 Hello, I'm Nesim from the Rosa Luxembourg-Stiftung and welcome to Climate Crisis – Time for a New Society, a podcast series in collaboration with Verso and the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation Brussels. We are bringing together writers and activists to discuss radical ideas and actions to move beyond the doom of climate breakdown, pushing for the transformation we need for a new society to rise and flourish. Today, we are in Brighton for the World Transform Festival and this episode was hosted by writer and journalist Dalia Gabriel. Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of this podcast collaboration between Rosa Luxembourg-Stiftung Brussels and Verso. I'm Dalia Gabriel, I'm a contributing presenter at Navarro Media and I'm also a co-curator of Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal, which is also a Rosa Luxembourg-Stiftung supported publication alongside Harpreet Paul, who you'll hear from later in the episode today. So we are currently at the World Transform in Brighton. We are sitting on a beautiful beach in a cloudy day with seagulls circling us in a way that feels quite threatening, but it's beautiful to be out and together in the sort of, you know, not behind our screens. In fact, the World Transform is actually the first time that we've all been together since the event that shall not be named and it's been the first time that we can talk in person about how we build power on the left in the midst of crisis. So that brings us to today where we will be talking about the pathways through and out of climate breakdown in ways that build a more just and abundant world. Today's discussion will be with Matthew Lawrence, the co-author of the book Planet on Fire, a manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown, which he wrote with Laurie Laban Langton. Matthew Lawrence is founder and director of Commonwealth, a think tank that designs ownership models for a democratic and sustainable economy. And we will also be joined by Harpreet Korpal, human rights lawyer, PhD researcher and co-founder of Tipping Point UK. So how are you both doing today? Yeah, good. So watching out for these seagulls, but otherwise, well. Yeah, good, good. So the book was written six months ago, Matt, and obviously, you know, a huge amount. It feels like it was a different world last time we were here in Brighton in 2019. What has changed since you wrote it and how much of what is what you've talked about in the book has, you know, can be applied to the moment that we're in today? Yeah, I feel in some ways, rather than there's been an acceleration, amplification runs of like, you know, structural change from before. So, you know, COVID is, you know, exemplifies a lot of the themes of the book. You know, this emerged out of a sort of wider entanglement of capitalism and nature and the extractive dynamics that have driven that. And the book's core argument is that environmental breakdown is a sort of crisis of politics and power. And it's rooted not just in decades, but sort of centuries of capitalist extraction and the dynamics of enclosure and, you know, commodification, exploitation of labor and nature that involves, and really, I guess, you know, what we've seen is the intensification of those processes in the last, you know, year or so of the crisis, you know, whether it's, you know, vaccine apartheid, whether it's sort of, you know, huge explosion in wealth inequality, whether it's sort of, you know, the differential treatment in terms of, you know, access to loans for the global south, you know, on every stage of the crisis, there's been a reinforcing of the underlying dynamics that have, you know, created the crisis of inequality that preceded COVID, but also, of course, the inequalities of power and resources that have driven the climate crisis. Harpreet, what for you has the pandemic taught us about, first of all, how we respond to moments of crisis that affect our everyday lives, that cause us to retreat away from sort of society? And what has the sort of government response also told us about how capital and the state is planning on responding to crisis like climate breakdown? I think Arundhati Roy said almost days into many different lockdowns across the world that the pandemic is almost like an x-ray for how we can see ourselves in the systems that we've created. And I think when we saw, for example, the Indian state declaring a lockdown and a number of informal laborers having to suddenly walk thousands of miles home without any access to wages, for example, the kind of disproportionate impact on people that have left rural areas, come to urban areas, looking for work in informal sectors and having no support in a crisis to be able to meet basic needs. And hundreds of thousands of people in those journeys home, where they were trying to re-access kind of community forms of support, experienced extreme hardship. And many people had had to leave those areas for climate change reasons, too, in addition to neoliberalism and economic factors. But I think closer to home, what we also saw was an expectation of states in the UK, for example, to enable workers to some workers to access furlough schemes, types of things that governments in the Global South haven't been able to do because of loan conditionalities and other kinds of regulation which restrict their space to be able to meet people's needs. But at the same time also showed how states define work. So while care workers that have been unpaid for a long time were expected to continue to do that work alongside doing paid work, I think really highlighted kind of extreme hardship for a lot of a lot of people. And I think one thing that has been quite interesting about how the pandemic has unfolded is that clearly this is