As regular readers will know, I recently had a run-in with PayPal after the payment processor cancelled the account of the Daily Sceptic, along with the Free Speech Union and my personal account. After I kicked up an almighty fuss, all three accounts were restored.
However, that’s not the end of the story. PayPal has deplatformed hundreds of individuals and organisations who still haven’t had their accounts restored, including the U.K. Medical Freedom Alliance, a group that campaigns against vaccine mandates which is run by Elizabeth Evans, a contributor to this site. Why? Because PayPal routinely closes the accounts of anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, whether about the mRNA vaccines or the war in Ukraine. We need to rein in these global financial services companies and stop them from engaging in this sinister new form of censorship.
Here’s how you can help to do that. Sally-Ann Hart, the Member of Parliament for Hastings and Rye, has tabled an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which is currently at the Committee Stage in the House of Commons, to make it illegal for a financial services provider to withhold or withdraw service from a customer on purely political grounds. We hope the Government will accept that amendment, but to encourage it to do so I’m urging everyone who values free speech to email their MP using the Free Speech Union’s campaigning tool, asking them to tell their whip that they support New Clause 15 of the Financial Services and Markets Bill. (You can see the amendment here. It’s on p.20 and labelled NC15.)
This is a critically important battle. If this amendment isn’t passed, we will soon see the emergence of a Chinese-style social credit system in the U.K., except instead of ideological dogma being enforced by the Communist authorities it will be enforced by woke capitalist corporations.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Done. Although I suspect my deeply illiberal Liberal MP, will not bother to do anything about it. As long as she can continue to wear her flowery cloth mask and support the rollout of mRNA gene therapies to children. Yey.
I use to baulk at the sight of MP’s in masks. Now I think – marvellous, keep it up, it’s helping to shorten your life.
Highly recommended.
Done. My MP is an MD as well, Conservative, so I have occasionally written about Covid-related matters. I haven’t checked his website recently so don’t know what his current position is on Covid, censorship and related matters. I think he may be sympathetic, so this is probably worth sending.
Done although I’m stuck with an SNP MP who will vote as Sturgeon tells him. I emailed him a year or so ago about the lack of credible evidence on the efficacy of face masks and received a standard reply telling me how effective they are, no discussion, he was right and I was wrong!
Well, I am delighted to say I was wrong about my SNP MP, I received this reply from him today:
Dear Kathleen
Thank you for writing to me on the free speech amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill tabled by Sally-Ann Hart MP.
In September 2022, I wrote to the then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Jacob Rees-Mogg, to urge him to investigate the actions of PayPal Europe against the Free Speech Union. I await a response from his department.
The SNP group at Westminster is opposed to this Bill in its entirety and in September 2022, tabled an amendment asking for it to be withdrawn altogether. There are multiple concerns we have, including the undemocratic transfer of power to the Treasury to decide on legislation. You can read a full critique of the Bill, by my colleague Peter Grant MP here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2022-09-07/debates/031C9811-9E3E-4EE5-AADA-AB9984934DFD/FinancialServicesAndMarketsBill
With particular regard to the above amendment, my colleagues in the SNP group at Westminster have yet to agree our response but you can be sure that we will act in the best interests of the public to oppose all of the damaging consequences of the Bill passing.
I hope you find this reassuring.
Kind regards
Allan
I tried to do this. However, this campaigning tool is unusable for me and an attempt to send the mail without ended up with my message getting eaten by the internet before it could be sent. As the person who would have received that is from Labour and used to be 100% everything-COVID the Labour party ever said, it would probably have been useless, anyway.
I had the same problem. It wouldn’t send. So I copy pasted the lot when I realised there was a problem and sent it via email instead. Pain in the butt!
Done. My Conservative MP is a Woke Socialist and sadly I’ve already told her I will never vote for her nor will I ever vote Conservative unless and until the covid response is repudiated and the stables cleaned (therefore never). So she doesn’t care what I think, and a while back I stopped receiving the automatic “we’ll reply in due course” responses which I used to get, leading me to believe my email address is on a blacklist.
