Out of touch and on the wrong side of history: the Institute of Directors cancels my membership

On the 8th of December I received an email from the Director General of the Institute of Directors (IoD) telling me that my membership (of around a decade) had been cancelled as a result of my conviction which may cause “harm or loss to the IoD’s goodwill, reputation or professional standing”.

For those readers who don’t know, I was convicted on 5th December 2022 along with 6 other ordinary women (the ‘Barclays 7’) for ‘criminal damage’, aka carefully cracking a window at Barclays Global HQ in Canary Wharf in April 2021 to call them out as the biggest fossil fuel funder in Europe and one of the largest investors in biodiversity destruction and plastics pollution globally. We were sentenced on 27th January this year: I received a 7 month custodial prison sentence, suspended for 2 years. (Meanwhile Barclays continue to profit from extinction and make bonuses from starvation).

I had been a paid up member of the IoD for over a decade, and a volunteer member of the IoD’s National Sustainability Taskforce for over 3 years (I see that they have been quick to remove my details from that page!), so to receive this message our of the blue was somewhat of a shock.

I am only sharing this news now as some of my (former) colleagues on the Taskforce asked the organisation to reconsider their decision to throw me out. It has taken them this long to do that and their answer has been a resounding “no”.

So, I feel I must write and share this news, and make it public.

The IoD has been in existence for 120 years. It’s website states:

“The IoD has been at the heart of business since its formation in 1903. The Royal Charter, awarded in 1906, charged the IoD with promoting free enterprise, lobbying government and setting standards for corporate governance. Today, we remain the authority on entrepreneurialism, professionalism in business and good governance in the UK and beyond”

When the IoD was created by a small group of businessmen, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was around 290 parts per million ie, very much at safe levels, and I daresay none of the other planetary boundaries had been broken. We are now at 420 parts per million CO2, almost all planetary boundaries have been thoroughly trashed, and we are heading for economic, ecological and societal breakdown by 2040. Crops are already failing around the world, driving hunger for hundreds of millions of people, and food inflation for billions.

The IoD is one of a number of ‘business’ and ‘professional’ organisations which are still operating or at least think they are, in a world that no longer exists.

The IoD wouldn't even support the simplest of policy positions – that of no new fossil fuel projects as of 2021 - when it's supported by the International Energy Agency, UN, IPCC, Scottish Government and all the main opposition parties in Westminster. Instead it ignored the scientists' warnings and hid behind it’s membership, saying that unless the majority of its members wanted this then it wouldn’t support it.

The Institute of Directors are showing their true colours – they are more wedded to procedures and the status quo than championing real change towards a habitable earth and the prevention of societal collapse and mass suffering and death on a global scale.

The IoD, along with the other main business bodies, have a meeting with UK Government Ministers every week... What an opportunity to be advocating for the scale and pace of change that we need and that children and young people across the country and the world are desperate for.

Instead of this the IoD continue to call for the very economic growth that is driving us off the cliff, and trumpet GDP increases. Hardly the ‘good governance’ for which they’re so proud. And their most innovative and far-reaching proposal seems to be for companies who have achieved net zero early to be taxed a bit less. Really? We're heading past 1.5C degrees in the next handful of years at most and a cascade of irreversible tipping points. Is that the best you can do?!

And then you top all that off by cancelling the membership of one of your committed volunteer members for taking nonviolent action to try to demand the change that you are failing to drive as an institution.

In 2023 this is not the way to demonstrate your relevance to a new generation of young leaders, and potential members.

Obviously I'd prefer the organisation to wake up and transform itself, but if it comes to it, then the IoD’s extinction will be one extinction I won’t be crying over.