Guest election blog – Reform by Henry Morris

I first voted in 2001. That was in Harrogate, when my vote went to Phil Willis of the Liberal Democrats. I once delivered some leaflets for him; I have a vivid memory of an ‘Up Yours Delors’ UKIP sticker in someone’s window and thinking they must be mad. It didn’t occur to me that 20 years later their talisman Nigel Farage would be shaping UK political discourse. I continued to vote Lib Dem until the coalition and have since voted Labour or Green. Since I now live in Wales, I’m fortunate to have an alternative to Labour: this time I intend to vote for Plaid Cymru.

Here are my thoughts about the environmental implications of Reform UK’s election manifesto.

Things I like:

• Ban foreign supertrawlers from UK waters: I endorse this idea. Although having read the rest, I suspect the key word we’re looking at in this sentence is ‘foreign’.

Things I don’t like:

• Ban ULEZ and clean air zones: Can I shock you? I like clean air.
• Scrap Net Zero: if the world we know is to continue in a recognisable form the case for Net Zero is incontrovertible. A desire to scrap it thus suggests only two explanations – ill intent or stupidity. In Nigel Farage’s case it looks like the former. In Richard Tice’s case it’s both.
• Scrap thousands of retained EU laws that hold back British business: have you noticed how often unregulated, profit-chasing businesses do unscrupulous things?
• Scrap renewable energy subsidies: why have unlimited clean energy when you can burn a finite quantum of destructive petrochemicals? Look, I’m not saying these millionaire xenophobes don’t have our best interests at heart . . . Oh well, actually, I am.
• No more bans on petrol vehicles: this raised a chuckle. The manifesto is largely predicated on banning things – refugees, regulations, rationality. This is the one thing with which they want to do the opposite.
• Fast track North Sea oil and gas licenses, grant shale gas licenses: who would you believe on fossil fuel extraction: a pair of mediocre business bigots, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency and NASA? The agony of choice.
• Scrap climate related farming subsides: hard to believe a statement like this in a manifesto that nowhere mentions biodiversity.
• Protect country sports: those who argue against the mass extermination of wildlife on grouse moors can piss off. Cheese rolling and bog snorkelling can stay though.

Things that appear to be missing:

A handle on reality.

Overall assessment:

Predicated on the deregulating of anything that gets in the way of making money. It reads like the deranged ramblings of a glue-sniffing property investor who doesn’t understand science, humanity or punctuation. Yet, at the time of writing, Reform have risen above the Tories in some opinion polls. Hence, while it is all to easy to laugh or jeer at this malarkey, the constant rightward shift in political discourse must be taken seriously. These people won’t become the opposition, but as we’ve already seen, that won’t stop the media endlessly platforming their ignorant ideas in front of struggling people who are susceptible to ‘easy’ solutions. A few years ago, ‘reform’ seemed like a progressive word. Today, Reform’s nonsense needs to be parried at every opportunity with facts, rationality, and hope.

Would I vote for these environmental policies?

Not if Richard Tice paid me £144k to vet his candidates.

This is one of a series of opinion pieces on the political parties’ 2024 general election manifestos. They were commissioned by Wild Justice several months ago by approaching a wide variety of conservationists and environmentalists long before the date of the general election was known. Some people who originally agreed to write pieces found the date and short timescale impossible and had to back out. We did not know what they would write and their only brief was to pick one or two political parties’ election manifestos and tell us what they liked and didn’t like about their environmental policies. We didn’t tell people what to write and we haven’t edited what they wrote (except to squeeze things into a common format, to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors and typos). The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Wild Justice.

If you think you could produce a review of one of the 2024 general election manifestos then we would need to receive it as soon as possible, but in any case before 26 June, in a similar format to that above, as a word file and with a .jpg or .png image of yourself, the author. Send any potential texts to admin@wildjustice.org.uk and we will look at them. We’ll let you know if we want to publish your piece and we may be able to pay you a small amount for it.