Tim Bonner: Banks discriminating against hunts and gun shops

Nearly 10 years ago I wrote an article in The Field magazine about the Co-operative Bank closing the account of a riding school which allowed the local hunt over its land, forcing a subsidiary, the Britannia Building Society, to refuse further services to the Blencathra Hunt Supporters Club and having an ‘ethical’ investment policy which included a commitment not to invest in organisations involved in “the use of ferrets to catch rabbits”.
 
It is slightly frustrating that it has taken a row between a bank and a politician to bring something which has been affecting  rural communities for so long to prominence, but now that “de-banking” has become such a newsworthy issue the Alliance has jumped into action. On the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph you can read the story of hunts using the financial services firm SumUp to take card payments being de-banked in the middle of fundraising events. Those of you who attended the Oakley point-to-point in March may have experienced delays getting in or buying a round in the beer tent as SumUp simply turned off the service with no warning. When challenged they pointed to a bizarre policy on restricted businesses which states it “cannot always support” a long list of categories of businesses from estate agents to pornographers, which includes ‘hunting clubs’ and ‘gun and firearm distributors’. What this really means is that SumUp has given itself the ability to discriminate against any business it does not like on the basis of an illogical restriction policy.
 
The duplicitous response of SumUp to the Telegraph was to blame “financial regulators, the card schemes and acquiring banks” for the guidelines about “the types of businesses we cannot support”. Unfortunately, this is largely nonsense. Financial regulators do not prohibit SumUp from doing business with rural clubs or shooting businesses and its clients - including American Express - deny imposing any restrictions. In reality this is another case of a business making a moral judgment about the ‘type’ of customer it thinks will impact on its reputation. I word that carefully because there is no evidence that providing financial services for the Oakley Hunt or the local shooting business would actually have any impact on SumUp’s reputation, nor do I actually believe that its executive have any real concern about legal trail hunting or licensed shotguns. They have, however, been persuaded somewhere along the line by PR consultants to talk about ethics and, having not a clue what those are, have settled on discriminating against minorities which they think fit the bill as they are disliked by some noisy activist or other.
 
The Orwellian doublethink involved in discriminating against minorities in order to prove how ethical you are was highlighted by, of all people, the Daily Mirror’s Associate Editor Kevin Maguire when he commented on the story in a newspaper review. Maguire has been a scourge of hunting for decades, as has his paper, but he was very clear that, despite his dislike of them, legitimate hunts and gun shops “should not be discriminated against” by removing financial services from them.
 
We will now be contacting SumUp, and also any other bank or financial service provider which excludes legal rural businesses, and pressuring them to amend their terms, as well as continuing to lobby Government to address the broad issue of discrimination and de-banking. If you have any relevant examples from your own experience please email hunting@countryside-alliance.org to help us to take action.