KEN LEE reports from the final full meeting of the council this year
Tin-earred: Labour councillor Callton Young sided with the Tories over a public petition
Ethics and morals are just too expensive for Croydon’s Conservative and Labour councillors.
Two petitions were submitted to Wednesday night’s council meeting calling on the Mayor to stop investing in some businesses and industries on moral grounds.
Mayor Jason Perry’s Tories issued a statement together with the “opposition” Labour group.
There has been a growing understanding that investment decisions when using public money – such as with the council’s pension fund – shouldn’t just be about making as much money as possible. Money can be invested in the best interests of the public, in an ethical and moral manner.
In 2014, the Croydon Labour had a manifesto commitment to stop the council investing in Big Tobacco, a change that they brought in after they were elected.
John Wentworth, the Labour councillor who was chair of the council’s pension committee at the time, said: “Having a pension fund that invests in tobacco was very much at odds with our responsibility to protect and improve public health in this borough, and there were clearly a number of concerns about the ethics of doing that.”
The council’s investments in fossil fuel companies is another longstanding issue.
On Wednesday night, it was Green councillor Esther Sutton who introduced one petition, saying, “changes to our climate are the biggest threat to humanity and our way of life that we have ever faced”.
Ethical: Esther Sutton spoke against investing in fossil fuels
Gill Slater, one of the campaigners behind this petition, also spoke at the meeting. “Croydon Council should not be investing in supporting the extraction or burning of fossil fuels – it is completely immoral to try to make profits out of our own destruction.”
Croydon Council has already acknowledged this in its own environmental, social and governance policy. It is just that they don’t appear to have done anything about it. So the first petition was asking the council to set firm deadlines to act on its own ethical guidance.
The second petition asked the council to stop investing in companies that support or enable war crimes and human rights atrocities.
Ferial Saada, a British Palestinian who supported the second petition, told the assembled councillors that “as well as the death, destruction and harm from war crimes and genocide, geopolitical instability harms economic performance and therefore puts the fund at risk”.
Saada said: “As more organisations divest from complicit companies, the risk of Croydon investing becomes greater and investing in genocide is not acting in the best interests of members, in relation to the council’s fiduciary duty.”
Despite a clear moral and financial case for changing the council’s investment policy, Labour and Conservative councillors didn’t do anything about it.
Callton Young, the current chair of the pensions committee, read out a joint statement on behalf of Labour and the Conservatives, claiming that “pursuing exclusionary policies for individual companies or sectors is not feasible without incurring significant costs”, a complete contradiction of what his own party did with tobacco 10 years ago.
Young went on to claim that the council already has a responsible investment policy. Official records show that Croydon Council’s investments even include Israeli government bonds.
Coming together: Wednesday was not the first time that Labour has backed Tories in the Town Hall Chamber
But according to Young, Croydon’s investment policy “complies with the council’s statutory obligations”. As if that was any reassurance to anyone.
And with that, Young sat down, with cries of “Shame” coming from the crowded public gallery. “Tin earred,” was how one observer described Young’s Tory-lite performance.
“He could have said he’d take the petition to the committee,” a Katharine Street source said. “Not for the first time, Labour in the Town Hall Chamber have badly let down the people of Croydon, and they have sided with the Tories.”
Ria Patel, a Green Party councillor who supported the petitions, was disgusted by the Labour and Conservative consensus. “It shows the depth that some people have sunk to where they think saving on admin fees is more important than saving people’s lives,” Patel said.
“Croydon residents have family and community connections to people across the world who are suffering, and our council should not be supporting those abuses.
“When it comes to climate change all of our futures are at risk. The council meeting showed that Labour and Conservative councillors have sold their consciences for 30 pieces of silver.”
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The people outside looked from Labour to Tory, and from Tory to Labour, and from Labour to Tory again: but already it was impossible to say which was which
I think it’s disgusting that Labour and Conservative Councillors are happy to make a profit out of death and destruction
Both parties have lost any sense of morality or decency
This really is shameful. Recent research suggests there appears to be no difference between the performance of ethical and non-ethical funds, so this ought to be a no-brainer, a way to do good at no cost. (And, as suggested in the article, non-ethical funds are vulnerable to divestment whereas ethical ones are not. If anything, investing in ethical funds is more responsible in purely financial terms.) We get the local government we deserve, I suppose.
The Green Party is not committed to pacifism so cannot object to the production and purchase of weapons, other than nuclear, for our self defence. Thus why not invest in and support UK arms manufacturers? It is certainly not ethical to leave this country’s defence to the likes of the UN, as The Greens know too well UN resolutions can be ignored at will.