Coutts must be held to account over Nigel Farage

When Nigel Farage said Coutts had closed his bank account and claimed political victimisation, many thought he was making it up. The BBC reported that Farage didn’t have enough of a cash balance to sustain an account in the King’s bank and many who oppose his politics suspected this was a TV talk-show host being provocative. But this week he produced a document that proved it was precisely as he claimed. The bank had decided that Farage’s views were ‘at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation’, so he was out.

So what we have here is discrimination masked as ‘inclusivity’, bigotry dressed up as tolerance. The board of Coutts may well have been appalled by the Ukip project but the party got more than 3.5 million votes in the 2015 general election. It is true that Farage is no fan of the European Union and can be crude, even distasteful, in some of the points he makes.