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

I know. Seriously how thick do you have to be when you think that's a winning argument?

This is surely something the banking regulator should have been keeping an eye on. In at least some instances it appears to be straight discrimination.

Oh, I forget. The chair of Stonewall prior to sweaty Iain was also a senior director at the FCA.

@

as well as changing the name of maternity leave to ‘primary caregiver leave’.

That could refer to a foster parent. Or the nanny.
Maternity leave recognises that a woman goes through pregnancy and childbirth and needs adequate recovery time (as well as caring for her new baby and breastfeeding).

Shocking. We must challenge this wherever we see it.

The chair of Stonewall prior to sweaty Iain was also a senior director at the FCA.

Someone needs to do a chart of all the organisations where members / employees of Stonewall have been in positions of influence, and then send in the De-Stonewalling squad.

They have got into so many institutions, that I now think it will be decades before their corrupt attempts to achieve their political goals are weeded out.

From Monzo's Transgender Awareness Week statement on LinkedIn:
"We call maternity, paternity and adoption leave primary or secondary caregiver leave".
So they know that it is actually maternity leave and paternity leave.
The order of the sentence seems to map the mother onto primary caregiver and the father onto secondary. And restricts the purpose of maternity leave to caregiving, erasing leave for giving birth and recovering from giving birth.

It's astonishing that given all the time and money spent on supposedly assessing the reputational risk of Farage's political views they entirely failed to consider the reputational risk of de-banking people based on the ideological positions of their staff.

Wonder how their incredibly narrow and biased 'risk assessment' is working out for them?

The FCA is "poised" to investigate:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/27/financial-watchdog-investigate-natwest-discrimination-fca/

"Sources at the FCA said the watchdog was monitoring the situation carefully before deciding whether to intervene. An investigation will be launched if the FCA is unhappy with the way an independent review, commissioned by NatWest into the scandal of its own makingg_, is conducted.

A source at the FCA said: “We will let NatWest go through the process of the independent review first and then decide if we need to take any further action.”
The source added: “We are not ruling out supervisory action. We are in touch with NatWest but we are awaiting the outcome of NatWest’s own review. We are certainly not ruling out further intervention with the bank. But we also want to look at how widespread this might be. We are taking a close interest.”
The source said that while the FCA did have the power to launch criminal inquiries it would likely go down the route of a “civil” investigation. The FCA’s powers are extensive and can even include withdrawing a firm’s authorisation to operate as well as banning individuals from working in the regulated financial sector."

Earlier this evening, a quote from the FCA's Sheldon Mills:

twitter.com/jamesfitzjourno/status/1683883441350225922?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

"Quick response from the FCA's Sheldon Mills re NatWest/Coutts/Farage: "On the basis of the review and any steps taken by other authorities, such as the Financial Ombudsman or Information Commissioner, on relevant complaints, we will decide if any further action is necessary.”

He adds: "We have raised concerns with NatWest Group and Coutts about the allegations relating to account closures and breach of customer confidentiality since these came to light."

"We made clear our expectation that these issues should be independently reviewed and note today’s statement from the NatWest Group Board confirming this will happen."

"It is vital that the review is well resourced and those conducting it have access to all the necessary information and people in order to investigate what happened swiftly and fully.""

Sheldon Mills:

www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/diversity-and-inclusion-driving-change-our-industry

twitter.com/stonewalluk/status/1255429240843055104?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

The same Sheldon Mills who started as a Stonewall trustee in 2013, and became Chair in 2020.

"During this time, he has been involved in Stonewall’s decision to become a trans-inclusive organisation in 2015" (Stonewall press release)

Despite his presumed support of #nodebate he will understand why banks should not sanction people for holding GC or any other legal views.

It's along the lines of 'well, I've got nothing to hide so there's nothing to fear' for complacent stupidity.

Statements like that are good IQ indicators, though.

This man is going to discover the strength of feeling about the modus operandi being imposed on us. It's no bad thing I think that this ideology proponent is at the centre of this clash between his rules and the rest of us.

He's going to hear the loudest megaphone he's ever heard.

STEPHEN POLLARD reveals the breathtaking arrogance of NatWest chairman https://mol.im/a/12346637 via https://dailym.ai/android

Maybe I have been reading too much DM, but I am sick of overpaid men allowing blatant misogyny on their watch. Like the CEO of Centrica, on £4.5 million a year who turned up to a Times interview wearing a hoodie with the slogan 'Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?'

What about just caring about the vulnerable generally, whether they be elderly, disabled, women and girls etc.

What about action, not slogans?

What about accepting that people have different views and use these to test your own. So rather than Farage is a Nazi/Fascist/racist so should not have a bank account, instead say I disagree strongly with Farage's views on X, because...

