Last week, the Canary, a British left media platform, announced its closure. In the rather vague statement published on its socials, the Canary states that “the extent of lies, defamation, and harassment by the ex-staff – coupled with the constant attacks by the state and those who’d see us destroyed – it has become too much”, and as such they are forced to suspend their activities for the foreseeable. They also announce that soon they will “publish what really happened at the Canary and push back against the vicious campaign against our team and us.” “We may be down, but we are not out yet”, they conclude.
Earlier this year, the media outlet informed us all that it’s been debanked by Lloyds and Metro banks. On this occasion, they offered more detail on why they think the account freezes occurred, framing both instances in a political context. In their first statement, published in June following Lloyds Bank freezing their main account, the Canary implies that the banks’s action was taken due to Canary’s pro-Palestine position. The subsequent statement from September 2026 decries another bank, Metro, freezing Canary’s backup account. The statement is more generous on details, linking the funds freeze to the claim that the Canary saw “members of our team targeted through their social media accounts, including accounts being hacked, restricted, or removed. Canary workers have been arrested, with another being assaulted by a far-right Zionist at a protest. Two others were attacked by the Israeli Defence Forces in Southern Lebanon.”
To be fair, there could be a political element to the freezes, and there obviously were some instances of banks taking politics into account when deciding who gets access to their services, most famously in the case of Nigel Farage, whose former bank, Coutts, did discuss politics as a factor in deciding to stop doing business with him.
But I think the Canary story, regardless of whether it has a political element(which I am sure the outlet itself will detail to us soon enough), is also a rather flagrant example of how the left tends to externalise internal failures. Regardless of the political context or the lack of thereof, it is also a story of suspected serious financial mismanagement that resulted in a collapse of one of the more well-known left outlets, as well as it is a story of creating a toxic workplace culture. Both are apparently a consequence of receiving a very significant financial injection. These are patterns I’ve seen over and over again in my 25-year “career” in various left projects and around them; the difference with the Canary is that the financial injection was very large, and the level of externalising internal failures matched the sum.
In this text, I will go into detail about what’s available on the Canary case in the public domain and will attempt to unravel the above-mentioned patterns based on this example.
2026 was not the first time the Canary experienced turmoil. It is a left project after all. Historically, it faced significant advertising revenue issues due to a boycott campaign organised by a group called Stop Funding Fake News. In 2022, it experienced an internal takeover by staff and was turned into a worker co-op. In the March 2025 text, the Canary Workers Coop describing the takeover as a “workers’ revolution”, shared some details of their investigation into the former Canary management. “Even by the standards of corporate capitalist criminals, the Canary finances and systems were a mess. Our latest set of official accounts were a veritable clusterfuck of irregularities.”, the workers said. Further, the workers describe the practice of the management paying themselves dividends and how this was beneficial to them in terms of easing their personal tax burden as well as a tool to hide the disparities between the regular worker pay and the pay of the management team.
Sadly, the workers’ revolution at the Canary appears to be short-lived, for only a few months after the March 2025 text, the Canary quietly went back to the more corporate structure and indeed acquired an external corporate investor.
The investor was one Cecil Hetherington, a millionaire Northern Irish businessman. Mr Hetherington isn’t the usual suspect for injecting money into left projects. He made his fortune through various disruptive business model enterprises, most notably the website Used Cars NI. He is also a chairman of PropertyPal. The money, in the hefty sum of 2 million British pounds, didn’t arrive at the Canary as a donation and instead it came with significant small print. Looking at the Companies House filing history for Canary Media Limited, a moderately careful reader should not struggle to note that on 8th August 2025, Mr Hetherington’s firm, Ulidia Investments Limited, was listed as the entity with significant control, holding “more than 25% but not more than 50% of the shares in the company [Canary Media Limited].” The same day, Mr Cecil Robert Hetherington was appointed as a director of Canary Media Limited. These actions effectively ended the life of the Canary Worker Coop.
