Bunk off school?
I know what that would have got me! The belt was the regular punishment at my school in Glasgow. Didn’t half make your hands sting. But that was nowhere near as bad as the tongue lashing I’d have got from my mother.
And yet there I was yesterday outside Parliament thanking thousands of young climate strikers for bunking off school to teach world leaders a lesson.
The Global Climate Strike saw millions of children send a message to all the Presidents and Prime Ministers meeting in New York next week: “Stop lying to us and sort out the climate emergency”.
Maybe Donald Trump still thinks climate change is a hoax, but the American people can no longer ignore the hurricanes battering their towns and cities. When it comes to a choice between Trump and the world’s scientists, I know who I trust.
Yes, climate change is already causing hurricanes, famines and flooding – but we really can combat it with a clean new future where wind power and solar create thousands of new high skilled jobs. It is about electric cars that don’t give sour children lung disease. That’s Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution.
Next week’s United Nations Summit should start by switching all the subsidies away from dirty fossil fuel production and into greener technologies.
Over the past 5 years this Tory government has spent £2.6 billion of our money supporting energy projects abroad. 96% of that money went to dirty fossil fuels.
You can’t pretend to be green and clean in your own back yard but export your dirty emissions everywhere else – especially when many people in those countries are already suffering from pollution and an unequal global economy.
So, when Boris Johnson goes to New York next week the eyes of the world’s schoolchildren will be on him. Will he act like a responsible grown up or will he behave just like Donald Trump’s Mini-Me? Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that one.
I don’t trust Johnson or Trump, but I know a Labour government will make radical changes to ensure our children can go back to their classrooms confident their world has a clean green future.
