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Let's be friendsLeeds Students' Union passes a motion against RBS-NatWest
Leeds P&P passed a motion through their Students' Union to mandate them to lobby RBS-NatWest on their financing of oil and gas projects. To celebrate they marched an oil pipeline through the city to a NatWest branch to highlight the issue.
by Steve Halpin, Leeds P&P
We had got started on planning for the DDD campaign before Christmas, and after Pete came up from the office in January to run a workshop with us we were ready to do something bigger than sitting on stalls. We’d heard about the motion that the Edinburgh group put through their student’s association threatening disinvestment from RBS, and decided that Leeds should be the next union to take up this call! The referendum process in our union was also a good opportunity for lots of students to get exposed to the campaign, at least enough to link RBS-NatWest with climate change.
It wasn’t hard to write a motion just spelling out what RBS-NatWest are up to, why its bad, and what connection we have with them. Soon enough we were constructing a big pipeline out of discarded materials from a re-use project, painting banners and using some lucky connections to get a couple of great polar bear costumes. The idea was that we’d be construction workers taking the pipeline down to the Natwest just off our campus and ask them for funding to finish it, as none of the other banks would and we’d heard they fund this kind of thing. It was a great laugh, especially when some impromptu drummers joined in, and in the end we didn’t just reach a lot of students but managed to get the message clearly across to the deputy manager of our Natwest branch too, who was quite constructive after a bit of persuasion and a good few minutes of refusing to move our massive pipeline from her doorway.
So after a couple of weeks of planning and one week of exhausting but fun work several thousand students have seen our motion and there’s one more Natwest branch out there sending up reports of customer discontent about the old oil and gas investments. We had lots of fun, some pretty heated debates now and again (I even found a couple of genuine climate skeptics- surely they’v got to be a dying breed now?!) and are all fired up for taking further action on RBS-NatWest.
To book a DDD workshop or order a campaign pack email Pete. You can also download the Leeds Students’ Union motion.
