Next week thousands of Extinction Rebellion protesters will descend on Westminster, the latest example of direct action in a year when committed women, men and children across the world have pushed climate change to the top of the global agenda, where it belongs. Although London will again be the focal point, the movement mustn’t overlook the committed activists in places such as Bolton, Wigan, and Sunderland who are also spreading the message across the country. For the climate movement to succeed we have to build a broad coalition that covers our nation’s towns as well as our cities, and reaches out across class divides.

Calls for individual action can’t just be modelled on the lifestyles of middle-class city dwellers. Telling people to get out of their cars can’t be the solution in those parts of the country where decades of chronic underinvestment have left us without public transport. In towns such as Wigan, jobs have disappeared as investment flowed into cities, creating lengthy commutes on public transport for most working-age people. Trains are overcrowded, deeply unreliable and ceased to function entirely for a large part of last year, while the buses are few and far between, and often more expensive than getting a taxi. Demanding people abandon their cars isn’t realistic if the alternative is a round trip of 42 miles a day on foot or by bike, just to get to work. Campaigns to tackle climate change need to link up with campaigns for better transport and fairer funding for it, particularly for buses.

Rooting calls for action in the reality of people’s lives is essential if the battle against climate change is not to become a battle against each other. It is galling to be lectured on not eating meat when you and your family are struggling to get by and relying on help from friends and local food banks. It isn’t fair to ask families to forfeit the one foreign flight they have saved for all year, while we have global corporations whose business models rely on frequent air travel and governments that refuse to tax them for it.

Climate activists must also rethink their language. Phrases such as “dirty coal” are profoundly condescending to communities in which generation after generation did dangerous, backbreaking work down the mines to build the country’s wealth and influence at great cost to themselves; pneumoconiosis victims are still fighting for justice decades after the mines closed. We are owed new clean energy jobs, and the infrastructure to create them. In Wigan and Barnsley, the desire for good jobs that provide a sense of purpose is palpable. Positive movements for change, such as the One Million Climate Jobs trade union campaign, provide an antidote to the stark warnings about climate scenarios that often leave people feeling powerless to act.

We must not let the climate crisis become a further source of division in Britain. The last Labour government’s decision to load the cost of clean energy subsidies on to energy bills left the poorest people paying six times as much of their disposable income on energy bills as their wealthy counterparts. If climate change becomes a major cause of migration it may prove fertile ground for the far right looking to exploit disillusion in towns that have experienced rapid, relative decline.

Instead, let’s seize this as an opportunity to rebuild our towns so they can play a major and significant part in our national story once again. Fighting for a better environment was always part of socialist tradition, as working-class people living among the smoke and soot of industry fought for parks, protection of the countryside, wildlife conservation, clean air and fresh water.

The first Bolton Extinction Rebellion meeting saw people queueing out of the door on a hot summer evening, and I get more letters about the environment from my constituents than any other single issue. Building an environmentally sustainable future will require the talent, intellect and hard work of the whole of our society – so it’s time for the climate movement to break out of the cities to make itself a movement for the many, not just the few.

• This is an abridged version of an essay in a special climate change edition of the latest HOPE not hate magazine.

• Lisa Nandy is the Labour MP for Wigan