LET’S be clear why Dame Alison Rose was unfit to be chief executive of NatWest. Instead of focusing on her main task of looking after the interests of her millions of customers, she chose to launch an attack on one of them for political reasons, fired by her fanatical beliefs in diversity and climate alarmism.
There can be no other explanation of why she grubbily entered into what looks like a conspiracy with BBC correspondent Simon Jack at the Langham Hotel on July 3 to malign and defame Nigel Farage.
Mr Jack was a willing recipient of what the BBC call ‘disinformation’ and, like a rat up a drainpipe, filed a story based on her lies that Mr Farage had been ‘debanked’ by NatWest subsidiary Coutts because he didn’t have enough money. In reality, of course, we now know it was because of his political views. In their smug self-righteousness and crusading zeal, they thought the former leader of UKIP was an enemy of their worldview and thus fair game.
Rose has ‘form’ as long as your arm of being a political activist rather than a sound and principled banker. From the moment she was appointed to her role in 2019 she made it clear that her priority was to drive relentlessly for ‘diversity’ on the lines of Black Lives Matter, and to campaign to stop British business investing in anything that might get in the way of her Net Zero agenda.
In an October 2020 speech published on the NatWest site, she spells out in chilling detail the extent of her fanaticism.
She crows about how she appointed Lord Stern – author of the notorious Stern Review on climate change in 2006 and arguably the man who locked Britain into climate fanaticism decline – as an ‘independent’ adviser to the bank on climate issues. That’s like putting a fox in charge of the hen house and in itself a manifestation of the fact that Dame Alison’s approach to banking is more about political activism than of sound and safe financial practice.
She goes on to detail how her main objectives will be to stop all investment in coal, oil and gas, and impose rafts of nanny-state measures to cut their clients’ CO2 consumption. In other words, to make them poorer, colder and less secure.
In the Sun on the day of Rose’s resignation, the veteran political analyst Trevor Kavanagh added another intriguing clue to her motives. He speculated that a reason why Dame Alison is such an ardent activist might be that she is a member of the deeply sinister group, Common Purpose. He opined that Nigel Farage and others who have been debanked ‘may actually be victims of another shadowy organisation, known as The Octopus, set up in the Blair era, whose tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of our daily lives. Its real name is Common Purpose . . .
‘It has grown in two decades from a small group of influencers under middle-class networker Julia Middleton into a global multi-million-pound charity with leverage in the highest places . . .
‘CP’s luminaries include ex-Met boss Cressida Dick, ex-EU Commissioner (and BBC Chairman) Chris Patten, council bosses and top civil service mandarins who pay £5,000-plus (my italics) for lessons on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, the issue at the heart of the Coutts row with Farage.
‘Its clients may also include Coutts itself, just as its relation, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was before being bailed out by the Government in 2008. The Sun last week asked Coutts if any senior figures — including chief executive Dame Alison Rose — have attended such courses. So far, no response.’
My organisation News-watch has been investigating CP for more than a decade. In 2010, a colleague wrote a blog for the Biased BBC website which detailed how its tentacles had spread to both the BBC and banking. Sounding familiar? It said: ‘Unsurprisingly for such a group, BBC connections are not hard to find. Bees to a honeypot. The corporation has spent more than £150,000 on sending dozens of its senior staff on CP “courses”.
‘Scratch the surface of the CP website and it quickly becomes apparent that one of its main goals is to ensure that we are all indoctrinated about the evils of climate change . . . It works towards doing this with Deutsche Bank, an organisation that is so besotted by AGW that it publishes pamphlets on how to spot and root out sceptics.’
It is impossible to know how influential CP adherents are. The website is dominated by psychobabble but it claims that its reach is 200-plus cities in 45 countries, that it has 20,000 participating organisations and that 42,000 speakers have contributed to its programmes. The bottom line is that the relentless drive towards the ‘woke’ agenda is multi-pronged and CP is clearly part of that process. BBC employees and banks have been acolytes for at least 15 years.
In that context, Rose’s decision to malign Mr Farage through Simon Jack as a BBC mouthpiece makes sense – they were united in a common purpose.
