First Santander now Kent Reliance Have Frozen The Accounts of the Brighton Trust, a Registered Charity

 In Order That We Can Meet Our Commitments to Grantees, Including the Al Tafawk Centre & Brighton’s Palestine House, I am asking you to contribute to Our Emergency Appeal

Is This a State Backed Bank Robbery?

  Emergency Appeal    THE BRIGHTON TRUST

https://chuffed.org/project/190193-emergency-appeal-the-brighton-trust

On 2^nd June Santander froze the bank accounts of The Brighton Trust, a registered charity. Eight days later they contacted me to explain that they couldn’t tell me why they had frozen them.

Not only did they freeze the accounts of the Brighton Trust but they froze the accounts of Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre, two personal accounts and an account belonging to my son, which I administer, via a Lasting Power of Attorney.

Debanked: How Regulations Are Hurting Innocent UK Bank Customers

Last Monday, Kent Reliance or One Savings Bank also froze accounts belonging to my family and also accounts containing money belonging to the Brighton Trust. Again they refused to say why they had frozen the accounts.

In the past two years I have been debanked by Nationwide building society (which contrary to belief is an anti-Palestinian bank), HSBC and First Direct. The only conclusion I can reach is that this is because I am being prosecuted under the Terrorism Act 2000 for allegedly inviting support for a proscribed organisation, Hamas.

These are not the first attacks on the Brighton Trust. In 2022 and again in 2025, the Charity Commission has conducted investigations of the Brighton Trust. These investigations were almost certainly triggered by Zionist charities such as UK Lawyers for Israel and/or the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The freezing of our accounts is being done under either The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA) or The Terrorism Act 2000. It is most likely to be the latter however it is impossible to know for certain.

It would seem that some government agency, either the National Crime Agency or the Counter-Terror Police, is deliberately feeding false and malicious information to those I bank with informing them that I am involved in money laundering and/or terrorism financing.

I wrote to the NCA asking if they had anything to do with the bank closures and they wrote back to say they do not instruct banks as to what they do but it is clear that they do supply the misinformation that causes banks to freeze and debank people.

The use of ‘regulatory’ pretexts has been used by financial payment services such as Wise and Payoneer to completely cut off people in Gaza from their money. These are literally life and death decisions made by faceless and anonymous bureaucrats.

Banks are notoriously ‘risk averse’. They act first and ask questions later. Or rather, they don’t even bother asking questions. They either freeze or close accounts or both.

Ironically the increased use of money laundering legislation and counter-terrorism legislation has made no difference to criminal gangs but it has impacted on political groups and vulnerable people, which one suspects was the original intention.

When Nigel Farage had his accounts closed by the Royal Family’s banker, Coutts it was headline news but when ordinary people or campaigning groups have their accounts closed it is ignored.

The legal provisions are contained here.

We are not the only ones this has happened to. Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has had £20,000 frozen by Unity Trust Bank, which is owned by the trade unions, for a year now.  So has Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine. This is in addition to debanking individual Palestine solidarity activists.

Both the National Crime Agency—answerable to the Home Office—and counter terrorism police declined to answer the Guardian’s query about which agency took the decision to freeze the GMFP’s bank account.

And then there is the decision of Lloyds Bank to freeze and debank The Canary, the radical alternative news organisation. This is a straightforward political decision by corrupt bankers. The Canary isn’t racist like Farage so the BBC and the rest of the media have had nothing to say.

We don’t know whether Lloyds is going to use ‘regulatory’ reasons as the pretext to debank The Canary but it may be that direct action will cause the bank to cough up since being polite has had little effect so far.

What is happening is that legislation passed for one purpose – terrorist financing or money laundering – is being used for entirely different purposes, namely to crack down on organisations that are campaigning against the genocide in Gaza.

The Brighton Trust provides the majority of funding for the Al Tafawk Centre, a kindergarten in Jenin in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine.

We went undercover to EXPOSE Israeli settlers

We also agreed earlier in the year to two year funding, £25,000 per year, towards the rent of The Old Palestine House in Brighton. All of this has been put in jeopardy by the decision of Santander.

