Canary director explains the Lloyds debanking situation to Double Down News

Appearing on Double Down News, Canary CEO and director Steve Topple has explained the Canary’s debanking situation.

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The Canary debanked

If you’re unfamiliar with the debanking, you can catch up here. In short:

The Canary has been debanked by Lloyds. Despite banking with them for almost a decade they are currently withholding a substantial amount of our money. We are left with barely any funds.

Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action. Despite multiple communications from us, the bank has not been forthcoming with its reasoning.

Speaking to Richard Sanders of Double Down News, Topple said:

Yeah, so we’re in a bit of a catastrophe, I suppose, is the right way to describe it at the minute. Lloyds Bank have unceremoniously dropped us and closed our account. It only happened recently, and we don’t know why, and I don’t want to speculate why…

The Canary is a famous or infamous outlet, depending on your viewpoint, and there could be multiple reasons why this has happened, but it’s left us in a very, very chaotic position… they’re holding a huge amount of our money somewhere in the ether.

Explaining how he became aware of the debanking situation, Topple explained:

The account was just shut, and I had to ring them up to find out what was going on, and even then, they’ve been extremely, extremely kind of non-descript with me… I’m struggling to get information out of them, despite repeated phone calls, all of which I have logged, and we’re still none the wiser as to when we’re going to get this huge amount of money back from them.

“We’ve pissed off a lot of people”

Explaining what the Canary is, Topple told Sanders:

So, The Canary has been around for over 10 years now, actually. We launched in October 2015. We’re a very left-wing media organization. We have always been disruptive. We think of ourselves as an online online tabloid.

He added:

We’ve pissed off a lot of people off over the years. A lot of people. From elements of the Labour Party to the entire Zionist lobby, to Nigel Farage and Reform to the Tories. I don’t think there’s many people we probably haven’t annoyed and frustrated over the years. …

Despite various ups and downs over the years, we’re here.

The wider issue

Speaking about the broader issue of debanking, Topple explained:

GB News put out an article which was actually quite supportive of us. It’s in their interest because, you know, debanking is not a left-wing or right-wing issue.

As Topple continued (and as we’ve reported elsewhere):

we’ve had… the Free Speech Union, Toby Young’s vehicle… come out in support of us. But, otherwise, you know, it’s crickets from the corporate media, and we didn’t expect anything less.

Topple also noted:

I can’t remember who put it out, but there was a very good post on X listing all the organizations that have been debanked over the years. The majority of them Muslim. And you know, even more recently, you have people like Tony Greenstein… a prominent anti-Zionist Jewish activist… repeatedly smeared and targeted legally or otherwise over the years. He’s been debanked recently. You know, and this is not a new phenomenon

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On a related note, Double Down News is a key independent media organisation on YouTube. And as we just reported, the UK government is looking into whether it should force YouTube to deprioritise independent creators like Double Down News in favour of establishment outlets like the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, and the rest.

We know why the government would want this, of course; it’s because these outlets are soft when it comes to accurately reporting on situations like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And that’s also why these same outlets are ignoring our current debanking crisis.

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore