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It would be against the law to silence Russia Today for reporting the news, but there is more than one way to skin a bear. It wouldn’t be against the law to shut down all of its bank accounts, and that is exactly what has happened.
It used to the case that when one news station’s take on current events became too hard to stomach you would just reach for the remote control and flick to another channel. At least that is what happened in our house when the BBC was on. Channel 4 was a godsend. Times have changed; now when the news starts spilling the beans on the government’s misbehaviour the banks step in and close down its accounts. Welcome to the world of political banking.
The interference of the banks in British politics is nothing new. During the 2014 Scottish independence campaign the UK banks were instrumental in spreading fear over the country – suggesting that a Yes vote would destabilise the economy, lead to runaway inflation, and drive up unemployment. They even went as far as to threaten the withdrawal of their headquarters from Scotland altogether.
This pattern of behaviour merely underlines the fact that banking and finance are instruments of government, or the possibility of something worse; that both the government and the banking apparatus are instruments of a bigger, more hidden agenda. Why not?! WikiLeaks – the group that published the Clinton emails that got Russia Today barred from Britain’s banks – has made almost every outlandish conspiracy theory concerning the UK and US governments since the 1970s a veritable fact book.
As the United Kingdom is a pillar of the “Free World” and the United States’ very bestest little lapdog, it can’t be seen to ban free speech. In a free country RT can report on the hideous dealings of Hillary Clinton as evinced from her own emails, it can tell the world of the half billion dollar contract the CIA had with a British PR firm to produce fake terrorist beheading films, and the government can’t stop it from talking. What it can do is instruct the British banks to shut down its accounts. Money makes the world go round, after all, and no one in Whitehall wants that sort of news going round.
RT bank accounts in UK will be closed without explanation
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