Free speech and values

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There seems to be a general consensus amongst politicians that banks should not be allowed to refuse to serve customers on the basis of their views, but I wonder how robust that consensus is, and how general its application. We know, for instance, that Nigel Farage certainly believes that businesses should be allowed to refuse to provide services to those who offend his own particular sense of morality, since this was actual UKIP policy when he was its leader. Can we really draw such a clear distinction between views on homosexuality and views on politics as supporters of Farage would suggest (the former being, in their eyes, purely a ‘moral’ rather than political standpoint)? If staff or owners of some companies providing services to the public were to have the legal right, as he suggested, to refuse to provide some of those services on the basis of their interpretation of their religion, should staff in other companies really be obliged to deal with racists and misogynists? At what point do political views diverge so far from socially accepted norms that it becomes reasonable for staff to refuse to serve those who hold them? At the risk of finding myself in breach of Godwin’s Law, would Coutts (in an admittedly completely hypothetical situation) be justified in refusing an account to a Hitler, or a Stalin?

It suits Farage and his supporters, of course, to paint this as a simple issue of freedom of speech, in which Farage, rather incredibly, emerges as the victim. In truth, it’s rather more nuanced than that. If a company is allowed to subscribe to a set of values (and most of them claim to do so these days, apparently) rather than simply being compelled to serve anyone and everyone who meets a set of strictly commercial criteria, then expecting that company to facilitate those who seek to undermine or negate those values defeats the objective. There is a case for compelling any organisation providing services to the public to use only commercial criteria and forget about ‘values’ – but that isn’t the case that Farage and his ilk are making. And nor, I suspect, is it what many would want. He has – not for the first time – succeeded in dominating the news agenda on a completely false prospectus.