Reform’s farmers are feeling the heat

“I’ve never seen such good-looking crops yield so badly in my entire farming career,” he wrote on X.

The “disaster of a harvest” was “soul-destroying for everybody involved,” he added, noting that farmers’ hard work was getting “destroyed by weather, seemingly every year now”. 

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Sadly, Bailye – who this year worked with Reform’s chief of staff James Orr on drafting the party’s agricultural policy – has a history of expressing climate science denial wildly at odds with his own experience of fossil-fuelled heatwaves.

Bailye has downplayed the urgency of slashing greenhouse gas emissions, and has frequently cast doubt on our impact on the climate.

Global warming, he has written, is a “perfectly natural long-term planetary phenomenon”, while the word “environment” has been hijacked “by the climate change nut jobs”. 

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These are perhaps unsurprising sentiments from a man who contributes to a party that would scrap the UK’s 2050 net zero target and end subsidies for renewable energy. Incidentally, as DeSmog has exposed, Reform has received tens of millions from fossil fuel interests.

Meanwhile, Reform leader Nigel Farage has said it is “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant.

Bailye insists he is not a climate science denier, pointing to his own use of regenerative farming methods such as soil carbon sequestration and zero tilling. And while he may not quite be joining the dots between weather and climate change, he can clearly see how extreme weather is leading to unprecedented, intolerable conditions for farmers.

If Reform is serious about supporting farming communities – or even winning the next election – it might just want to take note.