For the past few weeks, I’ve been considering voting Green in the European elections, and I think I’m going to do it.

It will be my first time voting Green. The environment is my main motivation. In many ways, I’ve always been an ideal Green party voter. I grew up vegetarian, surrounded by people who grew their own veg, and living next to a lake filled with the rare fish, Arctic char, under threat of extinction because of poor water quality. I’ve always been aware of climate change, but a combination of weird weather, awareness campaigns, David Attenborough documentaries and political direct action have made me look the situation more directly in the face.

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The UN’s reports are clear – humanity is facing a catastrophe that could bring about its eradication. I’m sick of watching footage of sheets of sea ice collapse into the waves, of polar bears rummaging through rubbish for food, of reading about the destruction of wildlife on a global scale, and feeling a profound hopelessness. For years I have felt a kind of muffled panic that I didn’t know how to channel. The small gestures I would undertake – eating far less meat, calculating the food miles of fruit and veg, not using any aerosols, not having a car – seemed pointless on a global scale. But watching Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate and the Extinction Rebellion protesters has inspired me. Voting Green is a way of registering my disapproval and alarm, and putting my support behind their aim to make the UK carbon-neutral by 2030.

Another reason is the profound disillusionment I feel with the Labour party. As a former Labour member who voted for Jeremy Corbyn in both leadership contests, and who has voted for him consistently as my local MP, it pains me to have to finally make my disappointment official. I was vocally pro-Corbyn, and in favour of his anti-austerity message from the very beginning, and one of those younger people who felt galvanised by his manifesto to tackle social inequality. Despite being told that a Labour party led by Corbyn would be unelectable, I voted for him, as did quite a few of my peers because we discussed it and thought: “Screw tactical voting – how often do you get the chance to vote for someone with policies in which you truly believe?”

I left Labour a couple of years ago, feeling disappointed by its direction, and yet hamstrung by loyalty to it, which seemed problematic for a journalist. As I have watched Labour tear itself apart over Brexit, failing to fully commit to a course of action as the clock has run down, I have stayed mostly quiet, in the naive hope that there was some sort of long-term strategy at play. I no longer trusted Corbyn, but I believed in and trusted many of Labour’s other excellent politicians. Unfortunately, they seem to have little say, and the party appears torn between what it sees as its white working-class voter base and its middle class “ultra-remainer” supporters.

Q&A How do European parliamentary elections work in the UK? Show Hide The UK elects 73 members (MEPs) to the European parliament, which is made up of 751 MEPs elected by the 28 member states of the EU. The UK is split into 12 European electoral regions, and each region is represented by between three and 10 MEPs. The constituencies are:

South East England (10 MEPs)

London (8)

North West England (8)

East of England (7)

West Midlands (7)

South West England (including Gibraltar) (6)

Yorkshire and the Humber (6)

Scotland (6)

East Midlands (5)

Wales (4)

North East England (3)

Northern Ireland (3) You can find out who is standing for election in your area here. In England, Scotland and Wales, voters can choose to vote for one party or individual. The ballot paper lists the parties standing with the names of their potential MEPs, as well as any individuals who are standing as independent candidates. The D’Hondt method of proportional representation is used to calculate how many seats each party or individual receives. In Northern Ireland, the single transferable vote method is used, where each voter ranks candidates in order of preference, marking 1 beside their most preferred candidate, 2 beside their second choice, and so on. These votes are then used to allocate Northern Ireland’s three MEPs. Those elected as MEPs on 23 May will represent the UK when the new European parliament assembles on 1 July, until such time as the UK ceases to be a member of the European Union.

I don’t fit into either category, and I don’t think many others do, either. You could call me an “ultra-remainer”, I suppose, though it is my feeling that these people are also labelled “Waitrose-shopping” and “privileged”, as though Brexit is just about wanting to retain the services of their Polish builders and Czech au pairs (it never seems to be about solidarity with Polish builders and Czech au pairs, or our European colleagues and friends, somehow. Is a precariat consisting of EU workers not the right sort of working-class voter base for Labour? Why this xenophobic division of the “working class” into us and them?).

I will probably never forgive Corbyn for letting down my EU friends and neighbours, for playing politics with their lives in this way. How could I vote for a party that is not only failing to stop Brexit but is failing to clearly and vocally make the case for why Brexit would be a disaster for its more impoverished voters? And I couldn’t look my friends from Italy and France and Romania and Poland in the face again. Meanwhile, the Greens are categorically anti-Brexit. I won’t risk Labour disingenuously using my vote for it as a vote for Brexit.

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What worries me most about Brexit is the impact it will have on the people whose lives have already been profoundly hurt by austerity. I have a personal stake in this. My brother is severely disabled and in the care of the state; my mother is a renter working on a casual contract. Both live in the north of England, alongside people who will have voted for Brexit while at the same time being likely to suffer under it. I have been more understanding than many remainers as to how torn the Labour party has been, how it doesn’t want to turn its back on its traditional voter base. Labour’s cowardice comes from not sufficiently attempting to change people’s minds, and mythologising a white working class at the expense of precariat workers, young people and EU citizens. Corbyn is using these votes as a smokescreen to put forward his own agenda, but in doing so is playing into the hands of all those comfortable Conservative southern leave voters who won’t be harmed by Brexit in the same way. YouGov recently polled 5,000 Labour heartland voters in the north-east, north-west, Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside and three-quarters of them backed a second referendum.

Furthermore, it seems ridiculously obvious that banking on electoral success while alienating all the younger people who brought Corbyn to power in the first place is a foolish strategy.

In contrast, a vote for the Greens is a vote against Brexit and a vote in favour of doing what we can to halt climate change. After all, what more can you do than cast your vote for the policies in which you believe? I want future humans to know I cared.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author