The big push to digital currency is about convenience and speed, we are told. But it also gives powerful forces – both inside and outside of official government – vast control over not just markets, but access to markets. Markets that are critical to everyday life for everyday individuals.
The following are excerpts from UnHerd on just the implications for what a future of all-digital, cashless society might look like for those who dare to question authority:
Let’s call her Laura. In September, Laura was out in Leeds City Centre, buying some bits, when her card was declined. Funny, she thought. She definitely wasn’t in the red. But these things happen, so she left the shop, tinting crimson, and dashed towards the nearest cashpoint.
But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.
Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.
She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.
“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”
He read out:
“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”
Could she have her money? No.
But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.
This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos.
Nearly a month on, she received a letter from Santander:
Under the terms and conditions… we can withdraw banking facilities at any time, and in line with company policy we don’t give further details.
The account had been closed. Without apparent irony, the balance had been appended as a cheque.
‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.
By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.
Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.
Read the UnHerd piece in its entirety here.