Reform UK's Richard Tice Says Britain Should 'Enjoy' Heatwaves and Stop Trying to Tackle Climate Change
Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, told journalists at a press conference on 17 August 2026 that trying to stop the climate emergency was "arrogant" and urged the British public to "enjoy" the warmth of recent heatwaves. "Climate change has always happened. It always will. Maybe the smarter thing to do is to adapt to it than think arrogantly that you can stop it," Tice said The Guardian.
His comments came after a record-breaking summer in the UK during which temperatures rose above 35C several times. The heatwaves caused thousands of deaths, millions of hospital visits, and cost the UK an estimated £4bn in economic output. British farmers, separately, warned of one of the worst harvests on record Financial Times. Tice compared this summer's heat to that of 1976, saying "when it's a bit warm, let's enjoy it," and suggested that improved English and sparkling wine could let the UK "take on the French."
Tice also called on the government to invest in desalination plants — facilities that remove salt from seawater to make it drinkable — which he said worked well in the Middle East, where he spends much of his time. This adaptation-only approach aligns with a position he has held publicly since at least 2024, when he posted: "We are not in climate emergency; nor is there a climate crisis. But yes, climate change is real because it has happened for millions of years past & will do in future." In a February 2025 interview with Sky News' Ali Fortescue, Tice went further, stating he does not accept that the main elements of climate change are "man made" Sky News via Instagram. He expanded on his energy positions in a May 2026 interview with Bloomberg's Akshat Rathi on the Zero podcast, discussing the unfolding energy crisis Bloomberg.
Reform UK has long campaigned to scrap the government's commitment to reaching net zero by 2050 — the target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible — and has promised to end green subsidies if elected. The party has taken tens of millions of pounds in donations from people with connections to the fossil fuel industry since it was set up in 2019, most notably from billionaire Christopher Harborne, who owns a jet fuel brokerage. Harborne's £5m gift to Nigel Farage is at the centre of a parliamentary inquiry.
The broader context here matters for two reasons. First, Tice's framing positions adaptation and mitigation (reducing emissions) as mutually exclusive, a framing at odds with the consensus in climate policy literature, including reports from the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body that assesses climate science), which treat them as complementary and deeply interdependent. Second, the financial architecture behind Reform UK's climate stance raises direct accountability questions. When a party campaigning to dismantle net zero policy receives substantial funding from fossil-fuel-linked donors, the line between ideological conviction and material interest becomes a matter of legitimate scrutiny. The parliamentary inquiry into Harborne's £5m gift to Farage ensures that scrutiny will have an institutional vehicle, though its scope and timeline remain undefined.
Tice's invocation of 1976 also warrants examination. The 1976 heatwave, while severe, was a discrete meteorological event. The summer of 2026, by contrast, saw sustained temperatures above 35C across multiple episodes, producing mortality and economic impacts at a scale the 1976 event did not approach. Collapsing the two into the same rhetorical category, as Tice does, functions as a minimization device. The £4bn economic output loss, thousands of deaths, and millions of hospital visits attributed to this summer's heat are not analogous to the drought-driven hosepipe bans of 1976. The concurrent warning from farmers of one of the worst harvests on record further illustrates the agricultural-system stress that repeated high-temperature episodes impose, distinct from a single anomalous summer.
The desalination proposal reveals the internal logic of an adaptation-only posture. If mitigation is abandoned as futile, the state must absorb the full cost of managing water scarcity, agricultural disruption, and heat-related mortality through infrastructure investment and emergency response. Desalination is energy-intensive and expensive. Scaling it as a primary water-security strategy, as Middle Eastern economies with different resource profiles have done, would require a fiscal and energy commitment that sits uneasily alongside Reform UK's broader deregulatory and subsidy-cutting platform. The policy coherence of adaptation at scale without mitigation remains unaddressed.
