Organising for lasting change at Scotland’s Climate March

This Saturday 15 November, ahead of COP30, Scotland’s Climate March joins a global day of action to demand change. The organisers, which include a broad coalition of campaign groups, NGOs and community networks, have put out a call to action: “Let's stand together to demand a fairer world for all.”

The march comes at a moment of crisis, not just for the climate but for the act of protest itself. We’ve seen protesters charged with conspiracy for attending a Zoom call and octogenarians charged with terrorism for holding a sign in support of Palestine Action. Bank accounts were frozen, defendants banned from speaking about the climate crisis and protesters sentenced to prison time for nonviolent climate actions, the first in Scotland’s history. 

In response to this crisis, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently stated what may prove to be a poetic summation of the Starmer project: “Just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day.” 

Over the last few years I’ve interviewed protesters, organisers and groups attempting to bring about change. Some of these conversations were captured in How Does Change Happen? published by 404 Ink. A consistent refrain I have heard within these interactions is that it has become increasingly difficult for anyone to protest in the UK. 

We arrived here quickly, but not suddenly. Consecutive governments have shrunk the acceptable definition of protest, brutally punished activists, and curtailed the rights of unions to organise. 

As the window of admissible dissent gets smaller, Scotland’s Climate March could be a welcome opportunity to gather enthusiasm and energy. I spoke to Freya Aitchison, Activism Organiser at Friends of the Earth Scotland, who told me about the goals of the upcoming march. “We are expecting loads of civil society groups to come together and demand better from their governments,” she says. “[COP30] is a useful focal point for the global climate movement to demand better, to demand more.”

Photo: Richard Dixon. 

To Freya, marches like this can play an important role during a time of crackdown on protest. “Part of the motivation is to visibly show how many people care about this,” she explains. “There are recent studies [published in journal Nature Climate Change] that show 89% of people support climate action, but most of those people don’t think that other people support it. A huge outcome of doing a march like this is showing that other people care as well.”

But any kind of effective change-making needs to involve, as she puts it, “a diversity of tactics.”  The march will present opportunities for attendees to connect with local causes through different stalls present on the day. The gathering, as well as a show of support, could be the first point of contact for people who care about the climate crisis but don’t know how to get involved. 

This resonates with what I have heard from other activists. It is folly to hope that one action will lead to a chain-reaction that can make everything better, but bringing people together can energise a movement. From there it is necessary to build resilient structures and coalitions that can fight on many fronts, consistently. 

One group I spoke to during my research was the Landless Workers Movement (MST) based in Brazil, the host country of COP30. MST has fortified their movement to the point of becoming a national institution that is impossible to ignore. Since their inception in 1984, they have become the largest producer of organic food in the country, taught hundreds of thousands of adults to read and write, and extended their presence to every state. They have occupied land that now belongs to the people working on it. 

By building a critical mass of working-class members engaging in protest, organising, and fighting legislative and legal battles, they have built a movement that was able to push back against the most oppressive forces – from the 1% of landowners who possessed 45% of land in Brazil, to the Government of Jair Bolsonaro which hoped to outlaw their efforts, to the growing environmental impact of the climate crisis. They built a movement focused on, as I was told in many of our conversations, a “protagonism of the masses.” They now find themselves able to influence agribusiness policy and consequently extend their struggle for climate justice. It’s easy to dismiss the work of MST as irrelevant to the Scottish context, but there is a clear lesson in their work that meaningful change requires strong movements that can support it in the long term. 

The real test of the upcoming march’s effectiveness will be about whether it can bring people in and energise permanent movements, capable of withstanding ongoing attacks. It’s tempting to see activism as an exchange of statements and proclamations. As a marketing campaign that, with any luck, could go viral enough to change things. But as the façade of freedom of speech and protest is eroded, meaningful change will require organising workplaces and neighbourhoods in our everyday lives, building resilient organisations that can withstand the pushback of a riot shield. As Freya puts it: “That's where the real power comes from, when you work with others to create change yourself.” We need to organise for freedom, every moment of every day. 

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How Does Change Happen? is out now with 404 Ink

Scotland’s Climate March takes place on Sat 15 Nov, assemble at Glasgow Green from 11am