Ten days ago, the City of London police were present in force outside Fidelity Investments in case a demonstration against the British arm of the giant US-based global pension house got out of control. In fact, the 25 protestors, from Reclaim the Streets and the Gaia Foundation, objecting to the company’s investments in Oxy Petroleum (which is in dispute with U’wa Indian tribespeople in Colombia), were entirely peaceful.
More interesting was Fidelity’s reaction. Reclaim the Streets has become synonymous with the Stop the City demonstrations in June 1999, which brought 10,000 protesters into the Square Mile and ended in full-scale riots. Fidelity, which knew about the planned protest in advance, was close to panic.
People were told not to come into work, its nameplate was unscrewed from the wall, the PR department went into overdrive to deny that they had any involvement in the faraway dispute and the company claimed that no money from any British investor went to Oxy. They also said that they would be reviewing carefully all their investments.
The City, specifically, and global capital generally, is increasingly a target for environmental and social activists. They reason, rightly or wrongly, that the source of many problems is the massive flow of capital which blindly supports corporate expansion and fuels destruction of communities and places throughout the world.
But this week, the struggle to persuade the people with the purse strings to act more ethically moved into a different and altogether more dangerous league. It was reported that institutional investors were bailing out of Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe’s largest contract research laboratory, which has long been a target of animal rights extremists. A series of hoax bomb warnings, crucially not to the company itself but to powerful institutions who invest in it, had been enough for City fund managers to dump Huntingdon’s shares.
The City reacted in horror, saying that the managers were capitulating to the animal rights lobby and warning that many other companies would face “a wave of activism” if they did not take a stand.
They may be right. The City has long been recognised as the ultimate target of a few extremists, as well as very many thousands of moderates who want to use sensible reasoning to persuade institutions to withdraw from funding unethical companies.
Both camps have a point and good reason to be impatient. Where individuals, governments and just about every area of business has been forced by weight of evidence or public concern to address environmental and ethical issues, the City has acted over the years as if the world has not changed, continuing to turn over hundreds of billions of pounds a year without a thought for how that money is used.
But there are now splits emerging in the activist movement over how to take protest to the City, corporations and financial houses.
On the one hand, growing numbers of individuals (presently more than 330,000) are voting with their money and investing their cash ethically, a massive rise in the past two years. These moderates, together with campaigners from large environmental groups, are making significant inroads into the previously closed world of institutions.
Letter writing campaigns, the use of shareholder meetings, lobbying and the building of coalitions between different groups may be desperately slow, but ethical investing, as in the US where the market is now worth more than a trillion dollars, is on the point of taking off in the UK.
The moderates are beginning to win the arguments with the City. One small group of students, People For the Planet (formerly Third World Network), for example, has been lobbying for two years to get the £18bn university pension funds to become ethical and has finally succeeded. Greenpeace, too, has targeted BP-Amoco and a motion to get the company to withdraw from the Arctic has been accepted for the next shareholder meeting.
Change, say the moderates, is coming as campaign groups and consumer organisations take up the cudgels against the City. Public distrust of multinational companies has never been higher, they say. Last month, UK insurance companies came under pressure to sharpen up ethical investment policies following a report from Friends of the Earth (FoE) which named and shamed top life companies which invest in businesses which FoE says harm the environment.
The moderates argue that tactics like those used against Huntingdon are bound to scare people off and dangerously associate social and environmental responsibility with extremism, setting back by years the work which has been done.
But the extremists are now entrenched and many have no problem turning to the kind of violence they believe is being employed systematically against animals, people or the environment. They have no hesitation in taking over demonstrations, manipulating people or hiding behind otherwise peaceful groups. So far they have concentrated their threats on oil companies, roadbuilders and those involved in animal experiments.
The June 18 riots and Seattle are seen as seminal, partly because they were both part of global demonstrations against corporate power, which gives their cause a wider legitimacy. Many extremists now recognise that one weak point in the chain between companies and unethical behaviour may be the institutional investors who have so far mostly escaped direct action. For a start, there are very few people involved. Up to 30 individual pension fund managers are thought to ultimately control hundreds of billions of pounds worth of investments. That they should become targets would surprise few.
