Millar and Farage swim in same pool.
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Tweets you never thought you’d see:
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They are ‘lied’ on their application, the reason there is no ‘political’ option, is they don’t accept political parties!
But is that made clear? Most people when filling out applications don’t go “my exact option isnt there so I must not be allowed”. Instead, they’ll select the one that fits them best.
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Am I the only person who, when completing a form and not finding a relevant option in a pretty important field, would actually then go and read the help files/documentation/Ts&C’s in order to find out what I should do?
Similarly, if opening a business account, am I being naive to think that checking if the type of business is allowed when investigating options for opening an account?
Not sure falling back on “Well they should have noticed it earlier” is a great defence either. Even if one takes this is a true, you’re still actually saying “They should have closed our account before now”. Which… I mean, that’s self-evidently not a great defence, right?
(The one point it is easy to grant is that Monzo could and should have said “We’ve discovered your account doesn’t actually meet our Ts&C’s, so for that reason we are closing it” rather than “We’re closing your account and can’t tell you why.”)
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I don’t think this one looks bad for Monzo in the way it did for NatWest. They were following a clearly stated criteria that they are currently allowed to have. Feels fundamentally very different to being accused of making a decision based on the political beliefs of people who work there.
If politicians want to make it so banks have to accept political parties, that’s fine they can do that.
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Pretty much what you’ve covered, that they didn’t make it clear enough when they told her the account was to be closed, but there isn’t the same dubious reasoning as with Farage or any sort of disclosure of personal details. But then they have announced the reason to the press 
The account just shouldn’t have been opened in the first place.
As an aside, am curious where other political parties bank if they’re not allowed business accounts. Is it a case of most banks don’t allow political parties but some do?
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Moved some off-topic discussion to a new thread 
11 posts were split to a new topic: Gender/Politics Language Discussion
A post was merged into an existing topic: Gender/Politics Language Discussion
I’m not sure if the exact law in the UK, but generally banks have dedicated teams for politically exposed persons - it all just costs more money because they are required to mitigate the risk of bribery and corruption (which the bank is on the hook for if it occurs). So some will, some won’t, and it will change over time who does and who doesn’t.
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Also via https://archive.li/NvPe8
Telegraph really doubling down on their usual Monzo-bashing there.
Mentions the Gina Miller thing early doors. I suspect Monzo will take sticking to their guns and taking some criticism over breaking their Ts&Cs and possibly exposing themselves to an FCA investigation.
I must have missed the memo that says bank staff aren’t allowed to have any political views at all. Large part of the article is therefore simply “People have different views from the ones we approve of.” OK, that’s fine, you don’t have to use Monzo as a bank if you disagree with them that much. 
I can’t be the only one who finds it hysterical that MPs are banging on about banks having a ‘Left-wing agenda’. They’re banks. Largely on the side of capitalism and making money. Two famously left-wing pursuits.
Slightly disturbing that JRM comes off as the sanest-sounding quoted MP in the piece, saying “he respected bank staff’s right to free speech”.
Suspect the only reason the Telegraph made the article so long and padded out was because they hope people will get angry and bored before the reach the end where they’ve had to include the very rational statement from Monzo:
“These cherry-picked comments are personal views of a handful of employees in informal conversations and it is wrong to portray them as the views of Monzo or our thousands of other employees.”
tl;dr, the Telegraph has long been anti-Monzo, and it’s not nicknamed the Torygraph for nothing.
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They’re people, not robots.
I know a few of us have suggested - after a Subject Access Request exposed some of their official Slack chats - that using company communication methods for this chat is indeed not the right forum, as that puts it on record. And I suspect that some or all of these revelations might have come from other SARs rather than a whistleblower.
But if indeed a whistleblower, that undercuts the ‘not the right forum’ argument as they could be leaking from chats that are not explicitly work chats - that is, groups set up by staff to socialise, not by the company to work.
On the one hand, not much. All companies have leaks in some form or other. It’s a fact on life. On the other hand, it suggests that they’ve hired at least one person who isn’t a good fit with their corporate culture. Again, this happens at all companies to some degree or other. Usually people adjust, or move on.
Which brings me to:
I think the Watchdog example is instructive here. When Watchdog did their hit piece on Monzo a lot of people thought it was terrible and the sky was falling and Monzo would be so reputationally damaged that they’d never recover… but in reality there was barely a blip. The majority of people just didn’t care and Monzo kept going from success to (er, pandemic, but lets skip over that and back to) success.
I think the same will happen here, insamuch as the only people who will think negatively of Monzo will be all the Telegraph readers who already think that was. I don’t think it’ll move the needle on any parts of the population outside of that.
Indeed, last time I searched ‘Monzo’ on Shitter to see what people were saying, the majority of relevant tweets I saw were from people saying they regretted closing or would be opening accounts with Monzo because of how ‘based’ they were.
tl;dr, despite the attack lines, I think Monzo have done OK, and they’ve already been through worse and still come out the other side OK.
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When it comes to closing accounts or having them rejected, in cases other than being flagged by fraud or credit systems, I would think it’s manual input.
It’s not great that Monzo seemingly had the company culture to discuss people/customers in derogatory ways on their internal messaging tools. Clearly this must not be that uncommon or it wouldn’t keep happening.
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Before I retired we had similar discussions on our own internal forums. I shouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of organisations are the same.
For once I agree with Rees-Mogg’s comment about freedom of speech!
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Hats off to the telegraph they’ve concocted the perfect rage bait article that services all of their current wedge issues, there’s even a nod to JK Rowling in there to maximise the rage from the readership.
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All companies are going to have people with opinions. That’s nothing to do with culture, in fact it’s probably the opposite because you don’t want an army of clones. “You can work here, but you have to agree with every single opinion we hold”
The pandemic has moved the ‘water cooler’ chats to a medium that means they are now recorded. “Whistleblower” or “Leaks” or SARs, are only going to increase and the publicity that Farage has had recently, more and more people will look to do them. Will Mrs Jones find out that someone thought she was an idiot? Will Mr Smith find out that someone thought his fraud was an obvious lie?
For the vast majority, there will be nothing to see. For the very few there is, if they find it, they are going to complain about it, when previously people thinking they were a lying idiot was kept between the people discussing it.
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Let’s be honest. Monzo staff aren’t wrong about the Tory part being evil. Regardless though of what you think, employees will have options and will talk to other members of staff about those opinions.However, obviously they shouldn’t be restricting accounts based on political views (unless views are illegal).
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They’re employees first and foremost, their responsibility is to their employer.
It is tremendously embarrassing and damaging to Monzo that they seem to be cultivating an image of picking and choosing customers, and crucially, judging them for whatever reason they so wish. Imagine calling out such a large chunk of the electorate like that on the record. It’s mental and they should be reprimanded.
People can be conservative minded whilst also thinking the behaviour of the conservatives is appalling. They shouldn’t be punished by lefties who think they know better.
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