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WHAT is the Green Finance Institute, the organisation behind Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s National Wealth Fund plans? Turns out it is an un-transparent, bank-oriented company cooked up between then Tory chancellor Phillip Hammond and the City of London.
Reeves and Ed Miliband say that from April 2024, the Green Finance Institute gave “policy support on the Labour Party’s National Wealth Fund,” running the task force designing the fund, in a donation worth £99,000.
Green Finance Institute chief executive Rhian-Mari Thomas told the Guardian she personally persuaded Reeves to redesign her green investment plans, lobbying the future Chancellor at Davos this January.
Thomas, who spent 19 years as a Barclays banker, says she told Reeves to junk her existing £28 billion public investment plan and let her put Labour “in the room” with the finance industry, resulting in the much smaller £7.3bn fund to work alongside the banks.
An ex-banker persuading the future Chancellor to rewrite her policy, reducing public investment, at the corporate Glastonbury of Davos, sounds like Labour dancing to a City tune.
The Green Finance Institute’s history adds to this picture: it was launched by Tory chancellor Hammond in June 2018 in a joint programme with the City of London Corporation. The City — representing Britain’s finance sector — and the government donated £2 million each to fund the Green Finance Institute, with a mission to “champion green and sustainable finance in Britain.”
The City has the right to appoint directors to the Green Finance Institute board, which is run as a not-for-profit private company. The bankers’ driving mission is finding how to profit from green investment, so it is predictable the Green Finance Institute’s boss was unenthusiastic about larger public investment.
Ironically, the Green Finance Institute itself rests heavily on public cash. To date, the government has given the Green Finance Institute another £6m for “specific projects” after the initial £2m grant.
Most of this money was given under the Conservative governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, showing the Green Finance Institute was a Tory-oriented, pro-City organisation that, in turn, influenced Labour.
The Treasury told me the Green Finance Institute “confirmed no government funding was spent” on running Labour’s National Wealth Fund task force. The task force published its report on July 9. The Treasury said the government continue meeting the Green Finance Institute “just like other stakeholders.”
The Green Finance Institute won’t reveal what other income sources it has, although some banks say they support the Institute.
For a publicly funded organisation shaping government policy, it is remarkably un-transparent. It only publishes the most minimal, unaudited accounts, which do not show income, expenditure or top salaries. I asked the Green Finance Institute for more detail, but it told me the “Green Finance Institute is not a public body or institution,” that it followed accounting standards and declined to say more.
When the Green Finance Institute set up its National Wealth taskforce, it said it would run “with the support of Brookfield,” a massive Canadian investment fund.
Mark Carney, the former Bank of England boss who is now chair of Brookfield, helped run the task force: in 2021, Carney described Brookfield’s $600bn dollar investment portfolio as “net zero.”
However, as Greenpeace investigators soon found, Brookfield has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in gas pipelines in North America, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Carney said Brookfield also has big investments in renewables, which “cancelled out” their hydrocarbon businesses, a method which environmental academics branded a “deception.” This suggests the National Wealth Fund’s “environmental” approach will be more about branding.
The task force was supported by six other businesses, including NatWest and a fund called Equitix, which specialises in investing in PFI projects. Equitix currently owns big slices of PFI hospitals, including Barts and the Royal London (the largest by value NHS PFI) and Forth Valley in Scotland.
This raises the prospect that the National Wealth Fund will have PFI-type structures, allowing banks to squeeze profit from large investments in public infrastructure.
JSO targeted with draconian legal repression
Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists who were released on bail last month (August 22) after being arrested for “conspiracy to interfere” with Heathrow airport in July face bail conditions making legal protests illegal, for them at least.
Five of the 10 JSO-ers were refused bail and remain in prison. Those who were released after a month inside have had bail set by the court with conditions including not being 1km near an “airport, aerodrome or airfield” (unless “passing through” on public transport) or engaging in person or online with their co-defendants or any other JSO folk, in order to “prevent reoffending.”
However, the bail conditions also say they must also not engage online or in person with “any other environmental protest groups.” This means they are banned from, say, joining Feargal Sharkey’s March for Clean Water in October or emailing Friends of the Earth.
JSO say they quite commonly get bail conditions banning involvement with otherwise lawful protests, raising the risk of a creeping criminalisation of formerly legitimate dissent.
There has been concern about bail conditions banning legal protests for some years. In 2013, the UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly said he was “dismayed about very strict police bail conditions which have been imposed on protesters” in his report on Britain.
However, these were police bail conditions imposed by officers when releasing protesters shortly after mass arrests on demos, which could be later challenged in court. The latest JSO bail conditions were imposed by the judge in court, so these “very strict” conditions are working their way up the legal system.
The Crown Prosecution Service also says it intends to increase the charges on these 10 JSO activists arrested around Heathrow in July, with charges being increased from “conspiracy to interfere with national infrastructure,” a law designed for eco-protesters carrying a maximum two-year sentence, to “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” which sounds less harsh but in fact carries a maximum 10-year sentence.
The bail conditions and increased charges are draconian: this is a worry not just for JSO protesters but for anyone who thinks protest is a legitimate part of a healthy society.
Follow Solomon on X @SolHughesWriter.