Our Climate Conversation

Who Voted For This?

This challenge was posed to Prime Minister Truss at the recent Conservative Party Conference by two young Greenpeace Activists who had infiltrated the audience, but is still relevant today. We have a petition submitted to Parliament with over 800 thousand signatures demanding a General Election and lots of Polling evidence that indicates support at around 90% of the population. By law Parliament had to arrange a debate but this took place in a committee room where two MPs eloquently outlined the case for the proposal and a government representative swiftly rejected it. This derisory dismissal is what passes for democracy in our present system. Is it any surprise that we feel excluded and frustrated that politics is outside of our lives, something that is done to us that we can only influence, if at all, at those brief election events?

It does not have to be this way. Politicians work for us, and we can and must demand transformational change. We the people should determine the principles that govern our politics. They should belong to us from the beginning. We need a constitutional convention to democratically achieve this, one of its results being a clearly defined written constitution.

In our country kids should not go hungry, we should not be priced gouged by energy companies making record profits, people should not need to work multiple jobs to survive, we must address the destruction of the natural world, migrants should not be treated as subhumans. There are so many issues that need to be sorted including the most critical one of Climate Breakdown, and yet Sunak and his Cabinet from Hell are looking the other way.

We cannot make this transformational change happen by writing polite letters to our politicians or signing petitions. Our only effective recourse is collective action. We, as a community of citizens, must take to the streets. Extinction Rebellion talks in terms of a critical mass for protest: 3.5% of the population or 100 thousand determined protesters by the hundredth day of 2023. If you are not young or strong enough to hit the streets then please support us in other ways.

In the meantime we must reject the austerity that affects the poorest in our society the hardest and raise the extra money needed by increasing taxation on Fossil Fuel companies (matching Norway’s 78% tax take and scrapping the 91p in the pound allowance for new oil and gas investment that encourages the wrong energy sources for the Planet) and imposing a wealth tax. As Alfie Stiring, New Economics Foundation, says: “The country is desperate for a change. People want energy security, a strong NHS, good schools, and a decent income to afford life’s essentials. It begins with our new PM taking an easy choice: making the very richest contribute their fair share.”