Brown To Flashmob: I’ll Go To Climate Summit

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has told a flashmob, assembled outside the Houses of Parliament, that he will go to the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December.

Around 300 people assembled at 12. 18 in Parliament square, as part of the Global Wakeup Call a world series of flashmobs in 128 countries, set up by the Internet pressure group Avaaz.org. On a pre-arranged signal, they all began phoning MPs, ministers and other influential people.

Their demands are that governments should take climate change seriously and take action. Gordon Brown responded, speaking to flashmob participant Iris Andrews (pictured on the phone to the Prime Minister), and telling her that he would go to the UN climate change summit.

The move had been signalled earlier in the day, but Brown was almost duty-bound to respond to the flashmob, having called in July for a greater use of modern communications to raise issues such as climate change. The climate change conference, COP15 for short,hopes to produce new agreements on measures to reduce climate change.

Brown thanked the protesters and told them that grassroots pressure is important.

“It’s encouraging to hear him say that campaigns like this are important, said Iris Andrews, describing herself as an ordinary flashmob participant taking part in her lunchbreak.

Brown has already spoken approvingly of the aims of the December summit: “One of the things that has to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months,” he said in July, “is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate change agenda.”