Contrary to group think, businesses have a right to choose clients
As Shakespeare would have surely written were he alive today, what a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to debank a former UKIP leader. The fallout from Nigel Farage’s highly publicised spat with Coutts and, in turn, Natwest, will continue for some time yet, but the details of the saga are less interesting than the philosophy.
It has become trendy in recent weeks for people to say that, well, no bank should have the right to terminate a customer. Commentators from left and right have nodded at each other sagely; Farage himself has found himself in common cause with Gina Miller, arguably Britain’s best known anti-Brexit campaigner.
Except banks do, just as any private business does. The issue is not that Coutts ditched Farage; it’s that they failed to be transparent about it.
In a competitive marketplace, there should be nothing to stop a bank indeed making a virtue of who its customers are. Far from Go Woke Go Broke, an appropriately virtue-signalling lender may well make a killing out of advertising that it won’t accept clients like Farage. Go Woke, Don’t Go Broke? After all, there should in theory be plenty of other banks willing to take him on and offer him banking services.
The problem is that Coutts, for all their ESG committees in the background filing 40-page dossiers on individuals like Farage, lack the balls to do it in public. And that, there, is how insidious right-think creeps into the corporate world. Quiet committees. Growing, unchallenged departments. And CEOs and HR bosses either too distracted or too carried away to prevent political thinking infiltrating what should be corporate decision making.
If Coutts want to debank Farage and a host of other customers whose views don’t match up with whatever imagined values the bank has, go for it. Stick it on a poster. Send your customers a purity test, or ask them for their views on the Rwanda plan. It’s a free market. And the marketplace, we suspect, would let Coutts knew what they thought of the plan pretty quickly.