Persecuting the UK’s Rural Communities by Freezing Financial Services

Newspapers this week reported that a prominent financial company, without warning, suspended its services to hunts and organisations associated with hunts throughout the UK. According to the The Daily Telegraph:

The Oakley Hunt was among those to discover an issue when its card machine was cut off half way through their point-to-point meeting in Northamptonshire in March. It is the biggest event in their calendar and the shutdown could have cost them thousands. When the hunt questioned the decision, SumUp said “after a thorough review of your profile we will not be able to provide you with our services.”

Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, wrote the following in an e-letter to the charity’s members on the 3rd of August, 2023:

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.

As Bonner highlights, freezing and suspending financial services as a form of discrimination is something with which rural people have had to contend for many years. He points out at the end of his letter that these financial services routinely resort to the “Orwellian doublethink” of exhibiting how ethical they are by discriminating against minority groups like the UK’s fieldsporting community. 

It is likely that mainstream newspapers would have taken no notice of these unjust actions against rural communities had they not come amidst a well-reported scandal regarding the prominent UK politician Nigel Farage and the closure of his Coutts bank accounts owing to his political views.

As a known advocate of fieldsports, I was contacted by The Epoch Times for a statement on what happened recently to the hunts. As that newspaper will only use an excerpt or two from my statement, if they use it at all, I have chosen to publish it in full below:

It is outrageous that financial organisations like SumUp have chosen to suspend their services to hunts across the country. Hunting live quarry with hounds was outlawed in 2004, and since then hunts have hunted within the law. The hunting community, like any community, has people who act sensibly and a few who act less sensibly. In general, however, the hunting community comprises decent and respectable people who love and understand the countryside and wish to conserve their culture which has developed symbiotically with rural life down the centuries.

It is obvious to me, and ought to be obvious to anyone with a brain, that the vilification of hunting was never primarily about concern for animals. If it were about concern for animals, then one would expect far greater outrage over the existence of battery ‘farming’ throughout the UK. However, often those who protest against hunting—which is one of the most natural activities on earth—are more than happy to consume fast-foods made with battery-farmed animals whose entire existence has been one of prolonged torture. 

The real reason why hunting has been increasingly attacked in our times is that it represents a shared, traditional, organic way of life, enjoyed by those who understand the landscape and who sought to manage wildlife so as to share the countryside with wild animals whilst maintaining it as a reliable source of food. Hunting and everything it represents is, then, an afront to the uprooted, insulated, managerial, busybodies who for decades have formed the political elite to whom we find ourselves subject. The ‘platonic form’ of the managerial busybody is, of course, that Brussels oligarchic and metropolitan snob Tony Blair, which is why his government went after rural people and their fieldsports in the early noughties: country life and its traditions simply seemed incompatible with the new Britain that he envisaged and wanted to force on the population of these isles.

Those who have no sympathy for the rural community or its fieldsports should nonetheless express extreme indignation at the unjust behaviour of SumUp and other financial organisations which are freezing accounts or suspending services because they happen to dislike the opinions or activities of their clients. We are witnessing a rise of intolerance towards anyone who departs from a new rigid uniformity, alongside a worrying emergence of novel means by which to punish extra-legally such dissidents. Those who unthinkingly cheer on this tyrannical trajectory may find that they are next. After all, who knows what witch hunts the politics of grievance and resentment will conduct in a few years? What might be deemed progressive today might be judged regressive then, and it’s not obvious that all of today’s progressives will be able to keep up. Those who help to build gulags may end up in one. Every person, hunt-supporter or not, should oppose the actions of SumUp and other financial services who behave similarly.