Following our expose of finance and big business affiliations of 20 of the Brexit Party would be MEP’s, we’re happy to republish a DeSmog article on the other common thread: Meet the Brexit Party’s Climate Change Deniers
With the rise of the Brexit Party threatening to send a new crop of climate science deniers to the European Parliament – and a full list of candidates now published – here are some of the party’s leading figures whose views on climate change are either ill-informed, obstructive, or both.
Nigel Farage
Farage has a history of spreading misinformation about climate science, of which DeSmog has kept track over the years. He told an interviewer in 2013: “I’m all for pollution controls but to obsess with carbon dioxide, which as I understand it, is a perfectly natural occurring phenomenon, strikes me as strange.”
Farage has also called wind energy “the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life.” That would be the cheapest source of new power, along with solar, energy experts now say.
Under his watch, UKIP’s 2015 and 2017 general election manifestos pledged to rip up green measures, including a promise to repeal the UK’s Climate Change Act, withdraw from the Paris Agreement and spur on fracking.
On the day of the Brexit Party launch, Farage told BBC Radio 4 there was “no difference between the Brexit party and UKIP in terms of policy,” which gives an indication of where the Brexit Party stands on climate change.
Ann Widdecombe
Although she might be better known by some for her moves on Strictly Come Dancing, the controversial former Conservative minister also made a name for herself as one of a small band of hard-line climate science deniers in the House of Commons.
Widdecombe, who retired from Parliament in 2010, was one of only five MPs to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. The following year she told the Daily Express: “There is no climate change, hasn’t anybody looked out of their window recently?”
Six years after the bill passed into law, Widdecombe wrote that she was proud to have been one of the “rebels” and credits fellow Conservative Nigel Lawson, founder of the climate denial campaign group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, with convincing her. In the same article, she compared the rejection of climate science denial to book-burning in 1930s Germany.
Another skeptic of wind power, Widdecombe has called the turbines “vast, ugly, inefficient” and “bird-mashing.” Evidence suggests wind turbines are responsible for far fewer bird deaths than other factors, including fossil fuel power stations.
Annunziata Rees-Mogg
Annunziata Rees-Mogg is a headhunter, former journalist and unsuccessful Conservative parliamentary candidate, havingstood for the party in the 2005 and 2010 general elections. Her brother is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the “hard” Brexiteer Conservative MP and an opponent of measures to tackle climate change.
While editor of the investment magazine MoneyWeek, Annunziata Rees-Mogg wrote articles recommending how readers could best profit from the Canadian “tar sands” boom and predicted that coal was about to make a comeback to the UK. In another article, though, on “How to profit from the world’s water crisis”, she noted that climate change “will mean more extreme weather conditions and more water in the sea.”
Rees-Mogg was previously editor of the European Journal, a magazine owned by anti-EU thinktank the European Foundation, founded and chaired by Conservative MP Sir Bill Cash. The Foundation is part of a network of pro-Brexit anti-regulation organisations based out of offices in and around Tufton Street. The UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, is based at 55 Tufton Street offices.
Continuing a long tradition of people confusing the climate and the weather, Rees-Mogg once tweeted: “I’m really enjoying this global warming. Simply tropical for late April in London.”
Claire Fox
A regular guest on BBC Radio 4’s “Moral Maze” programme, Claire Fox runs a libertarian think tank called the Institute of Ideas, rejecting government intervention even on issues like child pornography and online terror videos.
In a debate with environmental journalist George Monbiot, reported by the climate science denial blogger Ben Pile, she was asked whether she wanted people to be “free to pollute,” answering: “I want freedom.”
Fox has frequently tweeted about her denial of climate science, calling the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “advocacy research” and says treating the body as “high priests of The Science and final word on climate” would be a “betrayal of scientific inquiry.”
Fox has also tweeted supportively of Viscount Matt Ridley’s climate science denial and recommended people look to Bjorn Lomborg, who argues it would be too expensive to tackle climate change in a meaningful way.
Fox is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and forms part of a pro-free market network based around the Spiked magazine, funded by US oil billionaires the Koch brothers, as DeSmog revealed.
Alka Cuthbert, another Brexit Party candidate, is also a regular Spiked contributor. They are joined by Stuart Walton, a Senior Lecturer at Abertay University who has called for all hate crime legislation to be repealed, says anti-smacking legislation “criminalises parents”, and who has spoken at Fox’s Battle of Ideas extravangaza on why people are becoming reluctant to “fight for Queen and country”.
Read DeSmog’s investigation into the Koch-funded Spiked network
George Farmer
George Farmer is the chairman of Turning Point UK (TPUK), a newly launched right-wing student organisation and an offshoot of