In addition on 6 July Kent Reliance (One Savings Bank) froze £70,000 belonging to Trustees of The Brighton Trust and intended as grant aid to a number of radical community groups.

The Brighton Trust was established in 2016 as the Trust for Unpopular Causes. We have given hundreds of grants to Palestinian groups, campaigning organisations and people, as well as numerous other radical causes. See here for details of the last 3 years of grant giving.

The precedent for all this was set by the United States which has sanctioned and frozen the accounts of UN Raporteur Francesca Albanese and the judges of the International Criminal Court. We have in the Trump Administration the political equivalent of the Mafia.

US issues sanctions against UN investigator probing abuses in Gaza • FRANCE 24 English

What the NCA and the Counter-Terror Police have not done is to freeze the funds of Zionist organisations involved in sending money to illegal settlements in the West Bank. 32 charities according to Melanie Ward MP have sent £28 million to illegal West Bank settlements without so much as a murmur from the NCA or Counter-Terror Police.

Indeed the Charity Commission has approved the sending of money by Zionist charities to West Bank settlements.

We are therefore appealing for donations to fulfil existing commitments and to enable us to continue to make small grants to radical organisations as well as seeking to bring legal action against the banks and/or the state bodies involved in these attacks.

Either we confront what the state is doing now or we will allow them to continue to target activists and campaigns they don't like, especially those connected with Palestine.

Brighton's Old Palestine House

Politically the banks, which didn’t hesitate to come running to the State, i.e. taxpayers after the banking crash of 2007/8, need to be taken into public ownership. They were given handouts because they were ‘too big to fail’. They are too powerful. Banking is an essential requirement of modern society and the banks cannot be allowed to use their own reactionary politics to impose censorship on civil society.

Banks are too important to remain in the private sector. They are candidates for nationalisation. See

The Police & Security Services Are Using Financial Terrorism To Add to My Malicious Prosecution for ‘Terrorism’

UK Labour government oversees decision to freeze bank accounts of pro-Palestinian organisations

Two UK pro-Palestine organisations have bank accounts frozen

STOP The Banks & National Crime Agency from targeting Palestine Solidarity activists

Dozens of UK groups call for unfreezing of pro-Palestine group's bank account

Unions and charities call for pro-Palestine group to have bank account restored

Charities in England and Wales ‘donate millions to illegal Israeli settlements

Yesterday I Learnt That Santander has Frozen My Accounts – No Reason Given – No Reason Needed – Opposition to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza is Enough

The British State’s Attack & Banks’ Complicity in Attacking Palestine solidarity Activists is Financial Terrorism

You Can Donate Here 

Update

It would be useful if people email Santander to protest at their outrageous behaviour and ask them if they are happy depriving the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre of vital funding. Email addresses I have for the bank are:

ukbbusinesscomplaints@santander.co.uk, ceo@santander.co.uk,

ConsumerService@santander.co.uk,

ExecutiveCommunications@santander.co.uk,

complaints@santander.co.uk, 

Nearly a year ago I wrote about how the Police and the Security Services were using money laundering legislation, introduced to stop serious crime, to target Palestine solidarity supporters, including myself.

As is normal these days with the Terrorism Act 2000, legislation introduced for one purpose is being used for another purpose, in this case attacking peaceful direct action groups and opponents of Genocide.

It is Financial Terrorism because it is intended to frighten and deter people from taking action against the British State which is actively complicit in the Genocide in Gaza. The State faces an uphill battle to convict me in a trial starting at Kingston Crown Court on August 18^th for ‘inviting support for a proscribed organisation (Hamas)’. This despite the fact that we have a hostile Judge Plashkes KC presiding over it.

Ironically I Received This From Santander Today!

Hence the attempt to intimidate me. The question that springs to mind is whether those responsible for contacting the banks are engaged in trying to pervert the course of justice.

