THE CITY VIEW

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 virtuesignalling 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