Almost everything this government are doing is wrong. We are leaving the EU, intentionally increasing inequality, doubling down on austerity, investing in over-priced and inappropriate infrastructure and most importantly of all failing to tackle the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

I’ve opposed every government over the last fifty years and have never voted for any party that has formed a government. I’ve been on countless protest marches, written letters, lobbied my MP, leafleted for the Green Party and been a member of countless pressure groups. I’ve given talks and led evening classes articulating how we could have a very different future.

Last weekend we had an Extinction Rebellion training weekend: lots of people, energy and determination, love and courage. Tomorrow I’m off to Birmingham for the West Midlands Green Party regional conference, which is a sell-out event. I’m also getting more involved in the Quakers and their Yearly Gathering has the intriguing title ‘Listening, prophecy & reconciliation: allyship in a climate emergency’. In this extraordinary Planetary Emergency we have countless allies in all countries on Earth.

Those still promoting socially and ecologically destructive policies control the media, and have the money and the power, and seem able to hoodwink sufficient numbers of people to vote for them, as is evidenced by Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Modi and so in a way Putin and Xi Jinping. Change is inevitably coming. The future could be dreadful: ecological and social collapse, war, famine and quite possible extinction of our species. We could also be on the verge of something very much better, an era of ever greater ecological restoration and growing global equality, of social and environmental justice. As many of the young climate protestors have written on their banners, ‘Everything Needs to Change’.

To effect that change we need many millions of us active in multiple ways: legal, political, non-violent direct action, entrepreneurial and academic. So this week I want to say ‘Thank-you’ to Client Earth for taking the UK government to court over their mad decision to build a vast new fossil gas power station, going against their own climate guidelines. Thanks too to Caroline Lucas and Ellie Chowns for being politicians to be proud of. Thank-you to Extinction Rebellion, to the School Strikes movement and to the vast number of activists for Ecological and Social Justice in every country on Earth, and thanks too to all the academics and entrepreneurs developing the ideas and technologies that might make rapid decarbonisation possible.