a global crisis. It's that the virus does not respect national borders nearly as much as we do. And yet it has been the responses have been very much articulated through national governments in a way that has been very ineffective. So one example of that is seeing the hoarding of vaccines by global North nation states, as if having an unvaccinated world population won't cause the pandemic to accelerate and mutate. How can we what can we learn from the lessons of the pandemic about connecting the local and the global in our responses and in the way that we narrativise our pathways out of these crisis? And what especially can we learn about the importance of breaking out of the nation state as the primary unit that we are sort of appealing to in these moments? The hoarding of vaccines is an interesting place to start. So I think, again, it's that sense of the crisis of amplified preexisting patterns of how we organise our societies rather than a break. So obviously, you've seen this extraordinary moment where the primacy of property and property relations and intellectual property in this this form and the profits of big pharma have been put ahead of the needs of people across the world. And of course, what makes it particularly peculiar and therefore really reinforces the point that profit and property sort of take precedent over lives and needs is that, as you say, no one's safe until everyone's safe. And so there's even for the global North, there's self interest in delivering this and yet there's just been a complete failure in that. And I think that sort of reinforces the need, I guess, to sort of think in and through and beyond the nation state at the level of these deeper structures. So like, you know, property relations would be an obvious one. How do we sort of reimagine property relations, not just in relation to, you know, COVID vaccines, etc., but the whole sort of complex of, you know, big pharma in the round? You know, what is, you know, where do we direct research and development to who has access to it, towards what ends, obviously, about organising medical research and production? And, you know, obviously I can assure the other case the left should be making is that it should be based on need, not profit. You know, there should be a sort of public good, not sort of a site of accumulation. And that obviously requires organising far beyond the compliance of the nation state. And I think, you know, some of those, you know, in terms of the narrative, there are, you know, whether it's the crisis of care that's been so exposed, you know, the vaccine department, there are a series of moments, you know, ongoing moments in the crisis that are so acute and so, like, narrative-visable, if that's what, and that I think there's an opportunity to sort of, like, you know, construct broad coalitions. And it's interesting, you know, the IP sort of situation there was, and which kinds of reinforces the sort of, you know, uneven field of exchange and terrain of power in the global economy. But, you know, if you look at some of the work that was being done by the WTOs of India and South Africa, delegations early in the crisis sort of organised, I think, up to 75 countries in the global south to sort of suspend some of the IP laws. And so you can kind of see, like, an emerging network of sort of, you know, transnational solidarity there. And I guess it's really a case of, you know, the global north catching up and, you know, living in the global north working much harder to break out of sort of those structures of power and profit that currently govern, you know, the global economy. Interestingly, I think the role of grassroots groups in the US that have been able to force the Biden administration into a position that's more progressive than the UK is perhaps indicative of something that I think is perhaps lacking on this question of how UK grassroots movements are able to respond to this question. I think it's a really, really crucial one of how do we not forsake our relationship to global communities while addressing kind of really real, tangible housing issues within the UK, gentrification that's happening, air pollution that's happening. And I think it's something that we really need to dig deeper into ensure, you know, our political context is different. We're not dealing with anything remotely like the Biden administration here. But I do think that a kind of grassroots focus of people power acting in solidarity in the ways that Matt has just started to outline is really crucial and crucial to kind of solidify in ways. And I actually think that it's really hard to imagine responses outside of nation states, partly in the absence of ways of which we can connect within communities beyond that. And I think before we met as we were getting coffees this morning at the World Transformed, Dalia, you were talking about something that's really quite unique in the Kurdish movement of a sense of community and coming together and that exists beyond the nation state, given that there isn't one, and sure that there's an element of that that's rooted in ethnicity. But those in the Kurdish movement would say that it transcends that too. And that's really important to hold on to. And I think how do we reconnect within our communities so that we're not just only using workplaces as sites of organising, but that we're actually speaking with neighbours, people that are moving from very different narratives and ways of thinking and organising, meeting people's needs in communities and then making links as to how we've arrived at a system that gives us reason to fight for more in the UK, but also fight in solidarity with people that are helping create the things that we're using every day. And I think coming off that, you know, we are at the