First Direct and Natwest closing bank accounts for political reasons inc being gender critical

[Snorkers]

Apprently First Direct have closed the account of the Wings over Scotland founder for his beliefs (He's Gender Critical), and Coutts, owned by Natwest, closed Nigel Farage's account.
Whatever you think of Nigel Farage he is entitled to a bank account.

This is really worrying.

I bank with First Direct. I am gender critical. Do I need to hide my beliefs to keep my bank account? Will tey stop me getting access to my money?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12249755/Nigel-Farage-claims-three-loved-ones-bank-accounts-closed-Brexit.html

Minutes of a meeting of Coutts’ wealth reputational risk committee held on Nov 17 2022 state: “The committee did not think continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.
“This was not a political decision but one centred around inclusivity and purpose.”

That is genuinely terrifying. It's not political because it's about inclusion?

I wonder who Ricky Gervais banks with? I bet they won't be closing his account any time soon.

What's more scary is that they actually searched legitimate reasons to get rid of him and couldnt find any.

The dossier noted that “there is no evidence of regulator or legal censure of the client,” that he was unfailingly polite to staff and that he had recently been downgraded from a “higher risk politically exposed person [PEP]” to lower risk, and was on the way to being classed as no risk at all.
Closing his accounts was not justifiable on a monetary basis because “the client’s economic contribution is now sufficient to retain on a commercial basis”.

Ricky Gervais isn't mentioned in the Telegraph article posted earlier - it's in this one. It doesn't say what the joke was:

The real reason Coutts closed my accounts – and it has nothing to do with my finances
I have seen the Stasi-style surveillance report used to justify the bank’s extraordinary action – it is, frankly, shocking

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-coutts-uk-bank-accounts/

SirSamVimesCityWatch I agree!

"We are going to exclude you from being able to get paid, pay your bills, look after your family, travel, have shelter, food and warmth and generally live a normal life - because our values are to be inclusive".

It's basically a form of internal exile.

Seeing as it is the Banks doing it and the Agenda they are following is top-down from the UN, that's looking very like global fascism.

How to stop banks’ new social credit system
We need new legislation to force banks to respect free speech

Extract

Access to a bank account must now be enshrined in law, just as when the Post Office used to be obliged to provide everyone with a post office savings account. Banking has become an essential service, like a public utility, and should be available to every creditworthy person, unrefusable other than for criminal convictions like fraud, with banks’ reasoning subject to challenge.

Decisions made on ideological grounds must be proscribed (application should not be fishing expeditions to determine whether prospective customers are aligned with the bank’s “values”).

The same needs to apply to debit card and banking services like savings, transfers and payments — as well as payment processors like PayPal — and banks must also explain any refusal to provide credit facilities and mortgages. It’s not good enough for people to have accounts in name only.

One approach is to stipulate that banks may only “de-bank” someone with a court order or final adjudication, unless the customer has separately been convicted of a financial or other relevant crime.

We also need a statutory right to sue banks, beyond regulatory review. In the US, decisions after review by the regulatory body may be appealed with a judge at a federal court, so this is hardly an unprecedented idea.

https://thecritic.co.uk/how-to-stop-banks-new-social-credit-system/

Thanks Bosky x

Dame Alison Rose: the bank boss who steered Coutts’ diversity drive

The chief executive of NatWest has overseen a pivot towards saving the planet and LGBT rights since taking the helm

<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/2023.07.19-072338/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/alison-rose-steered-coutts-diversity-drive-nigel-farage" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.ph/2023.07.19-072338/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/alison-rose-steered-coutts-diversity-drive-nigel-farage/

Sorry about the messed up link

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/alison-rose-steered-coutts-diversity-drive-nigel-farage/

I think Nigel Farage is repulsive but stripping him of a bank account is a much more repulsive decision.

I agree. There are lots of ways that someone people generally dislike but who does nothing illegal can be socially sanctioned. For example losing votes or freelance work.

As soon as we start having banks and other service providers (Cloudflare) deciding to be social arbiters we are in trouble. What is to stop email/Twitter campaigns suggesting JKR/Maya and others should also have services withdrawn.

