First they came for Muslim activists. Then they came for Nigel Farage. Now, they’re coming for independent media outlets.
UK-based readers may recall the moment almost exactly three years ago when the word “debanking” entered the mainstream British English lexicon. The prestigious London-based private bank Coutts had just decided to close Nigel Farage’s bank account due to his unsavoury political views and alleged Russian connections. That decision turned out to be very costly.
Almost immediately, Farage did what Farage does best: he whipped up a massive media frenzy. In next to no time two senior banking scalps had been claimed: those of Dame Alison Rose, the CEO of Coutts’ parent bank and “Big Four” lender, NatWest (formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland) and Coutts’ chief executive Peter Flavel.
Within a month, NatWest’s share price had slumped 8%, wiping £1 billion off its market cap, much of which was being propped up with public funds, and generating juicy returns for short-selling hedge funds. As we reported at the time, the resulting scandal drew much-needed public attention to a long-standing but accelerating trend — the “de-banking” of people and organisations with politically inconvenient views:
[T]his is hardly a one-off event: as I reported a couple of weeks ago, banks on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly debanking their customers, often without explanation. I gave the example of California-based writer, activist, and social and political commentator Elad Nehorai, whose political views and ideals could not diverge more from those of Nigel Farage. Yet he, too, had his account at Bank of America, his bank of many years, summarily closed with no apparent warning or explanation…
Without a bank account, it is almost impossible to participate in the economy. And it is getting more difficult as cash becomes harder and harder to access and use. As Alex Lo writes for South China Morning Post, “Banking is a fundamental utility like water and electricity, and that’s precisely why democratic societies are increasingly turning to its use as a method of censorship and repression.”
The latest to fall victim to this trend is the left-wing news website The Canary, which has accused the Lloyds Banking Group of “withholding a substantial amount of our money” after nearly a decade of use. The news outlet — which brands itself as “radical working-class media” — says “Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action… despite multiple communications from us”.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Canary speculated about the possible reasons behind Lloyds’ decision, including its anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine stance:
Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this.
We do know that multiple other politically engaged people have suffered similar actions by other banks in recent times. It is not lost on us that powerful banks are able to restrict the financial activity of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals..
It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds.
Starmer’s Last Attack
It would hardly be surprising if the attack was due to The Canary’s pro-Palestinian sympathies. The UK government has done everything within its not inconsiderable powers to criminalise pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activism, including by scrapping the ancient right to a jury trial. Through its new National Security Law, the outgoing Keir Starmer government seeks to bulldoze literal thought crime legislation into law — in Orwell’s native United Kingdom no less.
An article in The Canary explains just how dire a threat the new National Security Law poses to journalism and political dissent, describing it as “one last power grab” by Keir Starmer’s outgoing government:
As I am sat here writing this, there’s a sense of terror kicking in. I’m a journalist. It’s my job to be in the know about foreign affairs. At the Canary we pride ourselves on bringing people the news that the mainstream doesn’t dare. But this terror is absolutely nothing compared to what other people must be feeling.
This radicalised weaponisation of new legislation will hit marginalised communities so first and hardest. Journalists and community workers with direct, lived and painful connections to global conflict zones are facing a massive legal trap. If a reporter so much as quotes an entity that the home secretary has designated as a threat, they face immediate prosecution.
Civil liberties groups warn that the law will grant the Home Office absolute power to decide who is allowed to speak. And by leaving the definition of ‘assisting a designated body’ vague, the state has created a total monopoly on the narrative. It’s very much going to be, follow their way and toe the line, or go to jail, it seems.
Indie media outlet Zeteo warned of the severe danger of this new power-grab. The outlet warned that journalists face immediate arrest simply for conducting public interest interviews with banned groups. People will only get one side of the story. There will only be one narrative fed to us… and it will be the government’s.
