Tory MP rages at big banks leaving Britons HELPLESS to cashless surge as 20,000 ATMs shut

He said: “I actually met with one of the ATM companies a couple of weeks ago now to talk about about why they're now having to begin to charge on the Isle of Wight.

“I said ‘look, that's really bad’ and he said it's because we're not getting the appropriate rates off the banks.

“Yet again, you have these big firms, in this case the banks, that are shutting down branches all over the Isle of Wight and all over Britain and who's taking up the flack?

“It's the ATM machines to get cash out sometimes.

“But they're now having to charge because the banks aren't giving them a fair cut.

“But also more importantly, it's the postmasters and postmistresses that are struggling, because they're having to do the bank's job.”

Seely added: “A lot of folk on the island still rely on cash. We probably have a larger cash economy than some of the parts of Britain and maybe places like London, where people tend to be more cashless. But no, for sure, sign me up.”

The 57-year-old’s concerns about the number of ATMs available to his constituents has been echoed by research conducted by LINK.

The total number of ATMs in the UK stood at 70,588 in 2015 but collapsed to 51,272 last September.

There were just 78 free-to-use ATMs across the whole of the Isle of Wight in April.

The former Army captain even said he would campaign to get Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to back GB News' Don't Kill Cash campaign.

Seely said: “I’m going to ask him, actually, next time I see him…I’ll see if I can sign him up.”

He added: “I actually try not to carry cash because I use this [phone] and my credit cards at the back to try to pay for stuff, so I'm very happy to live without cash.

“But I'm hugely respectful of the fact that a lot of people on the island don’t, a lot of people around the UK, especially older folks, don't.

“So we need to think of them a bit more and that means that we have cash for another 10, 20, 30 years and all well and good.

“And if that time, slowly, people get used to it and become happy with a cashless society, that's great.

“But we need that cash for folks on the island, it is important so I'm very supportive.”

GB News launched the Don’t Kill Cash campaign yesterday with more than 50,000 people signing our petition in just the first 24 hours.

The total number of signatories calling on the Government to protect the status of cash as legal tender and as a means of payment until 2050 has since surpassed 65,000.