Did The Canary just go down in history as one of the first media outlets in the United Kingdom, if not the first, to be put out of business by debanking?
Yesterday (Oct. 19), the British left-wing news website The Canary announced that it is closing its doors “indefinitely” after 11 years of journalism. The outlet, founded in October 2015, weeks after the election of perennial backbencher Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party, was de-banked by Lloyds Bank in late June.
Now, the Canary has closed its doors “indefinitely”. In its public statement, the news outlet has promised to set the record straight on what actually led to its downfall:
“It is not over. This week, we will publish what really happened at the Canary and push back against the vicious campaign against our team and us. We may be down, but we’re not out yet.”
The Canary, which branded itself as an anti-austerity, anti-Zionist and pro-freedom of expression platform, accused its main banking provider, the Lloyds Banking Group, of “withholding a substantial amount of our money” in late June. As tends to be the case, no explanation was given. In September, another lender, Metro Bank, allegedly withdrew its banking services, prompting the outlet to suspend operations.
Following yesterday’s announcement of The Canary‘s closure, attention is now turning to the actual causes of its downfall. The immediate catalyst appears to be the debanking by Lloyds, which unexpectedly froze access to a substantial chunk of the company’s funds, severely crippling its day-to-day cashflow.
Former employees, however, have alleged that the organisation’s demise was primarily the result of “wider financial mismanagement”, including the squandering of funds on a short-lived nationwide newspaper, which folded after a matter of weeks. Employees have also claimed that they were asked by management to sign “non-negotiable” non-disclosure agreements and told that if they refused, changes would be made to their employment contracts.
Presumably, a clearer picture will emerge over the coming months amid the inevitable airing of dirty laundry. But even if things were already bad at The Canary, as former staff claim, the cancellation of banking services by Lloyds would not have helped matters. Indeed, it probably served as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
The question is: why were those services cancelled?
If it was for political reasons, it would not be the first time The Canary has been the target of a politically driven financial attack. Labour Together, the factional British think tank set up in 2015 by Morgan McSweeney, the recently disgraced political strategist and former Downing Street chief of staff under Keir Starmer, “to delegitimise and destroy” Jeremy Corbyn and restore the Labour right to power, tried to bankrupt The Canary, one of Corbyn’s biggest pillars of support.
As UK Declassified reports, “the key weapon they alighted on was allegations of antisemitism”:
Labour Together aimed, McSweeney wrote in an early confidential strategy paper, to cultivate “seemingly independent voices to generate and share content to build up a political narrative and challenge fake news and political extremism.”
One of these was the campaign group Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), which later morphed into the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
One of its first targets was The Canary, a pro-Corbyn website that was achieving 8.5 million hits a month.
Working closely with the anti-Corbyn Jewish Labour Movement, the book says McSweeney secretly recruited Countdown co-presenter Rachel Riley to front a campaign targeting The Canary’s advertisers with claims the outlet was antisemitic.
The Canary was later cleared by the independent regulator Impress…, but the damage was done. The Canary “went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,” SFFN crowed.
The actual setting in which the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s CEO and founder, Imran Ahmed, made this statement was a conference on internet anti-semetism organised by the US State Department.
Given this backstory, it’s not too far fetched to imagine that Lloyds Bank, and perhaps also Metro Bank, chose to sever their ties with The Canary due to its “extreme” opinions on the Israel Palestine question. If true, The Canary goes down in history as one of the first media organisations in the collective West, if not the first, to be put out of business by debanking.
As readers may recall, Wikileaks, whose operations were originally based in Sweden, faced major operational disruption when financial institutions including Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union cut off all donation processing to the site in 2010, after the massive “Cablegate” scandal. The financial blacklisting reportedly wiped out 95% of the publisher’s revenue, but it was still able to soldier on.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) condemned Lloyds Bank’s debanking of The Canary as a “disturbing precedent for UK press freedom”. Commentators from across the political spectrum have warned that the establishment’s ability to cripple media organisations critical of them creates a hostile environment that will pressure other news outlets to fall into line or face similar potential backlash.
“Debanking is arguably the most pernicious form of cancellation,” asserted the Free Speech Union. “Banks must not have the power to effectively shut down an organisation — let alone the media — by removing their access to their funds purely because they and their staff disagree with its views or ideology.”
