The campaign group Green New Deal Rising held a rally outside Labour conference protesting the party’s position on climate change and the cost of living crisis. 

Dozens of young climate change activists protested outside Labour’s convention centre in Liverpool on Sunday demanding immediate action on the climate change crisis. 

The protestors posed with a papier-mâché ‘Fake Keir Starmer’ who was pictured pretending to burn ‘promises to young people’ after the party postponed its £28 billion green financing plan. 

Protestors carried placards saying ‘no new oil’, ‘tax wealth’, and ‘the seas are rising but so are we’. 

Activists said Labour has been backsliding on its climate change commitments, and that it needed to abandon its fiscal rules and revoke new oil and gas licenses to achieve real change. 

Speaker and campaigner Tash said: “High prices affect everyone and everything, every industry, and we think the critical industries are falling short and we also need a green new deal.”

“We use the arts as a radical platform to imagine and create a world transformed. We need the arts to imagine a liveable future and likewise we must hold the creative industries to account and put people and planet first.”

Green New Deal Rising is campaigning for the Labour party to pass legislation to enact these demands in the first 100 days of its new Government:

1. Expand Public Ownership of energy, water, transport and land.

2. Tax Wealth Now, taxing wealth and capital at the same rate as income and introducing a series of wealth taxes to raise 50 bn.

3. Promise a Green Jobs Guarantee and secure income for all, investing in the low carbon economy, to create an abundance of high value well paid jobs in every community alongside a strong social security system that provides people with an income at the rate of the cost of living.

4. Enacting a National Nature Service;

5. Make Polluters Pay with a permanent and progressive windfall tax on fossil fuel companies and corporations profiting off the climate crisis, leading the charge in setting up an international windfall tax which is redistributed as reparations to those on the frontlines of climate change and global inequality.’

Co-Director of Green New Deal Rising, Hannah Martin said: “Green New Deal Rising has rallied outside Labour conference today to remind the Labour Party of their responsibilities to young people as their conference kicks off this weekend.

But we will keep pushing them over the coming days, weeks and months to step up and commit to a real alternative to Tory chaos, by adopting a transformative Green New Deal.”

Labour’s climate pledges include building up to £28 billion a year over five years on green investment.

Labour was approached for comment. 

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