HSBC: nothing to be proud of

Birmingham Pride took place last weekend. 

I have friends for whom Pride events are incredibly important. I recognise they are an important place of witnessing to the inclusion of and radical solidarity with a community that is so often forced into the margins. 

I understand the importance for everyone to feel seen, represented, celebrated; the more so for those who often aren't. I believe deeply in the importance of welcome and inclusion: for everyone but especially for those at the edges. I believe wholeheartedly in stretching wide the boundaries of who is included ... and then stretching them further until they snap altogether. 

I am also acutely aware, as a person of faith, it is perhaps even more important, given the damage continuing to be done by the churches (and other faith communities) to the LGBTQ+ community that I nail those colours to the mast on this specific issue of inclusion even more publicly. 

I hope I find ways to do so. 

Birmingham Pride is not one of them. Even in the years the Pride Parade passed my front door, and was a member of a church which was actively visible at Birmingham Pride, I made a conscious choice not to participate. I do not necessarily need to justify this, but I want to. 

You see Birmingham Pride is sponsored by HSBC, and for all its rainbow window displays and beautifully written slogans, HSBC is not a force for good in the world. It is not a bastion of the kind of world and welcome I believe in. 

Climate change, the greatest existential threat to the future of humanity and our planet, is exacerbated by HSBC (and others) continuing to bank roll the fossil fuel industry and other extractive, exploitative industries.

HSBC remain guilty of massively financing the arms trade that fuels global conflict and keeps despotic regimes in power, (including, lets be honest, regimes whose approach to sexuality and gender identity is the very antithesis of the values of Pride). 

Big banks and the culture they create, are at the heart of facilitating the destructive practices which keep the poorest in our society, and the poorest in the world, locked into cycles of debt and powerlessness: helping the rich get ever richer while those at the bottom continue to suffer. 

This is not a well researched post with all the facts and figures and details about their investments and practices, but it is something I know to be true. Selling out to big banks and big business has no place in the world of radical inclusion I believe in, and that Pride at its best promotes.

I think Pride is a good thing: any public protest against HSBC's sponsorship of it would be at risk of being misconstrued as an objection to Pride itself so clearly I was never going to do that. So perhaps this private act of objection benefits no-one, perhaps it just sounds like an excuse to not walk in solidarity with a community who need support. But sometimes we have to do what we believe to be right even if it makes no difference and goes entirely unnoticed. Perhaps that's why I am writing this, too.

So I'm sorry: to all those who needed last weekend, and at whose side I should perhaps have been standing. I wasn't there, and this is why. On behalf of a whole other group of excluded and vulnerable people who are victims of the corruption of power and money, I couldn't.