One of the most worrying problems in this modern Britain – laid low by 13 years of harsh Tory rule, bewildered by social media, blighted by social division – is that we now struggle to recognise a real victim when we see one.
But not today. Today, in the wake of the passing of the government’s obscene illegal migration bill, the attention is back where it should be – on those who are truly suffering. Yes, poor Nigel Farage and his fight with Coutts, the top, top, people’s bank, has made the front pages of the Mail and the Telegraph. True, their record in fighting the corner of the downtrodden is not great; but today marked a great stride forward.
It is truly a wretched story. As Oscar Wilde might have observed, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. Farage has for many years had a bank account at Coutts. In this time, despite him not having quite as much money as top, top people are supposed to have, it has humoured him by letting him keep the account; but now Coutts has said that he can’t any longer – and that has really upset Farage.
Sources told the BBC and others he had fallen below the financial threshold required, and was offered a standard compensatory account at NatWest, which owns Coutts. Farage maintained that his Coutts account had been shut for political reasons, and revealed that nine other lenders wouldn’t take his money either.
And because Farage is Farage, he wouldn’t let it rest. Yesterday, after a subject access request to Coutts, he said, via the Telegraph, that Coutts closed his account because his views “do not align” with their values.
He cites minutes of a meeting of Coutts’ wealth reputational risk committee last November, which said it “did not think continuing to bank NF [Nigel Farage] was compatible with Coutts, given his publicly stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation … This was not a political decision, but one centred around inclusivity and purpose.”
Farage says the notes claim that he is perceived as “racist and xenophobic”: an “appalling slur”.
And there it is. True injustice in plain sight. No wonder Rishi Sunak has tweeted his support. Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury, has got involved by writing a letter to the Financial Conduct Authority about the treatment of “politically exposed” bank customers such as Farage. For what point is there to a government that doesn’t protect the weakest in society?
It’s wrong to laugh at the plight of someone who so loves to rub shoulders with the super rich, be it Arron Banks or Donald Trump, being dumped by a bank for top, top people because they think he’s just a bit, well, grubby.
It’s wrong to laugh at seeing this champion of capitalism, a former City trader whose father was a stockbroker and brother a broker, laid low by the alleged decision of a super-capitalistic, super-private bank to make a commercial decision to try to limit its customer base to people it might happily admit through the front rather than the rear entrance.
Wrong again to stand by while a man who always seeks to set such limits on where other people can go and what they can do is excluded from the private bank of his choice. Has no one here read Magna Carta, or watched it on YouTube?
We can’t be definitive about the racism claim. That’s often made – and it’s for Farage, his mates and his God to know and to process as they will. Coutts, in its now public internal document, observes that Farage’s “commentary remains within the law regarding hate speech and arguably on the right side of ‘glorifying or promoting harmful behaviour’”.
But we can agree that surely it’s wrong to consider his 2014 statement that any “normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door” and confuse that with any hint of xenophobia.
Some will point to the infamous “breaking point” anti-migrant poster during the Brexit campaign, with its megaphone untruth of using a photo of migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015 to raise the fear of a mass invasion of Dover. But xenophobia and that kind of toxic rabble-rousing are different. As to how, that’s a discussion for another time, but they are. And so it is right that Farage, in time of need, has our support.
It’s all so sad. The law prevents private entities from shunning customers on grounds of sex, race, disability or gender, and everyone has the right to a bank account. But where is the law protecting rightwing poison hucksters, who’ve made themselves so objectionable that even hyper capitalists don’t want to touch them?
Farage has his devotees and his show on GB News, but it must hurt when a financial institution that really loves money says “your money is no good here” – and really means it. Coutts, meanwhile, surely risks opprobrium. Proper banks launder ill-gotten gains and fight for the stewardship of oligarch cash. Here it is weeding out undesirables.
It’s a world in flux and crisis, but we are not without agency. If we all fall in behind Farage, we can turn this around.
Hugh Muir is the Guardian’s executive editor, Opinion
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