Freshly empowered in local administrations across the land, Richard Tice has been outlining the priorities of the People’s Republic of Reformia. “If you are thinking of investing in solar farms, battery storage systems, or trying to build pylons,” he wrote on X, on Saturday, “think again. We will fight you every step of the way. We will win.”

He meant it, too. “This is war,” he announced the following day. “We will wage war against you people and your terrible ideas.” In his arsenal are “planning blockages”, “judicial reviews”, “lawsuits”, “health and safety notices” and “every available legal measure” to prevent things like “ugly pylons” appearing on Reform land.

“It’s going to cost you a fortune,” he warned developers, and they wouldn’t get anywhere, either. “So give up and go away.”

I’m not sure what pylons these parts of the country will be allowed instead. Sexy pylons, perhaps. Pylons that excite the passions of a Reform UK gentleman as much as a bare ankle excited the Victorians. I’m also not clear why he left out wind farms. Maybe he just forgot.

We’re left, either way, with an obvious question, and that is, “why?” Because it seems to me that something weird is going on here. Indeed, something worse than weird. Something pathological. One thinks of liberals wincing when passing a Trump hotel, or even of pro-Palestinian protesters so triggered by posters of Israeli hostages that they have to tear them down. In the Commons, repeatedly, Tice has attacked Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, over his “obsession” with renewable energy. I’m not certain it’s Miliband who is obsessed.

Net zero is in trouble. Everyone knows that, even if some still don’t want to say. Yesterday, the Hornsea 4 wind farm expansion in the North Sea fell apart, as the developer declared it no longer made financial sense. Sitting here in 2025, the idea that we’ll buy no more petrol cars and have almost no fossil fuel energy by 2030 resembles what you might call a “pipe dream”, were it not for pipes being exactly what it dreams of doing without. You can see, in real time, Kemi Badenoch hardening in her view that net zero is costly and doomed to fail, no matter that she once supported it. Distressing as environmentalists may find it, she might be right.

Some would argue — and they include me — that it’s worth aiming for, anyway. We will never regret having clean, green energy once it’s here, any more than we will regret the energy security that only a huge domestic supply of it can give us. It also seems inevitable to me that every country on Earth will eventually be pretty green. And we don’t want to end up as a dirty, backwards nation, still reliant on setting fire to stuff long after the likes of India and China have started asking us to stop.

The rationale of renewable energy, though, needn’t rest upon any of that. Nor need it rest upon Miliband’s timetable. Or, to put that another way, project by project, green energy remains a good idea, even if net zero by 2030 absolutely isn’t.

If Richard Tice doesn’t recognise this, then he could try asking a man called, um, Richard Tice, whose property company told shareholders only in 2023 how much money could be made from investing in solar panels. “Solar panels are a good way to multi-use a roof,” he explained to The Guardian, presumably before he decided he had to fight people like himself every step of the way.

Or he could ask the former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, who not only had battery storage and solar panels installed at his farm in Cheltenham but had them installed by his own mechanical installations company, which then boasted about how much money it would save. Mind you, he might not be answering Tice’s calls.

On her own campaign website, meanwhile, the new Reform UK mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, declares that she, too, will be “fighting against solar and wind farms on prime agricultural land”. If she also wonders what sort of monster supports such things, she could try asking (I think you can see where this is going) one Andrea Jenkyns, who as a Tory MP was the guest of honour at the opening of the 20-acre Haigh Hall solar farm. Feasibly, one of these Jenkynses might also want to ask the other Jenkyns why the tweets she sent out about this at the time have since been deleted. Although she may already know.

On solar farms, Reform’s position rests upon outrage that farmland, which should be used to grow good patriotic British vegetables, is being given over to woke Milibandite energy instead. Were we starving, this would indeed be problematic. Yet about 70 per cent of the UK is farmland, and energy types reckon we could supply all of our electricity needs — repeat, all — with something like 1 per cent of that. So I reckon we’ll be OK.

On battery storage installations, meanwhile, Tice has taken to tweeting about the risk of them catching fire. Granted, I wouldn’t want to live next door to one if it went up. But I’m not sure I’d want a shale gas plant in my village catching fire either. Or, for that matter, a modular nuclear reactor.

None of this is real, and they know it. In reality, and so transparently, Reform UK’s antipathy to green energy is based on antipathy to the people who support it. Whatever you think of net zero, or indeed of Miliband, your bills are not going to get more expensive because somebody in Lincolnshire builds a solar farm. Green energy is still energy, green investment is still investment, and green growth is still growth.

Being charitable, perhaps Tice, Jenkyns, Farage and the rest have truly convinced themselves they’re in a war against ideologues. But who are the ideologues now?