The opening piano chords of I Believe suddenly blare out in Parliament Square. A young girl steps forward on the green and stretches gracefully to the sky before being joined in her dance by another and then another, until 150 dancers are enthusiastically shaking their booty in the shadow of Big Ben. The Greenpeace protesters, still up on the roof of the houses of Parliament, are nudging each other and pointing, with the same baffled-but-intrigued expression as everyone else. Tourists, police officers, bus drivers are all craning their necks and the phone cameras are up in the air everywhere you look. This dance-off was the finale of the UK Youth Climate Coalition’s Powershift weekend. Four hundred members of the UKYCC (an umbrella organisation for youth climate groups) had spent the last two days bonding and learning how to deliver their message from Marshall Ganz, the man who shaped Barack Obama’s successful campaign for US president. They had planned small demonstrations and actions all round the country and sent messages to the other branches of the YCC around the world in Australia, Thailand, Cambodia. And now they were ready to unleash themselves on the rest of us. And, happily, that’s just how it worked out. Their original, planned, performance underneath the London Eye went perfectly. After that nothing seemed more natural than hopping across the Thames to show the Greenpeace protesters a bit of solidarity. A bit of rearrangement and off they go for a spontaneous …

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