‘Cancelling the Countryside’: Shooting Clubs, Gun Shops ‘Treated Like Criminals’ in Debanking Scandal

Clay pigeon shooting in a rural location
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Oliver JJ Lane

Shooting businesses including shops and clubs have blown the whistle on their treatment at the hands of cancel-happy banks, which have been embroiled in a ‘debanking’ scandal revealed by Nigel Farage last year.

British countryside stalwarts like gun shops, shooting syndicates, and gun clubs are being “treated like criminals” by big banks that are “cancelling the countryside”, they claim, with the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) reporting a third of such businesses have had their accounts closed, and two-thirds have struggled to open new accounts.

15 different UK-operating banks are implicated in the claims, British legacy-conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph reports. The paper notes gun clubs and shops are being treated like “sex workers” by banks apparently using any pretext to withdraw essential banking services from businesses that don’t meet their social standards.

The report cites a note by the Financial Conduct Authority that states: “We have received submissions from representatives of the gun trade and sports shooting, and adult entertainment (including sex work). These highlight the challenges, for the members/affiliates of business types or sectors that may divide wider opinion, of obtaining or maintaining a payment account.”

BASC hit back at the moral equivalence made between the shooting industry and sex workers, with a spokesman saying just because a “very small minority of people opposing shooting”, it does not become a “reputation risk” for banks to have on their books. “A small minority of people oppose the banking system, that doesn’t mean dealing with banks is a reputational risk to their client”, they said.

The association warned against banks “discriminating against perfectly legal and respectable accounts that have been run for years on a proper basis”, which they said was damaging. The body said: “Financial service providers are cancelling the countryside… You wouldn’t expect your water electricity or gas to be shut down because of your interest in shooting so why should banks be allowed to get away with politicising fundamental financial services to the taxpayers that not that long ago bailed them out.”

While debanking is a longstanding problem that has been causing considerable difficulty to individuals and organisations for years, it broke into the political lexicon last year after Brexit leader Nigel Farage revealed he was in the process of being debanked by Coutts, the banking house he’d kept his money with for decades. While Coutts and its parent group Natwest denied the charges, it was later revealed they had lied and briefed against Farage, and he was in fact being debanked for political reasons.

The fallout of the revelations was considerable, with top figures at Natwest including its CEO stepping down over their role in the debacle.

The debanking of shoots and gun shops follows similar attacks on other traditional countryside organisations like mounted fox hunts having card facilities withdrawn as “restricted businesses” despite pursuing trail hunts legally, being classified alongside “illegal or questionable businesses”.

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