‘You don’t care about the future!’ – Labour MP takes down Julia Hartley-Brewer over Extinction Rebellion remarks

She pointed to Grant Shapps, the Tory transport minister, as she said: “It’s no good for Grant to sit here and say ‘look at all the brilliant things we’re doing’, when his government is the one that’s slashed investment in solar, that effectively banned wind farms, that subsidised diesel that is the dirtiest fuel of them all, and slashing transport funding.”

But Hartley-Brewer interjected to claim that Labour were the ones “opposed to fracking”, which she said “is one of the cleanest energy forms”.

But Nandy pointed out Labour is “in favour of giving people the right to decide, which strikes me as democratic when you’re going to have fracking imposed on your area.”

She continued: “Let me say this to you as well, this not just about the environment, this is about Mark Carney – the governor of the Bank of England – that climate change and our failure to tackle it is the biggest threat to the global financial system.

“This is people’s pensions, this is people’s savings, this is people’s livelihoods.

“If you don’t care about the future, which you clearly don’t, and you won’t accept the evidence about that, at least accept there are people in this room and watching this at home who stand to lose an awful lot if you carry on pretending this isn’t real.”

Nandy’s monologue was applauded by the audience in Beckenham watching – in particular by young spectators – as well as on social media.

In response Hartley-Brewer claimed that she did care about people’s livelihoods, but she wanted a “grown-up debate” in response.

“This is the scaremongering we have, and instead of having a sensible debate about the science and the facts and what the economical and political costs are of different forms of action to tackle the issue, we all just shout ‘you just don’t care about the children if you don’t agree with me’, and that is not a sensible grown-up debate.”