World Transformed, which for those who aren't aware, it's a sort of festival that happens alongside the Labour Party Conference. And the relationship between grassroots movement, social movements and the Labour Party has been a very fraught one over the past few years. There was a point at which there was much more dialogue under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and that's very much changed. So I think that that question of, you know, in the book, Matt, you speak about the necessity of building social movements of concepts like mutual aid, community energy production. And yet, at the same time, it's very clear that we need to have very drastic action that is done in a short amount of time. And a scale of action that could probably only be taken on by only an institution currently that can take that on that exists is the state. So in that context, what is the relationship between the state and social movements and how does that change according to geography, you know, where you are located in the context of climate breakdown? You know, unfortunately, social movements probably can't retrofit every single person's house. That is something that or build enough, you know, energy, we just reorganize our energy production system to to rely on renewables. So in that context, what do you think the relationship between these social movements and community organisations should be? At its core, it's about building power and collective power. So if the climate crisis is overwhelming a crisis of politics, it's not a crisis of do we have the resources? Can we mobilize the finance? Do we know how to decarbonize our energy? You know, it's not a technical challenge. You know, it's difficult, but it's not that's not the main barrier. The main barrier is our politics and the wider sense are organized around, you know, lodges of accumulation, expansion and expropriation. And that's that's the core that has to be cut by mobilizing power. And so social movements and, you know, down the road from the Labour Party, but social movements in some ways building power in of itself, you know, in communities, you know, whether it's in neighbourhoods, in workplaces, you know, in and beyond just one root geography. That's, you know, whether it's housing, migrant rights, it's just like an endless list of areas where we can, we can and must be building collective power. That in itself seems to be should be a key goal, because I think you know, you're right that in the States, obviously, you know, there's a huge amount to be said there. And obviously, you know, the castle state and the levels of violence, there's these huge things I need to dismantle and how the state currently operates, but at the same time, given the scale of transformation we need and the resources that can, but do need to be mobilized, you know, the state is the actor that can drive the scale of retrofitting or whatever it might be. But I think to get that done, you know, you need to start by building power, you know, in place. And then that might then in adjacent forms, you know, shift more like parliamentary focus forms of political activity, like like the Labour Party in the UK. But I think in some ways, rather than focusing on, you know, the Labour Party is the object, much better to focus on, you know, social movements, building power. And then that will then sort of necessarily create leverage in other institutions, whether it's political parties, whether it's the state itself. And and, you know, so I think it's that sort of dialectic and being in against the state, obviously. But, you know, that is probably where, you know, we have to be. And I think, you know, against of COVID is a stimulus for that, because I think, you know, a lot of the sort of things that have really sort of sprung up with this mutual aid so solidarity networks, et cetera, like reflect the type of impulse that we need to sort of, you know, accelerate and amplify. But, yeah, it's a difficult question, because there's obviously like one of the sort of key political challenges in terrains, like sort of navigate particularly post-2019. I think what social movements absolutely have to do is change what is politically tenable at the moment. I think that's partly what you were saying around the role of social movements in being able to drive the policies as well. And at the moment, we have a context in which, as Matt says, we've got available solutions. Yes, we need huge resourcing for them. We need political will to make them happen. But the technologies of reducing our energy use and having that transition to renewable energy is absolutely possible available. What we have instead are kind of political contexts in which we've got a UK government talking about net zero, which is essentially predominantly around offsetting responsibilities, maintaining a current level of consumption here and offsetting responsibilities by using land and resources in the global south. And what social movements can do is build that power that Matt was talking about to change what is politically tenable to make what is absolutely necessary obvious in a way that it's not at the moment. It's the kind of scale of action that we need, I think, is regarded even in some mainstream NGO circles. It's like untenable and reachable because of the scale of what's required, what needs to change. And I think if we're starting from the perspective of building power in communities, what we're recognizing is that democracies are built to represent people. And if people are engaged in saying we need systems and structures that respond to our needs and not to the will of a small minority of people, then absolutely we can kind of create the politics that that can respond to the scale of our crises. Both of you have mentioned at some