Farage versus Coutts

People will see this case as a proxy for their own imagined future humiliation at the hands of bureaucrats and feel a cathartic anger.

Many were sceptical when Nigel Farage first publicised his dispute with his bank. When the BBC reported the smears about Farage’s finances, which were offered by a senior executive at Coutts, there was delight in some quarters that it may have been turning out that he was simply being a drama queen. Once the former UKIP leader’s subject access request was fulfilled and The Telegraph reported its content, denial was no longer a viable cope for those who were incapable of distinguishing between the abstract problem and their dislike for the Brexiteer.

Some doubled down, said it was right that his views were not allowed and drew weak parallels with other forms of generally accepted privilege loss, such as bans from football grounds for those guilty of racial abuse. Others complained about a “posh private bank” and adopted a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face. The more competent sophists pivoted to quirky sounding alternative takes that only really smart people would grasp, like ‘ackshully the real story here is about the 2008 banking crisis and Brexit’.

The troubles we have in our banking industry may be a story. It may well be a bigger story than this. But this story is not that one, this story is about senior executive types in grey suits saying if you think X then you are unacceptable.

The reason it has resonated as a scandal is that lots of people either have views which cross over one way or another with Mr. Farage’s (or have views which they know are considered to be on the margins even when very different from his) and object to institutions, which just so happened to be a posh bank on this occasion, awarding themselves the smug authority to decide which opinions are legitimate. Further, they are willing to use all the petty power they have in their arsenal to assassinate people with a death by a thousand cuts of little inconveniences.

People are not just angry about this because they admire Farage or feel a great deal of personal empathy with him (I am sure he will do just fine), but they will see this case as a proxy for their own imagined future humiliation at the hands of bureaucrats and feel a cathartic anger. The story is ‘did you know companies may have massive email trails about you, deconstructing your character and opinions, and deciding whether you’re good enough to give them your custom’.

It reminds many of the shallow pseudo political-ethical ‘values’ the big wigs at their own bank, university, or employer, drone about. Corporate elites who believe their views, which they’ve held passionately since the last PowerPoint slideshow they saw about it, are in some way the norm and any deviation from them is a HR matter.

There is a lot of folly in this. That we have hordes of grey-suited officials across the country who have decided that their professional remit includes formal judgement on the acceptability of your opinions. That the BBC could so easily swallow the excitable (and false) reports that it was all just a technical financial matter and not political. That so many can make desperate intellectual contortions to keep the dream alive that Farage is not going to add this to his win column. But none more so than our inability to consider current affairs from a non-tribal perspective.