Dozens of protesters, including a 77-year-old rabbi, have been arrested while blocking traffic in London’s financial district, as Extinction Rebellion switched its focus towards companies funding and profiting from the climate emergency.
Hundreds of demonstrators walked into the roundabout outside the Bank of England in the City and sat down in the road early on Monday morning.
In a statement, the group said: “Extinction Rebellion this morning are disrupting the system bankrolling the environmental crisis.
“The day of disruption, which will target financial institutions, seeks to highlight the far greater disruption faced by those living in the environments systematically being destroyed by UK-backed companies.
“The ecological damage is global, and it is hitting the global south now.” Protesters said they were switching their focus to the financial institutions “funding environmental destruction”.
The UK group of Extinction Rebellion has three core demands:
1) Tell the truth
The government must tell the truth about the scale of the ecological crisis by declaring a climate emergency, “working with other groups and institutions to communicate the urgent need for change”.
2) Net zero emissions by 2025
The UK must drastically cut its greenhouse gas emissions, hitting net zero by 2025.
3) Citizens’ assembly
The government must create a citizens’ assembly to hear evidence and devise policy to tackle the climate crisis. Citizens’ assemblies bring together ordinary people to investigate, discuss and make recommendations on how to respond, in this case, to the ecological emergency.
In the US activists have added a further demand: “A just transition that prioritises the most vulnerable and indigenous sovereignty [and] establishes reparations and remediation led by and for black people, indigenous people, people of colour and poor communities for years of environmental injustice.”
Jeffrey Newman, emeritus rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue, knelt down in the middle of Lombard Street, opposite the Bank of England, after leading a Shacharit festival morning service. He was carried away by police, who at one point appeared to drop him on the floor, after he refused to go with them voluntarily.
As he waited to be taken, Newman, a long-time environmental campaigner, said: “We are in a period of enormous catastrophic breakdown, and if it takes an arrest to try to find ways of helping to galvanise public opinion then it is certainly worth being arrested.
“The other side of what I want to say is that Extinction Rebellion is this: it is activism, but underneath it’s also about rebuilding, about showing that a society can function better when people collaborate.”
Interrupted before he could finish, Newman told officers surrounding him that he disagreed with what they were doing and did not accept their grounds for his arrest. “It’s not OK!” he shouted at the arresting officer before he was taken away.
Another protester, Chay Harwood, 23, from Bristol, said: “We are here in the financial district because we know for a fact that these companies and institutions have a vested interest in deforestation and the decimation of people’s lives and livelihoods, not only in the Amazon but in the global south in general.”
Shortly before 3.30pm, the Metropolitan police announced that 1,405 people had been arrested in connection with the Extinction Rebellion protests since last Monday. Of those, 76 had been charged, with offences including failing to comply with a condition under section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986, criminal damage and obstruction of a highway.
The protest outside the major finance institutions bankrolling big oil comes after the Guardian’s polluters investigation, which found that the world’s three largest money managers had a combined $300bn fossil fuel investment portfolio, using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions.
The Guardian found that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which together oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, had continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies even after the Paris agreement, which set out the urgent need to drastically scale back fossil fuel expansion.
The two largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change.
On Monday morning, the Metropolitan police announced there had been 1,336 arrests linked to the protests since they began last week. The rate of arrests appeared to have slowed over the weekend as the group focused instead on mass actions involving members of the general public.
Near the Bank of England, Andrew Medhurst, a former City trader turned full-time activist, said the financial industry needed to realise that some of the projects it was financing were “essentially leading us to destruction”.
“We have no more time left in terms of taking action,” he said. “We haven’t got 12 years. We should have started yesterday. We have to decarbonise our economies, so for the banks to be lending money to fossil fuel companies – it’s just barmy. It doesn’t make sense.
“It basically means there’s a disconnect between those emotional family connections [between City workers] and their future children and grandchildren, and making money, which is morally repugnant.”
Emily Grossman, an expert in molecular biology and genetics and a member of Scientists for XR, said she was protesting outside the big finance houses to shine a light on the central role they played in the climate emergency.
The group now has more than 700 prominent scientists signed up to support non-violent direct action around the escalating ecological emergency. Grossman said the big banks in the City were a key target, having lent hundreds of billions of pounds to fossil fuel projects in the past year.
She said: “They are the ones who are pushing ahead with these huge investments … they are using our own money – in terms of pensions and investments – to drive us all towards climate catastrophe … They are threatening the lives of our children and grandchildren for the sake of their profits.”
