Not long ago, I wrote a piece highlighting the arrival of a new form of political control, namely governments’ authorization of banks—without due process—to freeze the bank accounts of members of their citizenry. I noted that this was a form of coercion that had existed in China for some years now, and had recently been adopted by Russia, but I emphasised that it had also been deployed by the Canadian government against a minority of its population—those who participated in the ‘truckers’ protests’—with zero uproar from Canada’s allied nations. I feared that UK parliamentarians had been silent over this tyrannical quashing of the late Queen’s subjects across the Atlantic because, as I wrote then, they were likely “looking over at this innovative model of political control and thinking, ‘Golly, what a clever idea!’”
