‘Tool of oppression’: Rising number of UK pro-Palestine voices debanked

The mother of a Palestine Action prisoner has said she was refused a mortgage due to “adverse media”, as more pro-Palestine voices in the United Kingdom are opening up about their experiences of “debanking”.

Emma Kamio, a small business owner in south Wales, was denied a remortgage with Lloyds on her commercial properties in April due to “adverse media.”

The decision “devastated” her, she told Al Jazeera. “It has put me in a difficult position, one where I have relinquished my responsibilities [in the family business] and let my sister pick up the slack.”

Despite the setback, she said business was no longer central in her life.

“I’ve got one goal and that’s to get my girl out of prison,” she said.

Her daughter Leona “Ellie” Kamio has also been affected. In February 2025, while the 30-year-old nursery teacher was held on remand awaiting trial, Kamio was debanked by Lloyds Bank – meaning the financial institution suddenly closed her bank accounts without explanation.

George Galloway, the Scotland-born politician and broadcaster, said last week that Bank of Scotland, owned by the Lloyds Banking Group, closed his personal account without explanation or notice after 39 years.

“My parliamentary and old age pensions are paid into these accounts,” he wrote on X. “The mortgage on our family home is paid out of them. The mortgage is with them.”

In late June, when Lloyds debanked The Canary, the left-wing news outlet wrote that the bank “has not explained why it has taken this action … despite multiple communications from us”.

More recently, the Pakistani-British writer Tariq Ali on Wednesday said a bank, which he did not name, refused to receive a transfer from his account due to his “opinions”.

“My opinions can only mean those on one subject: Palestine,” he wrote on X.

In the case of Kamio, her account was closed before the UK proscribed Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation. It was also before she was convicted of criminal damage in connection with a raid on a factory operated by Israeli defence firm Elbit in Filton, Bristol, in August 2024 – and sentenced as a “terrorist”. Four of six Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage, including Kamio, are seeking to appeal their unprecedented sentencing.

Their appeal submission argues that the judge was wrong in law to find that the non-terrorism offence of criminal damage in their case had a terror connection.

Since Palestine Action was outlawed, more than 2,700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act at rallies and demonstrations in support of the group.

At the time of publishing, Lloyds had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

“We have reached a point where debanking pro-Palestine voices has become systemic,” Anas Mustapha, at the campaign group Cage which advocates against legal abuses from UK counter-terrorism strategies, told Al Jazeera.

He said Cage was debanked more than a decade ago, “with no explanation ever given”.

“Since then we’ve watched the same pattern extend further, with activists being penalised for their politics, and now the families of people jailed for opposing a genocide.”

‘Tool of oppression’

The issue last made the headlines in late 2023, when Muslims in the UK found a rare common link with Reform leader Nigel Farage.

Anas Altikriti, head of the London-based Cordoba Foundation think-tank, was among those affected by debanking, which he said was being used as a “tool of oppression.”

“This is happening on an industrial scale, to thousands upon thousands of people,” the British entrepreneur, who has also been debanked several times, told Al Jazeera on Friday.

More than 450,000 bank accounts were closed each year, according to The Telegraph.

Altikriti argued that the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, marked the beginning of the “commercialisation of the term terrorism”.

Twenty-five years on, the term “slides off the tongue so easily for any kind of adverse opinion,” he said. “The problem is that once that term is on record, it’s always on record. It’s fixed. It’s always there and it impacts your entire life.”

Altikriti was himself labelled a “terrorist” in a banking database following a claim from the United Arab Emirates that was never independently verified by UK authorities. The British citizen said the term has not made his country safer because it is being used “in order to satisfy certain political agendas”.

“If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” he added.