Stark raving mad. The Times:
A women’s rights and gender equality campaigner is having her bank account shut without explanation, her family said last night.
Professor Lesley Sawers, 64, the Equalities and Human Rights commissioner for Scotland, has been with the Royal Bank of Scotland, a subsidiary of the NatWest Group, for 32 years.
However, two weeks ago, she and husband, Allan McKechnie, were told that their joint account, containing thousands of pounds, would be shut next month. In a letter, RBS said that it would be ceasing its “banking relationship” with the couple and they would have to make other banking arrangements “outside of the Natwest group”.
RBS added that it was “not able to discuss this decision with you or provide you with any further information in relation to our decision-making”.
Wtf do they mean “not able”? Of course they’re able; they don’t want to.
Sawers has been in her role since 2016. She has not been involved in any controversies but the role deals with women’s and LGBT rights.
McKechnie, a private pilot from South Ayrshire, said that they had spoken to another bank about an account only to be told that Sawers has a “mark against her name”.
They were given no further details. McKechnie added: “It is extraordinary. It’s a terrible way to treat someone and a very serious thing.”
It’s stark raving mad, I tell you.
Comments
11 responses to “Without explanation”
The road to Gilead…. I wonder what Margaret Atwood has to say. She foresaw this, but apparently she’s also bought into the gender woo.
It isn’t just stark raving mad, it is also potentially illegal on the bank’s part, unless they can assert (and get the industry and governments to accept) that gender-critical feminists are “politically-exposed persons”. This is unlikely, as that category is normally reserved for high-ranked individuals under specific sanctions regimes; it would also be an extremely dangerous precedent. But given the push for digital currencies and social-credit systems, it is only a matter of time before things like this become more routine, in the so-called lands of the free.
“a mark against her name”
Seems those Bible-thumpers may not have been wrong on that Mark of the Beast thing that some of them go on about. The mark that must be accepted or you will not be permitted to buy or sell. Wonder how this is going to fly in our USA? Last week I was thinking the true holy war that I might live to see in my country was going to be the “lgbtwhatevers” vs. Muslims. Now there is a chance for lgbtwhatevers vs. Christians or maybe both at the same time?
I bet they don’t want to explain the cancellation because they don’t want to put anything actionable on paper. Any reason they supply for the cancellation, unless the source is lying or something, is probably outside both the law and their own cancellation terms.
But is closing people’s bank accounts for no stated reason not itself actionable? Or at least a risk of a whole load of unwelcome attention?
I would think so. They can easily stonewall ordinary queries, but I bet things will move if the individuals get lawyers involved.
RBS appear to be in breach of their own T&Cs.
In the first instance complaints have to be made to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which if it’s like the one in NZ is funded by the banks and is pretty bank friendly. Consumer or discrimination law might work better, but is expensive (anyone want to sue a bank?), and as noted by comments above, the refusal to disclose the reason for closing the account is quite probably because it expose the bank to exactly that sort of lawsuite.
Damned irregular. I know that in the US a bank doing this would both be subject to a lawsuit and have to face and explain to regulators just what it is that they think they are doing.
If there are rogue TA’s in these banks, then they will be outed, I hope, and made examples of.
Because very few employers pay their employees in cash, and especially because all Social Security benefits and pensions, etc. are paid by direct transfer into bank accounts (with very limited exceptions) the British laws state that a bank cannot refuse to open a basic current account for anybody, and can only close one under special circumstances, those being pretty much as per the RBS terms above (Rob, #7).
It is my understanding that even if the couple violated RBS’s terms, they should still be entitled to open a basic account at the very least at a non-NatWest group bank unless the violation was also a crime for which they have been prosecuted and convicted so long as they can show that they receive salaries, pensions or government benefits. This does only apply to the very basic accounts, though, and access to other account types such as savings or investment accounts are at the banks’ discretion.
The bank can close your account if
Well, there you have it. Someone transgender on their staff (or the hypothetical possibility of there being someone transgender on their staff) came across something Professor Sawers wrote (or potentially may have written) which said (or implied) that transgender identities weren’t real (or weren’t equivalent in every conceivable way to biological sex) … and they Felt Unsafe.
@Sastra, I understand the reasoning for that clause, because if a customer is abusive to a bank employee directly, a manager has every right to close their account. I have seen it done after a customer abused one of my co-workers over the phone with ethnic slurs. The bank would need to prove that any action she took was directed at a particular member of the staff, and a mormal jury seeking the “preponderance of the evidence” would be hard put to find direct abuse – unless they are all “be kind” allies who see injury to trans identifiers in every breath.