A Little Light in the Darkness: Joining some dots and a date for your diary

Amongst the various and increasing decisions from Rachel Reeves returning to austerity, attacking environmentalists, and grovelling to big business, there is one noteworthy step in a far more useful direction.

Rachel has noticed that “defined benefit” pension funds are sitting on a surplus of around £160 billion, which it seems they can’t do anything useful with. By any reckoning, it’s a sizeable lump. Four times the infamous “black hole” of £40 billion that came as such a surprise to Keir and Rachel shortly after the Election.

Enough to restore the entire £28 billion per year of Green Investment that was in Ed Milliband’s original departmental budget.

Now, local authority pension funds are not the same, but the key point is that they could use the money that they look after in radically different ways. The starting point, right now, would be to STOP all investment that aids the destruction of the human race from global warming and the Israeli government’s continuing attempts to destroy the Palestinian people.

To that end, you may wish to support the Lobby of the next meeting of the All Wales Pension Partnership, which meets in Swansea at the Guildhall on the morning of Wednesday, March 12^th. Keep watching this site for further updates.

You should note that nearly all the calls for divestment (particularly those by the campaigns to divest from Fossil Fuels campaigns) also call for the money divestment to be reinvested in local green sustainable enterprises. The opportunities are massive and seriously game-changing. In Wales we could put billions into a new sustainable electricity grid with generation from offshore and onshore turbines (and no pylons). Thousands of Acres of solar farms. Millions more trees. Fundamental projects for flood prevention and mitigation, clean rivers, food security …. All of which would create many thousands of good green jobs and a hugely beneficial knock-on effect on the NHS and education.

Here is a much more detailed piece about Pension Funds.