The Farage-Coutts affair exemplifies the bankruptcy of UK media and politics

 

Failed politician [1] loses account at exclusive bank. It’s a story with very minor human interest, and of no importance whatsoever. Yet it has consumed the attention of the UK media for weeks now, involved the UK Prime Minister and other government politicians, and led to two very senior people at the bank concerned resigning. It is summer, but there are plenty of far more important stories the media could cover. So why does something so insignificant dominate much of the media, and what does it tells us about the state of politics in the UK today?

You cannot begin to understand why this story hit the headlines without understanding the nature of the current Conservative party, including its media arm that dominates the UK press. To put it bluntly, the main purpose of the Conservative party today is to preserve the interest of its very rich donors. It is not there, as some on the left continue to believe, to pursue neoliberal ideology or (equivalently?) to support the interests of large corporations. That notion died with Brexit, and Johnson’s ‘f**k business’.

It is not there because its MPs believe in rolling back social norms to sometime in the last century. A few MPs may actually want this, but most Tory MPs are more socially liberal than the average voter. The party’s social conservatism and anti-woke crusade is mainly a device to conceal how right wing its economic goals are, and attract votes so the party can maintain power. Power for power’s sake, the financial perks that it brings, and the maintenance of right wing economic policies that benefit some (not all) of the top 0.1%.

Maintaining power requires money, and those providing the money want to see a return on their investment. Sometimes that return might be very personal (a seat in the House of Lords for example), sometimes it may involve rent seeking for the businesses donors are involved in, and sometimes it may be to promote the political views of donors. Among this self-selecting group of the very rich a handful matter more than all the rest: the owners of most UK press titles with large circulations. The relationship between these newspaper owners (and the editors and journalists that work for them) and the party is two way: the newspapers print articles which most of the time slant the news in the party’s favour, but the party will also respond to causes and issues highlighted by these newspapers.

One more fact of UK media life is required to complete the picture. The mainstream broadcast media, which is in theory independent of any particular political party, sees the UK press as a major source of news stories. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the government controls the finances of the BBC, and has appointed some of its senior leadership. If the BBC fails to run a story the right wing press think is important, it runs the risk of censure by that press and incurring the displeasure (see above) of the government. In addition senior political journalists work in a market that includes not only print and broadcast media, but also in some cases politics itself. Partly for these reasons, Westminster political stories tend to dominate the broadcast media.

I have seen it written more than once over the past few weeks that Nigel Farage has an uncanny ability to capture news headlines. This is nonsense, and just reflects the media’s own inability to recognise itself. Farage gets the headlines not because he wins some kind of opinion poll for what really matters, but because those choosing what should be headline news find it useful to amplify what he has to say.

Farage, like Johnson, is a populist who is attuned to the concerns and worries of newspaper owners and the 0.1%, and so knows how to become the subject of their headlines. For them, a bank for the wealthy where you need to have savings of over £3 million is their kind of bank. For most of us, who are quite happy to use normal banks like NatWest, being refused a Coutts account and offered one instead at NatWest is beyond our experience and sounds trivially unimportant. Compared to most other news stories it is trivially unimportant. So in itself this is a story that editors and columnists in the right wing press are happy to write about with one snag, which is that no one will read it.

To make this story into a headline people might actually read we need one final ingredient, the culture war. In the culture war, as portrayed by those that push it, those with socially conservative views are forever getting cancelled by the Establishment, which is of course totally made up of social liberal Remainers. [2] So Farage losing his account at Coutts was the latest instalment of this forever culture war, where the champion of social conservatism was losing his account because those running the bank didn’t like his political views. As many/most of the readers of the right wing press are socially conservative, this us/them victim/elite pitch is enough to get the headlines read.

Like nearly all culture war stories, the version of events pushed by the right wing press is mostly nonsense. The facts are set out clearly by Frances Coppola here. Farage’s account was closed because he no longer had a mortgage with them, and so the bank were no longer making money from him. They could have kept his account despite this, but they chose not to because of the reputational risk his activities posed. That assessment by the bank was correct ex ante and has been shown to be correct ex post in spades.

Yet despite the story told by Farage being at best a very selective version of the truth, the BBC has apologised for its original reporting, the source of that reporting - the Chief Executive of NatWest (that owns Coutts) - has resigned, as has Peter Flavel, the head of Coutts, under pressure from the Prime Minister and the Treasury. (The government owns about 40% of NatWest.)

What this reveals is that Farage is not a helpless victim because of his political activities, but instead is extremely powerful because of them. Others who have struggled to get any bank account at all have not only failed to get the headlines Farage has, but would never have obtained two high profile resignations and a BBC apology. Yet Farage not getting the elite account he wanted and instead being offered a normal account captures those headlines. What makes Farage powerful is the right wing press, and their political wing the Conservative Party.

Did the Prime Minister and government intervene in this case, and ministers rush to Farage’s side, because they are scared of Farage? In the past Farage has been a clear threat to the Conservatives, helping to remove two recent Prime Ministers, but today they effectively bat on the same side. Both UKIP, the party Farage previously led, and Reform, the party he created, have polled poorly in recent by-elections, because the government has stolen most of their cards. With the prospect of a Labour victory in next year’s general election the right wing press are not going to give these right wing insurgent parties any oxygen, so the Conservatives have little to fear from them. Instead this Conservative government is singing the same culture war tune as Farage, and so is only too happy to join in.

So for the next year we will see the government and their press turn up the culture war to max. It probably will not work anything like as well as it does in the US (if it works at all) because of important differences between the two countries, but the brutal truth is that this is all the government has. It cannot campaign on its record, which is as dismal as it gets. It can offer tax cuts (or promises to cut taxes), but with public services in a dire state most voters know any tax cuts will be quickly reversed and promises are worthless. Voters have moved left on economic issues since the financial crisis, but the Conservative party has not. The culture war is all they have.

As Emily Maitlis says, successful wealthy populists can turn a sense of entitlement into victimhood, and it is our mainstream media that generally fails to call this trick out, let alone expose how this trick is done. So while the UK continues to fall apart, our media obsesses about how a politician can no longer have an elite bank account. While many struggle just to eat, our media will be full of stories about how Low Traffic Neighbourhoods or 20 mph speed limits are an imposition on motorists. And as many parts of the world experience the dreadful consequence of global warming, our Prime Minister decides now is the time to grant hundreds of new licences to pump oil from the North Sea. [3]

In 2019 I wrote that “The UK is a failed state because the producers of information have made it fail.” At the time I was rightly criticised for using a term (‘failed state’) normally reserved for countries in a far worse situation, but events (and two PMs) since then certainly confirm that the UK as a state is failing. If you want one incident that exemplifies how and why this is happening, it is that a politician’s failure to keep his elite bank account should hog the headlines for so long.

[1] Failed in the sense that he has repeatedly run for parliament and lost every time. Failed in the sense that his main policy, Brexit, has been the disaster for the UK that many predicted. The only thing he is good at is hurting other people, including the voters who supported him. (To be fair, he can help one or two of the already very rich make even more money.)

[2] Those who push this culture war story are populists because they seek to divide society into us (social conservatives) and them (a socially liberal elite).

[3] Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in 2021: “If [governments] are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.” For Sunak, I'm sure the fact that his family's business has strong ties to oil and gas is just a coincidence.