The issue of politically motivated financial censorship was back in the news this week after Nigel Farage revealed the bank he’d been with since 1980 has informed him they’re closing his account. He also disclosed that his approaches to seven other banks to see if they’d open an account for him had all been rebuffed (Telegraph, Times, Mail).
The Free Speech Union has been lobbying the Government to change the financial regulations since we were ‘debanked’ by PayPal last year to make it impossible for banks and payment services providers to close customers’ accounts for purely political reasons and, today, it looks as if those efforts may bear fruit.
According to the Telegraph, banks and payment processors are to be told by the Treasury that they must protect free speech. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, is said to be “deeply concerned” that overzealous lenders are closing down accounts because they disagree with customers’ opinions and has asked City minister Andrew Griffith to investigate the issue. A delegation from the Free Speech Union met with Mr Griffith earlier this year to urge him to tighten up the rules before this problem gets completely out of hand.
Whitehall sources told the Telegraph that results of a consultation on the subject – a consultation the FSU submitted evidence to – will be published within weeks, after it was launched earlier this year in the wake of PayPal blocking the Free Speech Union’s account.
If the Government does change the payment services regulations to stop people being censored in this way, I’d be tempted to call it our biggest victory to date. We simply cannot have financial companies, many of them based overseas, interfering in our right to freedom of expression in this way. In an increasingly cashless society, closing a person’s bank account leaves them virtually unable to function and the threat of that will inevitably have a chilling effect on free speech.
People might be tempted to dismiss this as alarmist, but the FSU is aware of dozens of people and organisations this has happened to and we’ve shared a lot of that evidence with the Treasury. (We’ve put together a Twitter thread detailing a small selection of examples here.)
Just in the last month, HSBC Hong Kong has followed PayPal in closing the accounts of members of the League of Social Democrats, threatening the future of one of the few remaining pro-democracy parties that dares protest against China’s draconian security law and free speech crackdown in the Special Administrative Region territory.
Back in the UK, Barclays Bank was forced to pay over £20,000 compensation to the Christian organisation Core Issues Trust after it closed its accounts due to pressure from LGBTQ+ groups.
And last week, Henrik Overgaard Nielsen, a former MEP for the Brexit Party, was informed his account with MetroBank would be closed, and the Rev Richard Fothergill, a Church of England vicar and member of the FSU, was told by the Yorkshire Building Society that it would be closing his account after he responded to a request for feedback to complain about the bank’s promotion of Pride and what he considered a morally suspect trans agenda.
The issues at stake here go way beyond the politics of left or right, socialism or liberalism, Labour or Conservative. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe — this new, sinister form of cancel culture has no place in a Western liberal democracy.
If any of our members of supporters need to talk to someone about their own experiences of financial censorship, email our case team on [email protected].
