RBS: in bed with Edinburgh University.
Edinburgh uni P&P have taken action at their freshers fair against the Royal Bank of Scotland's funding of climate chaos by exposing their university's £10 million investment in RBS. A symbolic 'Edinburgh University', complete with mortar board, bedded down with an RBS 'dodgy banker' to represent the unhappy union.
Freshers Week Action: Edinburgh P&P highlight their university’s £10 million investment in RBS
Their creative stunt grabbed the opportunity to engage with students arriving fresh to Edinburgh - and on the look out for student accounts. Action cards were signed by passers-by for a mass hand-in at a local RBS branch.
Ruth who helped organise the action said:
Freshers week is a fantastic time to take some action and make new students aware of your P&P group and what they do as well as keeping the pressure up on RBS. Even with a small action at the freshers fair or outside the promotional trailer, it helps to spread the word and get people thinking and talking.
Edinburgh university has £10 million invested in RBS. Edinburgh P&P passed a motion at their Students Association mandating them to call for the University to constructively enagage with RBS. The motion empowered them to use the threat of disinvestment, and to lobby the University to sell its shares in RBS unless they stopped investing in new fossil fuel exploration and extraction by their 2009 AGM.
RBS (who own NatWest) are hugely significant private funders of fossil fuel projects, including a $70 billion loan to E.On, who are planning to build the first new coal fired power station in the UK in 30 years at Kingsnorth in Kent. Between 2001 and 2006, RBS provided over $10 billion in loans to oil and gas projects. The embedded carbon emissions resulting from these projects in 2006 were greater than the carbon emissions for the whole of Scotland.
People & Planet is running the Ditch Dirty Development campaign, which calls on RBS to take responsibility for the climate impacts of their financing for oil, gas and coal projects, put a cap on embedded emissions, and switch funding to renewable energy projects. This action was a reminder to both RBS and Edinburgh University that P&P students will continue to pressure them to act, and was a great way to get the Ditch Dirty Development campaign up and running for the year ahead.