Coutts Bank Is Now Big Brother

Fabled London Bank just went full Orwellian

By JOHN LEAKE

One of the saddest things to observe in recent years has been the infection of British society and politics with woke nonsense and an accompanying slide into totalitarianism. During the pandemic, we saw an acceleration of the United Kingdom— cradle of the Common Law and Parliamentarian government—sprint towards the nightmare dystopian reality that George Orwell warned about in his books and in a recorded statement he gave just before his death in 1950.

For a strong, freedom-loving people to accept a dictatorship of morally depraved phonies masquerading as benevolent protectors of society, it is necessary for the people to lose their fine sense of humor and irony. More so than any people in Europe, the British used to have a keen understanding of the word HUMBUG. As they lost their intuitive understanding of the word, so has the word fallen out of usage.

Americans are familiar with the word humbug largely by way of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, who frequently exclaims “Bah humbug!” in reference to things that he considers sentimental nonsense. Scrooge used the word in a crude way.

To put a finer point on it, humbug is related to sentimentality, and describes the way in which self-serving people indulge in self-congratulatory feelings NOT as a result of actually doing something for others, but for expressing benevolent sounding opinions. Oscar Wilde’s description of a sentimentalist conveys the idea.

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

Paying for it brings me to the subject of this morning’s post. I just read in the Epoch Times a wonderful essay by the British retired doctor and author, Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays and books I highly recommend. Dalrymple reports that the Coutts Bank—one of the oldest and most fabled money institutions in England—has closed the bank account of British politician, Nigel Farage for the crime of … expressing the wrong opinions.

During the 19th Century, Coutts Bank was a key institution of the monied, fashionable society of London, as was expressed in this little verse published in the Punch magazine of humor and satire:

Money takes the name of Coutts,
Superfluous and funny
For everyone considers Coutts,
Synonymous with Money.

When I read Dalrymple’s essay, I couldn’t resist thinking that Britain—the once great liberal civilization—is finished, done, dead, over, end of story. Tourists may now visit London in the way Lord Elgin visited the Acropolis in Athens in 1799 and marvel at its monuments. Its government, institutions, and rich culture have been taken over by sappy, self-important, humbug totalitarians who have virtue-signaled their way to total control.

For more detailed information about this baleful occasion, please click on the following image to read Dalrymple’s essay.