When summarising the life of Nigel Farage, future historians may well look no further than focusing on just one week in June 2023. A screenwriter could use the events to succinctly demonstrate the persecution he has suffered for his defence of the national sovereignty of the UK.

Communism came out of the closet in the UK this week. We all knew it was happening, we just didn’t expect such a blunt instrument – financial persecution – to announce its arrival on the national stage.

Things started on a high. Brexit’s seventh anniversary was celebrated on June 23, but the real ‘power for the people’ moment was to follow on June 27 at the Television and Radio Industries Club (TRIC) Awards where Farage won a complete and vindicating victory.

Formed in 1931, TRIC’s mission statement reads that it exists, ‘To promote mutual understanding and goodwill amongst those engaged in the audio, visual, communication and allied industries.’ It’s a worthy goal and their website speaks of praising ‘diverse talent’ and bringing the industry together, similar to Australia’s Logie Awards.

Notably, all of the awards are voted on not by club members, but by the public. The TRIC awards are one of the few opportunities the public has to give direct, transparent feedback to the broadcasting industry, an industry that holds immense sway over culture and politics. The industry largely uses internal assessment methods when analysing its impact and viewership; Farage compared it to ‘marking one’s own homework’. Media awards voted on by the public matter – perhaps more than ever – as we watch the Oscars becoming overrun by identity politics and discarding more and more viewers in the process.

However, there wasn’t a lot of goodwill and mutual understanding to be found when the public voted and crowned Farage the winner of the TRIC News Presenter of the Year award. The prestigious win shouldn’t have surprised the media elite in attendance at the awards ceremony; the Press Gazette had just declared GB News to be the fastest-growing top news brand for May 2023.

Regardless, it was an unwelcome disruption to the evening’s narrative and no time was wasted in getting straight down to the business of sabotaging the win. An angry media elite went low and booed Farage on stage while he accepted his award – how dare the viewing public like Nigel Farage! It was a scene you’d expect at a high school full of mean girls, not the Great Room of Grosvenor House.

In previous times, this would have been a shocking affront to our deeply held values of decency and good sportsmanship at an awards ceremony but not for the current crop of Britain’s Fourth Estate. Free speech and diversity do not extend to diversity of thought, that’s a given. TRIC, like a majority of the media, is only interested in diverse and free expression of the same opinions – over and over again – a sort of parroted rote learning. Not so much a flourishing marketplace of ideas as a bargain basement, TRIC is set upon fusing the Fourth Estate with the other three.

TRIC’s handling of Farage’s win has been ambivalent, to say the least. The announcement apparently appeared on Twitter, before being deleted and then reappearing. Make of this what you will. There remains the possibility that this could be the first award category to be cancelled when a group didn’t like the winner, taking their bat and going home.

Everything then took a drastic turn for the worse. On June 29 GB News viewers could have been forgiven for feeling like they had stepped into a real-life scene from Dr Zhivago. Farage shared that the his bank accounts and those of his immediate family were being closed in what he deemed to be an act of ‘serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system’. ‘The establishment is trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts,’ he said.

The week that had started so well for Farage ended with him contemplating leaving the UK to seek political asylum, while officially defining a new movement in politics: debanking.

Like Brexit, debanking has the potential to be the defining issue of British politics for the next couple of decades. History, like mathematics, is about pattern spotting and there is a pattern to be found here; Farage is Britain’s political weathervane, at huge cost to himself.

Farage claimed the bank was closing his accounts and those of his immediate family members for ‘commercial reasons’ with no further explanation forthcoming. Farage is a father of four and has to date kept his family out of the public eye. Punishing the family of a political opponent is straight out of the Soviet playbook – in real life, the woman who inspired Pasternak’s character Lara in Dr Zhivago was sent to a gulag to punish him. Putin is alleged to have punished the leader of the Wagner coup by threatening his family, a tactic we are now seeing being adopted in Britain. Both Farage and his family are being ‘de-personed’.

Following Farage’s claims, other conservatives in the UK were quick to come forward and share that they too had had their own experiences with debanking. This group included members of UKIP, the account of Reverend Richard Fothergill, the Reclaim party, and other political commentators.

‘The ascent of money,’ writes Niall Ferguson, ‘has been essential to the ascent of man.’ No one can survive in the world without a bank account or thrive without access to the modern fractional-reserve banking system. Conservatives must fight for bank accounts to be treated as an unalienable right, protected by law from political interference.

This is a whole new plan of persecution, incredibly effective. There has been remarkable naivety among conservatives about the lengths to which the far left will go to maintain power. This naivety should end now. What next, re-education centres for those challenging the official narrative?

All too often conservatives lament, like Job, that the latest blow is insufferable, like ‘something from Soviet Russia’. In Britain, Communism isn’t ‘coming’, it’s arrived. If leaders of the conservative movement ignore the plight of the Farage family and others in the UK they’re simply raising the white flag and wallowing in paralysing angst.

Little has been done by conservative parties in Australia and the UK to support parental and other basic rights. To not stand up for the banking rights of conservatives is another betrayal.

The upshot is that the scariest part of debanking isn’t the debanking itself; it’s that it’s proceeding unchallenged.