The Green New Deal UK is a commissioned 2D animated short (done in Photoshop) for the ambitious ten-year national action plan to tackle climate breakdown in a way that improves people’s lives and builds a fairer, more democratic society and economy. It aims to improve energy, housing and transport for us all, creating millions of well-paid, secure and unionized jobs while repurposing the finance sector to serve society as a whole and ensuring the transition leaves no-one behind.
Green New Deal UK is a non-profit organisation campaigning and building a movement for a Green New Deal in the UK. The movement aims to increase awareness and support for the Green New Deal, and create a positive vision for the future – one which matches the scale and ambition of the challenges we’re faced with, while centering local communities and the voices of those who are disadvantaged by our current political system.
A woman cycles through a city, and takes us from the world as we knew it pre-corona, through the corona pandemic and into a better future.
She’s in Notting Hill, passing vibrant markets, Grenfell Tower, a deadly quiet street of mansions, with a sunglassed man getting out of a 4x4 carrying luxury shopping bags. On she goes, battling smog and smoke from car exhausts as she weaves in and out of traffic and busses. She looks up, the sky is full of planes. It’s our world: with all the good and the bad in it. Full of chaotic and joyful life, community, family, churches, mosques, cafes, and small businesses. But she also shows us the deep inequalities: homeless people, food banks, kids playing in concrete, pollution.
She passes a run-down hospital, waves to a group of nurses going in. She cycles further into town and the streets get quieter as she cycles into the time of the coronavirus. She passes graffiti of a masked face, homemade rainbow signs and ‘we love you NHS’ in the windows of houses. When she looks up there are no planes in the sky, and the smog of London is lifted. Behind the walls of the council flats, kids clambering over each other, full of warmth and love, but anxiety on the face of their parents. The richer streets with their huge gardens are sparsely inhabited.
She passes delivery cyclists laden with takeout orders. She waves to them, to the Royal Mail vans, to the UPS drivers delivering packages. She passes neighbours talking to each other from across the road, a delivery of food for a vulnerable person, an older man walking up and down his garden. We glimpse inside someone’s home; an older woman sits alone looking out the window. We are nearing the height of the pandemic now, she passes a hospital full of ambulances, she stops to clap the health workers. The people in the building behind her all are clapping from their windows and banging pots from their balconies. The health workers stand to hear the clap, masked, 6 feet away from each other. A doctor with a sign ‘Give us PPE’.
It’s our darkest hour now and she’s nearing central London. She sees the homelessness, the tent cities and the charities feeding these workers who’ve lost their jobs. She stops for a moment of silence for the dead health workers, the dead bus drivers, for those we lost too soon.
She cycles on, slowly life is beginning to return, a few more people on the buses, more people funnel into the tube stations. But people are masked, fearful, tentative. Then an outpouring onto the streets, Black Lives Matter protests in the centre of town, and also in smaller parks and neighbourhoods. We pick up signs, ‘Teach colonial history’ ‘the UK is not innocent’ ‘Justice for Belly, Justice for Grenfell,’ etc. Perhaps we glimpse statues being taken down, crowds insisting that we learn from our history. These protests continue as she cycles, and we see the connections being made from Empire to structural racism, to the climate. and demands for a different, fairer future. When she gets to the river there’s a huge march of Black Lives Matter and climate with signs like ‘No Going Back’ ‘Bail out People, not Corporations’ etc.
The city as we know it begins to change as she cycles into our future. She passes gardeners rewilding the city central arteries, where there once was traffic there are now abundant trees, grasses, wildflowers in the middle of the roads and instead of cars there are cyclists and electric busses. She passes a new public housing complex fitted with solar panels, vegetables growing in a communal garden, and a sign for free childcare. A newspaper stand shows the headline: ‘Branson refused bailout.’ ‘Oil to stay in the ground, oil workers guaranteed new jobs’ ‘Deaths from pollution at record lows.’ A betting shop’s sign is being taken down, replaced by a sign for a worker’s cooperative. She’s arrived, and at the modern hospital, surrounded by trees, solar panels and gardens for the patients, she parks her bike, and walks in.
