Nigel Farage fears the UK has been lost to woke ideology – and those who do not conform to this worldview risk being completely cut off from society. The former Brexit Party leader’s warning came after he claimed this week his bank accounts were closed “without explanation” in what he suggested was an attack on his “traditionalist and conservative” beliefs.
He said: “I fear Britain is lost. This was brought home to me when I was recently told by my bank that it is closing all my accounts without explanation.
“It is impossible to function without a bank account. It should alarm everybody that a bank has the power to punish those it considers to have erred or strayed.”
Writing in The Telegraph, he added: “I am going to take some time off to work out what to do. But all this makes me wonder: has Britain gone so far down the road of authoritarianism that it is too late to turn back?”
The former MEP has suggested closing his bank accounts is part of a wider establishment plot to force him out of the country after seven banks refused to let him have an account, something he blasted as “totally outrageous”.
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On Thursday evening, he went a step further, claiming others who share his worldview face being treated in the same “stressful” way.
Speaking on his GB News show, the Brexiteer said: “It seems to be all one way. It seems to be all against people who have traditionalist or conservative views. There is something totally outrageous going on here.”
The former Brexit Party leader went on to issue a direct warning to his loyal viewers that anything they said on Facebook or Twitter could come back to haunt them and land them in a similar position.
He said: “Anything you say on Facebook or Twitter may result in you losing your bank accounts too. That is, I think, how scary this whole thing is.”
It comes as an Anglican church leader accused the Yorkshire Building Society of closing his account within 14 days after he criticised its alleged alignment with transgender “ideology” in an online feedback message.
The Rev Richard Fothergill, 62, accused the bank, which has three million customers across the UK, of bullying after it snubbed him following 17 years of loyal custom.
The vicar told The Times: “I wasn’t even aware that our relationship had a problem. They are a financial house – they are not there to do social engineering. I think they should concentrate their efforts on managing money, instead of promoting LGBT ideology.
“I know cancel culture exists and this is my first first-hand experience of it. I wouldn’t want this bullying to happen to anyone else. I was polite all the way through. I was pointing out that they are a financial house – surely they should just be worrying about financial issues.”
The building society disputes Rev Fothergill’s version of events and told him in a note it had a “zero tolerance approach to discrimination” and that their relationship had “irrevocably broken down”.
A spokesman for the building society said: “We never close savings accounts based on different opinions regarding beliefs or feedback provided by our customers. We only ever make the difficult decision to close a savings account if a customer is rude, abusive, violent or discriminates in any way, based on the specific facts, comments and behaviour in each case.”
Commenting on the case, Toby Young, the Free Speech Union’s founder, said: “People who’ve been debanked contact the Free Speech Union all the time, but even I was shocked by this story. If you respond to a bank’s request for feedback in good faith you shouldn’t lose your account if you say something it doesn’t like.
“That‘s the kind of thing we’d expect to happen in Communist China, not a supposedly free country like ours.”
