RBS ready to meet protesters

Published on Saturday 24 April 2010 14:30

ROYAL Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton has offered to meet demonstrators who are planning a major protest this week ahead of the bank's annual meeting in Edinburgh.

Hampton's gesture marks a change of tactic from the bank, which has faced a number of protests from environmentalists and human rights groups over the years.

Although the bank's corporate sustainability team have met protest groups in the past, Hampton's offer of a meeting before Wednesday's AGM is said to reflect the changing culture within the bank since the global financial crisis erupted.

Hampton has previously shown his willingness to talk with those who object to the bank's lending policies. Before Christmas, he spoke briefly with a group of Dutch activists who arrived at RBS's offices in London as part of a broader campaign against lending to the defence sector.

This week's protest outside the Edinburgh International Conference Centre involves a coalition of human rights, anti-poverty and environmental groups who are objecting to RBS spending billions to support fossil fuel and mining companies.

They have denounced the bank for backing tar sands extraction in Canada and supporting Vedanta Resources which is accused of destroying the lives of thousands in one of the poorest regions in India.

Tar sands are a carbon-intensive form of fossil fuel and the refining process is said to leave behind a toxic combination of chemicals. Among those leading this week's protest is Canadian activist Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a veteran oil and rainforest campaigner.

Camp for Climate Action, the latest in a series of protest groups to target Royal Bank of Scotland, staged its first protest in August 2006 at the Drax coal-fired power station in West Yorkshire. About 600 people gathered for ten days at the site, which Climate Camp claims is the biggest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK.

The camp moved on to Heathrow the following summer, where participants gathered to oppose the building of a controversial third runway at the airport.

Climate Camp focused on the Kingsnorth coal-fired station in Kent in 2008, then set up in Bishopsgate the following spring during the G20 Summit in London.

The group's organisers say they want to broaden their campaign to include banks that fund the oil industry. They chose RBS in particular because the part-nationalised institution, which has received some 20 billion of taxpayers' cash, is the UK bank that "has been the most heavily involved in financing fossil fuels and corporate bad guys around the world".

Climate Camp's plans mark the latest development in several years of environmental protest against RBS.

Two of the main groups are Platform, which campaigns for social and ecological justice, and People and Planet, the UK student group that campaigns on poverty, human rights and the environment.