Despite tight security, the activists managed to enter the grounds of the JCB headquarters. When the event began with the cyclists being flagged off, several cyclists revealed striking black and yellow T shirts with the message ‘Stop Bulldozer genocide in Palestine, India and Kashmir’. Simultaneously supporters of the campaign shouted slogans and held banners accusing JCB of complicity in genocide and NSPCC of a callous and racist lack of care for children in these parts of the world. Despite the JCB security guards’ best efforts, this scene was enacted several times during the 50 km route of the sportive.
One of the protestors, Josh, commented: ‘I am glad to be here exposing the crimes of JCB, a British company which hypocritically poses as family friendly when in fact it is destroying communities in Palestine, India and Kashmir. As for the NSPCC, the fact that they are accepting JCB’s blood-stained money shows that they think only some children matter. This is blatant colonial racism!’
The protesters, who were mainly South Asian, were met with extreme hostility and racism from a few cyclists taking part in the ride who appeared to be JCB employees and their supporters. These men shouted ‘go back to your own country’ and ‘you don’t look like you were born here’. At one point, a passing cyclist grabbed a megaphone out of one of the protestors’ hands and threw it into the road, damaging it in the process, before doing the same to a mobile phone belonging to a fellow protester trying to film the incident. Despite these experiences, the protesters remained chanting with their banners.
As one of the protestors, Raj, commented, ‘Attending the JCB Sportive has shown us the disgusting dominance of this company complicit in genocide in the area surrounding its headquarters. As a predominantly South Asian group of protesters, we were met with outright racism of the kind that is only growing across the UK. This experience was a stark reminder that not all lives are valued the same by the UK establishment and that companies like JCB - with children’s blood on their hands - reinforce this thinking among their employees and supporters.’
JCB’s Chairman, billionaire Anthony Bamford or Baron Bamford of Daylesford and Wooton is a ‘super donor’ to the British Conservative party and a close friend of Boris Johnson. The JCB empire is controlled by the Bamford family trusts, which have been involved in off shore tax scandals.
More recently Bamford has been getting closer to the far-right Reform party. In March this year party leader Nigel Farage entered a major Reform rally on a JCB machine lent to him by Bamford. Earlier Bamford had treated him to a £8000 helicopter flight to tour a JCB site.
Over the years the NSPCC, a long-established children’s charity whose aim is the ‘prevention of cruelty to children’, has been frequently asked to stop taking funds from JCB and provided with evidence of the callous and illegal home demolitions carried out by JCB. As the UK Palestine Mental Health network puts it. "It would appear that children’s services provided by the NSPCC in the UK are financed in part by profits from state crime and the abuse and traumatisation of children overseas."
Across India, state governments controlled by the BJP have consistently used JCB bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes, shops and places of worship during the ongoing project disturbingly named ‘bulldozer justice’. In fact, JCB is so closely intertwined with this project that it has come to symbolize attacks on Muslims. The harm to children is incalculable.
The Stop JCB Demolitions campaign pointed to the fact, for example, that on 2 February 2024, the demolition of a madrasa and 600 year old Mosque in Mehrauli, South Delhi left more than 20 orphaned children who lived in the madrasa displaced and traumatised. There was no notice given before the JCB bulldozers moved in.
In Kashmir, in the name of development drives, houses have been demolished across large areas, affecting whole communities and of course numerous children, permanently damaging their physical and mental health. In January, the Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign, which is a coalition of organisations based in Britain including South Asia Solidarity Group and Nijjor Manush, produced a report titled Stop JCB’s Bulldozer Genocide, a report on human rights violations referencing a large number of cases in Palestine, Kashmir and elsewhere in India where JCB has been involved in serious human rights violations.
The campaign has also filed a complaint with the UK National Contact Point, a government body promoting OECD guidelines on responsible business conduct, alleging that the manufacturer had failed to address the adverse human rights impacts from the use of its products in India.
The Stop JCB’s Demolitions Campaign has two main demands: firstly that JCB must end its relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and cease all activities in occupied Palestine; and secondly, that JCB must commit to ensuring that its products are not used for human rights violations in India and Kashmir through robust monitoring and prevention systems. This includes making compulsory the use of its existing LiveLink technology to trace and locate JCB machines. JCB’s failure to use this technology is a deliberate violation of its human rights responsibilities.
As Mukti Shah of the Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign commented: ‘The fact that JCB continues to operate on behalf of the Israeli state in ethnically cleansing Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and that they have also failed to make use of the technology they already have to prevent horrific human rights violations in Kashmir and elsewhere in India, despite an Indian Supreme Court ruling is utterly shameful’
In November last year, more than 180 authors had spoken out against the JCB literature prize, a clear strategy by the company to ‘culture-wash’ its reputation. In March 2025, activists from the Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign and Parents for Palestine occupied London’s South Bank Centre, the well-known multi-storey riverside arts venue, where JCB sponsors a branded lift. The campaign to expose and shame JCB continues to grow.
