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With legal support from the Free Speech Union, he fought back at the Employment Tribunal. One of the most striking aspects of the hearing was the extent to which Lloyds fixated on Borg-Neal’s use of the n-word in isolation, disregarding the wider context entirely. It was on the basis of this semantic fixation that the bank could concede that he had not intended to cause any hurt, that he asked the question with no malice, and that the question itself was valid – and still sack him anyway. The bank’s argument was that Borg-Neal should have known better than “to use the full word in a professional environment”.
Freddie Attenborough, The Critic, 26th November 2025.