From Patriotic Alternative.
By Edward Saunders
I recently finished reading journalist Ian Fraser’s book ‘Shredded: Inside RBS, the Bank that Broke Britain’, and have come away feeling more annoyed about that whole episode than I did before. We all know the story, of course, of how stupidity and greed brought the world’s banking system to its knees, and how governments bailed out the banks in order to avert oblivion. Yet for the most part, the finer details – arguably more important to people of our political persuasion – are still largely unknown to much of the public.
For example, throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, governments in the West encouraged deregulation in order to allow banks to lend money to lower income households, especially minorities, who could not afford to pay them back. What’s more, these mortgages and loans were then often sold off by the bondholder, and repackaged by whichever institution bought them. In other words, not only were the banks lending to people who could never repay the money but the banks often got rid of such assets before they felt the consequences of such bad deals.
The drive to lend to minorities – especially Black households in the United States – was driven by corporate greed as much as it was driven by the state’s obsession with equality. Without the ideological impetus to ‘level up’, governments would never have been compelled to allow such reckless lending. Indeed, the American financial institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were largely created to increase home ownership among people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. People are often surprised that equality and left wing ideology can go in hand-in-hand with hyper-capitalist banks, but they do and have done for centuries – Nietzsche noticed it in the 1860s.
But what has all this got to do with Britain and the 2010s?
Well, the most interesting part of the book that I mentioned above – and the most rage inducing – is the part that covers the story of GRG, which was owned by RBS. GRG (Global Restructuring Group) was an institution supposedly set up to help struggling businesses avoid insolvency by rearranging their assets. However, what has been revealed is a monumental scandal. In most cases thousands of small and medium sized British businesses, which were actually highly profitable and needed no assistance, were persuaded into the arms of GRG. Then, by threatening the foreclosure of loans, GRG seized their assets and destroyed the businesses for profit.
Catastrophe for British Businesses
British hotel chains, local car dealers, salons, corner shops and thousands of other family businesses were seized, decapitated and sold off well below their market value – often to foreign buyers. According to RBS’ own figures, 96% of businesses that were taken in to the arms of GRG did not survive, with the result being tens of thousands of British jobs, families and marriages were destroyed under the pressure. This whole sadistic practise continued for years after the bank was bailed out by taxpayers in 2008 until summer 2014. So in effect, British taxpayers bailed out RBS, and RBS returned the favour by destroying their life’s work for profit.
All the while this was going on and thereafter, RBS accelerated its woke PR campaigning and activism. For example, in 2007, the bank launched the ‘Focused Women’s Network’, which was designed to promote gender equality in the work place. And this was just the start, with the bank employing a Diversity Manager from 2010, in part to ensure its business complied with the Equality Act. Then, RBS won the ‘Diverse Company Award’ at the National Diversity Awards in 2017, for ‘providing development opportunities for female talent and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) colleagues’. And to top it all off, the Financial Conduct Authority’s 2019 investigation into GRG refused to take action against RBS whatsoever, even though documents leaked to the media proved extensive wrongdoing.
The lesson from all this is that it’s fine to destroy thousands of British businesses, and the lives of their owners and relations, as long as you have a diverse workforce, because that is how our absurd society is measuring success. However, don’t you dare destroy thousands of British businesses with a non-diverse, all-White company – are you mad?! – now that’s just going too far. As the woke cultural revolution continues unabated, it’s important to remember those funding it are often the biggest hypocrites around, and are simply projecting in order cover up what they are really getting up to, knowing full well the political establishment has their backs.