The message I get when I log on

In the past two years I have been debanked by three banks – Nationwide, which is an anti-Palestinian bank, HSBC and First Direct. No reason has ever been given but it’s not hard to work out what was going on. The Financial Ombudsman Service, to which I complained, has proved itself a completely toothless lapdog.

I Received This Yesterday From Santander!

The Police and the National Crime Agency have decided to attack the finances of Palestine solidarity groups. Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine have both had their bank accounts frozen because of an alleged link to Palestine Action, even before the  latters unlawful proscription.

Unity Trust Bank, which is supposed to be a progressive bank, since it’s owned by the trade unions, confirmed at a meeting with Scottish PSC that the freezing of their account was at the behest of the NCA. It seems that ‘serious crime’ today is not robbing a bank, money laundering or human trafficking – it is opposing Genocide in Palestine.

The NCA is one of these organisations that are accountable to no one but wield a great deal of power because their remit is serious crime. However Palestine solidarity has been redefined as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘terrorism’ so the NCA has become the State’s instrument of choice in the attempt to criminalise solidarity with the Palestinians.

It is not only in this country that the State is employing financial terrorism. Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur for Palestine, has been a target of the Trump regime. Her bank accounts, credit cards and finances have been frozen, all because she has been an outspoken critic of the West’s role in financing and arming Israel’s genocide.

Albanese’s reaction to US sanctions sums up my attitude – ‘What a mafia. But they will not break us.’ The Trump and Starmer regimes are just that – mafia bosses in suits. At least though Trump doesn’t claim to be a human rights lawyer unlike Starver.

The Judges of the International Criminal Court were also targeted by Trump’s sanctions, which include travel bans, asset freezes and denial of services from US companies, for having had the temerity to press war crimes charges and issue a warrant against Netanyahu, the Hitler of our age. The idea of indicting war criminals is not one that our leaders take very kindly given that they may be next in line.

As Ashifa Kassam wrote in respect of Kimberly Prost, a Canadian Judge at the ICC:

For years, she has sat as a judge at the international criminal court, weighing accusations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity; now she is on the same list as terrorists and those involved in organised crime. “It really was a moment of a bit of disbelief,” she said.

And that is the reality of the financial sanctions that I and others face in Britain. A government which had an iota of morality or principle, would have condemned outright the US sanctions on Albanese and ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, which the Trump Junta imposed in February 2025.

Starmer and the ‘Labour’ Government said nothing and quietly went along with everything Trump decreed, ending up with Charles Mountbatten being sent to Washington to flatter Trump.

Capitalism is now run by politicians who owe more to Al Capone than Thomas Paine and the Rights of Man. This is the context in which I have once again been faced with anonymous allegations, the nature of which I am not allowed to see or know, being used to freeze my accounts and those of the charity of which I’m a trustee.

For the past year Santander has intermittently carried out 3 investigations into the accounts of the Brighton Trust and related organisations. It found nothing but I always suspected that their justification of ‘getting to know their customer’ was simply a pretext.

I first found out what was happening when Stripe, who handle payment processing for the Chuffed crowdfunder which we set up to appeal for donations to the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin sent me a cryptic message saying that ‘A recent payout to your connected bank account failed’. It soon became clear why it had failed.

Without any warning Santander had frozen a total of 8 accounts. The only one spared was that of my son, which I administer. When I contacted the bank no one would speak to me from the department in question.

It was not until June 5, three days after the freezing of my accounts that they sent me an email, which said nothing other than that ‘We will arrange for a specialist complaints manager to contact you at their earliest opportunity.’ They still have not contacted me.

It is as if they were too ashamed to even try to defend their decision.

It means that I have had to take emergency action to ensure that funds raised for the children of the Al Tafawk Centre are secured. To attack the ability to operate of a charity raising funds for a children’s centre is despicable. They suffer enough at the hands of the terrorist IDF without facing the terrorism of the British state acting via its banking system.

The faceless men who run the National Crime Agency in conjunction with tame bankers are, like their counterparts in the Metropolitan Police, devoted to supporting the Genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing underway in the West Bank.

