I’ve written the lead comment piece for today’s Sunday Express. This is how it begins:
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to whip up support for Nigel Farage in his battle against woke British banks.
Closing people’s accounts for expressing the ‘wrong’ views is a brutally effective type of censorship that originated in Communist China and has no place in a supposedly free country like ours.
My first thought was to create a meme based on the old advert for the National Lottery.
A giant hand holding a pair of rainbow-coloured scissors would emerge from a high street bank.
Then it would cut up the credit card of an unsuspecting member of the public, with the caption: “It could be you!”
But I realised this wouldn’t capture the threat posed by this sinister new form of cancel culture because not everyone is equally at risk.
The people most in danger of losing their accounts are those with unfashionable views, whether it’s the former leader of the Brexit Party or Richard Fothergill, a Church of England vicar who was de-banked by the Yorkshire Building Society after he objected to its promotion of trans ideology.
I think that’s why almost no one on the Left of British politics has taken Nigel’s side in this dispute.
So far, broadcasters Paul Mason and Emily Maitlis, Remoaner propagandist Alastair Campbell, Labour’s Rachel Reeves and comedian Omid Djalili have defended Coutts’s decision to defenestrate the GB News presenter.
A YouGov opinion poll last week revealed 24 percent of Labour voters think banks should be allowed to remove customers who have personal or political beliefs that don’t align with their values.
Labour leader Keir Starmer did eventually mutter something about how no one should be refused banking services because of their views, but it had to be dragged out of him.
Think how different the reaction would have been if it had been Jeremy Corbyn who’d been de-banked and not Nigel Farage, particularly if the lender then leaked confidential details of his finances to the BBC in an effort to pretend the reason he’d lost his account was for purely “commercial reasons”.
The entire Liberal Establishment would have been up in arms, demanding the head of the bank’s CEO.
The same people who’ve been sniggering at Nigel’s misfortune would have been loudly proclaiming that having a bank account is a basic human right, like access to water and electricity.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Watch me talking to Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News about how paper thin the new woke ideology is.
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