We now have the definitive image of Just Stop Oil. As the England wicketkeeper, Jonny Bairstow, carried protestor Daniel Knorr off the ground at Lords, like a bored parent removing a toddler from a soft play, young Daniel raised his fist to the crowd in a gesture of triumph. Yes, in that moment of maximum futility, not to mention humiliation, the Just Stop Oil protestor thought he’d scored a popular victory. I won’t labour the point, but I will say that I’d buy the t-shirt if anyone cares to produce one.
We should not, however, allow ourselves to become too distracted by the slapstick sabotage of Just Stop Oil. Because there’s a much more serious and destructive campaign of sabotage being conducted in Britain right now. This involves, among other things, letter writing campaigns of the type we associate with late-stage totalitarian regimes.
The difference here is that the letters are being written to banks, payment companies and other corporations, not the secret police. The concept is the same though. They denounce their ideological enemies to people with the power to make their lives difficult, if not intolerable. And the surprise, for me at least, is how readily our banks and payment companies have taken on the secret police role.
In response to the treatment of Nigel Farage by Coutts, the Government is reportedly planning to table legislation to prevent banks from denying service to someone on political grounds. The obvious question is whether the Government should also be looking at the letter writers themselves?
It would be natural to baulk at this. It feels heavy handed and illiberal. And it would be far better if the banks and payment companies realised that this is commercially counterproductive, ethically wrong, and sometimes unlawful. On closer inspection, however, a government response might require little more than codifying and updating existing legal principles that are already backed by sound public policy.
For example, there is, in most common law countries, a tort known as intentional interference with a contract, or inducing a breach of contract, or similar. This involves a person intentionally causing someone to breach their contract with a third party. I’ll spare you the detailed analysis of whether the technical elements of the tort apply to the examples we’ve seen, not least because I’m not qualified to provide it. I will, however, offer a few observations.
I’ve seen a lot of bank and payment company terms of use, from both sides of the professional and commercial fence. I have never, however, seen any that include, as grounds for closing an account, “expressing an opinion that conflicts with the views of the bank’s social media team, the University of Sussex Student Union, or Stonewall”. To close an account by falsely accusing the local vicar of breaching some other provision, such as a prohibition against hate speech, would put the bank itself in breach. Pressuring a bank or payment company to do so does, therefore, look something like the tort.
There are, of course, ways for a bank or payment company to exit a client without breaching its own terms of use. Financial services firms must retain some discretion regarding whether they offer, or continue to offer, regulated products to each customer. This is to enable them to ensure, among other things, that their products are suitable and safe for each customer, that they deploy capital and balance sheet in accordance with sound prudential principles, and that they minimise the risk of money-laundering, terrorist financing and other criminality. This may make any examination of a bank’s true motives for exiting a client difficult.
I’m also reminded of the terrible accident that happened at PayPal last year. It amended its terms of use so that it could levy fines against customers who breached its Acceptable Use Policy. The poor folk at PayPal were mortified when this came to light because, as they explained, it was an accident. We’ve all been there. You’ve instructed someone in your legal team to draft a clause guaranteeing procedural fairness to your customers, but they’re notoriously poor typists. They look like the Swedish chef from the muppets, swinging their arms wildly and hitting all the wrong keys. Still worse, the text doesn’t come out as gobbledygook, it comes out as a perfectly formed legal clause. It then turns out that the person responsible for approving the clause has been ignoring those reminder emails from their optometrist for months, so they miss-read it. Such accidents could happen at any bank or payment company, resulting in far more lethal and targeted terms of use.
There’s also the question of whether the letters constitute inducement and so on, but this could get very boring very quickly. The main point is that the common law has long recognised that it is a wrong, actionable at law, to deliberately sabotage someone else’s contractual relationship. And that is precisely what these campaigners are attempting to do.
This is not all though. There is a constellation of existing legislation and other common law principles that, taken together, provide a reasonably clear public policy consensus on this issue.
This includes the powerfully effective U.K. GDPR. One reason I’ve been able to write this piece is that I have so much more time now that my inbox is not full of spam and my phone is no longer ringing about the car accident I never had. One set of principles established by the U.K. GDPR, in its beautiful prose styling, is that a “data controller” (that’s the bank) must disclose to the “data subject” (that’s you) the way it collects personal information and the purpose for which it collects that information. The data controller is prevented from using the information for any other, undisclosed, purpose.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a bank privacy notice that says: “We may collect information about your personal beliefs from vindictive strangers who, acting in bad faith and with the sole intention of harming you, write letters to us denouncing you. We will retain this information for the purpose of monitoring your personal beliefs. We may use this information to deny you service if we, or the campaign group that we pay to tell us what to think, disagrees with your beliefs.” Although, as mentioned above, accidents do happen.
