The short sighted stupidity of Reform UK’s climate denialism

A number of recent opinion polls have found that the hard right Anglo-British nationalists of Reform UK are on course to win the next Westminster general election. That alarming prospect is still four years off and it’s entirely possible that Farage’s latest political vehicle will implode before then just as all his other political parties have collapsed into bitter in-fighting and schisms. With Reform now the ruling party in a number of English local authorities, it is having to confront the realities of office, which is a very different proposition from carping in opposition about migrants and promoting conspiracy theories.

This is a challenge which is already causing the wheels to come off the Reform bandwagon, as we have seen with this week’s suspension of four Reform councillors in Kent amidst bad tempered internal disputes and chaos within the governing Reform group. There is also the looming cloud of suspicion of financial links between senior figures in Reform and the Putin regime. Reform’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill has admitted to taking bribes from Russia in order to make statements favourable to Russia while serving as a Member of the European Parliament. Gill is now facing possible jail time.

While an MEP, Gill took money from Oleg Voloshyn, a former Russian MP who the US government describes as a “pawn” of Russian secret services, in return for making pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament.

Gill was not a marginal figure in Reform. He served as a UKIP, and later Brexit Party, MEP between 2014 and 2020 and was leader of UKIP Wales between 2014 and 2016. He was one of seven UKIP politicians elected to the Senedd in 2016 when the party was led by Farage. Gill was leader of Reform UK Wales between March and May 2021, and led the party’s Senedd/Welsh Parliament election campaign. Gill was a close associate of Nigel Farage, despite attempts by Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf attempting to distance the party from him, claiming – unconvincingly – that he didn’t know who Gill was.

Farage has now admitted that he has known Gill for a very long time but vehemently denies that he knew anything about the bribes Gill accepted from Russia. In 2016 Farage described Gill as “hard-working, honest and loyal”.

Farage has himself met with Voloshyn’s wife, Nadia Borodin, who worked as a presenter on the Ukrainian pro-Russia Channel 112, which was owned by one of Putin’s closest allies, Viktor Medvedchuk. Ukraine banned the channel in 2021.

Farage appeared in a photo with Borodin, after she had done an interview with Gill for Channel 112 at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Farage denies that his party has any financial links to the Putin regime. However questions about his finances continue to surface. The cash purchase of an £885,000 house in Farage’s constituency of Clacton by his partner Laure Ferrari has raised eyebrows and led to questions about the source of the funds. Farage denies that he has any financial stake in the property.

Farage has also denied avoiding more than £44,000 in additional stamp duty on the purchase of the house by putting it in his partner’s name, saying that she bought it with her own funds. Farage claims Ferrari was able to afford the four-bedroom home because she comes from a wealthy French family. However an investigation of French property and company records from the BBC failed to find evidence that Ferrari’s parents have the means to fund their daughter’s purchase of the home.

Now the Times newspaper reports that Ferrari has been embroiled in a fraud investigation in Belgium involving a Eurosceptic think tank she once led. Ferrari, 46, was the “day to day manager” of the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe (IDDE), a think tank which promoted Eurosceptic ideas from its Brussels base before it was wound up in 2017. The EU’s anti-fraud office Olaf has been looking into IDDE’s funding for some time. Investigators have now reportedly uncovered what they describe as “serious” financial irregularities, including claims that some donors were awarded questionable contracts. The case has now been passed to the prosecuting authorities in Belgium who are expected to make a decision about whether to proceed with the case in November.

Ferrari has strongly denied any wrongdoing, calling the case “politically driven” and the claims against her “fake,” saying they stem from leaks by a hostile MEP.

There are plenty of ways in which Reform UK could implode before 2029, despite the fact that the British media seems to be markedly lacking in curiosity about the Nathan Gill case or about Farage’s partner’s finances.

However here in Scotland we don’t have the luxury of four years in which to hope that Reform eats itself. The Scottish elections are due in less than eight months. While Reform is performing more poorly in Scotland than in England, it is expected to gain representation in the Scottish Parliament, doubtless aided by a Scottish media which will platform the far right party at every turn, while turning a blind eye to the reality of Reform’s English nationalism.

