Farage gave a recent interview to the C4 religious spot and managed to score a couple of spectactular own goals in as many minutes. I quote from Alan Wood's verbatim transcript.
"My name is Nigel Farage. I was born an Anglican but I was also born a capitalist because I worked in the City of London during the Thatcher heydays of the 1980's and I don't think that money is wrong, evil or bad.
It has become fashionable to bash the bankers, to say we must limit what people can earn (and) we must stop them having big bonuses, and this is all based on a huge misunderstanding. We cannot have nurses, doctors, schools and a civilised society unless we have wealth creation. If we tax punitively those that are most successful in this country they will leave our shores and go and work somewhere else.
Well, I was christened into the Anglican church and I chose as a teenager to be confirmed into it but I am a very lapsed Anglican now, I feel very disconnected. We have a Christian Socialist as Archbishop of Canterbury in Rowan Williams and he has joined the chorus of attacking the banks and the bankers, and money, and capitalism, and all through the crisis, ever since the banks started collapsing back in 2008, all we have had from the Church of England is endless negativity. Without the money the City of London has generated this country would literally be sunk."
As well as that C4 captioned him as a former City banker. If anyone knows which bank formerly employed NF I would be grateful for a post naming it.
Calling the Archbishop a 'Socialist' and the C of E's attitude to the banking crisis is silly. Farage was obviously operating in his disastrous van Rumpoy mode, again! It can only help alienate the many millions of Anglicans in the UK and reinforce UKIP's 'fruit cakes and loonies' image.
Supporting bankers is another sure fire vote loser in the current circumstances. Far better to go for the middle ground and call for a reduction in the gap between the poorest paid and the most highly paid in the UK.
Farage's economic ideas are what Alan Sugar called prune juice. The City does not create wealth for the UK only money for bankers just as the EU does not create wealth for the ordinary citizen. It only takes our money and gives it to MEPs like Mr Farage and their ilk. Wealth is created by engineers and designers in manufacturing companies of which Germany has a great many and we have far to few. That is why Germany currently prospers and the UK does not. Other companies such as miners and traders also create wealth but definitely not banks. Banks provide the capital not the ideas and management that creates wealth.
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Another interesting thing is that Farage, in an interview about his religious beliefs, never once in this verbatim account mentions God or Christian morality or any of the other things that you would expect to be mentioned. He says he's a very lapsed Anglican purely because of what he perceives to be the CofE's attitude to the City - a very peculiar reason to abandon one's religious faith. He also implies that all this came about since the financial crisis. Hmmm. I don't recall Farage being any more of a churchgoer - or being more greatly guided by his supposed Christian faith - before the crisis broke, three years ago. As I recall, he had the morals of an alleycat prior to then, as well. And if it's all just a question of falling out with the CofE over politics, rather than any doubt about Christianity per se, why doesn't this soldier of the Lord, who tells us he made his own decision to be confirmed, join one of the many other branches of the Church on offer? Even by Farage's standards, this little display of rank hypocrisy is sickening.
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