It has been deeply shocking to see the independent Canary media group crushed, after being debanked first by Lloyds and now by Metro Bank.
The Lloyds debanking came just two weeks after the launch of its Canary newspaper, and promptly led to the closure of one of the very few UK papers not owned by a billionaire — almost at birth. The recent second debanking by Metro has led to the suspension of the rest of their operations just a few months later.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026/09/04/canary-debanking-metro
It is thought that the debankings are likely to be linked to a spate of debankings aimed at those campaigning against the zionist terrorist regime. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine, and their chair’s and treasurer’s personal bank accounts have all been debanked.
How we got here
The billionaire-owned media have waged a relentless campaign on this issue for the last three years. Their headlines have backed Israel’s actions in Palestine and successfully demanded that the UK government crack down on the freedom to protest against them.
That has resulted in legislation enabling the police to ban and re-route Palestine peace marches, and in the outrageous proscription of the peaceful direct-action group Palestine Action. That proscription means any newspaper or media outlet faces closure, and their journalists imprisonment, if they are in any way associated with support for, or donations to, Palestine Action.
Debanking — without being found guilty of any crime, and without any legal recourse to defend your newspaper or media outlet from being shut down because its funds have been blocked — is a deeply authoritarian tool that is incompatible with free speech or a free society.
The absurdity at the heart of it
So Britain is now in an insane situation.
Our government has legally approved the sale of one of our most politically powerful newspapers, The Telegraph, to a German media group whose journalists are contractually bound to a set of corporate “Essentials”, the second of which commits them to supporting the right of existence of the State of Israel.
And that same foreign-owned Telegraph can then campaign successfully, alongside Britain’s other foreign billionaire-owned media, for laws that can shut down and destroy British-owned papers and news outlets committed to opposing racist terrorist zionist colonialism.
The UK’s foreign billionaire-owned media are a malignant curse on freedom of speech in this country.
This is the alarm call
The suffocation of The Canary in the billionaire media’s coalmine is a loud alarm call to all of us. We need to end media billionairism before it ends and crushes free speech for the rest of us.
It is time we took back control, before they destroy and shut down all our other independently owned British news outlets.
Free speech depends on billionaire-free media ownership.
Our petition closes this Friday, 18 September.
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Please sign and share our petition to ban foreign media ownership: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760061
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