Again, I won’t attempt an analysis of whether the banks and payment companies have breached the U.K. GDPR in any specific case, but you get the point. It is accepted public policy that businesses should not unnecessarily collect, retain or, most importantly, use personal information about you. According to the U.K. GDPR, banks should screw these letters up and throw them in the bin. So it seems a small step to prohibit the writing of the letters in the first place. In fact, what is the point of privacy legislation if it doesn’t deal with unhappy people who self-soothe by keeping a file on your personal beliefs and reporting them to your bank, dentist, and local Waitrose?
Then there’s the entire common law of defamation. And the FCA Handbook, that places a regulatory obligation on banks to treat customers fairly. And the Equality Act 2010 which, apparently, prevents businesses like banks from discriminating against people because of their ‘protected’ religious or philosophical beliefs. And, more tangentially, competition law, which deals with boycotts and other abusive practices intended to disrupt commercial relationships and markets. All of these have something to say, directly or indirectly, about the issue.
Would it be a stretch to draw from this body of law a general principle that it is wrong, and against public policy, to write letters to businesses about the personal beliefs of their customers, with or without a threat to harm that business by organising a boycott or a negative PR campaign, for the purpose of disrupting that business relationship or harming those customers?
All of this is without recourse to those twin cousins of the common law, common sense and common decency, who would surely object to these letter writing campaigns on principle. Common sense might also suggest, however, that before we consider legislation to prevent individuals from writing letters, no matter how objectionable the individual or the letter may be, it is better to wait and see whether our banks and payment companies can be convinced to simply ignore them. As of course they should.
Adrian Brown is a former lawyer who works in payments and foreign exchange, with experience across both the banking and financial technology sectors.
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Off topic, for which I apologise, but I have a question. My view: there is no ‘climate emergency’, the climate is only changing as much as it would normally do, AGW is a myth, solar activity is probably the major factor, a bit more CO₂ in the atmosphere would be good for everyone anyway, we must avoid conflating the need to ‘de-pollute’ with risible idea of ‘de-carbonising’, etc. … and I’m old enough to remember the winter of ’63 and the summer of ’76.
Nevertheless, prompted by a couple of articles in La Repubblica yesterday, I was struck by the apparent increase in extreme weather events, certainly in Italy and continental Europe. Is this simply down to more reporting of such events, exaggerated reporting, or is there a step increase in the normal cycle of climate change? I’d be interested to know what other sceptics think.
Our town is prone to flooding, it’s on a river. The highest floods were 1901, 1932 & 1987. Further down the river high water marks were in different years, but same river. What used to be local news is now national news, insofar as it’s available nationally, or internationally. There’s always a record being created somewhere but they don’t necessarily show a trend.
Answer – we’ve only been measuring this stuff (badly) for the blink of an eye.
Same here. I can just about remember the 1963 winter, and certainly the 1976 summer. Much more recently 2007 was a wet Summer with a fair bit of flood damage locally. Not quite as bad as winter 2014, perhaps, but it did force certain companies to improve their drainage system, and local authorities to improve local rivers etc to reduce the risk. No shortage of house development on areas prone to flooding, though.
At present there is a lot of abuse of terms to promote certain beliefs. E.g. “emergency” cannot last indefinitely, nor can a “crisis”. It could be that there are more scribblers doing selective reporting, and exhibiting a degree of hubris on the idea that we can do much about long term weather events (i.e. climate). Investing in improvements that could reduce various problems can be useful, but often money says no. Thus a lot of work is done only after a (real) emergency (like railway improvements between Exeter and Teignmouth). https://www.networkrail.co.uk/stories/five-years-since-we-reopened-dawlish/
Highly sensationalist news reporting. There is a heatwave, yes, but the temperatures they are recording have been shown to be entirely fallacious. ESA (European Space Agency) admitted its figures (and accompanying red map!) were based on actual land surface temps rather than air temperature. If you’ve ever touched a car on a very hot day you’ll understand the discrepancy. Extreme events however are not climate, they are weather and weather is not climate… I also remember ’63 – making tunnels under the snow on my grandmother’s lawns and ’76 when I left school. Good memories of extreme weather!
The IPCC’s own technical report (as opposed to the downstream politicised reports) show that there is no evidence for an overall increase in extreme weather events over the last century. That’s on the basis of data, rather than appearances and impressions.
It’s very easy to manufacture an “apparent increase” simply by reporting it all the time (compare the very apparent COVID with the near-invisible Hong-Kong flue pandemic that killed more people).
I would be interested in Adrian’s view of Refinitiv’s Privacy Policy. They’re busy hoovering up personal data and assembling it into new datasets to sell on to banks. Most people have never even heard of Refinitiv so how can it be within the law to assemble this data without explicit consent?
Perhaps they have covered themselves by referring to “publicly available” information. Of course that information may have been made public without the subject’s consent, but perhaps it would be up to the subject to pursue the original publisher, get it removed and then pursue Refinitiv. You could argue that Refinitiv could not reasonably be expected to establish whether every piece of already public information had been made public legitimately.
Point 2 (iii) specifies that information from another person, unless specifically described as confidential, is allowed –
iii From a person to whom the data subject has disclosed the personal information (provided that LSEG does not have knowledge that the data subject has restricted the information to a specific audience)…
It seems to imply including just about anything you may have said to anyone that wasn’t described as confidential AND that if you did say something in confidence they should know that too. That’s terrifying.
An interesting article, and it raises a few questions about the banks and payment company’s in adopting stances and taking actions without legal oversight to the full legality of those actions. It hasn’t the mark of professionalism about it, has it? It seems to be the general trend as when an entity gets too big, complacency is quickly followed by incompetence, where its drive is for its own existence not the purpose of which it was designed.
Hubris is generally followed by Nemesis
Wholeheartedly agree. It’s time to stop playing nice and turn the tables on all those ‘activists’.
Here is an interesting story about one of the worst ones:
https://www.takimag.com/article/smears-for-money/
The only problem I see is the collaboration with wokeness and as such total corruption of the judiciary.
United we stand!
I think divided is the aim of the ptb!
Use the gullible to police the righteous!
Very good article and a witty read.
On the one hand it is a comfort that our common law has the answers to our current problems in this area. On the other, we are living in disconcerting times, with the threat of a CCP-style social credit system on the horizon.
My understanding is that snitching is the main way that you gain points under the CCP’s social credit system.
Which only goes to show that “social credit” is totalitarian. It has been evident to many of us for a fairly long time that the left has “reverted to type”. It seeks to coerce people into a state of hopeless, passive obedience, mouthing a litany of platitudes – varied at the whim of the commissars – in the weird belief that mass delusion of this sort involves a change of perception which in turn “transforms” reality. That is what we are faced with. And yet most people are only now, at this last moment, belatedly yawning, scratching their flanks and getting out of bed, with the burglars all over the property. Such is the degree of infiltration that it may well be too late to do more than barricade the bedroom – and no such barricade will last long. Social credit, digital currency, a censored press, a unsettled, resettled native populace and a grim support from the legions of new colonists – the new totalitarians have their plans in place. All they need now is a government absolutely committed to the same ends: a Labour government. True, the Tories are not much better, but they are at least reluctant. And whilst we keep them in office for now – if we are sufficiently “long term” and wise in our strategy – we can speed the process of enlightenment across society. This really and truly is our only chance of a peaceful or successful escape. If Labour is helped into power by idiot despair and internecine right wing strife then our destiny is tragic.
“to exit”. Seriously?
The CEO of NatWest used exit incorrectly too. The only way ‘to exit a client’ is if you are inside them to begin with.
Yes the term has clearly been used in the Merchant Banker’s handbook, or in a DIE PowerPoint presentation at Davos or somewhere similarly and ironically exclusive and has stuck, like shit to a banker.
It’s part of the Language Change Crisis – like “leveraging,” “meeting a criteria,” “referenda,” and many more examples of Chewspeak.
Trans woman and biological man. Or in the old money, man.
There’s a whole industry of denunciation and corporations react on the basis of a single denunciation. I remember one of those organised Twitter psychos found out who Stefan Molyneaux’s email provider was, tweeted to the email firm that he’s a white supremacist and the email provider tweeted back their thanks and that they’d immediately shut down his email. Molyneaux already is defamed on Wikipedia and in other places. That’s all it takes now: generate a biased profile of someone across several major platforms and then denounce them. Look at what Stop Finding Hate has done to GB News. It would be fascinating to know who funds these denunciation organisations. I’m surprised there aren’t more class actions happening against tittle-tattle organisations. Presumably the lawyers are on their side rather than the victims’.
Bravo! Hilarious. 10/10.
There is a simple truism that if you haven’t had a good kicking in a whil of one sort or another then you do become soft. I came to this country in the late 1970s and there were some tough characters around. In 1982 during the Falklands War, Henry Kissinger said that the British were the only people left in the world who enjoyed fighting. How I wish that were still true but you had the death of Diana and all the fake emotion and then just a gradual descent into utter weakness and stupidity. But there will always be some good English lads who are willing to fight the good fight on the highest level.
Those opposing the Social Credit system the Globalists are trying to impose using Banks and Corps as their enforcers need to get onto the letter-writing and boycotting “game.” We have seen some willingness to do this with the BudLight debacle.
Encouraged by a superb letter by one of the BtL commentators here, I wrote to NatWest yesterday stating my personal opinions: pro Brexit; anti clearly senile Presidents; anti trans-genderism as a lifestyle choice; anti-coerced mass medical experiments etc.
I told them that although – unfortunately – I do not have a NatWest account to close, I am the elected Treasurer of an organisation which has two accounts with them and I will be tabling a motion to change our banking provider at the next AGM.
Get onto the letter-writing “game” …. and follow through with action.
During lockdown Britain became East Germany
Latest leaflet
African children sacrificed on green altar
Toxic solar panels destined for landfills
to copy and print – both sides
t.me/MillionLightPaperAndLeaflet/249
An even bigger concern is how data about us is being harvested and could be used against us by automated curtain twitchers. Refnitiv collects data on political opinions, religious & philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, sex life and even genetics. This can be used in mass-screening programmes.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/what-a-wunch-of-bankers