We’ve grown up in an age of crisis.
At a time when it has felt hard to stay hopeful. We’ve grown up in a world at the tipping point of climate chaos. We’ve seen austerity rip apart our communities whilst putting up with low paid, zero-hours contracts. We’ve seen the gap between rich and poor get wider and wider and we’ve seen how all of this is so much worse for people already struggling all over the world.
A secure job, decent home and financial security are impossible for most of us. From police brutality to Windrush we have a crisis of racial justice that stretches beyond our borders. We can feel the clock ticking down as we’ve watched floods and fires destroy lives from Dhaka to Doncaster.
And none of this happened by accident.
We are trapped in a system that prioritises extraction and exploitation rather than people’s health and wellbeing. A system that is hurtling us towards gross inequality and climate chaos.
But instead of trying to change that system, all we see are politicians and climate delaying corporations again and again using empty words to greenwash their road-building, their fossil fuel company handouts and the hollowing out of our public services.
We are being pursued in the media, at the sharp end of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘war on woke’ just for speaking the truth to power. And all this is happening while fossil fuel companies do everything they can to carry on with business as usual to protect their profit margins.
the kind of change we’re calling for is our generation’s giant leap forward.
But we know that big change is possible. When people rise up and force decision makers to feel the heat, transformation happens. We stand on the shoulders of movements that fought until Governments listened, until they built the NHS, until they gave everybody the right to vote and the right to love who they wanted to love. But they won’t make these big changes without a fight – there’s too many vested interests holding them back. And the kind of change we’re calling for is our generation’s giant leap forward.
We know what we are fighting for is huge.
And that’s why we need to rise up.
GND Rising is a movement of young people from every part of the UK. We are millennials and Gen Z. We come from towns devastated by cuts and we grew up in cities choked by air pollution. We are black, brown and white. Queer, trans and disabled. In school, college and at university. In work and unemployed.
Things only change when we rise up together.
We rise up when we take to the streets for Black Lives. We rise up when we strike for the climate and we rise up when we knock every door in the wind and the rain in a battle for our future. And we will keep rising up, because we know our history. And we know that the only thing that has ever altered the course of history is a huge disruptive movement willing to do what it takes to win.
We know what it feels like to be afraid. But we also know what it feels like to be powerful. To tell stories and imagine the future we could build.
And we will be heard.
We know what it feels like to be afraid. But we also know what it feels like to be powerful.
We see through the empty words of climate delaying politicians and fossil fuel executives who are fighting to stay in control by any means necessary. Even leaders who know the scale of the problem don’t have the courage to stand up and do what it takes.
So we are calling time on these empty words and broken promises.
We are going to work together to create widespread disruption to the political system by challenging politicians wherever we find them. Where they work, on the street and in the corridors of power. It’s time to force them to choose a side. To show who they are protecting. And who they are leaving behind. No more excuses. Nowhere to hide. We need to make every MP to feel the heat.
This is our choice as a generation: to rise up and build a future worth fighting for, or watch it burn up in front of our eyes. Winning a Green New Deal needs everyone to play their part, no matter how big or small that may be. Our movement is growing and if we unite in our strength – we can turn that into a power no politician, party or Parliament can ignore. The Green New Deal is our roadmap to a future we deserve.
We are not here to play. We are the Climate Generation and we are here to win the decade of the Green New Deal.
