OUR proud history of collective action across the UK stretches from Dagenham to Clydeside to right here in Brighton.

Many of the rights we hold dear, in the workplace and at the ballot box, have come from organised struggle and movement building.

These rights have been taken, not given, hard-won by people coming together to make their collective voice heard.

And these battles have almost always meant fighting powerful vested interests in a status quo environment that is harmful to the many.

In their actions yesterday, the youth climate strikers followed in this rich tradition.

The industrial revolution, which transformed work and life in Britain, created the environment for workers to organise on a large scale, making the gains many of us take for granted today.

Through the collective power of the trade union movement, workers have fought for fairer wages and working conditions, sick pay, limits to working hours, annual leave, and paved the way for the first equal pay legislation for female workers.

The right to strike has played a vital role in this.

Yet the restrictive laws placed on the unions by Margaret Thatcher’s government and the Trade Union Act of 2016 have made it much more difficult for workers to strike legally, and so workers were limited yesterday in their ability to strike with the youth climate strikers.

Despite this, the Trade Union Congress, Unite, Unison, the Public and Commercial Services Union, the National Union of Journalists, and many more unions organised their own actions and encouraged their members to show solidarity with young people.

Tackling climate change does not need to pit unions seeking to protect jobs and climate activists against one another. There are no jobs on a dead planet.

Just as the industrial revolution provided the ground for workers to join together and demand better working rights, so should too a Green Industrial Revolution encourage and support collective action to fight for a better world.

Workers, and future workforces, will be key in bringing about the transition to a sustainable economy that all our futures depend on.

Today at the Labour Party conference, we will be unveiling more detail on how we will transition from fossil fuel to renewable industries.

And where better to have a Party Conference that has tackling the climate change crisis at its heart than here in Brighton, a city known for its early activism on climate change, home of the world’s first accredited climate change school teacher, and where thousands of schoolchildren took to the streets yesterday calling for urgent action on the climate emergency.

In celebrating the advances that have been made through organised struggle, we must also acknowledge that the right to protest in safety is not a given.

It has been a hard-won freedom in the UK, a fight in which many have been detained, injured, and even killed.

Celebration of the activism we saw yesterday must acknowledge that where some voices have been heard, others have been systematically ignored. Workers have been silenced, injured, and killed in the fight for climate justice in the global south.

In 2017, Global Witness recorded 207 deaths of environmental activists.

In pushing forward the movement for climate justice, we are long overdue in taking collective action in solidarity with them.

This means taking responsibility for our own role in carbon emissions across the world by counting the output of our consumption through imports, as well as what we produce here in the UK.

We should not feel helpless about the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. Collective action offers hope.

In the same way it would have been easy to feel hopeless in the fight for better working conditions in the face of powerful factory owners, things that do not seem possible today may one day be taken for granted.

Climate activism starts in local communities like Brighton.

The world can learn from the community-based efforts to tackle to climate crisis that began long before there was serious recognition of this emergency.

The people of Brighton should continue leading the way of collective activism and innovative ways of making a positive change.

In the words of Greta Thunberg: “I want you to act.

“I want you to act as you would in a crisis.

I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

The future is not yet written, and that gives us the space to act. We can and we will make a difference.