I am taking legal advice over my next steps and without giving anything away I will not hesitate to challenge the freeze in court if necessary. I intend to force Santander to justify their actions and to release the money. To do this I will need to raise money so I ask people to contribute to my Legal Crowdfunder. As Chuffed is based in Australia it is beyond the reach of Starver’s mafia and his police state mates.

However this whole debanking exercise needs to become a political issue. Banking is essential for anyone to function in the modern economy. To take peoples’ banking facilities away because they don’t conform to the state’s expectations is financial terrorism. Banks need to be forced to justify any attempt to debank someone.

The ideal solution would be for the banks to be nationalised. They are too important to be left in the hands of the private sector. When they get into trouble, as was the case in 2008, then they come running to the state to bail them out. If they are ‘too big to fail’ which is how they were able to secure billions of pounds from the state in a bailout, then they are too big to be owned by private shareholders.

Ivor Caplin caught by a sex sting

I have no doubt that these dirty tricks tactics by the state are intended as a prelude to my trial at Kingston Crown Court. But whilst the Secret State is targeting my bank accounts and those of other opponents of genocide, paedophiles like Ivor Caplin – former Defence Minister and former Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement go scot free.

Caplin was the subject of a sting in January 2025, when he tried to liaise with a young boy for the purposes of sex. 18 months later he still has not been charged. Of course the police have form over this as Jimmy Saville might testify. As do Sussex Police which turned a blind eye to Saville and another prominent paedophile and Charles Mountbatten’s friend, the Bishop of Lewes Peter Ball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYKYkhRwzU8

Ivor Caplin arrested for attempt to meet 15 year old boy

However Sussex Police did arrest a friend of mine, Greg Hadfield, a former journalist on the Sunday Times and Daily Mail, for exposing Caplin’s predeliction for hard core pornography and sex with young boys on Twitter.

Jeremy Scahill on Sky TV About Israel's Burning Alive of Children

It can't be often that a Perjurer is Given a Police Award!

Hadfield was the subject of a complaint by a leading Brighton Zionist Fiona Sharpe, friend of Sussex Chief Constable Jo Shiner, who was awarded a top police award. Sharpe cannot but have been aware of Caplin’s extra-mural activities as he advertised them on X. Another who clearly knew was his ex-boyfriend and now Trade Minister, Peter Kyle the MP for Hove. Corruption

But whatever dirty tricks the Police and National Crime Agency get up to between now and my trial they will not deter me. As should be obvious from my arrest at the Nakba demonstration for defying Mark Rowley’s ban on the use of the words Globalise the Intifada.

So when we hear of two-tier policing we should remember that the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, have always protected the rich and the powerful. That is why Andrew Mountbatten was able to get away with raping trafficked girls without as much a whisper from the Metropolitan Police. Their only concern is leaked documents.

But we should never forget that this is about the British State continuing to support war crimes such as the burning alive of people in tents as Israel bombs them mercilessly or the targeting of hospitals in Lebanon - three of which have been attacked in the last week. Attacking a state’s health facilities is a speciality of the barbarous ‘Jewish’ state.

Open Letter to Sir Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner – Yesterday You Were Anti-Semitic, Today you are Anti-Palestinian

Rowley Has Decreed that ‘Globalise the Intifada’ is A Crime – Today I Repeated It Twice in A Speech As Sussex Police Looked On

Please register here

https://qrco.de/bgWXRg

The attack on Jews at a Chanukah celebration in Australia has become the pretext for a crackdown on civil liberties and democratic rights. Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police Commissioner is to the fore in calling for the suppression of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Heinrich Müller of the Met

Rowley, as part of his efforts to use British Jews as the Trojan horse for a Police State has repeatedly refused to meet with anti-Zionist Jews or the Palestine Coalition whilst meeting with pro-Genocide Zionist groups. For him, anti-racist Jews are as much the enemy as Palestinians. 

Written evidence to Parliament by Palestine Solidarity Campaign states that

The MPS has so far refused repeated requests for an in-person meeting with representatives of the Jewish bloc and on at least two occasions the police have sought to prevent them joining the march on the grounds that, being Jewish, they were assumed to be counter demonstrators.

