Farage’s row with Coutts matters more than you might think
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The ongoing row between Coutts and Nigel Farage has, predictably, turned into a he-said, they-said brouhaha that does nobody any favours. But that does not mean that it isn’t worth tuning into, for the right to a bank account – and a bank’s decision on whether to give you one – does, indeed, matter.
As Lord Macpherson put it yesterday in an interview with LBC, it is “worrying” that the bank appeared to brief reporters last week on the state of Farage’s finances. “Getting a good service out of your bank is difficult enough at the best of times, but if they’re just going to make, on the face of it, fairly arbitrary decisions about your beliefs or politics, I think that is quite a dangerous development,” he said, and it’s difficult to disagree.
One imagines that Coutts would have been better to have kept a dignified silence. Hitting back, even with a leak to the BBC, turned a molehill into a mountain and will now no doubt lead to a national debate, the like of which we haven’t seen since the Belfast bakery lost a discrimination case for refusing to bake a pro-gay marriage cake, or the recriminations after BA asked a staff member to stop wearing her cross.
It is unlikely to be edifying. There is a more interesting question, though, that this row throws up. Regardless of the reason that Coutts (allegedly) gave Farage the shove, it’s clear plenty of work and effort went into deciding what to do. So we decided to draw up a list, and banks can let us know whether or not they’d take their money or not. Sanctioned Russian oligarchs are probably now off the table, but what about Putin-supporting Russians who haven’t quite made it onto the West’s naughty list? What about the connections of regimes that still chop heads off? Or people who think the January 6 riots were an expression of democracy, rather than a violent insurrection?
It gets quite difficult, you see, to decide where to draw the line. Perhaps the lesson is to think twice before you make what are quite big calls.