Banks would be better off cancelling parts of their own culture first - David Behrens

His cash was the same colour as yours or mine but its hue evidently clashed with those on the rainbow flag with which the society had been virtue signalling its support for people of diversity.

Its managers piped up when Mr Fothergill wrote to them to complain about this. He hadn’t gone out of his way to do so; they had asked him for “feedback” in the needy way that everyone does these days. So he replied with a few choice sentences wondering whether it was really a building society’s place to promote gender ideology.

But here’s the thing about feedback: companies only really want it when it’s positive. Mr Fothergill’s view did not chime with the society’s “zero tolerance approach to discrimination” – so it replied by telling him their relationship had “irrevocably broken down” and that his account of 17 years’ good standing was being closed forthwith.

“They’re a financial house – they’re not there to do social engineering,” bristled the cleric as he licked his wounds and took his business elsewhere.

Some might say the same about the clergy; people’s private lives are not their affair, either – and Mr Fothergill’s stance does not strike me as especially Christian. But that isn’t the point.

Neither is the fact that this is a storm in a teacup stirred by right-wing factions and served up as an assault on free speech.

No, the issue here is that if banks are going to seize the cancel culture climate to claim the moral high ground, they had better start cancelling parts of their own culture first. There are far worse organisations to be in business with than a bunch of religious radicals in the Lake District and I don’t see many of them being shown the door.

Let’s run down a few of them… In the last few years, at least five international banks have been accused of moving dirty money despite knowing it was acquired illegally; one has confessed to bribing foreign officials in exchange for underwriting billions of dollars in bond deals; and four have faced charges of manipulating American furlough grants to rake in bigger fees.

On top of that, Credit Suisse has collapsed under a litany of scandals including allegations that it held $8bn in the accounts of criminals, dictators and rights abusers.

All of that – not to mention the wholesale closure of high street banks in Britain that are actually useful to people but which don’t earn enough money – is apparently acceptable practice yet disagreement on a point of principle is not.

The Yorkshire Building Society – which I grant you is probably not the first recourse of international money launderers – insists that it never closes savings accounts based on different opinions or beliefs; only if a customer is rude or “discriminates in any way”. But that’s a highly subjective judgement.

Richard Fothergill is not the only person to have discovered this. Barclays had to pay more than £20,000 last month to settle a court case brought by Christian ministry groups whose accounts were closed when objections were raised to their support for conversion therapy practices. And a former Brexit MEP claimed MetroBank closed his account and then refused his daughter a mortgage on which he was to be the guarantor.

Ministers are said to be concerned about all this; no-one should be denied a bank account by virtue of holding the “wrong” opinions, they say. Legislation or at least strictures are therefore likely. But where is the intervention on banks who hike interest rates on mortgages but not on savings? Where are the laws that will compel them to reimburse customers who fall victims to scams they could have helped prevent? The number of such cases is rising faster than Richard Fothergill’s blood pressure and fewer than one victim in four gets all their money back.

In a sector with so few scruples, it’s impossible to believe that dissenting views, however unfashionable, are genuine deal-breakers. What we’re seeing is a hollow PR exercise that will lose more business than it attracts.

So forget the bank that likes to say yes – I’ll take the one that just shuts up and minds its own business.