This proved too much for PayPal, who first restored the account of UsForThem and then the Free Speech Union. That was a relief because about a third of our members paid their recurring membership dues via PayPal. We wrote to those affected as soon as our account was closed, urging them to switch to a different payment processor, but only about half of them did and in the meantime payments coming due were going on hold. After PayPal reopened our account, those payments starting going through, but we are encouraging our members to switch nevertheless. We don’t want to rely on a company that has a track record of pulling the plug on its customers without warning. We also don’t want to be in business with a company that has closed hundreds – possibly thousands – of accounts for political reasons.

Incidentally, if you are one of the affected members you will have received an email from us with instructions about how to switch to another payment processor. If you haven’t received an email, that means you’re not affected and there’s no need to do anything. If you think you may have been affected but haven’t received an email from us, contact us at [email protected].

So, here’s what you can do about this new form of censorship. Sally-Ann Hart, the Member of Parliament for Hastings and Rye, tabled an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which is currently at the Committee Stage in the House of Commons, to make it illegal for a financial services provider to withhold or withdraw service from a customer on purely political grounds. You can see the amendment here. It’s on p.20 and labelled NC15.

Following discussions with Andrew Griffith, who promised to go away and think about how to address the problem, Sally-Ann withdrew the amendment. But we need to keep the pressure up, so we are asking our members and supporters to email their MP using our campaigning tool (see below), urging them to tell their whip that they would like to the Government to do something about this new and sinister form of cancel culture. 

This is a critically important battle. If we don’t pass a law to rein in companies like PayPal, we will soon see the emergence of a Chinese-style social credit system in the UK, except instead of ideological dogma being enforced by the Communist authorities it will be enforced by woke capitalist corporations.