Mel Mulling’s Ecosocialism Conference Speech

Mel Mullings (RMT Trade Unionist & Train Driver) 

Part 1: The Deep Tunnel Reality 

Greetings, comrades. I’m Mel Mullings. I’m an RMT trade unionist, and I am a London Underground train driver.

I’m here today at this opening plenary to talk about the climate fight at the ballot box. But before we talk about ballots, I want to ask you a question: When politicians stand in front of the cameras boasting about London’s iconic, public transport system do you think they ever mention the human cost paid by the workers who carry the weight of this climate emergency?

Of course they don’t!

Let’s do a quick reality check right here in this room. Who here is a train driver? Put your hands up.

Now, let me ask the rest of you: Who here travels on the London Underground? Raise your hands.

Let me ask you this: When you are standing on that platform, do you actually notice the driver in the cab?

And more importantly, shout it out to me right now: What percentage of those drivers do you actually see wearing protective masks?

Exactly. Zero percent. Almost none of us.

But let me bring it even closer to home: How many of YOU wear a mask when you are travelling on the London Underground?

Hardly anyone. We have all been conditioned to treat this toxic environment as completely normal.

Now, listening to me, this might sound like I am discouraging people from using public transport. But let me be absolutely clear: I am not!

In my personal capacity as an activist, I passionately support free public travel and the Fare Free London campaign. To win true climate justice, we need a massive expansion of public transport to get cars off the road and cut emissions. But an eco-socialist transition only works if transport is run for people, not profit!

This is a fundamental class issue and a frontline climate crisis issue. We cannot afford job cuts. We cannot let management slash our stations and maintenance staff when what we actually need is a fully staffed, dedicated workforce to manage this transition safely. We need proper infrastructure. We need it to be maintained correctly, which means more unionised jobs, proper maintenance of the London Underground, and rigorous deep cleaning to ensure the network is safe not only for the passengers but also for the workers! I refuse to let a ‘green transition’ be bought with the lungs of transport workers and the travelling public!

Look at the science of what this climate crisis means for our bodies underground. A groundbreaking study from the University of Cambridge proved that deep tunnel dust is a heavy metal soup packed with an iron oxide particle called maghemite. These particles are ultrafine just 10 nanometres small. Your lung tissue cannot filter them out. They pass directly through your lungs and enter your bloodstream, traveling straight to your organs.

What does this actually do to your body? Medical data shows it triggers a systemic inflammatory response. It causes Pulmonary Siderosis literally iron-dust disease and chronic internal scarring that destroys your lung elasticity. It leads to Ischemic Heart Disease, strokes, and COPD. If you have inherited underlying conditions which disproportionately affect workers of colour this toxic dust increases your risk of suffocation, heart attacks, and heat stroke. This is the reality of facing climate breakdown at accelerated levels. We are trading up to 15 years of our life expectancy just to go to work!

And while your lungs are breathing the metal, your ears are being battered. The continuous clanging on the rails and that agonizing wheel screech isn’t just annoying it is an environmental hazard. TfL’s own data shows that sections like Green Park to Victoria consistently breach 92 decibels. Investigations have caught noise levels inside carriages spiking to a deafening 112 decibels! Trust me I know!

That is louder than a rock concert. The relentless screeching permanently flattens the microscopic hair cells in your inner ear. Once they are destroyed, they never grow back, leaving workers with permanent occupational hearing loss and chronic Tinnitus.

When the surface world gets a hot summer, our cabs turn into literal ovens breaching 35 to 47 degrees. All predictions of flooding and climate chaos set for 2030 are hitting us right now, in 2026. A leaked internal report (motion 16 climate.) revealed that 57 Tube stations are at high risk of flooding including Waterloo and King’s Cross. TfL is already forced to pump 1.4 million cubic metres of water out of the tunnels every single year just to stop us from going under. Are we supposed to just sit back and wait until the tunnels completely submerge before the establishment takes this climate emergency seriously?

Our union, the RMT, has put in motion after motion. We demand a four-day working week with shorter hours to limit our exposure to this noise and dust, alongside mandatory training for staff on heat first-aid and flood survival. For a deep tunnel worker, a shorter working week is preventative healthcare. It is a matter of life and death!

