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Green Finance Institute: much ‘finance,’ little green
SOLOMON HUGHES reveals how one of the organisations shaping Labour’s investment plans was created by Tories and bankers, looking like a slightly green-flecked PFI vehicle instead of a body for proper investment
Rachel Reeves met Green Finance Institute chief executive Rhian-Mari Thomas at Davos this January; Thomas says she told Reeves to junk her existing £28 billion public investment plan and let her put Labour ‘in the room’ with the finance industry, resulting in the much smaller £7.3bn fund to work alongside the banks
If the government really wanted to address public finances, improve living standards and begin economic recovery, it would increase its borrowing for investment, argues MICHAEL BURKE
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WHAT is the Green Finance Institute, the organisation behind Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s National Wealth Fund plans? Turns out it is an un-transparent, bank-oriented company cooked up between then Tory chancellor Phillip Hammond and the City of London.
Reeves and Ed Miliband say that from April 2024, the Green Finance Institute gave “policy support on the Labour Party’s National Wealth Fund,” running the task force designing the fund, in a donation worth £99,000.
Green Finance Institute chief executive Rhian-Mari Thomas told the Guardian she personally persuaded Reeves to redesign her green investment plans, lobbying the future Chancellor at Davos this January.
Thomas, who spent 19 years as a Barclays banker, says she told Reeves to junk her existing £28 billion public investment plan and let her put Labour “in the room” with the finance industry, resulting in the much smaller £7.3bn fund to work alongside the banks.
An ex-banker persuading the future Chancellor to rewrite her policy, reducing public investment, at the corporate Glastonbury of Davos, sounds like Labour dancing to a City tune.
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