Clean up the banks!

To highlight that the banks are investing enormous amounts of their customers’ money in dirty fossil fuels, we staged a cleaning flash mob at branches of Barclays, HSBC, Santander and Natwest in Leicester city centre.



We wore our cleaning clothes and brought dusters, brushes and polishing cloths to symbolically clean up the banks. While some of us cleaned, Melanie Wakley explained why we were there with a loud hailer:

“Scientists tell us that we’ve got 11 years left to take action if we want to avoid irreversible changes to the climate.

Runaway climate change would be an unthinkable disaster – it would mean drought, floods, extreme heatwaves and sea level rises. The poorest people would be the worst affected and it would become impossible for humans to live on parts of the planet.

We need to be investing in clean energy and a liveable planet. It’s time for these banks to move their customers’ money out of fossil fuels.”

Outside the banks, we also spoke to customers about how they can move their money out of dirty energy.



Between 2016 and 2018, Barclays invested $85.1 billion in fossil fuels; they are one of the top investors in oil mining. In the same period, HSBC invested $57.8 billion in dirty energy, including tar sands, Arctic drilling, coal mining and fracking. Santander have increased their investment in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change was signed in 2015, investing $14.9 billion in dirty energy in three years.



Following a meeting with a member of Leicester Friends of the Earth last week, Leicester East MP, Keith Vaz, signed a cross-party letter to the prime minister in support of onshore wind energy. Onshore wind turbines are now the cheapest source of energy in the UK. They are also hugely popular, with over three quarters of the public backing their use, according to the government’s own statistics. However, since 2015, the government has introduced planning and financial barriers that have stood in the way of new projects. The campaigners are hoping that Leicester’s other MPs, Jon Ashworth and Liz Kendall, will also sign the letter and support clean energy.