Anti-genocide activists scale Glastonbury Pyramid Stage to demand festival drop Allianz

Early on Wednesday morning, four activists from the ‘Boycott Bloody Insurance’ campaign climbed the scaffolding structure of the well-known ‘Pyramid Stage’ at the site of the Glastonbury Festival before raising a Palestine flag and unveiling banners demanding Glastonbury Allianz boycott.

Glastonbury Festival: Boycott Allianz.

The action calls on the festival’s organisers to cut ties with Allianz, which insures the event, because of Allianz’s financial backing of weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel giants and corporations complicit in the oppression and killing of Palestinians.

Glastonbury Allianz boycott

One activist said the protest was out of love for the event but that the festival had gone astray from its original principles:

We love Glastonbury. So we’re here to help it live up to what it stands for. The festival should be a beacon of peace, not a billboard for a company that finances imperialism, genocide and climate chaos.

The protest follows a series of escalating, yet still ignored, appeals to Glastonbury organisers in recent months to ask them ‘amicably’ to reconsider their choice of insurer. When no action was taken, Boycott Bloody Insurance published an open letter with hundreds of signatories including artists, then by a petition that gained thousands of signatures. Subsequently, festival staff and organisers received mass emails from campaigners – and now activists have taken this visible stand from the festival’s most iconic structure.

The Pyramid Stage has been considered a symbol of artistic and political expression ever since it was famously topped by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) logo in the 1980s. Today’s protest continues that tradition and calls attention to the deep hypocrisy of a festival celebrated for peace and justice partnering with an insurer that bankrolls violence and destruction across the world.

Allianz: An Insurer Of Death

The protesters point out that Allianz provides insurance to, and invests in, companies fuelling imperialist wars and environmental devastation, including:

• Elbit Systems – Israel’s primary arms supplier, providing drones, ammunition, and surveillance systems used in the ongoing bombardment and occupation of Palestine, including attacks on people in Gaza
• Textron – a US weapons manufacturer responsible for cluster munitions and attack helicopters used in imperialist-backed violence from Yemen to Gaza
• Chevron – one of the world’s worst fossil fuel corporations, driving catastrophic climate change while continuing to extract and pollute amidst global climate breakdown
• Marubeni – a Japanese conglomerate financing new coal power plants across Asia, directly undermining global efforts to prevent climate collapse

Allianz’s involvement in harmful business extends beyond the Gaza genocide — it has investments totalling more than $43m in Serco Group’s migrant detention centre. Allianz has profited from immigration detention centres and the criminalisation of refugees by successive governments. It is also complicit in regimes and corporations that abuse the human rights of those displaced by war and climate disaster.

Allianz’s Role in Genocide and Ecocide

By underwriting these companies, organisers say that Allianz provides the essential financial backing that allows them to operate — without insurers like Allianz, these corporations would struggle to function at all. Allianz’s investments and policies therefore help sustain the machinery of massacre, enabling the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the destruction of ecosystems worldwide.

A spokesperson for Boycott Bloody Insurance said:

Allianz hides behind greenwashing and corporate responsibility rhetoric. But the reality is that their money is soaked in the blood of Palestinians, of communities on the frontlines of extraction, and of all life being pushed to the brink by climate collapse.

Glastonbury Festival has always been a symbol of hope, peace, and solidarity. Continuing to partner with Allianz betrays those values.

Featured image provided by the author