Farage: Scrap the fracking ban and bomb Iran
Would a Reform government lift the ban on fracking? 'Abso-bloody-lutely,' is Nigel Farage's answer. Fracking and nuclear will form the core of Reform's push for British energy self-sufficiency – a drive that will see the Net Zero target junked if the party wins power.
The Reform leader made his remarks at 'Net Zero: The New Brexit?', a panel ebent in Westminster, put on by Heartland UK & Europe, a new cross-Atlantic offshoot of a prominent US think-tank. But while his punchiest view at the event was on the Iran-Israel war – 'Let's get rid of this bloody awful lot' was his take on the Islamic Republic – the Reform leader clearly sees how the subject of energy can help his party to woo voters.
For Farage, Net Zero is the new Brexit for the simple reason that it once again pits British voters against the establishment. Big businesses, the old parties, Whitehall, trade unions and much of the media may support the push for clean energy. But as the costs of the energy transition manifest, voters are unlikely to continue support a scheme that hits them where it hurts.
What Reform's energy revolution will look like hasn't yet been clearly defined. In a response to fellow GB News regular Jacob Rees-Mogg as to how various contracts for difference would be renegotiated or scrapped in Reform's push to abolish all green subsidies, Farage could offer little more than the pledge that we will see 'some haircuts'. But he did speak highly of South Korea's speedy approach to small modular reactors – a sign, perhaps, that he has been reading Sam Dumitriu.
Farage is a former Green voter. He admitted that he had backed the party in the 1989 European elections. But in the years since, it has switched its traditional environmentalism of protecting wildlife and ecosystems for a myopic obsession with carbon emissions. He worries that the dash for Net Zero comes from a wider godlessness within modern society. When you stop believing in God, he suggested, you believe in anything – a wonderfully poignant reflection from the supposed pub bore.
Whether Net Zero is the new Brexit remains to be seen. Most voters, when presented with something marketed as Brexit 2.0, would want to run a mile. But as the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband continues his one-man crusade for national immiseration, one wonders if British voters will become conscious of how the decarbonisation agenda is increasing their bills and massacring our industry.
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