The totalitarian silence of the banks dumping their customers is an affront to free speech

IMAGINE waking up to find your bank has shut you out, your pay cheque frozen, no readies from the cash machine.

No other bank will take your custom. And they won’t tell you why.

How do you pay for your Sky or Virgin subscription? Your mortgage?Child maintenance?

Even beggars on the street accept debit cards these days.

Was it something you said? Have you provoked the iron fist of woke censorship by expressing a view on, say, net zero, gay pride, Brexit, Covid vaccines or 101 gender choices?

Don’t ask. They won’t tell.

Even Nigel Farage, a household name with media muscle, can’t find out why he was dumped after a lifetime with Coutts bank, a NatWest subsidiary half-owned by taxpayers — aka its customers.

Such totalitarian silence is an affront to free speech — ­bedrock of a functioning democracy.

It is a sledgehammer wielded solely by the Left.

And it raises questions about the way a left-led Labour government would run Britain.

Was Harriet Harman’s “kangaroo court” a sign of things to come?

If you are among thousands of small-fry victims whose accounts have been closed without explanation, you face an authoritarian nightmare.

You must switch quickly from slick, face-recognition online transactions to under-the-mattress cash-and-carry.

You are probably being cancelled for something you have said which is absolutely no business of your censorious bank manager.

Ex-Ukip leader Farage, for instance, could be paying the price for Brexit, or his views on mass illegal immigration.

Or taking appearance fees from Russia Today — years before the war in Ukraine made Putin a global pariah.

It might even be a case of “pre-emptive cringe” by bank bosses in terror of draconian US money-laundering rules.

He has asked. Coutts won’t tell him. He has no way of forcing it to explain. The bank simply gave him two months to get out.

Blatant censorship

NatWest heads the list of complaints to the banking watchdog, but it is not alone.

Vicar Richard Fothergill was dumped by the Yorkshire Building Society after writing to it about “transgenderism” on the YBS website.

“I know cancel culture exists and this is my first first-hand experience of it,” he says.

“I wouldn’t want this bullying to happen to anyone else.

“I think they should concentrate on managing money, instead of promoting LGBT ideology.”

YBS refuses to discuss the case but admits it closes customers’ accounts for “rude” or “discriminatory” behaviour.

Free speech campaigner Toby Young is a rare victim who took on the Big Tech bullies and won.

His Free Speech Union and Daily Sceptic newspaper were shut out by online payments giant PayPal last year for “violating the Acceptable Use Policy”. PayPal refused to say how.

Young’s “thought crime” was perhaps to raise doubts about such left-wing issues as shutting schools during lock­down, net zero or gender pronouns. He asked. It wouldn’t say.

Leftie lunacy

Luckily, when this story broke, Young had a full-throated fan club of Tory MPs, ministers, peers and newspapers who expressed outrage at such blatant censorship.

“As so often with these Silicon Valley behemoths, it’s impossible to hold them to account,” said Young.

“I was able to successfully appeal the decision — not via PayPal but in the national media and in the British Parliament.”

Within days, PayPal had reinstated the accounts.

But this was way back last autumn, when the Tories commanded a big majority and a chance of winning a record fourth term.

There is not the slightest chance Sir Keir Starmer, the ex-State prosecutor who tried to jail 21 innocent Sun journalists for writing the truth, would go into battle for the Free Speech Union.

Those days are over.

Labour might soon be sharing power with the Lib Dems, whose ex-leader is Nick Clegg, global boss of Meta, one of the Silicon Valley giants famous for gagging the Great UnWoke.

All of us will be at risk for daring to question leftie lunacy.

The last thing Rishi Sunak must do before turning off the lights is to force faceless banks and Big Tech “behemoths” to come out of hiding and justify their contemptible behaviour.