In his pocket. Photo montage by Wendy Mayes from original photos by: by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

For anyone who wants a future for this country that does not smell of ash trays, exhaust fumes and the sour sweat of xenophobia and, for that matter, anyone who wants any future at all, we will be running a regular look on this blog at the absurdities of what Reform is saying and doing in its last ditch defence of fossil fuels.

Tice backs off

The UK’s biggest clean-energy investors have accused Reform UK of “undermining the national interest” by threatening to remove public subsidies from renewables if it wins the next general election, as this would risk “thousands of green jobs and could push up energy bills for homes and businesses by making the UK more reliant on volatile global gas markets”. Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, had given “formal notice” to developers that the party would axe any deals struck in the upcoming renewables subsidy auction, allocation round 7 (AR7), this summer, if elected to government. However, Tice backed off in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s PM, the following morning, conceding: “I think some people may have misread the wording of the letter…A legally binding contract is a legally binding contract.” Perhaps he didn’t know what it meant when he wrote it.

All mouth and no trousers

Meanwhile the Chief Executive of Reform led Northamptonshire Council, which has just scrapped its “net zero” targets and banned all mention of climate change in Council documentation, nevertheless indicates that a lot of this is surface froth, stating: “I would like to emphasise that our Council is continuing with its wider sustainability work, still publishing our Annual Sustainability Report and will continue to work towards our environmental accreditation.

“We will also continue with projects that deliver long term savings like solar power and warm home initiatives. We will also develop and deliver a Sustainability Strategy and all services across our organisation will continue to play a key role in this work to protect and improve our local environment.”

Reform threatens almost a million jobs

If all the offshore wind projects supported by CFD auctions had to be replaced with gas and nuclear generation, as Reform threaten, Aurora Energy report that it would raise the cost of energy by £10bn (in 2022 prices) over the next decade.

The potential 48 GW of large-scale renewable capacity that Reform would block by 2030 includes 25 GW of offshore wind, 10 GW of onshore wind and 13 GW of solar. Every GW of offshore wind adds £2 – 3bn in GVA to the economy, so a loss of 25 GW would wipe out the potential for £50 – 75bn in value. For onshore wind the estimates are £1.6bn for every GW and £0.075bn for every GW of solar. Reform UK’s policies would therefore cumulatively deprive the economy of £67-£92bn in GVA. In today‘s figures, that is almost 3% of the UK‘s entire GDP.

In total, across wind and solar, Reform UK’s ambition to halt all large-scale renewables would destroy over 60,000 jobs by the end of this decade. This is a significant underestimate as this does not consider indirect and induced jobs. CBI Economics estimates that today across the UK, 273,000 people are employed in net zero businesses directly and an additional 678,000 across supply chains. Reform UK’s anti net zero policies could put many of these jobs at risk.

The New Economics Foundation has a full report on that here.

Meanwhile, on the Reform model in the US, companies have cancelled, closed or scaled back more than $22bn worth of clean-energy investments during the first half of this year. As a result, more than 5,000 jobs were lost to the changes in June alone, pushing the total number of job losses this year up to 16,500

Meanwhile, the Scotsman notes that “Scotland is at start of re-industrialisation on a scale not witnessed since oil boom of the 1970s” and the “SNP says Nigel Farage’s renewable energy ’sabotage’ will ’turn Aberdeen into Detroit’.”

Two messages to stop Reform

1. When voters were presented with a DeSmog story showing that Reform received over 90 percent of its funding from fossil fuel interests and climate science deniers between 2019 and 2024, this pushed down Farage’s popularity and “was the only message to significantly reduce willingness to vote for Reform”.
2. The second most effective issue was letting Farage’s bromance with Donald Trump speak for itself.