Sean Matthews, the Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council, has said he’ll “lie down in front of bulldozers” to stop Britain’s largest solar farm being built in the county. He’s taking sides in a new rural culture war that pits green energy against the countryside’s traditional image of food and farming.
Reform’s opposition to renewables isn’t surprising. Fossil fuel interests have provided around 92% of the party’s funding according to research by DeSmog (when contacted by DeSmog, Reform did not comment on that finding). But solar farms have become a way for the party to mask these interests by presenting itself as a defender of farms, fields and “common sense” against what Matthews called the “nonsense” of net zero.
Meanwhile, the protest group Farmers to Action has urged supporters to “keep the land growing, not glowing”. Its leader, Justin Rogers, has called climate change “one of the biggest scams that has ever been told”, and the group now operates in lockstep with the Together Declaration, a rightwing campaign group with an explicit anti-net zero agenda.