Part 2: Activism, Betrayal, and the Parliamentary Vacuum 

So let’s bring this straight to the ballot box. What are the politicians doing to address this climate crisis? Across the board, political support for underground and transport workers has been awful. They take our labour for granted.

Every single year, as the lead organiser, I send an invitation to every single ‘leftish’ politician in this country to attend the RMT Reparations Conference. I ask them to come, address our members, and show us their political and personal contributions to the campaign. Do you want to know how many of them actually show up to stand with Black workers and fight for climate justice?

So far, ONLY Green Party councillors have attended and participated! The rest of the political establishment is completely missing in action.

So let me ask you: Can we trust these establishment politicians to deliver climate justice?

Can we trust them to protect our communities from this climate emergency?

Look at what they are doing right here in London! They stand on platforms and mouth polite words about green policies, but then they vote to expand the toxic Edmonton incinerator in one of the most deprived, working-class communities in this city. They push through the Silvertown tunnel, locking working-class and racialised neighbourhoods into decades of heavy, deadly pollution. This isn’t just bad planning this is institutional environmental racism!

Look at Lewisham, where nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah became the first person in UK history to have air pollution officially listed as a cause of death. How many more working-class children have to gasp for air before these politicians wake up?

And this violence starts even before birth. Look at the damning evidence given by Agnes Adjapong to the APPG on Race and Climate Emergency. Her research exposes the horrific, hidden reality of environmental racism on Black maternal health. Black pregnant women are disproportionately forced to live in the most densely populated, heavily polluted urban corridors. This toxic air pollution is highly linked to devastating birth defects, critical neonatal breathing issues, and severe antenatal complications. They are literally poisoning our babies in the womb!

So I ask you again: Can we trust the politicians who greenlight this violence to save us?

Absolutely not! We don’t wait for politicians to give us permission to make history. If you scan that QR code on the screen from our 2025 RMT Reparations Conference Booklet, you will see the true blueprint of eco-socialist activism. Our Black workers didn’t wait for a handout; we leveraged our collective power to force the establishment of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on African Reparations onto the national stage!

We take the fight directly to them. Look at the document on the screen. I personally attended the APPG on Race and Community parliamentary launch for ‘A Vision for Climate Justice: Tackling the climate and nature emergency and global systemic racism’. We go into Westminster to confront them directly on their home turf, because despite their polite speeches, the UK political vacuum is staggering. British institutions are still actively profiting from the financial legacy of the 1833 compensation system that paid out enslavers while leaving the victims with absolutely nothing, completely ignoring the structural racism at the absolute heart of the global climate emergency.

Part 3: Radical 2026 Mandate and Ecoside 

We don’t go to parliament to beg. We go to intervene. Because this year, 2026, marks 20 years of independent RMT leadership in the struggle for Afrikan Reparations. This isn’t a commemoration; it is a structural intervention. Last year’s theme was about climate justice but this year is going to be even better!

Our 2026 theme outlined in the document RMT 20th Anniversary Reparations Solidarity Event!!! (2026) is uncompromising: Return the Land. Restore the Tongue. Rebuild the People.

This is the Trade Union Year of Climate Action, and we welcome committee members who came to our conference to learn from our platform. Because as eco-socialists, we understand a fundamental truth: the very same capitalist extraction that treats a London Underground driver’s lungs as a filter is the exact same system that treats the Global South as a sacrifice zone. The climate crisis is a colonial legacy!

Let’s stop talking about climate change in the cold, bloodless language of finance and statistics. Look at these images behind me. These are human beings. These are families, children, farmers, and nurses who just want to live their lives in dignity on the land they have loved for generations.

There is a direct, unbroken line between the horrors of the Transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans where they raided villages to kidnap their best minds, their doctors, their nurses, and their farmers and the corporate boardrooms driving modern climate breakdown today.

