Environmental and pro-Palestine group Youth Demand have announced plans to collaborate with other groups to create a citizen’s assembly.
The assembly, named the “House of the People” is a joint venture with activist groups Just Stop Oil, Assemble and Robin Hood. It is meant to voice ordinary people’s concerns by acting as a “parallel parliament.”
It will sit for the first time in July and lists “climate collapse” as one of its three concerns.
Assemble said it will be made up of 50 members elected by their local communities and 50 people selected by a lottery system.
The plans were announced at a meeting in a community centre in central London last Saturday.
Youth Demand spokesperson Chiara Sarti said: “It’s meant to be an institution which we build on our own – we don’t get permission from the government – but eventually, it’s going to be contending with the House of Commons and the House of Lords as a centre of democracy for the country to give a voice to people.”
A Youth Demand organiser, Ella Taylor, said of the plans: “We’re not looking at policy change, we’re looking at system change.”
“We need the system to actually start representing ordinary people which doesn’t happen without ordinary people taking that power.”
The group’s recent protests have focused on members’ other key concern, the war in Gaza.
However one attendee, who did not wish to be named, warned against losing sight of their climate demands.
The attendee said: “We do have an environmental concern as well, and I don’t think we’re pressing that enough.”
Previous citizen’s assemblies have been organised by the UK government and NGOs to address the climate crisis.
The first UK-wide citizen’s assembly on climate change was commissioned by six House of Commons Select Committees in 2019 to understand public preferences on how the UK should tackle climate change.
Climate activist group Extinction Rebellion said the 2019 assembly was a “good starting point” but deemed it inadequate in several respects, including ignoring the UK’s international carbon emissions.
