Climate justice activists, poverty campaigners and trade unionists have vowed to take to the streets and occupy key sites next month to oppose the UK government’s energy and cost of living plans.
Protesters say they are planning to step up their campaigns in an effort to stop Liz Truss’s government doubling down on oil and gas extraction, which experts say will do little to help the cost of living crisis while exacerbating the climate emergency.
Trade unionists and cost of living campaigners are due to march through London and other cities across the UK on 1 October, while direct action groups including Just Stop Oil saying they will “occupy Westminster”, with supporters prepared to risk arrest to block roads with “a wave of action including strikes and occupations” throughout the month.
Zarah Sultana, a Labour MP and a leading figure in the trade union-backed cost of living campaign Enough is Enough, said the energy crisis and escalating climate emergency had the same root causes.
“Truss is doubling down on the broken system that causes bills, billionaires and CO2 to soar while pay falls. People simply won’t put up with it. Enough is enough. From trade unionists fighting for decent pay, to climate campaigners, this autumn will see a wave of action to force change.”
Truss announced plans on Thursday to ramp up north sea oil and gas extraction and lift the ban on fracking. Experts say this would have minimal impact on the cost of living crisis and be disastrous for the UK’s legally binding climate targets.
Truss’s new chancellor, Kwasi Kwartang, wrote an article earlier this year stating that “no amount of shale gas … dotted across rural England would be enough to lower the European price any time soon”.
Hannah Martin, from the campaign group Green New Deal Rising, which has been confronting leading politicians about climate inaction over the past year, said the next few months would be crucial in the effort to force the government to transition to a low-carbon, more equal and sustainable economy.
“As we head into one of the worst cost of living crises this country has ever seen, young people are getting organised. We will continue to take to the streets, disrupt government meetings and put politicians on the spot in public to get answers.”
She called on opposition parties to put “forward a plan that offers a truly different vision of the future”.
“This conference season we need to see Labour and the SNP go further with bold and visionary plans for a Green New Deal.’
Protesters taking to the streets this autumn face a far stricter public order policing regime, after the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act earlier this year. The first test of that bill was to have been on Saturday, when Extinction Rebellion had vowed to occupy Hyde Park for a three-day “festival of resistance” – a plan postponed after the Queen’s death.
Tessa Khan is the director of the climate group Uplift and co-founder of Warm This Winter, a coalition of charities such as Oxfam and Save the Children and fuel poverty and climate activist groups, which is demanding the government do more to address the cost of living crisis.
She said the government’s apparent intention to double down on oil and gas exploration and push ahead with fracking was “both a challenge and real opportunity” for the climate movement.
“There is so much at stake for people in terms of their spiralling energy bills that it is going to be hard for the government to get away with plans that are obviously not going to address the fundamental cause of the problem and which simply lock us in to the same bust system. This can no longer be dismissed as a campaign about a future abstract threat, it is about the material reality of people’s everyday lives.”
