After ‘it’s not happening’, ‘it may be happening, but for different reasons’, and ‘would it be such a bad thing if it was happening?’, we have finally arrived at the ‘it’s happening and it’s a good thing’ stage of the Nigel Farage banking story. This now-familiar pattern of motivated reasoning was first identified by conservative writer Rod Dreher in his law of merited impossibility, which described how progressives could simultaneously hold the views that gay marriage wouldn’t diminish religious liberty and that the religious liberty of opponents of gay marriage ought to be diminished. As Dreher put it: ‘It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.’
Freedom of conscience and speech were not invented by Harriet Harman in 2010
When Farage first claimed that Coutts had closed his account for political reasons, the standard progressive response was that he was lying, followed by some pitiful attempts at justification anyway. Now internal documents show the NatWest-owned bank decided Farage’s ‘xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist’ views ‘do not align to our values’. Cited by way of example are ‘advocating for the government to leave the European Convention on Human Rights’ and an occasion when Farage ‘compared the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to the Taliban and Islamic extremists in relation to the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol’. The document also floats the possibility of financial ties to Russia, but admits ‘we cannot find any evidence of a direct Russian regime connection’. It further notes that ‘he has not made any inappropriate remarks to our staff and treats them professionally and with courtesy’.
I’ll leave others to speculate on what this means for Coutts, whose parent company is 39 per cent taxpayer-owned. My purpose is to reflect on how this story shows the fundamental breach between liberals and progressives. I use both terms frequently and some people assume they mean roughly the same thing. I consider them antagonistic and probably irreconcilable. To my mind, a liberal belongs to the tradition of Locke, Smith and Mill and asserts the sovereignty of the individual; his freedom of expression, association and conscience; an open society organised around democracy, the rule of law and separated powers; the virtue of liberty, tolerance and pluralism; and the necessity of institutional neutrality, proper process and equal treatment. A progressive, to my mind, is someone who wants many liberal ends but is impatient of liberal means and eventually finds himself advocating illiberal means and ends.
A liberal could never support Coutts’s treatment of Farage. I’m a liberal and, unlike most of the people castigating the elite bank, I dislike Farage and his politics. If you want the full-fat version, I consider the former Brexit party leader an odious demagogue; a faggy-breathed loudmouth; a rubicund rabble-rouser; a phoney populist; a Dulwich dull-wit; a poisonous poker of societal wounds; a hideous weeping pustule on the body politic who oozes resentment like pus over everything he comes into contact with. (Other than that, an alright bloke.) But the thought that his bank account could be cancelled, the account through which he appears to have paid his mortgage, and all because of his political leanings, is more offensive to me than many of the views he has expressed over the years. It is an action thoroughly pernicious, illiberal, and antithetical to a free society: a bank, co-owned by the government, punishing an opposition political figure for holding the wrong views. Nigel Farage has been made a financial unperson.
Right-wingers are urging their opponents to imagine what they would think of a bank doing the same to a Labour MP, a trade union, an LGBTQ organisation or the like. A liberal doesn’t need to imagine: he would feel the same way as he does about Farage. Throwing a man’s life into chaos – hampering his ability to pay the mortgage, meet household bills, and go to the supermarket – because of his political views is wrong in and of itself. Only a sinister authoritarian believes people’s bank accounts should be shut down as a political punishment and only a moral idiot believes doing so is justified provided it applies solely to people he disagrees with.
This week’s Spectator leader, which otherwise isn’t bad, concludes by alluding to the Equality Act and the protected characteristic of belief. That may be what ultimately does for banks engaged in financial cancellation but I am wary of the growing tendency to fall back on this protection. Freedom of conscience and speech were not invented by Harriet Harman in 2010. They belong to a cherished if imperfectly observed tradition in British history and civic culture. And before the what-iffery starts up, let me be clear: my line is the law. If it’s not illegal to say it or do it or plan it, a bank should not be nuking your account over it.
Farage may not be the only victim of this abuse of power. The Scottish blogger Stuart Campbell, who runs the pro-independence website Wings over Scotland, says his personal and savings accounts with a different bank were abruptly closed in June. No reason was given but he has questioned whether politics – Campbell is a left-leaning critic of transgender ideology – had something to do with it. Last September, PayPal closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic website. (Full disclosure: both are run by Spectator columnist Toby Young. Fuller disclosure: I think the Daily Sceptic is batty.) The Free Speech Union is considered Gammon HQ by progressives for advocating for the speech rights of Bad People who hold Bad Views. Earlier this month, Our Duty, a campaign group of parents opposed to gender ideology, claimed it was denied a business account with Metro Bank because ‘the content of your website conflicts with the culture and ideas we are pushing’. It’s almost as if cramming your oversized ESG departments full of hysterics and ideologues can have unfortunate consequences.
Progressives have deployed various justifications for Coutts’s actions. Banks have a right to accept and reject customers as they please. Applying social justice considerations to banking only reflects changing attitudes among the general public. There are lots of banks and anyone who finds their account shuttered can take their money elsewhere. Farage is a bad man with bad politics and therefore deserves this treatment. There is something mesmerising in watching progressives rush to side with banks and champion their right to punish the politically disfavoured. We’re going to need a new quadrant on the political compass for people who want to regulate the financial sector and stand in solidarity with it at the same time.
There are degrees to all this as to all things. Mild progressives struggle to empathise with the man who helped take us out of the EU and other right-wingers with awful right-wing ideas. Others want to keep their options open. Closing Farage’s account: fine. Closing a gender-critical feminist’s account: misogyny. Others still are afraid of their offspring, those progressive monsters they didn’t realise they were raising, and just want a quiet life. But liberals cannot make an accommodation with progressivism because progressivism is the repudiation of liberalism, even if many progressives do not see that. A liberal must reject it wholesale, and with it its caprices, fashions, certainties and intolerances. Progressivism is not liberalism run amok, it is the totalitarian impulse with a #BeKind badge attached.
Comments