Radical right-wing think tanks previously associated with the Conservative Party are flocking to this year’s Reform UK conference, DeSmog can reveal.

The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) is set to host an event at Reform’s conference alongside the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), and the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA). All three of these groups are part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of “free market” think tanks and lobbyists based in Westminster, London, that are opposed to government spending and regulation, including on climate action.

The event, entitled “The Bully State: How Nanny is taking over Britain”, will feature James McMurdock, Reform’s MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. The panel will also include George Morris Seers, the head of UK public affairs at the global tobacco and vaping company Japan Tobacco International (JTI).

A number of Tufton Street think tanks have received funding from tobacco companies in the past. The IEA has received funding from British American Tobacco (BAT) – the firm behind the likes of Dunhill and Lucky Strike – since 1963, receiving £40,000 from BAT in 2018. The ASI has accepted sponsorship from JTI in the past, as well as funding from other undisclosed tobacco companies.

According to the ASI website, the Reform conference event, set to take place in Birmingham on Friday (20 September) will focus on how “burgeoning public health interventions” are allegedly restricting individual freedoms. “We are asking where these coercions have come from and how we can limit them,” the event page states. 

These claims have been made in relation to climate action, with anti-green groups including Reform UK alleging that government policies to limit air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are placing too many costs on ordinary people. The party, run by climate science denier Nigel Farage, has called on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target to be scrapped entirely. 

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, has warned that policies to reduce emissions are being hindered by a “prevailing narrative… pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult; it’s too expensive.”

Both Reform UK and Tufton Street groups have a history of accepting funding from fossil fuel interests and those who have donated to climate science denial groups. 

As DeSmog has revealed, Farage’s party received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate deniers between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, equating to 92 percent of its funding.

Between 2019 and 2023, the ASI accepted £40,000 from Nigel Vinson – one of the few known donors to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group – and £40,000 from Tory peer Lord Jon Moynihan. Lord Moynihan holds shares worth more than £100,000 in each of the oil and gas majors BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies. He has also provided funding to the GWPF.

The TPA also received £35,000 from Lord Moynihan between 2019 and 2023.

In 2018, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit Unearthed revealed that the IEA had received funding from oil major BP every year since 1967. In response to the story, an IEA spokeswoman said: “It is surely uncontroversial that the IEA’s principles coincide with the interests of our donors.” 

The IEA also received a £21,000 grant from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil in 2005, and last year received £3.7 million from Vinson – the IEA’s life vice president and a former Conservative member of the House of Lords.

55 Tufton Street in Westminster, which houses the GWPF, acts as a focal point for these free market groups and is owned by Reform donor Richard Smith. 

The Tufton Street network has historically been close to the Conservative Party, with its alumni often going on to work for Tory governments. DeSmog and Democracy For Sale revealed in June that Conservative donors had given over £6.8 million to Tufton Street think tanks since 2019.

However, with Reform challenging the Conservatives in the polls – following the party’s worst ever election result in July – it appears as though Tory think tanks may be cultivating relationships with Farage’s party as a new route to political influence. 

This includes Policy Exchange – an influential think tank that has close ties to the Conservative Party. Policy Exchange is planning on launching its new ‘Future of the Right’ project on the opening day of Reform’s conference, featuring Rupert Lowe, the party’s MP for Great Yarmouth. 

The event will also feature former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has a history of obstructing climate science, alongside Lord Charles Moore – a former GWPF trustee.

Speaking at the think tank’s 2023 summer party, former prime minister Rishi Sunak credited Policy Exchange with “helping us draft” the government’s crackdown on protests – policies that saw more than 2,000 people arrested from the climate activist group Just Stop Oil in the year to April 2023. Policy Exchange received $30,000 from ExxonMobil in 2017.

DeSmog has been blocked from attending the Reform conference, which runs on 20 and 21 September. 

