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Reform UK is trying to resurrect one of the most destructive ideas in modern politics: fracking.

The BBC is reporting that Richard Tice and Nigel Farage’s party is urging oil and gas firms to prepare licence applications for shale gas extraction, pledging that they’ll lift the ban “immediately” if they form a government.

Fracking – or hydraulic fracturing – involves blasting water, sand and toxic chemicals into underground rocks to release trapped gas.

It has been banned again and again in the UK since 2011 because of earthquakes, pollution, and fierce community opposition.

Back in 2014, I warned that “fracking is an especially destructive form of oil and gas drilling… Ground water can be contaminated by the gases and toxic chemicals used in the fracking process, and it is understood that waste from the fracking process is commonly mishandled.”

That danger hasn’t gone away. If Reform UK gets its way, Britain’s areas of outstanding natural beauty will become ugly industrial pits.

Our health will be put at risk while oil and gas companies pocket the profits.

Let’s bear in mind here that Reform UK has been said to get 92 per cent of its funding from fossil fuel corporations.

Even Conservative ministers once admitted that UK geology makes fracking more expensive, more polluting, and more disruptive than in the US – which means the promised “shale gas revolution” never happened.

When Liz Truss tried to restart it in 2022, the backlash helped topple her government.

Yet Reform wants to drag us back to square one, in a world that is moving rapidly towards clean energy.

Labour has pledged to ban fracking permanently and achieve 100 per cent clean power by 2030.

The choice could not be clearer: do we want safe, green energy for the future – or earthquakes, pollution, and wrecked countryside in the name of short-term oil company profits?

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