Around the same time, Mr Hetherington has been taking interest in or investing in other media projects. In September 2025, he was appointed a director of Declassified UK and then joined its board, with his bio stating that, “in recent years, Cecil has diversified his business interests to include news media within the UK and Ireland.” Declassified UK never made a statement about the extent of Mr Hetherington’s involvement or disclosed any potential cash that came with it. In a Companies House filing from October 2025, Declassified declared that there are no persons or entities with significant control involved in their company. So there is, of course, a chance that Mr Hetherington is just a chap who is really interested in investigative journalism.
Curiously, left outlets were not the only media interests of Mr Hetherington around the time of his investing in the Canary and the changes at Declassified. Just weeks after buying up his stake in the Canary via Ulidia Investments, Mr Hetherington turned his attention to the mainstream corporate press. Operating as a different private vehicle, Ardenlee Capital Limited, through several transactions he purchased shares in the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, Reach Plc: the publisher of The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror, The Daily Express and The Sunday Express as well as about bazzillion local newspapers like the Manchester Evening News. On 4th November, Mr Hetherington acquired 3.06% stake in Reach PLC, then increased it to 5.6% a few weeks later, and then to 6.28% in July 2026.
This wasn’t the end of Mr Hetherington’s shopping spree across the British media landscape. In the summer of 2026, in two transactions, he purchased a total of a 25.09% stake in DigitalBox Plc, the owners of The Daily Mash, The Tab, The Poke, Entertainment Daily, among many others. The purchase made Mr Hetherington the ic.
Other than the money, the engagement with Mr Hetherington, saw the Canary managing a spectacular crisis in transparency. For months after Mr Hetherington’s company, Ulidia Investments, was the registered entity with significant control, the outlet had not updated its entry in the Impress database that stated they were fully independent. After a formal complaint, Impress changed the Canary’s registry entry, which declared it had “absolutely no financial backing or outside investment”.
At the same time, their financial saviour appeared to run a totally different game, treating the UK media landscape as a Monopoly board. The Canary, I’d speculate, just ended up in the “high risk” field of his spreadsheet: a portfolio gamble of a man with an estimated business net worth of £45.6m.
The Canary leadership apparently told its workers that the cash injection will secure their operations until 2029. Mr Hetherington’s investment was 2 million, and frankly, I have no idea how anyone could assume this is enough cash to last for 5 years of operating costs of an organisation claiming to employ up to 50 people. UK payroll alone for 50 people at £25k/yr would be ~£1.4m annually with employer costs, meaning a £7m minimum over 5 years. If, as often is the case, they were employed on part-time terms, that would still far exceed the 2 million investment, and this does not even account for other costs of running such a project. There were also reportedly extravagant expenditures, including Canary buying a number of website domains; not to mention that, according to the whistleblower Twitter account, Canary Staff alleged that the wife of one of the leadership figures was hired on a salary of £70k annually, or, you know, £350k over five years: 17.5% of the 2 million received. Canary leadership also decided to start a new project: a daily printed tabloid paper, AKA one of the most cash-hungry media projects you can imagine.
When Lloyds Bank froze Canary’s account, it emerged that the 2 million initial investment melted down to 400k, with the Canary apparently spending 1.6milion of what the leadership claimed would last for 5 years in under a year.
Now, let’s discuss the bank freeze and how likely it is that it was politically motivated.
The Canary have been banking with Lloyds for around a decade. In this time, they published an absolutely astonishing number of controversial, to say the least, pieces of content, including plenty that directly went against the British establishment, status quo, or the interests of the British state. So it is a curious coincidence that Lloyds have been tolerating it like pros, up to the point when [checks notes] unusual financial activity and ownership structure of the entity they were a bank for occurred.
