Nigel Farage’s Reform UK describes itself as a people’s movement taking on the British establishment.
The anti-immigration party, which won five seats in July’s general election and is holding its annual conference this week in Birmingham, attacks climate action as a costly imposition by “elites” on ordinary people.
But a DeSmog analysis reveals that Reform UK has a powerful network of support among wealthy individuals and well-funded think tanks, many of which have fossil fuel interests and display a history of climate science denial.
Reform campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”, advocates for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the opening of new coal mines, and has cast doubt on climate science.
It sits among a co-ordinated populist movement in Europe and the U.S. that in recent years has tried to turn climate action into a “wedge” issue to divide voters.
On 13 September, Farage headlined a fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois, for the Heartland Institute – a group that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change – and urged the U.S. to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.
Reform received 14.3 percent of the vote in the general election and has said it wants to become the UK’s main opposition party to the Labour government.
Today’s investigation and interactive map compiles for the first time the political infrastructure supporting Reform’s anti-climate crusade.
Georgie Laming, director of campaigns for the anti-fascist charity HOPE not hate, responding to the investigation, told DeSmog: “Like many far-right parties in the West, Reform UK is propped up by the fossil fuel industry and climate change deniers, not the working people they claim to represent.
“Climate change is the biggest threat faced by the world, but Farage and his party are only protecting the interests of their funders – not their voters.”
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.”
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.”
Fossil Fuel Interests and Climate Denial Donors
As DeSmog revealed in June, Reform received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate deniers between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, amounting to 92 percent of its funding during this period.
This included £200,000 from First Corporate Consultants – a firm owned by Terence Mordaunt, a former director and chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
The GWPF has in the past expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. Mordaunt himself told openDemocracy in 2019 that “no one has proved yet that CO2 is the culprit” of climate change.
The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (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”.
Reform has also received more than £500,000 from Jeremy Hosking, whose investment firm Hosking Partners had more than $134 million (around £108 million) invested in the energy sector at the close of 2021, two thirds of which was in the oil industry, along with millions in coal and gas.
Hosking previously told DeSmog: “I do not have millions in fossil fuels; it is the clients of Hosking Partners who are the beneficiaries of these investments.”
Both former Tory donors, Hosking and Mordaunt epitomise a trend among senior Reform politicians and funders.
Reform draws many of its biggest financial backers from the Conservative Party. Twelve of its funders are current or former donors to the Conservatives: Richard Tice, Jeremy Hosking, Christopher Harborne, David Lilley, Terence Mordaunt, Zia Yusuf, George Farmer, Richard Smith, Fitriani Hay, Holly Valance, Robin Birley, Andrew Perloff, and Crispin Odey.
These include Zia Yusuf, who was still a paying Tory member as of August this year despite becoming Reform chairman in July and donating £200,000 to the party in June.
Three out of Reform’s five MPs are former Conservative Party members: Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, and Lee Anderson.
Farage quit the Tories in 1992 and was a founding member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) the following year. Tice has said that he was a Conservative member and donor until April 2019, when he and Farage set up the Brexit Party, Reform’s forerunner. Anderson was a Tory MP until February this year, when he was suspended after saying Islamists had “got control” of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and defected to Reform in March.
David Bull and Ben Habib, who are former Reform deputy leaders and stood for the party in July’s general election, are also former Tory members, as is Howard Cox, an anti-fuel tax lobbyist and climate science denier, who stood as a Reform candidate in the general election and the London Mayoral election in May.
The Media
Reform also receives a significant platform from millionaire-owned newspapers and broadcasters.
In particular, the party has been amplified by GB News, a right-wing broadcaster launched in June 2021.
Nigel Farage presents a TV show on GB News, having joined the broadcaster soon after its launch. Reform MP and deputy leader Richard Tice also hosts a show on the platform, as does Reform MP Lee Anderson.
In August Farage declared £81,607 from GB News, which he claimed covered several months of pay, having previously registered £97,928 per month from the broadcaster. Anderson receives £100,000 per year from GB News, according to his register of interests. Tice has yet to declare his GB News salary.
A DeSmog investigation last year found that one in three GB News hosts had broadcast climate science denial in 2022, while nearly half had attacked net zero. In May, DeSmog revealed that figures associated with the GWPF had appeared on GB News 36 times in the previous seven months.
Reform candidate Howard Cox is a columnist for the GB News website and a frequent guest on the channel, as is former deputy leader Ben Habib.
GB News is owned by Paul Marshall, a millionaire hedge fund manager, alongside the Legatum Group, an investment firm based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Marshall, who also owns the right-wing opinion website Unherd, recently bought The Spectator magazine for £100 million.
As DeSmog has revealed, Marshall’s hedge fund Marshall Wace had £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels firms – including oil and gas majors Chevron, Shell, and Equinor – as of June 2023.
One of Marshall Wace’s biggest investors, US private equity firm KKR, also has a large fossil fuel portfolio, including 188 assets in oil, gas, and coal.
Marshall is in talks to buy The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers, which would add more anti-green platforms to his growing media portfolio.
