It has now been established beyond any reasonable doubt that Natwest Bank closed Nigel Farage’s bank accounts solely and entirely because some people working inside that organisation disagreed with Mr. Farage’s political views.
It is, of course, not a crime to disagree with Nigel Farage. It is a cinch that across the upper tiers of British and Irish society, the people who matter disagree with him on almost everything. But nor should his views be dismissed as they so often are: Across electoral tests ranging from the Brexit referendum to various EU elections, large swathes of the British public have spoken with their votes and said something that the upper tiers of Irish and British society are repelled by: We agree with Nigel.
What is democracy, at its very heart, if not the right to disagree fundamentally with those who hold the power in the society in which you live? The right to hold, and advocate for, unpopular and unfashionable things is absolutely fundamental to living in a country where you can choose your own rulers. And in Farage’s case, the things he has advocated for have proven stubbornly popular over the years.
Which is why, I’m nearly certain, he had to go from Natwest.
When he kicked up a stink about it initially, the reaction from most of the chattering classes on both sides of the Irish sea was a mixture of amusement and schadenfreude. Amusement, at the jumped up little fellow who thought he could bank with Coutts and probably didn’t have the money for it. Who did he think he was, Royalty?
And Schadenfreude, at the symbolic exclusion from polite society of a man they detest with every fibre of their being. It was heads we win, tails you lose: If Farage had been “debanked” for not having enough money, then what had he to complain about? And if he had been “debanked” for having the wrong sort of views well, proper order. The only proper attitude to Nigel Farage, as far as so-called polite society is concerned, is contempt.
Which is why we owe him a debt of gratitude. For the entirety of his career, he has worn that contempt as a badge of honour, and embraced it. And unlike many who share his views, he has been unwilling to make any compromises in order to be liked by the sort of people who despise the things he believes in. In this case, for example, the easier thing would undoubtedly have been to say nothing and find a new bank – but by refusing to go quietly, it has ended up being the Natwest CEO, Dame Allison Rose, who needs to find herself a new bank.
And the Farage row has won a victory not only for himself, but for others: Because if they can’t do it to Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and just about everything else that people like Fintan O’Toole consider to be pestilent, then it has become much harder to do it to any of the rest of us.
There is no doubt in my mind, for example, that had they gotten away with doing what they did to Nigel Farage, then just about anyone prominent who stubbornly hangs onto the view that men and women are born, not assigned, would have found themselves without a bank in short order. The same would be true of anyone in Ireland prominently associated with protests about immigration.
That, after all, is how society works now: The ruling liberal order is maintained through a strict regime of incentives and punishments. If you want to keep your job and your nice life, keep your mouth shut.
We owe Farage for challenging that, and preserving the very essence of what it is supposed to be to live in a free society: The right to say loudly and proudly, without fear of punishment, that the people who are ruling your country are buffoons.
And that goes right to the heart of the problem: Modern liberalism can withstand just about anything but mockery. It relies for survival on the notion that its adherents are very serious people who’ve thought about everything more deeply than you have: Hence that abundant phrase, when you dare disagree with one of them on a topic: Educate yourself.
The entire construct of modern western liberalism is that you are ruled by an educated, intelligent elite that simply knows more than you do: About the climate. About immigration. About sex education. About how many genders there are. When these things are debated seriously, the argument from authority is deployed early and often: The science says; experts agree; nobody serious believes.
Farage has always been hated precisely because he punctures that and appeals to something more enduring: The common wisdom of the ordinary person who knows that what they are hearing is nonsense, but lacks the confidence to argue with “experts agree”. That, above all, is why they hate him, and why they try to shut him up at every opportunity.
It is also why, as in this case, he keeps winning. Lest this sound like an homage, there are many things this writer differs from Farage on – Brexit being just one. But in Farage versus Natwest, as in so many things before, he has once again shown that his existence is something for which every true democrat should be thankful.
If they’d gotten away with doing this to him, the rest of us were next in line.