This links with much wider issues around banking accessibility for the elderly, the poor and the disabled. Earlier in the week I stood in the queue at Lidl on the Old Kent Road with an intimidatingly full trolley, only to have several people ask if they could queue jump. No card so they could not use the self service tills. (I said yes to the first but any more would have been unkind to the people behind me.) Post pandemic it is hard to exist without the internet, a smartphone and a bank card. I hope banks being silly and denying access to people with a media profile can be used to look at the much wider issue of access to now essential services.

The rise of this informal 'social credit' system is antidemocratic and terrifying.

It's not just the banks and cloudflare, also Eventbrite have recently refused to sell tickets for a GC event.

https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/action-against-eventbrite-the-story?utm_medium=reader2

But it's the banks across that about me the most. Banks telling us how we should set our moral compass? I think not! Have Natwest , First Direct and Coutts et al stopped investing in tobacco, mining companies that destroy rain forests, weapons, sweat shops, etc etc? No? Then they can stop fucking moralising on this one niche issue which is after all about legally held beliefs.

🤬

This is the mailonline top story. It mentions RG and the old fashioned women, retweet via Lawrence Fox.

Really disturbing stuff - and bizarre that the bank wrote up 46 pages on Farage's views. A ton of political research, and somebody got paid for it.

Do we have anything similar re Richard Fothergill, the vicar? So far I haven't seen either what he wrote to YBS or what YBS wrote to him.

No sympathy for Farage personally, but I hope Ricky Gervais sues the ass off Coutts for casually smearing his 'old fashioned women' joke as "transphobic".

NatWest was bailed out with £45 Billion of taxpayers money, they need to be a bit more careful with their bigotry, we should ask for it back

The idea that Coutts should be a moral arbiter and that banks, rather than the laws of this country, get to decide who can participate in public life is terrify, yet some hard of thinking types are celebrating this as a win

I would love to see who else banks with coutts because I'm willing to bet some are far far worse than farage.

Not sure the people on Universal Credit are too worried about Coutts closing their accounts to be honest.

It's not just coutts though, is it. And it's not just farage.

They should be. We should all be worried. What happens if the govt starts saying that people with certain views shouldn't get UC. Because that's what could come next.

This is exactly right. Love or hate him, all Farage has done is "exist" (to use the Term Acceptable By Our Moral Arbiters). For which, he was treated worse than criminal. By their own admission, he's not. They just don't like him, so they disenfranchised him.

NRTFT : but, as well as the FCA who regulate banks, where are the OFT (office for fair trading) and the CMA (competition and markets authority) who regulate for consumer protection if banks are picking and choosing customers on basis of not liking protected beliefs?
plus The EHRC since there’s an obvious human rights interpretation issue here?

FWIW i thought I read yhay had closed Farage down because he fell below their minimum required account balance, which is non discriminatory in a private bank, if it is applied universally?

FWIW i thought I read yhay had closed Farage down because he fell below their minimum required account balance, which is non discriminatory in a private bank, if it is applied universally?

IIRC that was what Coutts said originally. Then it appears NF did an SAR and that turned over a few stones and it turned out that that appeared to be ahem...not true. It appears that Coutts have a 'wealth reputational committee' which does rather suggest that not all of their clients are as pure as the proverbial driven snow and they know it.

Thank you for the info MrsDanvers that sounds like a big equality question then- presumably such a committee has an agreed set of principles (if not a simple protocol to follow or a flowchart laying it all out nicely) that they use to take such decisions? Perhaps if they don’t want to make that public they can share those with the regulators and then see if they come out as reasonable or discriminatory and against the law?

I think the people I know on Universal Credit are much more worried about where the next meal will come from; whether they can heat their house; and whether they can cloth their kids than they are the travails of Nigel Farage who has quite frankly done fuck all to make their (or anyone elses) lives better.

plus The EHRC since there’s an obvious human rights interpretation issue here?

Nigel Farage is unable to use the ECHR. To do so would undo decades of his work.

One problem has been that Stonewall’s Chair was also a very senior executive at the FCA. He stood down not that long ago, indeed not that long after he was passed over for an even more senior position when it seemed that people finally noticed a potential conflict of interest. It is not surprising then that banks misread the runes.

I'll say it louder for those at the back.

This isn't just about coutts or farage. It could happen to anyone who voices an opinion publicly. Just because it's happened to someone you dislike this time, doesn't mean next time it won't be someone you agree with.

Honestly I'm agog at the people who seem to be willing to hand over the role of moral arbiter to fucking banks.