It’s not just banks forcing their worldview on ordinary people – it’s many of our big institutions and it has to stop
HAVING a bank account is like having access to both running water and a heated home — it’s impossible to function without one.
Which is why the scandal engulfing former Ukip leader Nigel Farage — who suddenly found his Coutts bank account closed because of his pro-Brexit views — is so outrageous.
Removing this basic right from citizens, removing their financial freedom, simply because they happen to hold views that are unfashionable among the elite class is something you’d expect in communist China, not modern, democratic Britain.
And the fact it then took Mr Farage weeks of painstaking research to find out exactly why his bank account was closed — while the BBC simply followed the misleading story provided to them by the bank — also smacks of a totalitarian regime in which the financial and media elites are in cahoots with one another.
The whole thing stinks.
More worryingly, this is just the tip of a very big, ugly iceberg.
The blunt and sad reality in Britain today is that many institutions, like the banks, have become openly political and deeply biased.
Instead of staying politically neutral, they routinely promote a soft Left liberal agenda which reflects the narrow world view of the elite who run Britain but is totally dismissive of everybody else.
From the civil service to universities, from museums to other public bodies, from the NHS to the BBC, too many of our institutions have morphed into overtly political organisations which are clearly driving an agenda.
You see it in how banking companies not only shut out people they disagree with but line up with other corporations on Twitter to tell people to “shop elsewhere” if they don’t share their woke beliefs — like their commitment to gender pronouns.
You see it in how civil servants now openly threaten to strike or leak against ministers who pursue policies which have been demo- cratically endorsed by voters, but which The Blob dislikes — such as clamping down on illegal migration.
Radical woke beliefs
You see it in how the Department for Work and Pensions was recently forced to pay £100,000 to whistle-blower Anna Thomas, who revealed it had been training staff in radical woke beliefs.
You see it in how you can no longer take public transport in London, use the NHS or visit a university campus in this country without being bombarded by rainbow flags and Orwellian billboards telling you how to think and speak.
You see it in how our museums and galleries now routinely fall over themselves to apologise for our history while simultaneously denouncing anything and everything as “racist”.
You see it in how our schools have also gone all-in on woke ideology, telling our kids they can identify with dozens of genders and should apologise for their “white privilege”.
You see it when the BBC is reprimanded for failing to show sufficient interest in ordinary people.
You see it in how our supposedly cash-strapped government and NHS are spending millions on woke “diversity and inclusion” projects, and subjecting staff to “anti-racism” training, even as studies show these programmes are flawed and have little to no effect.
And you see it in how our political institutions, whether led by the Conservatives or Labour, now lean much further to the cultural Left than the average person; where MPs look on with bemusement when ordinary British people ask for things such as reduced immigration, a tougher approach on crime and an end to cancel culture.
These are all examples of how an utterly stifling and oppressive culture is trickling out of the institutions, quietly but ruthlessly curtailing free speech, silencing dissenters and making it crystal clear that unless you sign up to this consensus then you and your family might well be next.
Why is it happening?
It’s happening because the banks and the institutions are now dominated by the likes of Dame Alison Rose, the now disgraced former CEO of NatWest, which owns Coutts, who has been forced to resign.
They are the members of an elite graduate class who are drifting much further to the cultural Left than the rest of us and taking the institutions with them.
Wielding immense economic and cultural power, they are using the institutions to impose their narrow world view on the rest of us.
This is why more than half of British people now feel they cannot say what they really think, and why our trust in the institutions is collapsing.
In fact, so strong is the groupthink in the institutions that many of the people who work in them — and many of the BBC journalists who report on them — do not even realise how political they are.
They mistakenly assume everybody thinks the exact same way they do then sneer at anybody who does not.
They are simply incapable of grasping the fact some people might hold different views to their own, and so they either try to shut them down or write it all off as “misinformation”.
And the bank’s political discrimination towards Mr Farage should be no surprise at all.
This is because this new elite are also the most politically intolerant of all — they are the most likely to unfriend and distance themselves from people who, like Mr Farage, happen to hold different views to their own.
Like Alison Rose and the BBC’s Simon Jack — the journalist she leaked details of Mr Farage’s account to — the new elite sit alongside one another at dinner parties deriding much of the rest of the country.
This is why apologising to Mr Farage and replacing the CEO of NatWest is a good start but nowhere near enough.
What we now need in this country is a full and frank debate not just about the banks but something much deeper and more sinister — the politicisation of all our institutions.
Only then, and only by reforming them, will people begin to feel their values are represented in the corridors of power and that they cannot be stripped of their bank account and self-respect.
The sooner that debate starts, the better for all of us.