The thing with banks is that they have something called compliance departments. In a nutshell, these departments monitor their clients for what they see as suspicious activity. These days this monitoring is largely automated. I will now dare say that the sequence of an unusually large cash injection, a drastic ownership-structure change, and what these departments would call “high burn rate”, aka spending a significant part of assets on failing ventures and causing rapid capital depletion, would raise a number of red flags, none politically motivated. One of these red flags would be called “potential money laundering”. Another:“potential corporate asset stripping”. Another: “potential inability to meet future liabilities” and “potential failing business model”. For the record, I am absolutely not implying that the Canary engaged in any of these: I genuinely don’t believe they did, and I think their money management patterns were falsely flagged for that, while in fact they were indicating a whole different problem. However, banks are banks, and if any of these flags were raised, this could plausibly cause a strong reaction, indeed including an asset freeze pending investigation.
The problem with this kind of freeze is that banks talk with each other and as such a freeze of assets at one of them is a bit like a virus, spreading to all other money hosts of the organisation subjected to it, which could be an explanation for the Metro bank freeze following the Lloyds bank one.
We do not know any details from the Canary leadership about any kind of communication with the banks, and in all fairness there are situations where a bank would not disclose the freeze reasons to the account holder. However, I am quite surprised that there was no proof of the freeze presented, be it, say, a screenshot demonstrating inability to make a payment. It is an unverified claim, but according to the former workers of the Canary, there is a possibility that the freeze did not occur and the story is being used only to cover the financial mismanagement. I guess for as long as the leadership of the Canary does not produce any evidence, we will not know.
There is much more to this story, definitely more than for one comment piece. Looking at the alleged former staff whistleblower account, other than the above, there were some other serious issues at the Canary, including some pretty toxic sounding workplace culture, providing conflicting information about Canary’s financial issues and standing, as well as some accusations of tolerating sexual misconduct which I really don’t want to link to, bearing in mind how sensitive and triggering these are.
I don’t know why Lloyds and Metro froze the Canary’s accounts. Until the banks, the Ombudsman or the Canary itself produce something, nobody outside those rooms does. It’s possible there was a political element, and I’m not dismissing that. What I can say is that the public record shows a company that took on a large investment, changed its ownership while still presenting itself as a workers’ co-op, launched a cash-hungry daily print edition, and then, by the accounts of former staff, ran through most of the money in under a year. Those facts alone would give any bank’s compliance team plenty to keep them busy with, and I’m saying it with the authority of someone who experienced an account freeze in the project I’m a part of twice in a year because our name has “ltd” in it while we are registered as a mutual society and not a limited company.
What strikes me most isn’t the freeze. It’s the reflex reaction to it. The Canary’s closure statement blames ex-staff, the state and “those who’d see us destroyed.” It doesn’t mention the money, the investor or the structure. That is the pattern I’ve watched for 25 years in left projects: a financial or organisational crisis arrives, and the narrative used publicly is about an external enemy. When the enemy is real, that, fair enough. But often it is conveniently imaginary.
Banks have made political decisions, as Coutts’s handling of Farage showed, and left outlets do get harassed. That is exactly why the reflex is so effective. A genuine threat makes every failure look like persecution, and anyone asking about the books can be cast as an enemy of the people.
The cost falls on the people with the least say in these decisions. Staff are told their jobs are secure until 2029, then the bank is blamed when the money isn’t there. Readers and supporters are asked to defend an outlet without being shown anything. And real cases of debanking, or political repression, which deserve serious attention, get harder to argue when the most visible example comes with unanswered questions about the finances, workplace culture and structural changes without transparency.
What would settle it is simple, and the Canary can do it. Publish the accounts. Show the correspondence with the banks. Explain where the £2 million went and what the decision-making process behind it was. Explain what role, specifically, their investor had.
The Canary closure statement promises to publish “what really happened,” and I’ll read it with interest. Until then, the evidence points more strongly to a story about how we handle money and accountability than one about how banks and states handle dissent.
Zosia Brom
A life long anti-fascist and anarchist organiser. Former editor of Freedom and organiser of the London Anarchist Bookfair, Zosia is currently a co-ordinator of the Class Work Project and has once again successfully dodged giving us a profile blurb.
Find essays here: theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/zosia-brom