Following the furore triggered by Coutts’ debanking of Nigel Farage in 2023, a parliamentary committee found that more than 140,000 businesses had had their accounts closed by the UK banks in the previous year. The reasons cited included concerns over financial crime and fraud, customers’ failure to provide requested information and the banks’ own risk appetite.
However, a resulting government enquiry 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.
Confirmation of Politically Driven Debanking in the US
Now, let’s shift our focus to the United States where a very different kind of debanking scandal is brewing. While the UK’s government inquiry found, rather conveniently, that customers were not being “debanked” for political reasons, a report published last week by the US Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reached the opposite conclusion.
The OCC’s investigation, prompted by President Trump’s Executive Order 14331, Guaranteeing Fair Access to Banking for All Americans, found that the nine large lenders under scrutiny — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank — had all denied or restricted access to banking services based on customers’ political or religious beliefs. From the report’s introduction:
In accordance with Executive Order 14331, Guaranteeing Fair Access to Banking for All Americans, the OCC conducted a supervisory review of debanking activities at the nine largest banks by asset size under its supervision to determine whether these banks’ policies or practices may have required, encouraged, or otherwise influenced banks to deny or limit access to financial services to Americans because of their political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.
The OCC’s findings show that, between 2020 and September 2025, all nine banks had such policies.
OCC Efforts to Address Debanking and Promote Fair Access
Americans who are denied financial services or whose accounts are suddenly closed experience real world financial consequences. The OCC has taken or is considering taking the following actions to promote fair access to financial services in the federal banking system:
- Consideration of Debanking in Licensing Applications and Community Reinvestment Act Examinations
- Removing and Prohibiting Consideration of Reputation Risk in Bank Supervision
- Further Rulemaking
- Complaint Process Changes
- SAR Confidentiality Considerations
- Coordination with Congress and Government Partners
- Promoting Increased Transparency
- Additional Bank Secrecy Act Modernization
- Account Closure Notice Analysis
There have been very different takes on the OCC report’s findings. A broadly bank-friendly article in CNBC notes that the findings may lend new regulatory weight to a grievance President Donald Trump has pressed since returning to office:
Trump has repeatedly accused and sued major banks for discriminating against conservatives and has said he was personally “debanked” after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, claims banks have denied.
The OCC stopped short of announcing fines or sanctions Wednesday, but said it is considering additional rules aimed at preventing political or religious discrimination.
Among the cases it highlighted: JPMorgan subsidiary WePay closed accounts belonging to merchants selling Trump and conservative merchandise. An internal screening list included terms such as “MAGA,” “Make America Great” and “America First,” even though the OCC found neither WePay nor JPMorgan had formal written standards for deciding when flagged material amounted to prohibited hate or violence.
The CATO Institute, a prominent critic of debanking practices, chided the OCC on its failure to establish just how widespread discrimination might be as well as the paltry information it provided to back up each case, noting: “it’s hard to land on the ‘irrefutable’ conclusion that systemic discrimination against conservatives and Christians is taking place in banking when that’s the only evidence being offered.”
However, the report’s biggest failing, according to CATO, is its absence of any serious consideration of the government as a driver of debanking:
The report repeatedly identifies decisions made around reputational concerns as a driving factor in debanking. The basic idea is that banks don’t want to be associated with someone who is controversial because it might drive away customers on the other side of the issue. And it does appear that banks have been extremely risk-averse in some cases.
What the report largely leaves unexplored, however, is the government’s role in requiring banks to manage reputational risk. The report acknowledges this regulatory framework, primarily when discussing its (limited) repeal in 2026, but does not establish how regulatory requirements and supervisory pressure shaped the decisions it criticizes. The repeal was welcome, but those requirements were in place during the review period, and a full accounting of debanking should examine their consequences.
So, will the partial repeal lead to actual respite from debanking for all US citizens and organisations, or just for those that are ideologically aligned with Trump 2.0? If the following words from Stephen Miller, delivered at the US Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in July, are any indication, the Trump administration is, if anything, planning to double down on Biden’s debanking policies, just with a different target in mind (emphasis added):
President Trump issued a directive in our parlance called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM — NSPM 7 to be exact, that directs our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.
If there is one thing the Trump 2.0 administration has excelled at, it is targeting and punishing its enemies. In other words, we could be about to see a sharp rise in the debanking of left-leaning public figures, commentators and organisations, particularly those of a pro-Palestinian, anti-war and anti-genocide bent. Just like The Canary.
