When it was put to him that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, was blithe in his reponse: “Why do you think the UK is one of the most nature-dependent places? You look at our countryside, look at the environment, it’s incredible. It’s absolutely remarkable.”
But, whether Tice admits it or not, the truth is that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We have lost 97 per cent of our wildflower meadows in just a century. 87 per cent of our peatlands are degraded, dried out and now emitting tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Just 17 per cent of our globally rare chalk streams are in good ecological condition. Our temperate rainforests cling on to a mere one per cent of our landscape, tiny yet luscious green islands amid a sea of intensively farmed land and growing urbanisation.
To offer a vision for Britain’s future, Reform must do more than sneer at environmental concerns
This is not a subjective impression or a left-wing talking point. It is a measurable decline. Yes, our countryside is still, for the most part, green. A ramble through it could certainly be described as pleasant. But we do our countryside a disservice when we refuse to dig a little deeper. Beneath the bucolic scenes of rolling hills and neatly managed hedgerows lies a tragic story of loss and depletion.
Tice is far from alone in his ignorance. For those who have grown up with farmland devoid of birdsong, rivers choked with pollution and rare habitats hanging on by a thread, it is easy to assume that what we see today is normal. This is what ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: each generation takes the state of nature it inherits as the norm, with no sense of what has been lost before its time.
Tice’s incredulity is the political manifestation of this amnesia. When he says, “Why do you think that?”, what he appears to mean is, “I don’t remember it being any better, so I won’t believe you if you say it was”.
The countryside of just a few generations ago would be almost unrecognisable today. Farming at the turn of the 20th century was far gentler on the land, when nature rather than machinery dictated a field’s shape. Rarely were fields perfect squares and rectangles. Along the edges, wildflowers thrived, attracting insects that in turn fuelled a cacophony of song with birds like curlew and lapwing swarming the skies, their calls a constant backdrop to rural life.
Those shaggy field edges have since been tamed. Hedgerows and the wildlife that once inhabited them are gone. The fields are larger, the insects have vanished and the chorus of birdsong that fed on them has been all but silenced.
It is no surprise, therefore, that many of today’s children cannot even identify a blackberry bush. The whimsical world of The Wind in the Willows has become pure fantasy. For most children, Mole, Ratty, and Toad are not merely absent but unimaginable. This is the real tragedy: when you cannot see what has been lost, you cannot even know to mourn it, let alone fight to restore it.
And here lies the danger of Tice’s dismissiveness. It is one thing for individuals to be unaware of how much has been lost. It is quite another for politicians to turn that ignorance into policy – especially because policy solutions abound. Indeed, many were put in place by the previous Conservative government, like paying farmers to restore nature on their land and using water company fines to finance water habitat restoration efforts, which are already starting to reverse the fortunes of our natural world.
Reform wants to present itself as a serious political party. Seriousness requires much more than soundbites and contrarian posturing. If Tice truly believes that the state of UK nature is fine, then he is dangerously out of touch with the facts. If, on the other hand, he knows the truth but chooses to deny it, then his position is worse still: a calculated bet that voters will prefer comfortable myths over uncomfortable realities.
Either way, Reform cannot claim to speak for the people of this country if it refuses to grapple with the real state of our natural world. Our countryside is not just a backdrop for Sunday strolls or tourism brochures but a cornerstone of our national identity. To restore nature is to recover something of Britain itself. To dismiss its decline as some sort of left-wing talking point is not just lazy but reckless.
To offer a vision for Britain’s future, Reform must do more than sneer at environmental concerns. It must have something constructive to say about how we restore our damaged landscapes, protect our rivers, and bring wildlife back to our fields and forests. Populism thrives on grievance and denial, but governing is about taking responsibility. That responsibility starts with telling the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable.
Tice scoffs at the claim that nature has been diminished because it is easier to deny the truth of what we have lost than to face the responsibility of repairing it. But the longer we deny reality, the worse the problem becomes. If we are serious about passing on a better country to our children, we must also be serious about restoring our natural world.
Our green and pleasant land deserves more than Reform’s empty rhetoric. It deserves honesty, ambition and a commitment to restoration. Anything less is not leadership; it is abdication.
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