I write to Swayne sometimes, have written to Chope to thank him for the vaccine damage vote.
I hadn’t heard of Sall-Ann Hart so I looked her up on Wokiepedia, which features this prominently near the top of the page on her: “Following comments she made and content she shared on social media, Hart was investigated by the Conservative Party over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia.”. Right wing people are too busy working and living to have the time and energy to dredge up weak smears against anyone politically to the right, and police all of the pages with such smears – discuss.
Done.
I think that Simon Elmer (in James D’s excellent podcast with him) said that such things are being enforced by corporations. BTW, according to my husband, SE’s The Road to Fascism is excellent and a very important book to read.
Done. Conservative MP so there’s a chance, but I’m losing faith in the entire shower at Westminster. They seem happy to hand the reigns of political power to anyone other than themselves, whether it be the EU or corporate America.
Done. Since my MP is no longer a member of the government he may actually get around to reading it.
Luckily Toby our Government (sic) couldn’t run a p*** up in a brewery and our police force resemble the Keystone Cops. Nobody listens to these cretins any more.
Done. Second email today to the piece of CON Lobby Fodder called Chris Loder.
I doubt it will do any good, but it makes me feel better. It appears he was “too busy” to attend the recent “debate” on the Covid “Vaccine” Injured ….. along with roughly 640 other MPs.
Do we know that the “Chinese social credit system” is even a thing? They do have a system for restricting travel and certain other things for people with unpaid debts, and unlike the US no-fly list it’s not a secret list. Some interesting discussion here: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/china-dystopia-psyop on a substack that, roughly, contends that China could not have grown as fast as it did if it was the authoritarian hellhole that it’s portrayed as in the West.
Also there is a problem with the proposed amendment referring to “purely political grounds”, in that the kinds of issues that PayPal is banning people for are not even considered political by the woke, they are considered moral or correct or scientific.
In 2004 I closed my Barclays Bank account because they withdrew banking facilities for the BNP. I wasn’t even a member of the BNP but it was clear to me that if the BNP could be cut off from banking facilities it could be UKIP next of which I was a member.
To put the added part of the letter I couldn’t send here again:
For so-called democracy to work, it is crucial that political power is only exercised through the proper democratic means. Someone who happens to work for Paypal must not be allowed to wield (or rather, abuse) the commerical power of his employer to amplify his own voice to the detriment of less fortunate others. He’s not some special human being who deserves a more prominent spot in the public debate but just another voter who’s neither above nor below all the others.
That the woke brigade constantly tries to interlope with the rights of others by (ab-)using whichever means at their disposal seem suitable for that marks them as fundamentally antidemocratic: They’re convinced that they are the ones who are justly more equal than the others. But they aren’t.
[Last paragraph added for this text]
Well I did it, as I reported earlier (below) and received this reply from my MP:
Thank you for contacting me about free speech and PayPal.
I was incredibly concerned to learn of PayPal’s recent decision to shut down certain accounts citing its “Acceptable Use Policy”. It is deeply worrying that a company can so quickly, and without warning, withdraw financial services from users likely reliant on continued funding. I will be sure to press upon my Ministerial colleagues the importance of delivering a regulatory regime that strikes the right balance between tackling illegal activity taking place online and not granting companies excessive power to act as censors.
I am grateful to you for taking the time to contact me.
Best wishes
Andrew
RT HON DR ANDREW MURRISON MP
Good man.
I still haven’t seen mention of Eventbrite’s wokery in banning one of their customers and returning tickets sold. Toby still uses Eventbrite for FSU events.
Eventbrite ‘silencing women’ by pulling ticket sales for gender-critical event (telegraph.co.uk)
Done. Unfortunately my MP is Debbie Abrahams and she is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.