A FEW weeks ago I came across one of the newly ‘remodelled’ branches of my bank. In the foreground was a café area and a gift shop. Banking desks were hiding at the rear. The gift shop had something I wanted as a stocking-filler, so I took it to the payment area and got my money out. The assistant said: ‘Sorry, madam, we don’t accept cash.’ My friend immediately proffered her touch card and the transaction was made. All’s well that ends well? No way! This is the start of something very unwell indeed, with terrifying consequences for us all.
TCW has already published the dangers of exclusively digital money, a development designed by the would-be globalist rulers to deprive individuals of their freedom and rights of ownership and decision-making. So ‘A glimpse into the future’ by David McGrogan, Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School, is a timely warning.
McGrogan was analysing the November 2023 case where the Administrative Court for England and Wales handed down its judgment in a claim brought by Elliott Associates and Jane Street Global Trading against London Metal Exchange and its clearing house LME Clear. The legal issues are very complex and focused on what the chief executive officer of LME perceived as the development of a ‘disorderly’ market. This led him to cancel the nickel market, but also the trades; which resulted in Elliott Associates and Jane Street losing millions of dollars in profits.
McGrogan agreed with the court’s finding that the CEO’s decision-making had not been irrational. English law allows a Recognised Investment Exchange to cancel, vary or correct trades to secure ‘fair and orderly’ trading. But he found the court’s judgment on the right to property a very different matter. According to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), in its Additional Protocol 1, every legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his property, but this in no way impairs the right of a state to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest.
This means that we are heading for a future in which the law itself will die out. McGrogan emphasises that the judgment boiled down not to the application of clear rules, but to the regulator’s discretion, which essentially means that this is not really law at all, and is ‘a microcosm for the dominant regulatory style of our moment’.
In the financial sector, we are now being cajoled into accepting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in place of cash. Once the digital pound is created, it will be regulated the same way this LME trade was ‘regulated’. And it will happen, because this is the perfect realisation of the ‘good tyrant’, who rules benevolently on the surface but ensures that his own actions are never constrained by law nor the individual’s right to property. We will own nothing and be happy.
So it is vital to remember Ronald Dworkin, noted legal philosopher of the 20th century, who pointed out that if we have the right to something only if it is ‘in the public interest’, then we have no right to anything at all, since any rights would be entirely contingent on the authorities’ view of what the public interest entails.
This is where current notions of governance have led us, says McGrogan. It is tyranny in the philosophical sense: governance in the absence of legal constraint, functioning not through brutality but through presenting itself as the be-all and end-all of ‘fairness and orderliness’. In the financial sphere this means that our money can never be ours, but merely the product of the tyrant’s largesse, a benefit he bestows upon us, not a store of our own wealth. We are already well on our way to that destination, but the ‘digital pound’ is McGrogan’s finishing line.
As TCW has already warned – Remember the Truckers!
Three key pillars of ‘global rule’ are already starting to be enforced: digital money, digital ID and ‘climate action’. The demise of cash is happening all too quickly – consumers find it convenient and institutions find e-money easier and cheaper to handle.
With the State increasingly dispensing with law and legal precedent, and governing instead by subjective decisions, on the ‘judgment’, or more likely the whim, of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, on what is deemed to be ‘in the public interest’, we urgently need to push back against these developments.
A recent study by the British Retail Consortium shows we can. For the first time in a decade, cash use is up from 15 per cent of transactions to just under 19 per cent. At a time of inflationary pressures and squeezed budgets, consumers find that with cash they can more easily control their spending and know exactly how much money they have. Two mothers featured in the Sun newspaper saved thousands of pounds by switching from contactless to cash.
These are small but vital victories in defence of cash, where individual decisions matter, and can contribute to general pushback. It’s about stopping the means of control and arbitrary decisions over our choices and movement. This is one way of saying no to woke capital controls and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) that dominates institutional decision-making. Catherine Austin Fitts, financial expert and publisher of the Solari Report, makes no bones about it: ‘They are trying to kill us. Then they are trying to take all our stuff and we can’t let them. In 2023, people started to realise that it is kill or be killed. We have to push back, because there is no going along with this.’
So just say no to CBDCs and demand cash, guaranteed by law, because we are teetering on the edge of freedom’s precipice.