Farage is paid £4,000 per month to write a column for The Telegraph, where he has written since at least 2016. In July 2023 he was hired as U.S. columnist and analyst for the right-wing Daily Express newspaper.
Reform has also received support from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
In 2017, shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Farage was hired by Murdoch’s Fox News as a political analyst. Farage has continued to appear on the channel as recently as August, though he has yet to declare any income from Fox during his time as an MP.
At least three Reform politicians have also had paid roles at Talk TV, the GB News rival owned by Murdoch’s News UK.
Richard Tice was a presenter on Talk TV from April 2022 to September 2023, when he left to join Farage at GB News. Tice’s partner, journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who publicly advocates for Reform policies, is Talk TV’s international editor, having joined in April 2022. She had previously hosted shows on GB News. Tice and Oakeshott also write columns for The Telegraph.
David Bull, who was Reform’s deputy leader from 2021 to 2023 and stood as a Reform candidate in July’s general election, has been a Talk TV presenter since 2022. Howard Cox and Ben Habib are frequent guests on Talk TV.
Cox also often writes articles for The Sun newspaper, owned by News UK.
“The fossil fuel industry isn’t just poisoning our planet – it’s polluting our media and politics too”, said Richard Wilson, director of the Stop Funding Heat campaign.
“Oil and gas billionaires have a long history of supporting groups that claim to be standing up for ordinary people against ‘the elites’ while promoting policies that benefit the rich and powerful, and put the rest of us at risk.
Tufton Street Ties
Reform also has ties to an influential network of think tanks grouped around 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, London, which campaign against government regulation and have a record of opposing climate action.
Reform donor Richard Smith owns 55 Tufton Street, the building which houses the GWPF.
Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham this week features an event on the ‘Nanny State’ hosted by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and featuring senior figures at fellow Tufton Street groups the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), and the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA).
The right-wing think tank Policy Exchange is also launching its ‘Future of the Right’ project during Reform’s conference. The event will feature Reform MP Rupert Lowe, former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who has a history of obstructing climate science, and Lord Charles Moore – a former GWPF trustee.
GB News and Spectator boss Paul Marshall donated £890,000 via his charity Sequoia Trust to Policy Exchange between 2020 and 2023. The think tank – which has in the past received money from the oil and gas major ExxonMobil – was credited by former prime minister Rishi Sunak for helping to draft laws that have cracked down on climate protests.
Marshall has also donated £1 million to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a conservative lobby group led by psychologist and author Jordan Peterson that has extensive links to climate science denial.
In July, Farage was interviewed by Peterson for the Canadian author’s YouTube channel. Peterson attacked “idiot climate apocalypse-mongering that’s used by power-mad tyrants to cow the public”, and claimed that CO2 emissions were a “net benefit” to the planet. Farage argued that the UK’s climate policies “have transferred vast amounts of wealth from the poorest to the richest”, and suggested global warming was caused by sunspots and underwater volcanoes.
Authors working for the 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”.
American and European Populism
Reform also has a number of warm relations with radical right-wing groups abroad.
Last week, Farage spoke at a benefit event for the Heartland Institute, a climate denial group that received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil.
Heartland has also received tens of thousands in donations from foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a U.S. fossil fuel behemoth and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.
On 18 July, Farage attended the Republican National Convention, saying that he wanted to “support my friend Donald Trump”. The Reform leader campaigned in 2016 and 2020 for Trump, who erroneously claimed in a recent interview with X owner Elon Musk that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property”.
Farage was paid £13,000 to speak at the ‘Keep Arizona Free Summit’ on 24 August, a libertarian event hosted by the AZ Liberty Network. In February, he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a right-wing U.S. event linked to the Republican Party.
In March, Farage used his GB News show to interview Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. group behind Project 2025, a radical blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Farage also gave a speech to the group back in 2015 about the prospects of a UK referendum on EU membership.
Project 2025 would roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate action, slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping state investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. Heritage received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to Koch Industries.
As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.
Farage also has ties with hard-right parties and lobbying groups in Europe.
In April, Farage spoke at a National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Brussels alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. As DeSmog reported at the time, the event was co-organised by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a Hungarian think tank chaired by Orban’s political director that is funded via a 10 percent stake in MOL, Hungary’s oil and gas giant.
NatCon events have also hosted Trump allies Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, along with Conservative MP and former home secretary Suella Braverman, who has called for net zero targets to be delayed.
At the Heartland event last week, Farage spoke alongside Harald Vilimsky, an MEP for Austria’s far-right Freedom Party who leads its group in the European Parliament.
In 2017, Farage endorsed far-right politician Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections. The same year, Farage spoke at an election rally for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD).
Farage has also said repeatedly that he admires Russian president Vladimir Putin as a “political operator”, and has advocated the UK working with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. As DeSmog reported in June, Reform donor David Lilley, who gave the party £100,000 ahead of the general election, owns 12,000 hectares of farmland in the Stavropol region of Russia.
Lilley previously confirmed to DeSmog that he still owns this land, saying that “I have never made a secret of my assets in Russia.” He said that he had made no profit on these assets since February 2022 and that he had been prevented from selling them by the Russian state.
