Reform UK’s fossil fuel nationalism may be a fantasy, but it exploits the very real contradictions of Britain’s energy transition.
In late February, at a steel processing factory in the West Midlands, Reform UK launched its vision for industry, trade, energy and housing. Richard Tice, its self-styled “Shadow Business, Energy and Trade Secretary”, vowed to “re-industrialize Britain with bold British companies… to remotivate Britain with… the brightest British entrepreneurs, to re-energize Britain with beautiful British oil and gas.” Customarily light on detail, Reform’s industrial strategy included plans for deregulation, the building of affordable homes for “British workers and for our veterans” and a £500 billion sovereign wealth fund to support British companies. Reeling at what he called the “insanity” of climate policy, Tice vowed to scrap what Reform awkwardly dubs “net stupid zero”, declaring it “our patriotic duty to use our energy treasure.”
Of course, this prospect, of a resurgent Britain reinvigorated by onshored manufacturing, untethered by red tape and fuelled by abundant offshore oil and gas and untapped shale, is little more than a fever dream. Nonetheless, Reform’s fossil nationalism appeals to a sense of decline felt by people experiencing cost-of-living crises, job precarity, crumbling public services and social isolation, while harnessing the cultural associations of fossil fuels with the land, hard work and national vigour. For those mourning the relative security of an industrial past, it also hits upon the real contradictions of the UK’s energy transition, one that has failed to deliver the long-awaited green jobs boom and attendant prosperity.
Fossil Nationalism
Reform is just the latest mutation in a series of reactionary projects led by Nigel Farage, all of which have been characterized by a melding of anti-climate and anti-migrant politics. In 2022, for instance, Farage’s “Vote Power, Not Poverty” campaign called for a referendum on the UK’s climate commitments, directly evoking Brexit in its exhortation to “take back control of our energy policies and prices.” Invariably, the prescription was to maximize North Sea oil and gas, reverse the fracking ban and rid the countryside of solar and wind installations, with renewable energy companies and their political representatives inheriting the role once played by EU bureaucrats and cosmopolitan elites in the Brexit campaign: remote, multinational figures trampling Britain’s sovereignty and siphoning off its riches.
Such populism, of course, belies Reform’s entanglement with business interests, particularly in the fossil fuel sector. The party, which until recently was a private company owned by Farage, drew 92 per cent of its donations between 2019 and 2024 from oil and gas companies, other polluting industries and associated lobby groups and think tanks, including organizations like the notorious Global Warming Policy Foundation. Reform is also embedded in networks of climate denial that extend far beyond national borders, increasingly sponsored by MAGA-linked groups intent on fostering far-right insurgents across Europe. Farage himself regularly flaunts his friendship with Trump and has enthusiastically transposed the libidinal politics of disaster nationalism into party policy. Matt Goodwin, the party’s ill-fated candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, also has links to the Heritage Foundation, architects of Trump’s dystopian Project 2025.
The case against Reform’s fossil-fuelled future is by now well-rehearsed. The North Sea basin is already depleted, with remaining reserves increasingly small and difficult to extract, rendering operations expensive and uncompetitive. Indeed, while advocates regularly claim that oil and gas development will lower energy bills, drilling is only attractive to investors if prices remain high; the industry has in fact long relied on state subsidies and tax breaks for financial viability. Moreover, oil—the bulk of the North Sea’s vestigial reserves—is sold on the volatile international market, any increased extraction having no bearing on domestic bills, while reliance on fossil fuels prolongs exposure to price shocks. During the 2022 energy crisis, induced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reverberating effects cost households, firms and governments across the EU and UK $1.8 trillion while oil and gas majors made record profits.
Onshore, the prospect of fracking has fired the imaginations of successive fossil nationalists, from the promise of David Cameron’s elusive “shale revolution” to the recent prostrations of Reform’s Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns before a US fracking company. Tice’s promise to release £1 trillion of “treasure” from “under our feet” is just as fanciful as Cameron’s was. Previous attempts to extract gas through hydraulic fracturing faltered in the face of concerted local opposition and safety concerns after earthquake tremors were recorded in Lancashire. Even Reform councillors in Lancashire and Scarborough have dissented, and future projects would likely encounter long planning delays and formidable public protest.
Despite the economic and geological reality of the UK’s energy base, Reform—along with much of the Conservative establishment and the right-wing press—has helped bolstered an emerging common sense around energy security in an increasingly uncertain world. As the US-Israeli war of aggression in Iran drove up oil and gas prices, a cavalcade of talking heads and columnists helped to legitimize this position, filling our screens and pages to promote home-grown fossil fuels as the only right-minded solution. Add to this the GMB union, a longstanding proponent of an “all of the above” energy policy to maintain industrial jobs, who have said that the most recent conflict proves domestic oil and gas remain “vital”.
Reform’s promise of reindustrialization is equally hollow. As David Edgerton has argued, narratives of industrial renewal project an image of the UK that is fundamentally at odds with its contemporary position in the world economy. Deindustrialization has been in train for decades, shaped by international competition, massive global labour restructuring and technological change. Compounded by the longstanding aversion of the state to productive investment, the UK is simply not placed to reclaim the industrial might of yesteryear. The recent job losses in steel and chemicals at Port Talbot and Grangemouth, respectively, have their origins in saturated and fiercely competitive global markets, not an overweening decarbonization drive. Even where there remains a manufacturing base, as in arms and aerospace—rare industries that have benefited from consistent state support—the long-term trend is job diminution, while profits accrue to multinational companies and asset managers.
The appeal of fossil fuels defies either straightforwardly conspiratorial or instrumental analyses. We cannot trace their enduring salience to the smoking gun of a well-funded lobby or to a clear-eyed assessment of their existing integration into the economy—although both are factors. We might also emphasise the cultural resources of nationalism that Reform deploys. This applies to the industries and ways of life that formed around the production of coal, oil and gas as well as the substance of the fuels themselves.