The U.K. boss of the Heartland Institute said she had been influencing Reform UK “at the highest level.”
BY ABBY WALLACE
LONDON — Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is being advised by a think tank which denies the science of climate change and claims the U.K. government wants to use electric vehicles to control its citizens.
Lois Perry, U.K. and Europe director of the Heartland Institute think tank, told attendees at Reform’s annual conference last week that she was “very grateful to be able to consult and influence the Reform Party at the highest level.”
The Heartland Institute confirmed to POLITICO this week that it has “held conversations with policymakers within Reform UK.”
The Institute — which is closely aligned with U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies — has cast doubt on global warming and branded climate change policies a “hoax” and a “scam.”
Earlier this year it backed Trump’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement and to roll back Joe Biden-era clean energy projects.
The organization was invited to an event in the White House Rose Garden when Trump announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement during his first term in office in 2017.
“The reality is this, we’re not facing a climate crisis,” the organization’s President James Taylor told a Heartland-sponsored fringe event at Reform’s party conference in Birmingham Saturday.
He added: “We cannot have a climate crisis predicated on the notion of global warming when temperatures remain unusually cold.”
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is unequivocal that human-induced climate change is “already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”
‘Have a look around you’
Speaking at the same conference fringe event, Perry — a former leader of UKIP — said: “There’s nothing wrong with CO2. CO2 is not a pollutant.”
She said that government net-zero policies are “bad for the environment” and had been introduced “to control us. It’s to tax us. It’s to take our money and it’s to take our liberty.”
Perry added: “They want us in electric cars. Electric cars can be remotely controlled. Again, not a conspiracy theory. These cars can be shut down.
“Imagine during Covid. Imagine your car is disabled remotely. You have no control over it, because it’s an electric car. And that’s if you can afford an electric car. There’s a reason why this neo-Marxist, communist, shambolic government wants us in electric cars. It is so that we have no freedom whatsoever.”