Look at how the West pollutes. While they preach ‘sustainability’ to us, corporations like Shein and Primark pump out ultra-cheap, disposable fast-fashion, use the Global South for cheap labor, and then dump mountains of textile garbage right back onto the African continent, causing catastrophic ecological disasters from here to over there. They carve up continents for profit, leaving behind everyday examples of stolen wealth from the gold reserves in Western vaults to the Kenyan coffee and cocoa grown on the most lucrative lands, owned not by the locals, but by foreign capitalists.

Is it right that the countries producing the world’s wealth are left with nothing but the toxic waste of this climate crisis?

Look at what Shell did to Ogoniland in Nigeria. They spilled millions of gallons of oil, completely poisoning the groundwater with carcinogens, ruining the soil, and leaving the villagers to die from a slow, generational ecocide that they are still suffering from today. And yet, during the peak of the pandemic, the UK government handed nearly 100 million of public taxpayer money to Shell. Let me ask you: Is that climate justice?

It is completely back to front! Look at Guyana, where ExxonMobil is attempting to unleash a massive offshore ‘carbon bomb’ that threatens the entire planet. But we are fighting back. The brilliant environmental lawyer Melinda Janki, who personally attended our RMT Reparations Conference, has taken ExxonMobil and the Guyanese government to court under their own constitution, securing historic legal victories to defuse that carbon bomb and protect the right to a healthy environment!

And look at Jamaica. The island is experiencing punishing, unprecedented heat waves. But instead of letting the people adapt, corporate greed is cutting down green spaces to build concrete gated communities for wealthy international elites. As the grassroots movement JaBBEM exposes, they are using colonial-era rules passed right on the eve of independence like the Beach Control Act of 1956 which stripped the Jamaican people of their inherent rights to the shore and handed control to the Crown. Today, the British King still inherits these rights to control the foreshore of an independent nation!

Because of this neocolonial enclosure, less than one percent of Jamaica’s coastline is freely accessible to ordinary Jamaicans. They are walling off the coastlines, meaning working-class Jamaicans can no longer even access the ocean just to cool down their bodies in a heatwave, feed their families, or find mental and spiritual peace in nature. This is a calculated, ongoing ecocide that leaves indigenous and working-class people to die while Western elites pocket the profit.

Ending- Worker-Led Power

And this brings us right back to the ultimate choice at the ballot box. Because this is what happens when we vote in the wrong governments. This is what happens when we vote for neocolonial, non-socialist administrations that are far more interested in capitalist profiteering than sharing the wealth with the people and taking care of our planet!

Whether it is right here in the UK under governments that look the other way while our infrastructure floods and our lungs are poisoned or whether it is the governments voted into power in Nigeria, in Jamaica, and in Guyana the story is exactly the same. When you vote for capitalism, you vote for a system that actively treats its own citizens as collateral damage. You vote for administrations that sell out their land, sell out their air, and sell out their coastlines to multi-national monopolies, while treating the terrifying reality of the climate emergency as nothing more than an afterthought on a corporate balance sheet.

So when politicians come knocking for your votes at the ballot box, do not let them off the hook with polite, greenwashed lies.

I urge ALL of you in this room today and all of our overseas comrades joining us right now via our hybrid link to attend our 20th Anniversary Solidarity Event on the 23rd of August 2026. Come and witness trade union power being used for true, structural restoration.

We don’t want Western charity. We demand radical climate reparations. It is about restoring stolen humanity. It is about forcing polluters to clean up the poison in Ogoniland, tearing down the corporate fences on the beaches of Jamaica, defending the legal fights in Guyana, restoring the indigenous languages that the ‘empire’ tried to silence, and winning a four-day working week to protect transport workers here.

In Jamaica, they say: ‘Who nuh hear, will feel.’ Are we going to let the political establishment ignore us until we feel the absolute worst of this climate emergency?

Then let us change the way we fight, let us change the way we organise, and let us make them hear our collective voice today! True safety, true equity, and true climate justice will never be handed down by timid, capitalist politicians. It will be won through independent, radical, worker-led, eco-socialist power!

Return the Land! Restore the Tongue! Rebuild the People!

Reparations Now! Climate Justice Now! Power to the people!

Solidarity!