Dangerous world when access to things like banking are governed by that hate though don't you think?
I suppose what is at stake here is this moral principle: everyone should be entitled to a bank account regardless of their political beliefs.
A problem with making something into an exceptionless moral absolute is that it is usually pretty easy to think of exceptions.
In this instance, and keeping it at the level of individuals, reckon that within 5 minutes I could come up with a very long list of people that I would personally like to deny a banking service to.
But that is a problem in itself because if you do something like that, a line eventually needs to be drawn, and in this case it is difficult to know where.
In the case of free speech, John Stuart Mill drew it at incitement. He famously contrasted a newspaper article in which the author claimed that corn dealers were starvers of the poor, with the same view spoken (or communicated via a placard) right outside a corn dealer’s house. The first is a controversial opinion that should be allowed to enter the public debate, even if the view is false or immoral; the second is, in those circumstances, an act of incitement to violence and unacceptable.
Transplanted into the world of banking, that might mean that characters like, say, Paul Golding or Tommy Robinson might be refused a bank account but maybe not Katie Hopkins (who compared asylum seekers to cockroaches in a Sun article).
Immediately, we can see that this is actually quite tricky, as one can easily envisage someone getting sufficiently wound up just by reading a newspaper article to go out and physically harm a representative of a group that was being targeted in it.
It is also interesting that Mill only focuses on the prospect of physical violence. But what about psychological harm? I never read what he wrote, but haven't some people been critical of Dan Wootton after Caroline Flack committed suicide?
Given these difficulties, should we flip the thing over and admit that the principle should be exceptionless after all?
One thing I do recall is that Roberto Saviano, the author of the wonderful book
Gomorrah, reckons that the UK has the most corrupt banking system in the world:
'It’s not the bureaucracy, it’s not the police, it’s not the politics but what is corrupt is the financial capital'
www.independent.co.uk
So things don't seem to get much better if we head in that direction either. I suppose you could argue that Saviano was highlighting something quite different, namely, the money laundering undertaken by the Mexican cartels, the Italian mafia, and others. But since they also try to use their wealth and power to influence politics, again this is not straightforward. Wonder how many foreign dictators also have UK bank accounts?
Will therefore need to go and have a think about all this. Maybe attempting to draw an analogy with the right to free speech might not have been the best thing to do, for example.
