Reform UK’s latest energy gambit reads like a fever dream (Tice has a lot of these) of 1980s Thatcherite boosterism—shale gas as “hundreds of billions in energy treasure,” trembling beneath our feet, just waiting for the heroic drill of free-market adventurers. Richard Tice’s rhetoric is not merely reckless; it is a cynical spectacle of neoliberal bravado dressed as fiscal responsibility. To call leaving gas underground “grossly financially negligent to a criminal degree” is to turn common sense on its head: the real crime is extracting profit from an exhausted earth while the climate burns, and leaving communities to pick up the tab.
The Reform pitch is a nostalgic fantasy of the American shale boom, ignoring that the U.S. experience brought not energy independence but environmental ruin, groundwater contamination, and seismic tremors. Protest, legal challenge, and community resistance (dismissed here as mere obstacles…LOL) were not aesthetic inconveniences but the embodied, rational opposition of people refusing to be sacrificed on the altar of private profit.
Make no mistake: this is about private profit. The “attractive regulatory and tax framework” promised by Tice is a gift to corporations, not communities. Public money is off the table, but public risk (earthquakes, pollution, and the acceleration of the climate crisis) is not. Every meeting with oil and gas firms, every pep talk in Aberdeen, every pre-election signalling of drilling ambition is the staging of a corporate coup, using Reform UK as its parliamentary proxy.
Meanwhile, Labour’s commitment to fill in the last wells and ban fracking “for good” is derided as obstructionist, yet the only obstruction is to private accumulation. Clean energy, according to Energy Minister Miatta Fahnbulleh, is dismissed by Reform as an abstract fantasy, yet it is the only route to genuine energy sovereignty: independence not in dollars extracted, but in resilience built, emissions curtailed, and communities empowered.
“Frack, baby, frack” is not a policy; it is a Faragist logan for the terminal triumph of short-term greed over long-term survival. Reform UK offers Britain neither energy security nor fiscal prudence. All it offers us, is seismic shocks in the earth and in our politics, all under the guise of “treasure.” The true criminal negligence is theirs: betting the future of the nation’s children on the whims of the oil market while the world heats beyond repair.
