Just when you thought things couldn’t get any madder, you find out the following: at the Co-operative bank, if you’re a murderer of women you can keep your account, but if you accurately describe women as adult human females, you can’t.
According to news reports, the Co-op bank, which prides itself on being super-ethical, allowed the serial killer Rose West to keep her account. But then it debanked a feminist group on the basis that it is hostile to the rights of transgender people.
A new level of lunacy has been reached
We don’t know which feminist group it was, or what exactly it says about trans rights. But we can hazard a guess. Feminists are pilloried for the mildest of blasphemies against trans ideology. Even saying ‘trans women are not women’ – a straight-up scientific fact – is enough to get the mob tapping their pitchforks on your door these days.
So it is possible we now live in a world where someone who collaborated in the torture and murder of at least nine young women is welcome at an ethical bank, while those who say ‘women don’t have penises’ are not.
Reader, a new level of lunacy has been reached.
Apparently the Co-op bank considered closing West’s account when it carried out a review of customers with criminal records ten years ago. But it decided that the monster from Gloucester should stay as a customer because the account was mainly being used by her daughter, and she would have been unfairly inconvenienced if the account disappeared.
No such concern about inconvenience was extended to the unnamed feminist group. Those wicked women were unceremoniously debanked by the Co-op in 2017. According to an internal ‘Values and Ethics report’, the feminists were turned down for an account because they ‘actively declined the rights of the transgender community’.
So this is ‘ethics’. This is what the corporate elites mean when they talk about values and doing the right thing. They mean they are willing to host bank accounts in the name of one of the most notorious murderers of modern times but not in the name of those political Jezebels who insist – brace yourselves – that sex is real.
We can now see just how politically motivated, and morally twisted, debanking is. As it happens, I’m fine with Rose West’s Co-op account staying open, given her daughter was the chief user. Rose herself is hardly going to rock up at a Co-op ATM anytime soon to withdraw some cash. The West kids suffered enough at the hands of their deranged parents – let’s not add to their pain by denying them access to a bank account.
And yet where the Co-op was willing to make a humane allowance for a child of Rose West, it refused to do the same for a feminist group that holds supposedly un-PC views.
Not punishing Rose West’s daughter was the right call, but punishing outspoken feminists absolutely was not. It stinks of corporate tyranny. ‘We will not associate with those moral lepers’, the Co-op was essentially saying, which is weird given its slogan is: ‘Ethical then, now and always.’
Debanking is a sinister outgrowth of cancel culture. It was Nigel Farage who brought it to public attention when he exposed the politically motivated maltreatment he suffered at the hands of the virtue-signalling bosses of Coutts. We’ve since discovered that many more people have been refused bank accounts on the grounds of their ‘problematic’ views.
Witless radical leftists have either cheered the banks’ treatment of ‘controversial’ people or they’ve shrugged a collective shoulder over it all. This is so dim. Having a bank account is essential to modern life. It is obscene that unaccountable bosses are deciding who is deserving of such a necessity and who is not. People should not be cast out of everyday life just because some wealthy suit in the City doesn’t like what they think or say.
Every big business is talking about ethics right now. We should remind them that there is nothing ethical in punishing people for exercising their freedom of conscience. Respect for individual liberty should be the guiding ethic in Britain, in business, politics, everywhere.
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