Pro-Palestine campaigners to protest outside Hackney Town Hall over council pension fund investments
Campaigners are keeping the pressure on Hackney Council’s pension fund to ditch stocks in companies operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) wants the fund, whose responsible investment policies are currently being reviewed by the council pensions committee, to divest from firms “that support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land”.
The group will stage a protest tomorrow (30 September) at 6pm outside Hackney Town Hall.
It follows a demo back in June which saw the campaign hand in a petition with 58,000 signatories that called on the council to divest from 39 companies it says are associated with the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The protesters say Hackney has invested £22.5m in 39 firms through its pensions portfolio.
The council’s pension scheme for its 7,011 members is worth £1.8 billion, according to a report from fund managers.
It was showing a surplus of £123m overall at the end of June, “largely due to strong investment performance”, a council report states.
Hackney PSC co-secretary Sussan Rassoulie said: “We are asking them to upgrade their investment strategy.”
She said campaigners are concerned about investment in “companies whose products are used in surveillance and oppression of Palestinian people or those whose products are used in demolition of Palestinian homes and infrastructure or the building of illegal settlements”.
She added that divestment from companies might not happen overnight.
PSC has been invited to address the pensions committee tomorrow about its concerns.
Ben Jamal, the director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK, is due to speak at the protest, along with Divest Hackney, which wants the council to end its investment in fossil fuels, and trade unionists.
The council held its first workshop this month to start the review of its responsible investment policies. It looked at United Nations “principles and related issues, its approach to climate change and the future development of a refreshed target and impact on its investment strategy”.
No decisions are expected until next year.
According to a report going before the committee, the fund “has looked to increase the level of engagement with the underlying companies in which it invests”, including “taking a more proactive role in encouraging managers to take into consideration the voting recommendations of the Local Authority Pension Fund Forum”.
These concerns include human rights and climate change issues.
In June, committee chair Robert Chapman explained: “The forum is actively engaging with companies cited by the UN as being involved in certain specified activities related to the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
He said: “Hackney Council does not directly invest council taxpayers’ money in companies. The pension fund’s assets are managed by external managers, with oversight from the council’s pensions committee.”
Hackney’s staff pension fund is part of the Local Authority Pension Fund Forum.
Cllr Chapman added: “The forum is actively engaging with companies cited by the UN as being involved in certain specified activities related to the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
He added: “The investments are a small part of a very large pooled investments and the fund has no direct holdings in any company through its equity portfolios.
“However, we have been advised that the transition costs that the fund would be exposed to in moving away from these particular investments would be significant and therefore likely to conflict with our overarching fiduciary duty.”
Cllr Chapman said the pensions committee could not divest from any particular holding in the investment fund without ditching the whole fund, which could incur costs and fees up to £1.5m.
Hackney Jewish response to hateful event
On September 4th, in response to the Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s (PSC) planned propaganda stall, which exhibited and gave away propaganda literature containing lies and exaggerations against Israel, Hackney Friends of Israel confronted them ,with our own literature on the Middle East. The announcement that the PSC planned this event, was intimidating and provoking to the Jewish community and other friends of Israel, who feel passionately that this kind of incitement encourages anti-Semitism and verbal and physical abuse against Jewish people, that we see is now so common on the streets of our Borough. Jewish people feel unsafe in Hackney and it is a disgrace that the PSC are allowed to inflame this publically, without sanction or control. Or perhaps there are elements among our local dignitaries who are actively promoting and supporting it? It is a disgrace, too, that they deliberately choose Saturdays as they know many Jewish people will tend not to demonstrate on the Sabbath or a Friday; but they underestimate the strength of our deep feelings on this matter.
Local Authorities do not have, and should not have, foreign policies, and bringing the contentious and complex Middle East Israel/Palestinian quarrel onto our home turf in Hackney, merely promotes social dis-cohesion and fractures community relations, whilst antagonising whole sections of our diverse population. We have enough crucially important local matters to resolve in our city, such as health and education and crime and racism.
These stalls are also guilty of brain-washing our local youth, even in our schools, with one-sided, simplistic and ill-informed statements and slogans and alleged ‘facts’ about Israel and Jewish people, so spreading anti-Semitic racist myths. If there are people in Hackney who wish to bad-mouth and insult Israel they should go to Whitehall and lobby the elected government, or outside the Israeli Embassy. If they really do consider themselves so brave, attacking a minority British ethnic group like the Jewish community that supports Israel, then let them go to Israel and face off the IDF there!
We will respond in kind, as is our democratic right, to any attempt to intimidate us on our streets in our home borough.