Happy Christmas from Divest Strathclyde

By Lewis Coenen-Rowe

December 2021

In what is quickly becoming an annual tradition, councillors on the Strathclyde Pension Fund Committee received an end of year e-card from us, featuring photos taken from many of our actions across the past year. See if you can spot any you recognise! 

Here’s a run down of some of the big successes we’ve seen this year:

  • In April Glasgow City council voted in favour of divesting the pension fund with a majority of 69 votes to 4. In October, this decision was reaffirmed by their choice to sign up to the C40 cities declaration, which also promotes divestment;
  • In August, we publicised updated figures, drawn from freedom of information requests, showing that the Strathclyde Pension Fund still invest over £800million in fossil fuels;
  • In September, the Strathclyde Pension Fund passed a motion indicating that they would consider divesting from fossil fuels as a viable strategy, although they were still a long way from making the full divestment commitment that we need to see;
  • Other councils in the Strathclyde area continued to show support for fossil fuel divestment, with a new motion passed in Renfrewshire and letters from Argyll and Bute and North Lanarkshire;
  • We continued to draw attention to the need to divest the Strathclyde Pension Fund with a whole range of visually striking protests that garnered significant attention in the press;
  • We did loads of cool things during COP26 (see our previous blog) and built further attention and support for the campaign.

Another Year and we're still here...