Latest reports suggest that Rishi Sunak, UK Prime Minister attended a protest alongside a group which has posted conspiracy theories about climate change, and which campaigns against net zero, the Observer can reveal.
Sunak has severally been accused of “pandering to extremists” by farmers and wildlife groups, who have asked him to “listen to reason and logic” rather than conspiracy theories.
He has however been making a concerted effort to improve his party’s standing in rural areas after polling showed the majority of countryside seats are likely to be lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the next general election. Last week, he gave the keynote address at the National Farmers’ Union conference where he told farmers “I have your back.”
On Friday, he attended a farmers’ protest against the Welsh Labour government, which is proposing to bring in a new payments scheme in which farmers will have to prove 10% of their land is woodland and 10% of it is quality habitat for wildlife. He appeared alongside farmer Gareth Wyn Jones and stood next to placards emblazoned with the logo for the campaign “No Farmers No Food”.
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Wyn Jones is a leading supporter of the campaign, which was started and is being run by James Melville, a GB News pundit and communications consultant.
Sunak joined in the protest, along with Andrew RT Davies the Welsh Conservatives leader, telling those assembled with their tractors that they had been “treated as Labour’s laboratory”. Speaking to Wyn Jones, he said the new subsidies scheme was “absolutely not right, the impact it will have on your jobs, your livelihoods, your incomes and food production around the country. It’s simply wrong.”
The No Farmers No Food campaign is anti net-zero and has shared conspiracy theories about climate change action, while Melville has questioned the effects of climate breakdown as well as sharing conspiracy theories about net zero.
Its manifesto accuses the UK government of having an “obsession with net zero” and calls for it to end climate measures.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
