The silly donkeys at Coutts got their just deserts in the Nigel Farage affair.
A few grossly overpaid execs stood down, and they will no doubt move on to even more overpaid positions. The irrepressibly perky Farage will feel he has won a great victory for freedom of expression and freedom of thought. But he hasn't really.
Someone who got much less publicity than Farage was the Rev Richard Fothergill, 62, who had been investing his modest savings with The Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years.
In the modern way, the building society asked their clients for 'feedback'. Mr Fothergill, being a conscientious chap, provided some.
It was 'Pride' month, and this conservative-minded clergyman said he did not agree with the building society's relentless promotion of trans and gay ideology. He took the old-fashioned - and now utterly unallowable - view that homosexual activity is forbidden by the Christian religion.
They closed his account, pompously announcing they have a 'zero tolerance approach to discrimination' and that their relationship had 'irrevocably broken down'.
'I wasn't even aware that our relationship had a problem', said the baffled cleric. 'They are a financial house - they are not there to do social engineering.'
They key phrase is 'zero tolerance'. These two words define the atmosphere of the age. Some young commentators occasionally express gratitude that they live in an age which is more tolerant than the one in which we oldies grew up.
They point to the fact that we no longer discriminate against people for being gay, trans, Jamaican, disabled, fat or indeed all five things at once. Hooray.
The trouble with this optimistic view of things is that it overlooks the atmosphere created by the phrase 'zero tolerance'.
Any person whose views differ from those of the 'liberal' consensus - about sex, abortion, Brexit or racial politics - can no longer debate their point of view. They must simply shut up or be punished.
The career of Kathleen Stock shows that zero tolerance can, on occasion, have truly sinister implications. Here is an obviously liberal-minded, decent, intelligent academic philosopher who was not, as it happens, hostile to transsexuals. But she had the temerity to question whether 'identifying' as a certain category of person automatically made you into that person.
I suspect that 99 per cent of reasoning people would agree with Stock. Merely to 'identify' as a woman does not make you a woman, any more than 'identifying' as Napoleon - or a fried egg - makes you into the phenomenon denoted.
The result of her simple Aristotelian distinction? She lost her job. Her colleagues were not brave enough to defend her. When she addressed the Oxford Union, there was a baying mob.
Zero tolerance is the rule of our day. Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the ludicrously self-important Suffragan Bishop of Dover, has moved that the Church of England's Lilliputian parliament, the General Synod, revoke its agreement to the clergy and parishes who do not want to have women priests.
Those priests only represent a tiny proportion of the national church - though, as it happens, their views coincide with the great majority of the Christians in the world who belong to the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches - namely that women cannot be priests. Bishop Hudson-Wilkin is offended by their viewpoint - so they should be silenced or driven out.
The point isn't whether they are right or wrong, any more than whether Farage is right about Brexit, or Stock about the transsexuals. It is whether one is nowadays allowed to have views that depart from the Liberal Elite Agenda.
Clearly, one isn't allowed to dissent. The zero tolerance of current liberal opinion is in its way as relentless and unforgiving as the Spanish Inquisition. In universities, colleges and the BBC and even in the 'Right-wing' journals and newspapers, it's foolhardy to risk dissent.
There was recently a solemn documentary on television presented by David Harewood, the first actor of colour to play Othello. He turned his attention to a dead boring programme of yesteryear called The Black and White Minstrel Show, in which choruses of white men in black greasepaint sang numbers such as Tulips from Amsterdam and Sing Something Simple.
I remember, as a child, asking my telly-addicted parents why the minstrels painted their faces and was told they were imitating a famous American performer called AI Jolson.
This drivel was watched by millions of viewers before there were many - in most areas ANY - people of colour living in Britain. Once we became a mixed society, the programmed died a death and it became no more than an embarrassing memory.
In the Harewood version of events, the programme was a sinister engine of authority, designed to engender racism in the minds of millions. A possible truth but - this is my point - anyone who dared to question this would immediately find themselves in the Naughty Corner with David Starkey and the late and much-lamented Roger Scruton. It's safer not to 'go there'.
Do we want to live in a society where dissent is simply not allowed? And whether we do or don't, do we really live in a more tolerant age than our parents?
