As I sat down to write this column, an old friend let me know he’d just been ‘debanked’. That is, he’d received a letter from his high-street bank notifying him it was closing his accounts. ‘Following a review, we’ve made the decision that you will not be able to bank with us any longer,’ it said, not even bothering to put the word ‘difficult’ before ‘decision’. It contained no detail about this ‘review’ or why, on completing it, the bank had decided to close his accounts. The only thing he can think of is that he used to be a high-ranking member of the Brexit party. He was told he had until 27 August to make alternative arrangements.

My friend is a member of one of Britain’s fastest-growing minorities: people losing access to financial services because their bank or payment provider disapproves of their political views. The most high-profile figure debanked so far is Nigel Farage (I don’t believe the BBC’s report that he had insufficient funds in the account), but there are plenty of others: Claire Fox, life peer and former Brexit MEP; Konstantin Kisin and Frances Foster’s Triggernometry podcast; Richard Tice’s Reform party; Stuart Campbell, an SNP blogger with gender-critical views; and yours truly – defenestrated by PayPal in September.

Banks and payment processors are supposed to give 60 days’ notice when they close your account, but one chap I know of discovered he’d been debanked only when he tried to pay for his groceries and his card was declined. In our increasingly cashless society, this is a brutally effective way of cancelling someone and is bound to have a chilling effect on free speech. Like many of the most fiendish forms of censorship, it was invented by the Chinese Communist party.

The Free Speech Union has been lobbying the Treasury to stamp out this sinister trend and it looks as though Jeremy Hunt will do something. But will it be enough? As I understand it, the plan is to amend the Payment Services Regulations, prohibiting firms from closing the accounts of customers who are exercising their right to lawful free speech and requiring such firms to set out their reasons in more detail if they do decide to close an account. The hope is that these changes will enable anyone who is debanked to lodge a complaint with the Financial Conduct Authority or take legal action.

But banks and other payment services providers may simply ignore the new rules, just as they’ve been ignoring the 60 days’ notice rule. (PayPal gave me no notice.) At present, they almost never admit they’re closing an account for political reasons and instead cite nebulous ‘policies’ that often contain hundreds of clauses without being any more specific. I fear that even if the Treasury does change the regulations, companies will continue to debank, quibble over how much the ‘more detail’ rule requires them to disclose, and accept the occasional fine or compensation payment as the price of doing business.

The fundamental problem is that these firms have too many incentives to continue cancelling awkward customers. Becoming a Stonewall Diversity Champion, celebrating Pride and adopting a ‘trans inclusive’ employment policy are inexpensive ways of getting good PR – much needed when you’re offering savers an interest rate of 0.85 per cent and charging mortgage customers 6.5 per cent. But you can’t very well endorse the ‘LGBTQIA’ agenda and not debank people who express their disapproval of it. What if Stop Funding Hate finds out? You’ll be accused of ‘woke-washing’ and lined up for a boycott campaign.

Getting a gold star from groups claiming to represent oppressed minorities also ratchets up your Environmental, Social and Governance score, one reason ExxonMobil has more ESG points than Tesla. And it appeals to the moral vanity of executives and board members, enabling them to tell their Guardian-reading wives they’re doing their bit to help the disadvantaged. Needless to say, these paragons don’t include in that category their office cleaners, who are probably earning less a year than their bosses pay in school fees.

Given that we can’t rely on politicians, the answer must be to adopt the other side’s tactics. That means pro-free-speech shareholder activism and organising boycotts of our own. By God, it’s been effective in the case of Bud Light. Since the beer in question announced a sponsorship arrangement with a trans activist on 1 April, its parent company, Anheuser-Busch, has lost $27 billion of value. The only way to solve this problem is to make the cost of debanking higher than the cost of ignoring left-wing political activists.