Climate choirs? Yes, they exist all around the country and campaign against climate change. On Monday, around 150 singers from London, Bristol, and other places congregated in the City of London to sing outside the offices of corporations that are still financing fossil fuels. One of their demands is to get a law against ecocide on the statute book so that companies can be prosecuted if they are responsible for ‘crimes’ against our environment.
Singers dressed smart to fit in with the city ambience and targeted well-known city companies and institutions like Lloyds of London, which continues to insure the big corporate polluters. Choirs had been rehearsing specially composed songs for this action.
Here is an extract of some of the lyrics:
Eradicate Ecocide
We won’t stand by (intro and repeat by various voices) When boundless corporate greed threatens life on earth we vow to eradciate ecocide And save us all from the great unravelling With fierceness of a mother defending a child We vow toe eradicate ecocide Defend the Earth, the only home we know chorus: It’s time now, it’s time now, it’s time It’s time to fight for the trees It’s time now, it’s time now, it’s time Stand up for refugees It’s time now, it’s time now, it’s time For now we know that.. What we do to the planet, we do to ourselves Stop Ecocide
The Choirs for Climate website, https://choirsforclimate.com/ provides lyrics, music,contacts, and lots of ideas about using choirs to campaign. Go to the website if you want to get involved with a local group.
There has been a resurgence of people singing together, partly inspired by television personalities like Gareth Malone and the various choirs he has worked with on TV. Linking singing with the campaigns on the ecological emergency is a great way of broadening and deepening the movement.
Organised choirs can provide a different, creative way of protesting, perhaps involving people who do not go on demonstrations. These songs can also be picked up and integrated into ongoing campaigns or political demonstrations, making them more fun and inspiring. One of the activists at last week’s EcoSocialism conference made exactly this point: we need to be colourful and creative in how we run our campaigning.
You get a much better flavour of how the Climate choirs work if you click on these links below to get short video clips of Monday’s actions:
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=climate%20%20choir
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0eidCYMZym/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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Already the backsliding begins. ITV news is reporting that the Government has changed one point in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. They have accepted that academies will retain their ‘freedom’ to set their own pay scales for teachers. So the criteria in the School Teachers Pay and Conditions document will only apply to teachers in Local Authority schools. Why have the Government climbed down on this issue? It’s not as if this is a major financial problem for academies. But what will be the next change/climb down by the Government? Will academies be exempt from the National Curriculum? Will Local Authorities be able to build schools according to the needs of their communities or will all new schools, as at present, have to be academies?