When people call out the racism of the Metropolitan Police we should remember that it began with colonial policing of the Irish, then moved onto Jews and is now manifested in  anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism.

On Sunday at midday I shall be one of 3 Jewish speakers at a webinar Scottish PSC is holding on the the killings in Australia. London’s Gestapo Commissioner Rowley, alongside his Manchester understudy Stephen Watson, announced that the chant ‘Globalise the Intifada’ was now an arrestable offence. In response I penned an open letter to Rowley.

Never has your racism @metpoliceuk been so clear. In your statement you say 'Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families and those injured.'

When have you ever made a similar statement in respect of the thousands of Palestinians, nearly half of whom are… https://t.co/IgDnbp8wWT

— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) December 18, 2025

Dear Mark Rowley,

You issued a statement recently which said that ‘Antisemitic hate crime has surged, protests have intensified, and online abuse has grown since 2023.’ This is the method of Nazism. Juxtaposing completely different phenomenon.  Everything equals everything.

Your concern about racism is touching, even novel, given that you have turned a blind eye to it for so long. In February 2025 you told BBC's Today programme: "The public can have confidence in us." Your only gift is knowing how to lie. The very police station Charing X, whose racism and misogyny led to the sacking of your predecessor, Cressida Dick, was the subject of a Panorama programme Undercover in the Police which confirmed that you were a liar. Racism and sexism were everywhere.

As long as the Metropolitan Police are led by a racist there is no hope of reform. You have made it clear that the only racism you are interested in is ‘anti-Semitism’ – a prejudice not a form of racism. Attacks on Mosques and Muslims and Black people are no concern of you. The only ‘racism’ that concerns you is that against privileged White people .

The implication of your remarks were clear. Protests against genocide were responsible for the growth of anti-Semitism and on-line abuse. Such a sleight of hand is worthy of Goebbels and is indicative of nothing so much as your own dishonesty.

There is no evidence of a growth of anti-Semitism, unless you redefine it as opposition to Zionism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. But let us assume I am wrong and there is a growth in anti-Semitism, why is that?

The Israeli government and the Zionist movement have branded all opposition to the genocide in Gaza as ‘anti-Semitism’. If you oppose starving children you are anti-Semitic. Is it any wonder that some people believe them and then target Jews?

No one knows better than you the history of the Metropolitan Police. From the murder of Stephen Lawrence to the murder and rape of Sarah Everard and the canteen culture of Charing Cross Police, to say nothing of all the Black people you have murdered in the line of duty (Roger Sylvester, Mark Duggan, Chris Kaba et al.).

Senior Police officers even agreed to the police spying on the Stephen Lawrence Defence Campaign. A fish rots from the head down and the precondition of the Metropolitan Police reforming itself is your replacement.

When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of racism in the 1930s, anti-Semitism was rife amongst the Police. Today when Jews are the moral alibi and the pretext for the British ruling class support for Israel then ‘anti-Semitism’ is a concern of the Police.

When I asked Google’s AI ‘were the Metropolitan police antisemitic during the 1930s and sympathetic to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists ’, which was led by Sir Oswald Moseley, the results were instructive and shed a light on your concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ now.

It is also instructive to refer to Daniel Sonabend’s book ‘We Fight Fascists’ about the fight of the mainly Jewish Anti-Fascist 43 Group after 1945 and the anti-Semitism of the Metropolitan Police.

It describes how the head of 'G' Division, Superintendent Charles Satterthwaite shouted 'Fucking Jew bastard!' at a Jewish anti-fascist Murry Silver as he repeatedly  beat him, whilst two of his officers held Silver against the wall.  Satterthwaite was described by one member of the 43 Group, Lennie Rolnick as a 'first class anti-Semite who would have done well at Belsen (concentration camp)’.

