IT WAS unprecedented. Tower Hamlets Councillors united, almost to a person, to stop the Council’s pension fund investing in companies involved in the arms trade.
The Council and its employees both contribute a small sum to a pension fund each month. These sums are invested and then used to pay the employees a pension when they retire. For years campaigners have been told that pension funds cannot use political grounds to decide where they can invest the funds they hold: pensions have to be invested to secure maximum profits. That advice has recently eased off a bit – not least because arms trading is not necessarily the most profitable investment. So now a number of Councils are being urged, by their councillors, to stop using these pension funds to help governments committing mass murder.
If you stop to think about it, investing in the arms industry is a nonsense. If you invest in, say, a company that make cornflakes, you can urge it to produce more cornflakes, or produce and distribute them more efficientlyso that the profits go up. There will come a time when everyone in the world is eating cornflakes three times a day, and no more can possibly be sold. At that point, you’ll have to take your money out and put it into rice crispies, or some such.
The only purpose of arms – guns and missiles – is to kill people or threaten to kill them. How will these companies increase their profits, then? Do you lobby the shareholders’ AGM and should “please kill more people”? Do you write letters to the local paper explaining that the more people that are killed, the more countries will re-arm – get on with it? No: you would probably be arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder if you did. It is a nonsense to invest in the arms trade.
The call for the Pensions Committee to consider divesting the pension funds from arms companies was made by the Aspire Councillors, who are entitled to put a motion to the Council each meeting. It came after a campaign from Unison to secure divestment by Council pension funds across London. Disregarding how much fundamental agreement there was over the divestment issue, the Labour Group used the debate in another attempt to show again that it is the only Group qualified to rule in Tower Hamlets. It didn’t really work out for them.
You always know you’re in for a squabble when the Monitoring Officer has to speak at the start of the item. All Councils have a Monitoring Officer: their jobs is to stop Councils doing anything which is illegal or beyond their powers. The issue this time seemed to be that Labour had submitted an amendment to the Administration Motion, but the amendment was late.
The Monitoring Officer pointed out that the Administration Motion was not asking the Council to make a decision. It was asking the Council to ask the Pensions Committee to take a decision. This is because the Pensions Committee takes decisions about pensions and the Council has no power to do so. So the discussion the Council was about to have was a debate, not a decision. This seemed to suggest that it was not crucial for Labour to have its amendment voted on, because it could add its points to the debate and put them before the Pensions Committee when the decision was taken. Labour wasn’t happy, but the Monitoring Officer stood her ground.
Cllr Abdal Ullah, who hadn’t spoken for a while, pointed out that he was a member of the Pensions Committee. He asked if he was allowed to take part in this debate, if he was going to be taking a decision on the merits of the arguments later on, at the Committee? The Monitoring Officer said the issue was one of predetermination: at the Pensions Committee, councillors would have to show that the hadn’t made their minds up before listening to the debate at the Committee meeting and had had an open mind before they voted at Committee. She invited councillors to withdraw from the Council debate if they wished: none did.
Labour questioned the Monitoring Officer again, who pointed out that as the motion said that the Council was not resolving anything on the issue but only resolving to ask the Pensions Committee to take a decision, voting on the motion would not, by itself, show any predetermination.
Cllr Golds then chipped in, comparing the position of a Councillor on a Pensions Committee with the position of a Councillor on a Planning Committee. You might have a provisional view on the general issue, but you could approach the actual Committee decision with an open mind. Someone else added that Councillors could always change their minds, and the Monitoring Officer agreed, and the clock carried on ticking. The Speaker then came back to life and said he agreed with the Monitoring Officer.
The Council went on to debate the motion and the amendment. The amendment was described by its supporters as a “friendly amendment” (a concept invented in the local Labour Party during the Chris Weavers dynasty – of which more another time). The amendment added in that the Pensions Committee should consider divesting from companies which harmed the environment, such as those which were involved in oil explorations, as well as those involved in the arms trade. The Labour amendment, aimed to help the Council target to achieve “net zero” status. Labour has two members on the Pensions Committee: Cllr Abdal Ullah and Cllr Maisha Begum, as well as Labour look-a-like Cllr Kabir Hussain. Maybe none of them had mentioned in Labour circles that work to make the investment of pension funds achieve “net zero” has been well underway for some time.
At the end of the debate, the Labour amendment was supported by 14 councillors: this included the Green Party councillor. It also included at least some of the Lost Lambs, who are not, of course, allied with Labour but who seem to be behaving as if they want to be. Cllr Golds joined the Aspire councillors in voting against the Labour amendment, so it fell.
All councillors present, except Cllr Golds, voted for the substantive and unamended motion. Labour Councillors and the Lost Lambs looked a little surprised to be voting in favour of something tabled by Aspire, but there seemed to be no alternative, and they forced their hands in the air. There were no abstentions. Polite applause came from a well behaved public gallery. Now we wait for the next meeting of the Pensions Committee, due on 10th March, to take the story further.
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