In 2023, we launched Labour: Be Bold.
We knew we needed to get organised to make sure we could elect a government that stood up for our generation – and we couldn’t let Labour just coast into power. So we built a campaign demanding they committed to pass legislation which would make an immediate difference in people’s lives and secure the future for us all: expanding public ownership, taxing wealth, delivering a green jobs guarantee and a living income, enacting a National Nature Service and doing our bit to make polluters pay globally in the first 100 days after the election.
We’d done it before. When Keir Starmer announced that he wanted ‘a greener, fairer future’ at Labour Party Conference, he was responding to the movements that have been constantly pushing him to be bolder. But now – he and his party needed to go further.
We wrote to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves asking them to meet with young climate activists about the Green New Deal. We drafted letters, signed petitions, and produced briefings. Labour ignored us, so we decided to go to them.
After the Labour Party watered down their flagship climate policy, we disrupted a speech by Keir Starmer. He offered to meet with us and we thought finally we might be getting somewhere, but he then claimed he was too busy.
So we wrote to them again and we started to sit outside their constituency offices every Friday. Three months later, we had organised over one hundred protests outside Labour Party offices across the country.
Then in the election, we saw the power of our movement – our ability to reach politicians and force them to respond to our demands, and our incredible organising power that elected 12 out of the 15 Green New Deal Champions we campaigned for. When Labour’s manifesto failed to offer solutions that met the scale of the crises we face, we disrupted the launch so they knew that youth deserve better.
Together, we poured everything into electing our Green New Deal Champions, and making sure political leaders were confronted on their climate commitments every step of the way.
We even challenged Keir Starmer on the campaign trail, and were once again promised a meeting to discuss our demands – but its been radio silence so far…
Our demands
1. Expand Public Ownership
To stop private companies from profiting off public services and tax payer money, and getting in the way of the transition to a greener fairer economy, we need to bring fundamental public services into public ownership.
Labour must keep their commitment to nationalise rail and lift the ban on local authorities bringing buses into public ownership. They need to expand public ownership into water and energy. And tackle the concentration of land ownership by giving more power to communities over land-use decisions.
2. Tax Wealth Now
We need to tax wealth and capital at the same rate as income to fix inequality and ensure that health, education and other public services are properly funded. It’s one of the first things that needs to be done to hardwire fairness into our society, and to raise the funds we need to build a society that cares for us all. In its first term, Labour could raise 50bn from a tax reform.
3. Promise a Green Jobs Guarantee and secure income for all
By investing in the low carbon economy, we will create an abundance of high value, well paid jobs in every community. From retrofitting to caring to working on our buses and trains, every single person who wants a job in the green economy should be able to get one. This has to be promised alongside a strong social security system that provides people with an income at the rate of the cost of living, to ensure that everyone in our society is taken care of.
4. Enact a National Nature Service
Labour needs to bring in a National Nature Service – giving communities a right to access nature and employing tens of thousands of young people to do the crucial work of restoring our land, coastlines, oceans and economy for a greener, more prosperous future.
5. Make Polluters Pay
The UK must do its global fair share to tackle the climate crisis, and build its capacity to do so through a permanent and progressive windfall tax on fossil fuels companies and corporations profiting off the climate crisis. It should lead the charge in setting up an international windfall tax that’s redistributed as reparations to those on the frontlines of climate change and global inequality.
