The Importance of Climate Suffrage

The universal suffrage movement that commenced in earnest in the 19th Century pushed back against disenfranchisement in order to secure voting equality. While the suffrage campaign was fundamental to securing rights for people the world over, we continue to pretend today that there is equality in voting – despite the eternal gerrymandering by politicians desperate to retain power over helping the people who elect them.

Yet, political disenfranchisement is on the rise once again, as more and more governments fail to uphold their ethical responsibility to act in line with the IPCC recommendations on the Climate Crisis; jeopardising the health and futures of their electorate, while simultaneously criminalising climate protests.

Even the right to protest itself is under threat across many European countries, as neoliberal politicians continue to side with big business – the main culprits for greenhouse gas emissions.

Today we look at the importance of the growing Climate Suffrage movement in the face of the Climate Emergency, the significant role that the media can play in garnering support – or quashing it, and the innate similarities with other social equality movements.

This is the context within with the growing civil disobedience movement, that we are terming Climate Suffrage, is growing.

The rise of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Scientist Rebellion and the hundreds of other climate action groups is a direct response to political inaction and media complicity in not raising mass awareness of the reality of the Climate Emergency.

While Ireland may not have engaged in the political criminalising of climate protests yet (there is still time for that to change), we are a perfect example of the need for Climate Suffrage. In 2019 our government declared a Climate Emergency – only the second nation worldwide to do so. Yet it has done nothing to act in line with this declaration.

In fact, it required the intervention of a citizen group to hold the government accountable for its unsuitable climate action plan that amounted to little more than a “my dog ate my homework” excuse, and which put the health and futures of Irish citizens in very genuine jeopardy. Its replacement - our current climate action plan - is hardly any better.

This is eerily reminiscent of the women’s suffrage movement in Ireland, the UK and beyond.

History Repeating

“My suffragette grandmothers are now seen as heroes. Today’s climate protestors will be too” – Helen Pankhurst, The Guardian

The recent escalation in both the frequency, urgency and desperation of climate protests mirrors not only the lack of political engagement in the issue, but also the socio-political response to the women’s suffrage movement.

Here, in Ireland, when the Home Rule Bill was passed on Committee Stage without a clause on women’s suffrage, the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL) stepped up its campaign. On 13th June 1912, eight members of the IWFL broke the windows of government offices – among their number was Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, who selected Dublin Castle, the seat of British power and control in Ireland, as her target. She, along with her suffragette sisters, refused to pay for the damage and received sentences between one and six months in prison.

We see this tactic being deployed by Climate Suffragists now, who break the windows of banks that continue to finance major fossil fuel polluters, despite their clear role in perpetuating and worsening the Climate Crisis.

Like their suffragist predecessors, climate protestors started with peaceful demonstrations – but decades of being ignored by the media, politicians and the powerful has led to ever-more-desperate acts to raise awareness and provoke meaningful climate action.

In April 2022, the UK Independent newspaper published an article titled: “Dear climate activists, stop alienating the public or you might lose the battle.” In May 2023, the Telegraph ran the headline: “’I’m a London liberal and I hate you,’ cyclist tells Just Stop Oil activists – Londoner wins applause from onlooker after telling the road-blocking protesters they are ‘hurting the green cause’”.

This is a microcosm of the vast media-led backlash against climate protesting.

For the media, and those with a vested interest in the status quo, there has always been a right way to protest and a wrong way.

Yet, despite the media furore and the increase in oppressive anti-human rights laws, a 2022 YouGov survey reported that 58% of UK adults support the demands of Just Stop Oil to end new oil and gas exploration and extraction.

And that’s in the UK, where the anti-climate rhetoric has been driven to a fever-pitch by the press and right-wing politicians.

The great leader of the British suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst, said of the continued suppression of women’s rights in spite of the growing movement and its increasing public support: “When the anti-suffrage members of the government criticise militancy in women, it is very like beasts of prey reproaching the gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance at the point of death.”

Her words ring as true in the context of Climate Suffrage as they did when spoken in October 1912. After all, it is an inescapable fact that women the world over are considerably more vulnerable in the face of the Climate Crisis.

The Climate Emergency is as much a feminist issue as it is a societal or scientific matter.

This rings true today in the context of the Climate Emergency. It is our moral duty to recognise that those people living in the poorest nations are the least responsible for the Climate Crisis, and yet the most vulnerable to it – and without the means to mitigate.

We should engage in climate action and climate protests because we know it is ethically right to support those who need our help the most and who are most exposed. We cannot rest on our laurels and be assured of our own futures until we know that we have guaranteed theirs in the face of the biggest threat that humanity has ever witnessed.

Stand Up, Act Up!

You or I may not always agree with the tactics of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion or their kin. Their actions are designed to disrupt – disrupt the unjust system that is perpetuating the increasing likelihood of mass extinction and mass human displacement, all in the name of maintaining profits.

Media coverage of their actions is designed specifically to provoke a negative emotional response. It pitches ‘hard-working people’ against ‘activists’, ignoring that those calling for climate action are also ordinary people, with ordinary jobs, who recognise just how dire a situation we are in.

Be in no doubt, the de-centralised actions of these climate groups are born out of desperation. Their actions will get more desperate as the situation worsens, just as the suffragettes engaged in increasing acts of violence – and self-sacrifice – in order to win their struggle against oppression, inaction and disenfranchisement.

Pankhurst encouraged suffragists to attack windows to “attack the secret idol of property”. Attacking the secret idol of fossil fuels (and the structures that uphold them) today is just as vital in the face of political disenfranchisement in the midst of the Climate Emergency.

Booing and breying at someone disrupting a game of snooker with some orange dye is a disproportionate response when considered in the context that 7 million people are already dying annually as a direct result of the Climate Crisis, that crops are failing the world over – including in the Global North – or that millions are already being displaced from their homes as the Climate Emergency worsens.

The only way forward – the only way to maintain a liveable planet – is political accountability. And that is the responsibility of each and every citizen.

Do your job: step up, protest and embrace Climate Suffrage!

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