A retired teacher from Buckinghamshire joined a mass rally in London at the weekend despite risk of being arrested.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets across the country over the weekend protesting against rising energy prices amid an average £600 rise in electricity bills, and the climate crisis, while postal and rail workers went on strike.

A grandfather-of-four Dave Cooper from Chesham protested for the sake of his grandchildren and disadvantaged people with Extinction Rebellion (XR) Chesham.

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The 69-year-old said: “In the end it all boils down for injustice for me.

"The climate crisis is affecting the less well-off in society much more than the better-off in society, and that will continue and get worse and worse.

"For me, that’s an injustice.

“Especially living in Buckinghamshire I’m okay financially but I see around me other people who are not, and who are being affected, in this case by the cost of living crisis." 

He saw a connection between rising fuel costs and climate crisis, and felt frustrated of "our government’s and other governments’ failure to do anything meaningful about it."

“They put out this thing that wasn’t a budget, and again for me that was more aimed at helping the better off rather than the less well-off, although now there’s been a U-turn there, no surprise.

“I see things in Chesham, like the ever longer queue for the community fridge and the lines keeps getting longer and longer.”

As a former teacher and currently a governor at a primary school Mr Cooper sees the impact of “cuts to the education budgets”, making schools struggle more each year “to give children and education, and more and more children qualifying for free school meals – although a lot of them don’t take it up because of the stigma attached to it.”

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School support staff and teaching assistants were struggling on a “very low wage”, and with the inflation it was getting “worse,” he said.

Mr Cooper said: “One of the criticisms of XR has always been that they haven’t been very diverse, they very much were, although it’s now changing, a white, middle-class group.

“And of course, we are the people who can afford the time and the money to go to these protests.

“Other groups in society, I’m afraid, find that very difficult.

“And if you’re an ethnic minority or if you’re black, you’ll also get targeted by the police much more severely than I do as a middle-aged, white male.

"I feel relatively safe." 

What change does he hope to see? 

“We need a just transition to locally produced sustainable energy with well-paid jobs in energy production, home insulation and other associated industries.

"Doing this we will lower carbon emissions and lower people's energy bills, we'll use less energy and have energy security for the future.”