different at some points the sort of the care economy and the way in which that is often invisibilized and our idea of what the economy is and that. And I think that what you know, what we are currently living through with the pandemic and what we will absolutely live through and many communities are living through with climate breakdown is the sense that when crisis hits, not only does it become very apparent what labor is actually important and necessary, when the rest of the world, when everyone retreated during a time of crisis, it was the nurses, it was the domestic workers, it was the care workers that had to go to work. And also that when crisis hits and social breakdown occurs, it is care workers, predominantly women, unpaid and paid who fill the gaps, who step in, they strategize around food and energy, shortage or insecurity, they look after the mental and physical well-being of their communities. And I think in many ways and a lot of proposals around, even from the left around climate breakdown and a just transition, there is still this assumption that that exploited and unpaid work will continue and it's not like directly addressed when we talk about things like work and a just transition or infrastructure and a just transition. What do you envision, how do you envision the role of a theory of the care economy as re-centred in our notion of what the economy is? How do you envisage that in your understanding of what our pathways are out of climate breakdown? I mean, I think care in someone should be the sort of, when we, as we re-found the purpose, the orientation of the economy, the care should be the sort of root of it. And it care in an expansive sense, sort of caring for both human and non-human life and sort of the ecologies that are underpin everything. And I think one of things in terms of less gaps think also being, being attentive to sort of like global supply chains of care and it's great to have, well-resourced, decommodified, publicly provided care systems in the UK, for example. But if that's then sort of drawing in sort of, very often women of color from the global south to come and work, and then there's a lot of interesting work looking at how that then pressurizes and then intensifies some sort of gendered divisions of labor in countries of the global south. So I think there's a whole set of areas, but I do think that fundamental principle like, care should be at the root of things, it should be valorized, it should be decommodified, it should be sort of publicly provided, it should be sort of taken out of sort of circuits of accumulation. So in the UK, there's been this debate recently around social care, adult social care. And there's a little, most of the political debate focused on, okay, well, how are we gonna fund this, the national insurance contribution debate, et cetera, et cetera. But there was no real sort of discussion about actually, like in the last 15, 20 years, one of the most pronounced sort of changes has been the rise of private equity controlled care provision, which has just been a transformative provision from a majority of adult social care provided by not-for-profit and public provision towards incredibly extractive, exploitative sort of economics of business models, like providing adult social care. So I guess going, how do you address waged and unwaged exploitation? Well, you've got to start by going back to the structures of property relations that then drive and underpin how care is organized and provided, and going back to those root issues. And really, I guess the sort of a sort of just transition should be about the meeting of needs, not at the expense of others. So it's not a just transition if you can meet the needs of citizens of the global North, but that's based on offsetting and land grabbing in the global South and global supply chains in terms of care that are sort of deeply unequally extractive. So really, and care is like the most basic of needs is the thing that during the crisis it was so acutely obvious that that is the foundation of everything. And so really it should be ordered as the first priority. And we should think about how do we adjust and how do we meet needs, like basic foundational needs for all and then expand from there. And so I think valorized, resourced, democratically controlled, publicly provided sort of systems of care would be some foundation to that. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I also think that it's absolutely essential to do that if we're committed to trying to meet the 1.5 temperature limit warming and modeling from Junior Steinberger and others actually shows that we only have enough energy to meet our needs, whether that's housing, food, education, care, healthcare and anything beyond what's serving a social purpose is threatening to kind of breach our temperature warming goals and exceed the current levels of resources that we have available. And so when thinking about this question, I think back to a lot of the things that Assad Roman often says, that the solutions to a lot of climate issues are the solutions to a lot of other injustices, whether it's housing injustice, access to social care, access to education. In order to meet the scale of our crisis, we have to focus on what we need and what's absolutely essential. And as Matt said, valorize that, put that at the center of everything. And isn't that beautiful that there's actually a kind of planetary boundary around continuing, I would have hoped that we could have got there without him also having the millions of people that are currently impacted by climate change, but absolutely there is a physical boundary on being able to continue to expropriate, accumulate profit over people. And I think that the solutions to a housing crisis to food