The ASI, IEA, TPA, and Policy Exchange were approached for comment. Reform UK declined to comment. 

The Tufton Street Network

The IEA, TPA, and ASI are prominent supporters of the continued and extended extraction of fossil fuels. 

They have all advocated for the ban to be lifted on fracking for shale gas, with the IEA calling it the “moral and economic choice” and the ASI saying that it could “play an important role in lowering energy costs”.

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee – a body of MPs that advises the government on climate matters – concluded in 2019 that fracking was incompatible with the UK’s climate goals.

These think tanks have also all opposed a ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences, and have criticised the windfall tax imposed by the government on fossil fuel firms in May 2022. The IEA said that the last government’s commitment to “max out” the UK’s fossil fuel reserves was a “welcome step”.

Stephen Davies, a senior figure at the IEA, appeared several times in Climate The Movie: The Cold Truth – a film directed by climate science denier Martin Durkin that allegedly contained more than two dozen myths about climate change. 

In the documentary, released earlier this year, Davies claimed that climate activists want to impose an “austere” life on ordinary people. “Behind all the talk about a climate emergency, climate crisis” is “an animus and hostility towards” working-class people, “their lifestyle, their beliefs and a desire to change it by force if necessary,” he said.

The IEA said that “Steve firmly believes that climate change is happening and carbon emissions are having an impact.”

As of 2021, the IEA, TPA, and ASI were all members of the Atlas Network – an international collaboration of “extreme” free market groups that have been accused of promoting the interests of fossil fuel companies and other large corporations.

In his recent biography of former prime minister Liz Truss, the historian Anthony Seldon – whose father Arthur Seldon co-founded the IEA in 1955 – criticised the group for moving away from “the academic scholarship that characterised its early years to appeal to a certain breed of right-wing politician promoting specific causes such as Brexit, climate change scepticism and opposition to the nanny state”.

The IEA was highly influential during Truss’s short-lived time as prime minister in late 2022. In 2011, just a year after entering Parliament, Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group of backbench Conservative MPs described as the “parliamentary wing” of the IEA. The IEA’s then director general Mark Littlewood told Politico that Truss had spoken at IEA events more than “any other politician over the past 12 years”, while former Downing Street adviser Tim Montgomerie claimed that the think tank “incubated” Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

Tufton Street groups are characterised by a lack of transparency over their funding sources. The IEA, TPA, and ASI don’t publicly declare the names of their donors.

“It is time all political parties, including Reform, started asking questions of the ASI, IEA and TPA,” said Tom Brake, former Liberal Democrat MP and director of the campaign group Unlock Democracy. “They could start with, ‘Who funds you?’ and follow up with ‘Why?’. It is only once these most basic of questions have been answered that politicians, and the public, will have a clearer idea of their agenda and purpose.”

Reform’s Climate Denial

Reform UK campaigns for net zero to be scrapped, claiming that “we must not impoverish ourselves in pursuit of unaffordable, unachievable global CO2 targets.”

Prior to the 2024 election campaign, Reform’s policy agenda promoted climate science denial, claiming that “climate change has happened for millions of years, before man made CO2 emissions, and will always change”. 

Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries, to many thousands of years”.

Reform’s election manifesto claimed that “net zero is crippling our economy” and that “renewables are not cheaper than fossil fuels”. Despite this, Reform MP Rupert Lowe owns one green technology company, and holds shares in another. 

Farage has himself denied established climate science. Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”

On 13 September, Farage headlined a Heartland Institute fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois, and urged the U.S. to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The IPCC has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

Polling by More in Common and E3G during the 2024 general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about rising temperatures, including 65 percent in Farage’s Clacton constituency, which is at risk of flooding and sea level rises due to climate change.

Reform’s former leader Richard Tice, who is now Farage’s deputy, is also a prominent climate science denier. Tice has claimed that “there is no climate crisis”, and has also expressed the view that “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.

Reform previously told DeSmog that: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it. We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.”