Campaigners take aim at East Sussex Pension Fund

Two sets of campaigners will be converging on County Hall in Lewes this Tuesday (11 February) to protest about the East Sussex Pension Fund’s role in the Gaza genocide and the climate crisis. Divest East Sussex’s Gabriel Carlyle reports.

Tuesday 11 February is the date of East Sussex County Council (ESCC)’s next Full Council meeting, which all fifty County Councillors from across East Sussex are supposed to attend.

ESCC administers the East Sussex Pension Fund, the local government pension scheme that covers both East Sussex and Brighton & Hove. It currently has millions of pounds of local people’s pension monies invested in the giant fossil fuel companies (like Shell and BP) that are driving the climate crisis.

Moreover, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign estimates that the Fund also has more than £170m invested in companies that are ‘complicit in Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian human rights’. It defines the latter as companies that are ‘supplying Israel with weapons and military technology it uses to carry out its attacks on Palestinians; companies providing infrastructure for Israel’s unlawful military occupation; and companies conducting business activity in, or with, Israel’s illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land.’

They cite Amazon as one example: PSC estimates that the East Sussex Pension Fund has over £43m invested in Amazon, which provides cloud computing technology to the Israeli government and military.

Hundreds of East Sussex residents have signed a petition calling on the local council to end these ‘complicit’ investments, as well as to sever its business links with companies and banks, that are similarly linked to Israel, such as Barclays bank, which provides substantial financing to companies supplying Israel with weapons used in its ‘attacks on Palestinians.’

Similar petitions regarding the Fund’s investments in fossil fuel (oil, coal and gas) companies forced ESCC to debate the issue in 2019 and 2023 – though in both cases Conservative councillors on ESCC unanimously blocked any action.

Genocide and apartheid

Last December, in a major report, Amnesty International asserted that it had ‘found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip’.

In an earlier 2022 report, Amnesty also concluded that Israel ‘imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law. Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.’

According to Jane, a member of the pension scheme who is supporting the PSC petition: ‘We trust the council to act responsibly and ethically with our pension funds, the money we pay from our wages every month to ensure our old age is a secure one. ESCC cannot in all conscience use those funds to underwrite and invest in the genocide of innocent people in Palestine. They deserve a secure and safe future as much as we do. I cannot sleep at night knowing my contributions are paying for the destruction of their homes and livelihoods, and the murder of their families and children.’

Campaigners from Hastings & Rye Palestine Solidarity campaign will be submitting the first tranche of signatures for their petition and staging a protest outside County Hall on Tuesday 11 February from 9.20am.

‘Fiddling while the planet burns’

Also present outside the Hall will be campaigners from Divest East Sussex and friends, who are now in the twelfth year of their campaign to get ESCC to divest from fossil fuel companies.

We will be staging a violin-based based protest there between 8.45 and 9.45am. Entitled ‘Stop fiddling while the planet burns,’ this will feature a throng of local residents in [Council Leader] Keith Glazier masks, playing cardboard violins against a backdrop of giant newspaper front pages about the climate crisis.

We will also be reading out a list of 325 extreme weather events that have taken place around the world since the Divest East Sussex campaign began over eleven years ago in 2013. In each case scientists have concluded that climate change made the event in question either more severe or more likely to occur (or both).

From Europe to Australia and from East Africa to southern China, these have killed many hundreds of people and done many billion dollars worth of damage.

A long list of local councils, organisations and individuals have called on the East Sussex Pension Fund to make a public commitment to fully divest from fossil fuels. These include: Bexhill Town Council, Brighton & Hove City Council, Hastings Borough Council, Lewes District and Town Councils, Peacehaven Town Council, Rother District Council, Saleshurst & Robertsbridge Parish Council and UNISON.

Links:
Hastings PSC petition
Hastings PSC website
Divest East Sussex website

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