insecurity, to racialized air pollution exposure, to numerous other issues are the same solutions to the climate crisis. And I think that applies to care as much as it does to everything else. And when thinking about care in this context as well, I'm also trying to center this idea of care for communities that are already impacted by climate change. So while we're speaking as the festivals going on, there will be hundreds of people that are dealing with river erosion in parts of Bangladesh, for example, and potentially having to leave their homes or have property that falls into the river. There will be glaciers melting in parts of the Andes, putting people at blood risks. And so kind of expanding our notion of what it means to center care and say actually countries and companies that have been historically responsible for driving these emissions have a responsibility to make sure that people exposed to the impacts that they've done relatively little to contribute to our own, that countries most responsible have a debt to pay. And that is also a kind of component of care and repair that absolutely needs to be central to how we think about moving forward. Both of you are touching there on kind of visions of a world that is organized very differently. And in the book, Matt, you talk about how a response to climate breakdown can promote communal luxury in societies of everyday beauty and comfort. And I would just love to know what luxury means to you in that context. Is it Gucci for everyone? Or is it something a bit more meaningful than that? Infinity fools for everyone. I mean, it kind of builds off what Hubbard was saying around sort of the public provision and the communal and sort of the democratic provision of the meeting of needs and the expansion of capabilities. The most foundational basic things like energy and housing and sort of secure dwelling, et cetera, through to having the resources and that can be time and that doesn't necessarily have to be material resources but having the resources to be the author of your own life and sort of be able to explore the full and varied capabilities that we all have within ourselves and then with others as well. That is best met through not through private profit driven provision but through collective provision. And so I think there's two things I guess, slightly segueing, but there's two things that I think are really important to sort of remember when we think about like how can the left construct sort of a sort of persuasive political strategy on the climate crisis is that firstly, the solutions are solution that through the climate crisis also necessarily intersect with a whole set of other things because the climate crisis is all encompassing and the less answers are just much more effective. They really are how we need to do it. And then the second thing that that responds to is, which I'm actually poking up on sort of something to mention here, but the most radical position is not the left's transformative program. It's those who are content to sort of tweak with the status quo that is already, the meteor has already struck for hundreds of millions of people, but it's, for those who hasn't, it's hurtling very quickly and sort of status quo, like let's on the margins, let's do a bit of offsetting here, a bit of green capitalism there. That is actually the most extreme position. I don't know, that's a bit of a segue on the sort of luxury. Yeah, I mean, it's not like Gucci though, if you can produce Gucci in a way that is not exploitative in fly chains, et cetera, then I'm all for people wearing nice clothes. But I think it is about that sort of a relationship. And this is nice line by Aaron Bennernav in his book, Automation Future Workarounds of Abundance is a social relationship. It's not a sort of technical threshold. It's sort of how do we organize our sort of, you know, finite lives together in ways that, you know, are not built on relations of exploitation and domination. And so luxury then becomes about, you know, having the security and capability to live together in ways that are sort of truly free and autonomous and can pursue our own ends, but not at the expense of others. And I think that's the key thing that so many of the sort of like, you know, ecological modernization visions that you see presented as essentially premised on the exploitation of people and places elsewhere. And so I think luxury has to be a sort of communal in that sense, both like, you know, being a sort of shared project of democratization and sort of decommodification, but also communal in the sense of like replacing private provision with collective forms, you know, public parks rather than private garden. You know, you can just go and go through the list, you know, public, you know, transport over privatized cars, you know, public provision of housing over, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that there's those multiple sense of communal luxury. But yeah, I think, and on that like, you know, everyday comfort and beauty, I think that the point is that doing these things and doing them well will actually enrich and improve all our lives. So yeah, so we should do it. Yeah, I'm interested in this notion of luxury having spent a bit of time thinking about planetary boundaries. And I think that this concept does confront finite level of resources that we do have. And I think confronts a really important question that needs to be addressed. We can't replace our current level of private car consumption with electric vehicles. For example, there isn't enough raw earth minerals and metals available to do that. We'd need just for the UK to make that replacement something like three times the current earth supplies. So it's not going to be possible to kind of imagine this