“This is a major move against the possibility of an independent media” in the UK.
Our July 3rd post, “The UK’s Latest ‘Debanking’ Scandal Should Give Everyone Pause“, set out how the British left-wing news website The Canary became the latest victim of the UK’s debanking craze. The news outlet accused Lloyds Banking Group of “withholding a substantial amount” of its money after nearly a decade-long business relationship.
The news outlet — which brands itself as “radical working-class media” and whose sharp reporting on Labour’s capture by Big Business has been a headache for the party bureaucracy — said Lloyds had not explained “why it ha[d] taken this action… despite multiple communications from us”.
In a statement, the Canary speculated as to 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.
Lloyds Bank’s decision to close The Canary‘s accounts came just two months after the publication 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.
Now, the newspaper is on the verge of financial collapse. After its initial debanking by Lloyds, the Canary said it was in a “financially precarious situation” and did 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,” Canary director Steve Topple told Novara Media. “We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo… We are trying our best to mitigate the situation and have so far received much-appreciated support from members of the public.”
Now, two months later, the newspaper has suspended operations with immediate effect after being debanked by a second lender, Metro Bank. The Canary says it can no longer pay its staff, and its news operation is in jeopardy.
🚨 Another Canary bank account has been frozen, and our money held
Recent events have created circumstances in which we have been left with no responsible alternative but to suspend Canary operations immediately.https://t.co/7Ys7SLrLXd
— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) September 4, 2026
From the above press release:
The Canary has faced sustained attacks from both the political right and left, alongside repeated attempts to undermine our organisation and restrict our ability to operate. This has resulted in the Guardian publishing allegations against us today (Friday 4 September).
At the same time, Canary Media Limited has had another bank account blocked, resulting in yet another financial institution stopping us from accessing our money. We are currently awaiting a response from Metro, the bank responsible, for why it has done this. This has meant that once again, some staff were not paid for August.
We have seen members of our team targeted through their social media accounts, including accounts being hacked, restricted, or removed. Canary workers have been arrested, with another being assaulted by a far-right Zionist at a protest. Two others were attacked by the Israeli Defence Forces in Southern Lebanon.
We have faced significant pressure and repeated attempts to disrupt our work.
Yet we have continued regardless.
However, recent events have created circumstances in which we have been left with no responsible alternative but to suspend the Canary’s operations with immediate effect.
This is not a decision we have taken lightly, nor is it a decision caused by any failure of the Canary or its leadership. It is the direct consequence of the debanking of the Canary’s funds, the resulting financial disruption, and the serious internal consequences that followed.[1]
…
Projects that were ready to move forward had to be cancelled. Staff experienced delays in receiving their wages, with some employees waiting several days and journalists working abroad waiting longer.
At one point, the Canary’s website was unavailable for a few hours because the direct debit required to pay for the service could no longer be processed as the bank account had been closed. We had to pause payments to pensions’ provider NEST to ensure staff were paid instead.
These were not operational choices made by the Canary. They were consequences of a banking decision over which the organisation had no control.
As with Lloyds Bank’s decision, it is not clear why Metro Bank has decided to withdraw its banking services from The Canary. However, as Professor David Miller points out in the tweet below, it is highly likely that it “involved deep state manipulation.”
This is a major move against the possibility of independent media.
It is extremely unlikely that this is just business decisions by banks.
No doubt information will trickle out in due course, but this almost certainly involved deep state manipulation.#DefendTheCanary https://t.co/34gX207nkL
— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) September 4, 2026
Metro Bank’s decision to debank The Canary has already triggered a fresh storm of outrage. Paul Holden, an investigative journalist and author of The Fraud, describes the latest attack on The Canary as “utterly chilling and Kafkaesque:
An outrageous assault o[n] free speech and media independence.
The Canary is a legitimate media outlet, independently regulated, and is being driven out of business. This will put its journalists in a position of serious hardship as they can’t be paid.
And the crazy thing is that they don’t even know why the accounts are being closed and have no way of rebutting evidence they can’t see!
This is the second time The Canary has been targeted by phantom allegations made by faceless actors. This absolutely STINKS of political targeting.
A country that shuts down journalism challenging the status quo and putting grannies in prison for holding signs… where are we going?
In his book, The Fraud, Holden documented how Morgan McSweeney, the operative behind Labour Together, the scandal-tarnished right-wing project that sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership and helped deliver Keir Starmer to 10 Downing Street, albeit not for long, actively sought to destroy The Canary. His mantra, apparently, was: “Destroy The Canary or The Canary destroys us.”
“He says we basically need to destroy The Canary if we’re going to be successful in our project”.
Paul Holden, author of ‘The Fraud’ explains how Morgan McSweeney targeted independent media such as @TheCanaryUK.
Full interview available this Saturday on YouTube. pic.twitter.com/kwDi7itCjp
— Turn Left Media (@TurnLeftMediaUK) October 24, 2025
As we noted in our previous post on this issue, the UK government launched an inquiry into “debanking” in 2023 following the furore triggered by Coutts’ debanking of Nigel Farage. The inquiry, however, concluded that customers were not being “debanked” for political reasons.
As a result, not only has debanking continued but debanked customers now face the prospect of being blocked from setting up new accounts at other banks. As The Telegraph reported in July, the UK’s most powerful banking lobby group, UK Finance, is developing a platform that will enable banks to share information on suspicious customers:
Banks are planning to block “debanked” customers from setting up accounts with other lenders, potentially leading to innocent people being effectively locked out of the financial system, The Telegraph can reveal.
