An Anglican church leader has accused the Yorkshire Building Society of bullying after it announced that it was closing his account within 14 days when he protested against it allegedly pushing transgender “ideology”.
The Rev Richard Fothergill, who has been with the building society for 17 years, wrote to them online in June, after he was invited to give general feedback.
He insists his message was a polite rebuttal of transgender ideology, which he claims the institution has been actively promoting during Pride month. He received a letter four days later saying that his internet savings account would be closed.
Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) told him in the note, seen by The Times, that it had a “zero tolerance approach to discrimination” and that their relationship had “irrevocably broken down”.
Fothergill, 62, told The Times: “I wasn’t even aware that our relationship had a problem. They are a financial house – they are not there to do social engineering. I think they should concentrate their efforts on managing money, instead of promoting LGBT ideology.
“I know cancel culture exists and this is my first first-hand experience of it. I wouldn’t want this bullying to happen to anyone else.”
Fothergill, from Windermere, Cumbria, typed out his views on transgender ideology to the building society on June 18. He responded to a monthly email he gets from YBS asking for his feedback, after noticing that it was displaying support for Pride month on its website. The minister, who no longer has his own parish but founded the Filling Station evangelical network, wrote out “a couple of paragraphs” about how he did not agree with trans ideology — or the idea that you can have alternative genders — being pushed on children.
Fothergill said: “I was polite all the way through. I was pointing out that they are a financial house – surely they should just be worrying about financial issues.”
On June 22 he received a letter from YBS about his “views regarding LGBTQIA+”. It said the comments he made were “not tolerable” and the building society had a “zero tolerance approach to discrimination”.
The building society, which has three million customers, questioned Fothergill’s version of events.
A spokesman for the building society said: “We never close savings accounts based on different opinions regarding beliefs or feedback provided by our customers. We only ever make the difficult decision to close a savings account if a customer is rude, abusive, violent or discriminates in any way, based on the specific facts, comments and behaviour in each case.”
Fothergill approached the Free Speech Union after his bank’s letter.
Toby Young, the union’s founder, told The Times: “People who’ve been debanked contact the Free Speech Union all the time, but even I was shocked by this story. If you respond to a bank’s request for feedback in good faith you shouldn’t lose your account if you say something it doesn’t like.
“That‘s the kind of thing we’d expect to happen in Communist China, not a supposedly free country like ours.”
