Cameron, climate change and Witney

Last night in the Oxfam Bookshop on Witney High St: more than a dozen 38 Degrees members, alongside Oxfam, Greenpeace and CAFOD supporters and a couple of local councillors, launched an open letter to their MP David Cameron asking him to start taking some tough action on climate change.

Since the recent catastrophic flooding in Oxfordshire and elsewhere in the country, David Cameron has started making the link between global climate change and local disasters – but in the words of Phil Ball, an Arctic 30 member and Witney constituent who spoke last night, joining those dots isn’t enough. He needs to act, too.

In less than two weeks Cameron will be at the EU climate summit, and in September at a global leaders’ summit – and he needs to make the choice now to go in hard and push for strong international climate change policy.

It can be hard sometimes in the fog that is international legislation on climate change to feel individual power and ownership over the process, but as Witney constituents proved last night: before David Cameron is a leader on the world stage, he is an MP for Witney, with responsibility for his constituents’ and their views.

38 Degrees members walked out of the bookshop with plans to book into his surgery, deliver the A0 print out of the open letter to his office, and to cut out any press on the event and send it to him. We’re coming, Mr Cameron.