future MPs,’ she wrote. She said: ‘What has happened at NatWest is a microcosm of what has gone wrong both in the boardrooms and the treasuries across many Western economies. ‘The saga shows how a powerful technocracy presides over an increasingly opaque system, while elected politicians in particular those politicians whose views do not find favour at London dinner parties are treated with suspicion.’ It comes as senior Tory MP David Davis, writing in the Sun, suggested he will bring forward a private member’s bill in the Commons to ‘guarantee everyone has a right to a bank account’. By Dominic McGrath, PA Political Staff source: PA Copyright 2023 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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