As supporters of Scottish independence we cannot afford to dismiss or trivialise the threat to Scotland’s interests posed by Reform, and as campaigning gears up for next year’s Holyrood election, canvassers and campaigners for Scotland’s pro-independence parties need arguments to counter Reform’s misinformation on the doorstep.

Reform poses an existential threat to Scotland’s burgeoning renewable energy industry. Reform is not – at least in public – quite as crass as Donald Trump, who openly dismisses anthropogenic climate change as a ‘hoax’, but Reform’s Deputy leader Richard Tice continues to insist that climate change driven by human activity is not a threat.

The science behind climate change is very simple and incontrovertible. Certain atmospheric gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) being one of the most important, act as ‘heat traps’ in the atmosphere, creating a blanket over the surface of the earth which inhibits the escape into space of energy which arrives on Earth from the sun. This energy causes the atmosphere to heat up. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more efficient this blanket becomes and the warmer the atmosphere grows. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been pumping huge quantities of CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

There are two main strands to Tice’s denialism of the threat posed by climate change. The first is to point out that in previous periods in the Earth’s history, average global temperatures were warmer than they are forecast to rise to over the next hundred years or so if no action is taken to combat carbon emissions. Tice points out that life on the planet survived these warm periods.

While it’s certainly true that there have been periods in Earth’s history when temperatures were warmer than they are now, Tice – deliberately perhaps – overlooks two key differences because they don’t suit his argument.

The first is that previous periods of global warming occurred over hundreds or thousands of years. That’s a blink of the eye in geological terms, but it’s slow enough to allow ecosystems to adapt. One of the most recent of these warm periods was the Middle Pliocene Warm Period which lasted from about 3.3 million to 3 million years ago. During this period the average global temperature was 2 to 3 C higher than it is today and sea levels were 10 to 30 meters higher.

This brings us to the second key difference which Tice ignores – from a human point of view the more important one. 3.3 million years ago modern humans had yet to evolve. Our ancestors were primarily represented by species like Australopithecus afarensis (the famous ‘Lucy’ fossil). These were bipedal apes with brains the size of those of modern chimpanzees who may have been experimenting with the use of crude stone tools. They were relatively few in number and most likely lived in small and mobile family groups, foraging for roots, fruits, insects, small animals, and carrion. If climate change caused water or food to become harder to obtain, they could migrate to a new territory.

Modern humanity lives in a complex sedentary civilisation with high population density requiring the reliable production and distribution of enormous amounts of food, energy, and raw materials. This necessitates devoting huge tracts of fertile land to agriculture, much of this land is flat low lying alluvial plains lying close to sea level. Additionally, since our modern civilisation depends upon international trade, most of the world’s largest cities grew up around sea ports and are highly vulnerable to sea level rise. If sea levels were to rise to the level of the Middle Pliocene Warm Period, most of London and South East England would be under water as would the Netherlands, much of Belgium, most of Bangladesh, the fertile Nile Delta where most of Egypt’s 110 million population live. Much of the US seaboard and most of New York City and Florida would be drowned. If Farage and Tice think that the numbers of refugees are excessive now, they would be dwarfed by the tens of millions forced to seek new homes due to sea level rise.

But a warming climate does not just create a rise in sea levels. The more energy that is put into the atmosphere, the more energy there is for devastating storms and hurricanes. Torrential downpours and wild fires would all increase in frequency and create ever greater damage and disruption, further stressing the already stressed production of humanity’s food and energy. What Tice with his net zero stupity ignores is that the most immediate threat posed by climate change is not to the planet. It’s to the survival of human civilisation.

The collapse of ecosystems threatened by rapid climate change is not just a threat to biodiversity and to the survival of exotic species that most of us have never heard about, it’s a threat to humanity too. Our survival depends on the survival of these complex ecosystems. We do not stand apart from nature, we are a part of it.

Tice also argues that since the UK only contributes around 1% of global carbon emissions then the UK achieving net zero would make little difference to the global picture, so why bother?

This is a deeply short sighted and irresponsible argument. It’s like saying that my dog only craps once a day so why should I bother cleaning up its mess from the pavement. If everyone did that we’d soon be wading knee deep in doggy doo on the way to the shops. We all need to play our part and if the UK abandons efforts to attain net zero then it has no moral standing when it comes to persuading larger polluters. But short sighted selfishness is Reform’s stock in trade.

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