Speaking of slogans - I was looking for paint ideas yesterday (my life is so unbearably exciting) and checked out the Sanderson site to see if I could order a colour card. This is their Design for Diversity

VISIBILITY
WE PLEDGE THAT OUR CHANNELS – OUR
WEBSITES, BLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA – WILL
AT ALL TIMES ENDEAVOUR TO INCLUDE PEOPLE OF EVERY COLOUR AND GENDER AND SEXUALITY.
OPPORTUNITY
WE PLEDGE TO SEEK OUT BLACK, ASIAN AND
MINORITY ETHNIC CANDIDATES TO INTERVIEW FOR ROLES THAT ARISE IN OUR BUSINESSES.

WE WILL ALWAYS HIRE THE BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB, BUT WE WILL ENDEAVOUR TO BRING
MORE DIVERSE CANDIDATES THROUGH THE
PROCESS. WE STOP SHORT OF POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION AND WE REJECT TOKENISM.
ACCESSIBILITY
WE PLEDGE THAT ANY EVENTS WE HOLD – BE
THEY PANEL DISCUSSIONS OR TALKS, DINNERS,
RECEPTIONS, OR MEDIA EVENTS – WILL
ENDEAVOUR TO INCLUDE
PEOPLE OF ALL COLOURS
AND GENDERS

Mate - you sell paint.

Like the CEO of Centrica, on £4.5 million a year who turned up to a Times interview wearing a hoodie with the slogan 'Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?'

Is that the ostentatious facial hair person on the front page of the Daily Star? Featured in the BBC’s “today’s headlines” item with all the front pages.

Or blood alcohol volume. DH (who came out with this gem) was probably 3 large glasses along by that late stage of the evening.

No mention of disability of course.

Apart from “all genders” causing an eye roll, I like that it’s short and focused, and says it doesn’t do tokenism.

Banks have a dangerous amount of power and lack of accountability. I have a couple of elderly neighbours who really struggle managing their finances because they are not computer literate and both are quite deaf and can't manage on the phone. There is no local branch and no support. They are both extremely vulnerable to this kind of cavalier approach.
My MIL's account was summarily closed when DH was helping to sell her flat when she went into a nursing home. He had POA and it was all documented with the bank. Then one person in the bank decided it was money laundering and froze the account. It was a nightmare and took weeks to sort out.
It seems that banks can just do whatever they like. Nigel Farage has shone a light on what seems to be the tip of an ice berg.

@fiftyandfat exactly. There are 850,000 people in the UK with dementia, and many more who are otherwise unable to access the internet.

A few years ago Natwest threatened to summarily close my mother's accounts when I tried to set up a small teenager-type account for her (no overdraft, no standing orders, just a small balance which I could top up so she could go shopping) on the basis she did not have capacity, and despite me having POA. My mothers affairs were quite complex and she used several financial institutions. Luckily she had both a driving licence and a passport and me to help her, and I live in Central London so was able to find branches. Support for the elderly is shit. Phone help lines often gave wrong information. Computer systems did not always allow POAs. That was a decade back. It would be far worse now.

So the FCA has been asleep at the wheel and are now prevaricating about whether they will investigate.
Seriously, what is the point of the FCA, they have completely failed in their responsibility to protect consumers and now they can’t even be arsed to investigate!

Yes. Linking two DM articles in one day will probably get me banned from MN, but they ran an article on him yesterday.

So last winter when we sat there cold and wondering whether that extra cardi would make any difference, he was making £4.5m a year, his company was making vast profits, and he was virtue signalling his concern for "marginalised" communities. I don't often get cross but what about those elderly people barely able to afford to heat a single room.

What happened to Farage was wrong. I cannot be alone in hoping he uses his soap box to highlight what can be described as "exclusion in the name of inclusion" in banking and other key services. Wearing a hoodie is no substitute for actually ensuring your services are inclusive.

FWIW I think the Tories are terrified of Farage. Labour activists are often far left of centre/Momentum types, whereas a lot of the Conservative grassroots leans towards UKIP/Reclaim through movements like the CDO. Sunak like Starmer is trying to appeal to the centre whilst keeping party activists happy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66333091.amp

In Friday's results, the last under the leadership of Dame Alison, NatWest reported a sharp rise in first-half profits to £3.6bn, from £2.6bn a year earlier.

Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor, said the profits are better than the £3.3bn expected by analysts.

I'm looking forward to the extreme knots left wing commentators are going to get themselves in over this profit made by a state owned bank who censure right wing customers.

A suspect a lot of profit made by banks this year relate to interest rate rises. Quick to hike up interest on mortgages and loans and slow to pass on rises to savers.

Unsurprisingly, having decided to cover this, Woman's Hour is spinning the line about it being curious that the NatWest CEO, a woman, stepped down, but not the Chairman, a man.

You might think that the BBC, having contributed to this scandal by being so incurious and as a result allowing itself to be used to disseminate misinformation from a massive bank, might now decide not to continue to spin this story to generate more misinformation.

When you've got a martyr, the next stage is to have a canonisation. St Alison of NatWest, the patron saint of banks being free to act against their customers.

Basically because Rose is a woman, and because she was first in a number of ways, and because she promoted diversity, then she shouldn't be accountable in the same way as a man in her position would be.

All she has to do is proclaim she's a trans man and the bomb will go off.