For the future of green politics, look beyond the Green party | Zoe Williams — SkimNews
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- Reform UK has prevailed at multiple councils moving to scrap climate emergency declarations; a similar King's Lynn motion lost 33-7 after a June meeting was suspended due to extreme heat in the chamber.
- Linden Kemkaran, a Reform UK councillor in Kent, argued climate change is fine because the Roman era was warmer and that CO2 is "a trace gas essential for life on Earth," making carbon cuts themselves dangerous.
- Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read's recent report advocates "eco-popularism" — concrete policies that "would genuinely change lives for the better" rather than appeals to emotion or abstract global disaster.
- Reform's "resilience building" pivot in King's Lynn stripped the phrase of any concrete meaning — no peat restoration, retrofitting, community wind, solar, or sustainable drainage — leaving "spend less on climate" rebranded as community strength.
- Nigel Farage's column last year, paraphrased by Lucas and Read, framed climate action as a "luxury belief of the comfortable elite" — a framing the column says Reform councils are amplifying locally.
- 68% of people want action on climate change, yet no single party represents that constituency in modern British politics, the column argues.
Why it matters: Reform UK is winning council votes to scrap climate emergency declarations even as 68% of people want climate action. The Lucas-Read report argues cross-party eco-popularism — concrete local gains rather than abstract global appeals — is the only counter to the cost-of-living narrative populists are exploiting at the local level.
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