Lobby group UK Finance is developing a platform that will allow banks to share data on their customers where they detect “markers of economic crime”.
Lloyds, Barclays and Revolut have already started sharing data about customers, leading to accounts being frozen or closed, The Telegraph understands, following a pilot in 2024.
The data-sharing platform will build on that pilot to make a UK-wide system, which could automatically bar people from opening another account.
But concerns have been raised that thousands of innocent customers and businesses who have been debanked unfairly could be barred from opening up an account with another bank, effectively leaving them locked out of the financial system.
Another recent victim of debanking in the UK is the former Labour MP George Galloway whose accounts with Bank of Scotland, a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group, were closed without explanation last week. Galloway, who is the current leader of the Workers’ Party, host of the Mother of All Talk Shows and a fierce critic of government policy, responded with the following tweets:
39 years ago I opened a personal bank account with Bank of Scotland in Byres Rd Glasgow. Yesterday without explanation or notice they closed my accounts. My parliamentary and old age pensions are paid into these accounts. The mortgage on our family home is paid out of them. The…
— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) September 4, 2026
Bank of Scotland offered me a new product for my savings account the same week they closed my 39 year old account without explanation or ANY notice never mind the notice legally required. They have sent me a cheque for my funds although I have no other bank in which I can lodge…
— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) September 4, 2026
Who gave the order to @LloydsBank to close my 39 year account with Bank of Scotland without explanation or notice? We don’t know. But in the light of my legal team’s injunction upon them this afternoon on the preservation of evidence, we will find out. Count on it. @KRWLaw
— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) September 4, 2026
Galloway was a vocal critic of Farage’s debanking back in 2023 and is now a target of the same treatment. The debanking of Galloway and The Canary are part of a much broader trend, warns Jonathan Cook in his latest article for Middle East Eye, “Britain’s Big Brother State is Already Here — We Just Don’t Realise It Yet” [2]:
The proscription of Palestine Action and placard-holding has paved the way for the British state to designate any opponent – challenging its lawbreaking or contesting its right to dictate truth – as a criminal or a supporter of terrorism. A precedent has been set, and now approved by the UK courts, that will be hard to reverse.
The state has many tools at its disposal, some of which it is already wielding, again to no protest from billionaire-owned media “watchdogs”.
A particularly powerful one is “debanking”: forcing individuals or groups who disrupt the narrative of western state moral and legal authority out of the financial system, driving them into a kind of purdah that makes it near-impossible for them to function in the modern, western world.
Notably again, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were an early victim of the use of debanking as a political weapon. Washington imposed sanctions in late 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks exposed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, cutting off almost all of its donor revenue.
Sanctions – what some describe as a “financial death penalty” – have already been imposed on several judges and staff of the International Criminal Court over the issuing of an arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.
UN legal expert Francesca Albanese, at the forefront of highlighting western complicity in Israel’s genocide, has also been debanked.
🚨 BREAKING:
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese:
“My credit card doesn’t work, I can’t pay or make transfers; my health insurance was canceled, and I can’t book hotels. I feel like Pablo Escobar. All because I said, ‘Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.'” pic.twitter.com/jeqtemXPJG
— GBC (@GBC_Press) September 6, 2026
Than there’s this…
Over 60k people in the UK have been arrested within the past 5 years for their social media posts. https://t.co/vdWbcXEIOf
— Kim Iversen 🇺🇸 (@KimIversenShow) September 6, 2026
Debanking is one of the most pernicious forms of cancellation that an individual or organisation can undergo, since everyone needs a bank account to be able to function within the official economy as well as society at large. As Alex Lo wrote 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.”
In this case, two of the UK’s lenders are using it as a weapon against one of the few newspapers in the country that has consistently called out Israel’s genocidal actions in West Asia. The Canary’s management insists that it is only suspending operations, nor surrendering, while it seeks to “rebuild on a stable foundation.” But to do that, it will need access to banking services.
As an aside, in Germany the Postbank, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, which formerly had close ties to the Nazi regime, recently closed the accounts of the anti-fascist VVN-BdA (Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime — Federation of Anti-fascists), founded by political opponents to Nazism in 1947. To justify the move, the bank’s management cited parent company Deutsche Bank’s commitment to Israel. Which in the current global context makes perfect sense.
Lastly, our parting warning from the previous post bears repeating: the processes behind all of these extra-legal sanctions being imposed on ICC judges, UN representatives like Albanese, critical journalists and academics like Hüseyin Doğru and Jacques Baud, and news organisations like The Canary could soon be automated through the rollout of digital identity systems and programmable central bank digital currencies.
We’re entering a time when the government won’t have to censor you for your opinions because banks will just freeze your money and cut your access to society off instead. Not sure people are grasping how serious this debanking bullshit is.
— Council Estate Media (@cem_uk_) September 5, 2026
If the political and financial establishment are willing to financially ostracize public figures like Baud, Galloway and Albanese, imagine what they’ll be willing to do to the rest of us once these technologies are fully operational? Even Kafka himself might be shocked.
[1] This last paragraph may have been in response to allegations from unnamed former journalists at The Canary that the banking issues in recent months have been used to distract from wider financial mismanagement at the firm. Such allegations are getting lots of airtime on social media as well as in the legacy media, particularly (surprise!) The Guardian.
[2] The “we” in the title of Cook’s article does not, of course, apply to long-standing NC readers, who have been reading about Britain’s Orwellian drift on this site for at least three or four years.
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