UK banks have been much in the news in the past few weeks for de-banking - depriving individuals and organisations of access to banking facilities. Almost all the media attention has been about Coutts’ decision to deprive ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage of his bank account, and whether this is because his balance had fallen below their minimum threshold (£3 million for savings, or £1 million for borrowing), or because he was a ‘Politically Exposed Person’ vulnerable to bribery, or because the bank disapproved of his politics. Or, most likely, a combination of all three.
Little attention has been given to a simultaneous, but much more sinister, development - the action of several banks in de-banking individuals and organisations that have been active in campaigning against gender ideology.
Following the publicity surrounding the closure of Farage’s accounts, the UK government has indicated that it will strengthen regulatory requirements to make it clear that customers should not have their accounts closed because of their political beliefs. Such a change will protect the accounts of elite politicians like Farage. But this will not deter banks from continuing to use account closures to silence critics of the gender industry. It will not be hard for a bank to engineer a complaint that an individual or organisation has ‘misgendered’ another customer or a member of staff, and to use that complaint as justification for closing their account.
I have written about this in a guest post on the 11th hour blog:
The world’s largest financial institutions, in alliance with Big Pharma, have embarked on a massive global campaign to normalise body dissociation and the deconstruction of human sexual reproduction. Two asset management firms - BlackRock and Vanguard - are at the apex of this push. Jennifer Bilek has analysed, here, how these two corporations use the leverage of their investments to push the ideology of ‘gender identity’. This is an ideology that denies material reality, but creates numerous new profit opportunities. Firstly by constructing artificial ‘identities’ which segment the market into new (and highly profitable) sales opportunities. And secondly by encouraging the body dissociation that enables the commodification of our sexed bodies and allows the highly exploitative and profitable surrogacy industry to flourish.
BlackRock and Vanguard are based in the USA, but their reach is global. In the UK they manage 8-9% of the shares in three of the four main high street banks - Barclays, Lloyds, and HSBC. They are not passive shareholders. Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, made it clear in his 2022 Letter to CEOs that “Capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change.” Promoting gender ideology is one of the ways Fink uses that power. I first came across BlackRock when I was researching Just Like Us, an LGBT+ charity which promotes body dissociation to primary school children in the UK. I was intrigued by the fact that BlackRock was a major corporate supporter of Just Like Us, and surprised to learn not only that BlackRock is a major investor in AbbVie, the supplier of puberty blocking drug Lupron, but that its CEO, Larry Fink, is co-chair of the trustees of a New York hospital heavily involved in what it calls ‘gender affirming medical interventions’ (newspeak for chemical and surgical construction of synthetic sex identities) for young people.
Policy initiatives from asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard in the US cascade down to retail banks in Europe,. Here, a recent policy development is de-banking - denying opponents of the gender industry access to money transfer services.
Thank you so much for writing about this. It's ESG at the WEF.