Historian Dave Renton found that anti-fascists were three times as likely to get arrested as fascists.  Sonabend asked why this was and his answer was ‘Widespread anti-Semitism in the Metropolitan Police force’. Nor was Satterthwaite the only officer who made regular reference to the faith of the anti-fascist disruptors he was arresting. Two young Group members from the East End, a hairdresser's assistant called Vidal Sassoon and his friend Mo Levy, had a particularly nasty run-in with the law, which Sassoon described in his autobiography.

One evening in Kilburn, we chased the fascists into a pub and were ourselves chased by the police. They arrested three of us. It took a long time to get to the police station which was only a few streets away. Two policemen held one of my comrades, Mo Levy, while a sergeant pounded him, beating him everywhere but the face, at the same time calling us 'dirty Jew bastards', 'fucking Yids who Hitler missed' and 'sons of foreign whores'.

Sonabend writes that

Knowing they were dealing with an institutionally anti­ Semitic organisation, the 43 Group's leadership were keen not to provoke the police. In fact, they went out of their way to be cooperative.’ 

Have the Police changed?  Yes in the sense they are no longer anti-Semitic, because the Jews are no longer on the left nor are they working class. Note that Sonabend described the Met as ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ just as Black people in the 1980s and 1990s were to describe the Met as institutionally racist.

Jews have changed and the focus of the Met’s racism has changed but that is all. The Metropolitan Police have changed the target of their racism but they are still the same old  uniformed racists.

Today support for Israel and Zionism is the political rationale for their Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Israel is the most anti-Muslim country in the world and has formed an alliance with anti-Muslim racists such as Tommy Robinson, who was an Israeli government guest recently as well as individuals such as Dutch fascist, Geert Wilders.

In your statement Mark you said that ‘Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives, their families and those injured,’ referring to Jewish victims of the Australian attack. Over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds of thousands injured in Gaza.  Children have been starved to death.  Yet you haven’t even acknowledged the death and destruction in Gaza. Your thoughts are with Australian Jews but not Palestinian children. What other explanation for this is there other than racism? Palestinian lives don’t matter because they are an indigenous people, the victims of western colonialism.

In your pathetic statement you say of Jewish people that

Jewish children attend schools behind fences, guarded by security and routine police patrols. No community should have to live like this. That must change.’

Really?  If Jews are under siege it is a siege of their own and your making.  You are deliberately making Jews into targets as a justification for the British State's support for Genocide. They are your colonial pets, hostages for your own malevolent intentions. Jews are the justification for the State's increased repression.

You say ‘Current laws are inadequate’.  Really?  You have been given more and more powers yet always you are dissatisfied. Perhaps when we have a fully fledged police state you will be satisfied? Or maybe when juries are finally abolished so that servile judges can be relied upon to rubber stamp your arrests and prosecutions.

It is not for you to comment on the adequacy of the law. Still less is it for you to define that law. For most people the laws are already too repressive and we know from past experience that it will be trade unionists, climate protesters, housing activists - indeed anyone bar employers and the rich who will feel their effects. 

What you want is a police state where people like you dictate the political agenda.  And speaking of dictating the political agenda you have all but outlawed chants such as “globalise the intifada”. Well I for one will make sure to include at least one mention of how the Intifada should be globalised. 

That is why today at a demonstration in Hove outside the offices of Vile Kyle MP, I repeated the slogan ‘Globalise the Intifada’ to make it clear that we, not you, will decide what we say.  Sussex police officers just looked on. So are we to have different laws now for different cities?   The Intifada is an Uprising against an Illegal Occupation. It has nothing to do with British Jews, much as you would like to lay the blame for Israel’s genocide on Jews.

We will not allow you to dictate what we are allowed to say and not say. You are paid to implement the law not to make the law.

We refuse to be stampeded into a police state by those who use Jews as the pretext for abolishing freedom of speech. When the Police decide what we are allowed to say and not say then we are already on the road to dictatorship.

It is time to move on Mark Rowley. You belong in a museum alongside all the other dinosaurs such as your role model, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. As long as you are head of the Metropolitan Police we can expect a continuation of the racism that led the Met 30 years ago to covering up for the killers of Stephen Lawrence.

Tony Greenstein