We’ve just come through the hottest June in England on record. As much as I love the heat, the pure joy of it is gone. It’s a reminder of the escalating climate crisis. 

You often just feel helpless.

Which is why it’s good to remember that some people aren’t letting the powerful get away with turning a blind eye to climate change. We’ve spent years exposing the beef producers and megafarm owners whose industries are fuelling the climate crisis. And we’ve also reported persistently on the banks pouring trillions into fossil fuels.

Throughout our investigations, HSBC has come up again and again. It has broken its own green pledges; it used so-called “sustainable finance” to fund companies destroying the climate; and it has led industry efforts to water down action on climate change. 

Investors saw our reporting and called out the bank for failing to live up to its promises. 

Now ActionAid, one of HBC’s major customers, has announced that it’s moving its money elsewhere.

The anti-poverty charity said its commitment to climate justice was directly at odds with the bank’s actions, which are harming communities around the world.

“HSBC’s investments show it is choosing profit over people and planet,” said Hannah Bond, co-CEO of ActionAid’s UK branch. “Moving our money is not just symbolic; it’s a vital first step in challenging destructive financial systems and standing firmly by our values.”

HSBC said it couldn’t comment on individual customers, but said it’s following policies which are moving it to net zero financed emissions by 2050.

ActionAid also released a report compiling figures of how much HSBC has poured into fossil fuels and industrial agriculture recently.

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

We tested a game aimed at UK school children that promotes fossil fuels, where players have to build a city by choosing a mix of housing, energy sources, businesses and community assets.

We were able to successfully complete the mission by building a city relying primarily on oil and some renewables.

Find out more

In an unusually frank admission of lobbying children, a web page promoting the game stated that it “aligns with our work to build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels”.

The game is targeted at pupils as young as seven.

Read more here.

Report into murdered children links parental alienation to ‘pro-contact culture’ of family courts

A new report details how 19 children have been killed over a nine-year period by adults who had been allowed contact with them despite a history of violence.

Women’s Aid, the UK charity which tries to help protect women and children from domestic abuse, said the deaths were all due to failings in the family courts system. 

Women’s Aid chief executive Farah Nazeer told us each of the deaths could have been prevented if child safety had been prioritised to the court.

Let that sink in. The institutions set up to protect our children are failing so badly that children are being killed.

But I want to zoom in on one aspect that was highlighted in this report for the first time: parental alienation.

Parental alienation is a concept that has been used in family court cases where parents are arguing over custody of their children. It’s usually used by the father against the mother – and often in response to allegations of domestic abuse. Faced with these accusations, the father will argue that the mother has turned the kids against him. She’s “alienated” them. This then means that the mother’s position is much weaker.

The idea that parental alienation is a diagnosable condition has been rejected as a “harmful pseudoscience” by the Family Justice Council and the concept is not recognised by the UK government. And yet, this legal approach has been so successful that the courts have given many fathers with a history of domestic abuse access to their children. Women’s Aid said that the court continues to prioritise contact between a child and their parent, even when they’ve known that the parent is an abuser.

“The concept of parental alienation has been deemed ‘more powerful than any other in silencing the voices of women and children resisting contact with abusive men’ in the family courts,” Women’s Aid said in its report.

The growing awareness around the way in which family courts fail children is not least down to our reporting on it over the past couple of years. We’ve exposed case after case where abusers have been allowed contact with their families by judges fully aware of their past behaviour.

Just to be extra clear, it’s not always fathers, just in the vast majority of cases.

Read our reporter Hannah Summers’ story by tapping the button below.