future where absolutely everybody has access to a private electric car. So I think redefining what luxury means in that context is really, really important. And I think redefining what it means to be in community in that context and designing architecturally, re-envisaging communities that are closer together, where there's more time to connect with one another, to pursue the things that make us feel alive rather than being the kind of bullshit jobs that people have to do and sit in traffic to get to as offices are reopening. And so I think redefining what luxury means so that we can kind of have a more radical imagination of what it means to live together in line with what's available on the planet is that absolutely essential. And we've been saying throughout this that we have all the technology to make that happen. The heat pumps, the retrofitting projects, the renewable energy, everything that we need to make this transition happen is available. And at the same time, what we have is a system that is luxury for a few where the majority of people struggling to meet very basic needs. In the book, Dahlia and I co-edit Global Perspectives on a Green New Deal. Hamza Hamishin, for example, talks about the fact that there's a solar plant in Morocco where the energy is intended for consumption in Europe at the displacement of local communities at the intense water use of local communities. So how do we define luxury in the global sense is a really important question. We've got the wealthiest 10% responsible for over 50% of emissions while the poorest 50% are responsible for less than 7% of emissions. And they're the same people that are struggling with access to food, with access to energy, with access to secure housing. So how can we have a global definition of luxury where equity is at the heart of access to the things that we need and the spaces that can cultivate a sense of freedom individually and collectively is absolutely essential? So the book talks a lot about the need to build narratives that can have a credible alternative vision and coalesce people around these visions. And we've seen narratives appear from various parts of the left, but also the center. There's the Green New Deal, which comes from the climate movement. There's just transition from the union movement. What do you think is missing from these narratives, if anything, and how do you think they need to be adapted or changed in order to meet the particular challenges of especially a post-pandemic world or a world that is still in the throes of pandemic? Maybe addings of a heightened element of antagonism to some of the narratives, in that there is embedded fossil capital, which does stand opposed to the interests of the vast majority of people in this planet in terms of their lives and livelihoods and well-being. And I think that is kind of implicit in some of the sort of discussions around just transition and the Green New Deal, but I think a bit of a many of you few sort of like dichotomy but resurfacing that and being like, this is not just, we're not all things together. And actually there are people whose politics, whose economics sort of vision does stand opposed to life. And making that a bit more antagonistic, whether it's in the sort of physical infrastructures of fossil capital and how we sort of engage with that, whether it's in sort of just a bit more rhetorically, like amplifying the antagonism in terms of the framing. And I think obviously, because you still need the sort of like, this is going to be great for everyone and communal luxury and flourishing and secure transition and sort of dignity for people in exposed sort of fossil fuel and intensive sectors, but actually just being like, there is actually a sort of, you know, nameable and chamberable, so to speak, like core of embedded fossil capital that has to be disembedded and dismantled in short order. And they show here the two very little sign of being willing to be, you know, willing participants in that transition. And so I think that that element of the sort of the politics and the framing, quite useful is pretty how, you know, the book has a sort of quite short but like little section on sort of drawing inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, strangely, but sort of like sort of like looking at how the neoliberal revolution sort of like took root in the sort of 70s and 80s and sort of looking at some of her things. And obviously, one of the things she did very successfully was have narratives like full of antagonism, you know, loony left councils and like the trade unions most obviously and Brussels, et cetera, et cetera. And I suppose like a bit of that, you know, and tag, you know, that sort of type of framing to go along with like the sort of smooth sort of, you know, the stick and the carrot, the carrot being just transition, you know, sort of commutional luxury, but the stick being like, hold on, there are sort of like identifiable political obstacles here that we need to be much more sort of aggressive in sort of like identifying and challenging. So I think that that would be probably the thing, the one thing I'd add to the mix potentially. It's nice to have the sun come out while we're talking about vision. And the seagulls suddenly look a little bit more elegant in the sun rather than threatening. But I think within each of these narratives, there are huge distinctions, right? There are conceptions of a global green new deal that draws from, you know, over 31 contributors in the book we co-edited, for example, that's very much rooted in global justice and decades-long struggles for global justice. And then there are green new deal narratives from Brussels that are emerging that are kind of slight reforms from the system that we currently have. And I think