The timing of Lloyds Bank’s debanking of The Canary is also curious, coming just two months after it announced the launch of a daily left-wing print tabloid — and what’s more, one that defends Palestinian rights. Following an injection of cash last year from used car and property website founder Cecil Hetherington, Canary director Steve Topple hailed the new tabloid as an alternative to the corporate press.
After its debanking, the Canary says it is now in a “financially precarious situation” and does not know when “money that Lloyds is holding will be returned” or how it will affect “our ability to get another bank account in the future”.
“The immediate effect has been that we have been unable to pay any staff or contractors,” Topple told Novara Media. “We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo. Many of them are marginalised people and it has hit them very hard. We are trying our best to mitigate the situation and have so far received much-appreciated support from members of the public.”
Lloyds’ actions have already triggered a storm of protests from across the political spectrum.
A Growing Phenomenon
The first major target of debanking in the UK, well over a decade ago, were members of the British Muslim community, particularly those involved in Pro-Palestinian activism. But unlike with Farage, their plight was met with total radio silence in the mainstream media, as the veteran journalist Peter Oborne recounts in the video below.
By the time Farage had lost access to Coutts’ banking services, in the summer of 2023, banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.
Following the Farage affair, the Financial Conduct Authority conducted an investigation into banks’ debanking practices, the conclusion of which was that banks had not been closing customers’ accounts for political reasons. Farage described the outcome as “farcical”.
In the US, recent victims of debanking include Scott Ritter, the former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector who is a prominent critic of US and Western imperialism. In January, his bank of 26 years, Citizens’ Bank, closed all of his accounts, including his and his wife’s joint accounts with their daughters, without offering an explanation, as he recounts in the first minutes of the following interview with Judge Napolitano:
In a letter to Ritter Citizens Bank apparently that not only was it under no obligation to divulge the reasons for closing his accounts but that Citizens’ policy actively prevents any disclosure of any information concerning the decision to close the account. As Cato Institute notes, this silent treatment often has to do with confidentiality laws:
However, these are not laws meant to protect the financial privacy of customers. Rather, this confidentiality is to prevent citizens from finding out they are under criminal investigation. For example, reports filed under the Bank Secrecy Act are restricted so heavily that banks cannot share the details of the reports or even admit that a report exists.
While Ritter does not know the exact reasons for his debanking, he suspects that someone in the FBI, fully armed with the “totality of [his] banking transactions”, had “tipped off” Citizens Bank about “suspicious activity” that resulted in Citizens Bank issuing an SAR [Suspicious Activity Report].”
Ritter believes that donations he had received and subsequent cash withdrawals before his three trips to Russia in 2025, which thanks to US and EU sanctions is disconnected from the Western economy, may have triggered the move. According to Ritter, the “purpose of “de-banking” is to harass a targeted individual,” even in the absence of evidence pointing to any criminal activity.”
The reasons for an account closure, while often a mystery to the customers affected, often include operational reasons. Put simply, a financial institution chooses to close the account of a customer because the reputational risks of being associated with that client are simply too high. However, political or ideological motivations appear to play a part in some prominent cases.
The most clear-cut example of this was the Canadian government’s decision, in February 2022, to invoke the emergencies act to compel banks to seize the accounts of the freedom convoy protesters who had blocked several key border crossings. According to the minutes of a meeting between Canada’s Economy Minister, Vice President and WEF board member Chrystia Freeland and senior bank executives the day before the act was invoked, one CEO flagged concerns that if banks were forced to close accounts, it could be seen as the sector “being used as an arm of the government” or even “a political weapon.”
In 2022, Paypal banned the accounts of the UK-based Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young and his online publication, the Daily Sceptic, for purportedly breaching its policies against hate speech. Worse still, the fintech giant surreptitiously slipped a line into its terms of service granting itself the right to fine customers $2,500 for spreading misinformation. When the news got out, provoking a huge public backlash, PayPal claimed it had all been a big mistake…
Click here to continue reading the article on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 