The cashless society: a dystopian loss of privacy and personal autonomy

“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”. That aphorism which, in every context except the lives of voluntarily enclosed monks and nuns belonging to contemplative religious orders, invites scepticism originated in a video published in 2016 by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The video was a summary of an essay written by Ida Auken, a Danish politician, originally entitled “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

The essay was later given a more reassuring title and the WEF thought it politic to issue a “clarification” that it has no stated goal to have individuals “own nothing and be happy”, insisting that its Agenda 2030 framework includes individual ownership of private property. For the avoidance of doubt, it should be acknowledged that Davos Man has no hair-shirt inclinations, inhabiting a milieu of champagne-fuelled luxury in which it is good manners to avoid any overt hint of compassion for those so deprived as to own only one private jet. 

That is not to say he is blind to the merits of other people being compelled to curb their appetites; since the fleet of private jets that carves a massive carbon footprint on every collective flight to the Davos junket damages the environment, it is only fitting that the little people outside that circle of enlightenment – more accurately, entitlement – should be made to compensate for this necessary infraction of climate protocols by driving electric cars or, if they cannot afford that expense, at least scrapping their petrol-fuelled vehicles.

Behind the caviar and après-ski façade of Davos lurks a strong inclination to asceticism; but Davos Man has the humility to recognise his incapacity, and that of a mere 3,000 billionaires worldwide, to change things radically – for that ambition, it is necessary to conscript the masses. 

In the joint worldview of the WEF, the IMF, the OECD, the EU, the UN and the other forums in which intrinsically stupid but powerful people impose their groupthink on the global population, it has long been recognised that it is time the Common Man piped down and knew his place, an impression aggravated by the rise of political parties known as “populist”, implying an insane and irresponsible agenda to implement the wishes of electorates.

Among the more powerful agencies enforcing the policies of the large corporations that control the globalist forums are the banks. The banks have the advantage of being shameless, armoured with rhinoceros-hide indifference to public opinion: Lehman Brothers, RBS –  bailed out by the mug punters at the behest of governments. There has been a dramatic, if largely unobserved, revolution in the philosophy of financial institutions, so that they are now staffed by cultural Marxists hostile to genuine capitalism: formerly temples of free-market capitalism, they are now workers’ soviets staffed by public school revolutionaries.

The debanking of Nigel Farage blew the lid off the secretive world of bonus-incentified socialism. The legal requirement for Coutts to disclose its file on Farage via a Subject Access Request revealed staff at this formerly elite bank expressing views regarding a customer which included a desire to push him out of a moving car. This was because his political views – which were in no way any of his bankers’ business – were deemed offensive by the snowflakes running Coutts. And why, incidentally, is Alison Rose, disgraced former CEO of NatWest, still a Dame of the British Empire when Post Office boss Paula Vennells has been stripped of her CBE?

The Farage affair led to the revelation that 10,000 people had been debanked by NatWest. If other institutions have been following similar policies, the overall UK total must be enormous. So much for individuals’ accounts, but last year alone UK banks closed the accounts of 140,000 British limited companies. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a small number of them had been guilty of money laundering or similar offences, are we seriously expected to believe that 140,000 British firms, in one year alone, were engaged in criminal activity?

Without a bank account, no business can survive. Since these were clearly not huge household-name corporations, it is evident that banks last year must have destroyed more than 100,000 British SMEs. We may be confident that this work earned the hatchet men lavish bonuses. What kind of capitalism is this?

Banks seem to go out of their way to disoblige, harass and dismiss their customers. Their activities are directed towards driving people into internet banking, with all the hazards that implies. Since 2015, banks have closed 5,970 branches across the UK, amounting to more than half the number open in 2015.

But the ultimate manifestation of “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” is the drive to abolish cash. The cashless society, represented as a convenient, innovative development, is actually a sinister dystopian prospect. Cash in hand is a guarantor of privacy. If every transaction is electronically recorded, the customer has no privacy, but is entirely at the mercy of banks and, ultimately, the government. 

How long before a captive clientele is subjected to censorship of transactions by imperious algorithms? “Transaction declined – the book you are attempting to buy does not conform to our values”? “Payment withheld – this food causes obesity”? In a country increasingly subject to totalitarian hate laws, the ability of the government, or even politically correct banks, as in the Farage case, to monitor all purchases and sales, all membership subscriptions or donations, would amount to a total surrender of personal autonomy.

The problem is that electronic transactions are popular with a couch-potato society. The pandemic, with people locked down, gave a further boost to the drift towards non-cash transactions. Even before the pandemic, an Access to Cash report raised doubts about the elimination of cash, indicating that around 20 per cent of society, including the elderly, rural dwellers and people on low incomes would all be disadvantaged.

The banks, while making the usual hypocritical professions, have relentlessly reduced the number of cash points, which cost them £5bn to maintain, with ATMs closing at a rate of 300 a month. Yet the question that is obscured by implausible reassurances regarding the safety of electronic activity, with claims that embedded microchips, NFC technology, AVS and a whole battery of sci-fi innovations will make electronic transactions secure, is how can we be sure. Any IT expert will tell you there is no such thing as complete cybersecurity.

What if hostile actors, with all the resources of a state behind them, penetrated UK banking and even deleted the records? What if our entire economy and personal incomes became a tabula rasa, the ultimate egalitarian outcome? If any financial expert tells you, with a patronising smile, that “it could not happen”, check his historical forecasts in the run-up to 2008.

In less extreme circumstances, power outages would affect electronic cash supplies. Many cashless systems are privately run, with the risk of bankruptcy preventing access to e-wallets. Cashless payments are so apparently painless they encourage extravagance and indebtedness. It seems likely that cashless transactions have contributed to inflation.

Jeremy Hunt (not that he will be calling any shots after the next few months) apparently favours the creation of a central bank digital currency by 2030. The movement to increase control over citizens, abolish privacy and open the route to control of spending by nanny institutions is advancing relentlessly.

We had an insight into the dystopian future when Justin Trudeau closed the bank accounts of Canadian truckers mounting an anti-government protest. But the same emergency also inspired a remedy: the truckers were kept solvent by resort to cryptocurrencies. They, too, are fraught with hazards; but if it is a question of retaining personal autonomy against the aggression of the intruder state, many independent-minded people may consider it a risk worth taking.