there are similar kind of distinctions within the just transition narratives. And I think, yes, we need powerful narratives. Yes, we need kind of bold narratives that speak to what's at stake and what the scale of what needs to change. But also, I think for me, visions that are a collective iteration in community is absolutely essential too. And I'm thinking of the GKN, Birmingham manufacturers that have voted to go on strike, for example, very recently, they've been producing, I think, 90% of their production is on combustion materials for cars and they wanted to transition to EVs, electric batteries for electric cars and GKN with money from the UK agreed to do that, but they've moved the jobs of shore and the workers at that factory have decided to go on strike and they've been referring back to the Lucas plan from the 70s where in another factory in Birmingham, workers wanted to move from producing military equipment to products that were socially valuable. And I think working in solidarity with workers outside of narratives, whether it's a just transition or a global Green New Deal, working in solidarity with communities, actively trying to transition and finding solidarity and making links in those very local struggles to how they interconnect with the impact of the choices that we're making here in the global north as they manifest in the global south is absolutely essential. And I think there are really interesting ways to do that. We were talking about what we need to dismantle and the financial industry that is pouring trillions into fossil fuel infrastructure is also the financial industry that's making London impossible place for people to live and is driving a kind of gentrified landscape. And so when we can connect the dots between the systems that are causing housing insecurity and driving the climate crisis and be able to speak to each other's struggles, I think we can build a kind of movement beyond specific narratives of a just transition and Green New Deal and move to what's necessary. And I think speaking to that, I want to end on this notion of connection and being together as I sort of mentioned at the beginning of this episode. This is the first time that we've been together as a movement in the UK for so long. What is the importance of events like this and moments like this where we are able to physically connect? And how do we build power in contexts where we can't do that for whatever reason, whether it's because of a global pandemic or whether it's because of various other barriers to access. How do we build these kinds of connections at times when connection feels very frail and very fragile? Yeah, nice question to end on. In some ways of one of the perks of the pandemic, definitely not a perk, but the actual accessibility of Zoom, although the ability to connect and to really minimize costs of gathering in place and all the challenges that presents was actually in some ways really quite a powerful and useful tool for organizing, but actually gathering in place and solidarity in person and rather than just fire a computer screen is actually transformable. So I think whether it's the tipping points of local groups through to the trade union organizing, et cetera, I think trying to bring back the human connections in physical rather than just digital spaces is actually really important to that building of power, building trust, building of shared solidarity. And so I guess we need one, two, many TWTs and many spaces in which we can do that while I guess being attentive to the fact that like that will always in place events necessarily create lots of barriers and sort of hidden, often invisiblized challenges to who can attend, et cetera. But yeah, it feels like as you're moving to sort of a different stage of the pandemic, it feels like it'll be a real sort of re-injection of energy and a release of welcome change. I was speaking to youth climate striker, Lola Vaikun. She was talking about the joy and connection of being at TWT implicit in the kind of the trainings and the panels and the songs and the different ways of being able to access the different spaces here. And Oli Armstrong from Breathe talking about how important it is to replicate that. And I think Breathe and working class parts of the Midlands where he lives are talking about running workshops for young children on climate justice and providing care for parents and also spaces to come together to have a creative output on being able to express what it means for young people who are experiencing climate anxiety, for example, to have an output leading to coming together on the 6th of November for the 26th Coalition's Global Day of Action for Climate Justice. And I think those types of spaces are absolutely essential coming to kind of replicate that way of coming together through singing or art or banner making for the actions that are going to be necessary to show our collective power over the coming months and years. And I'd love to see more of that happening and people taking that spirit from TWT into their communities to build that. And I think there are strong legacies of other movements doing that before ours that we should hold on to, whether it's the Union Movement in Detroit that was part of the Black Civil Rights Movement that provided breakfast, morning clubs while workers agitated or political education in Sunday schools and Saturday schools. The Caribbean community, there's a kind of ways of working with the student movement, with faith groups, with community groups to be able to take some of that spirit and come together and enjoy and rest and agitation together. Matthew Lawrence and Harpreet Corporal, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute joy to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.