Reform deputy leader's heatwave comments spark backlash from medical experts

Richard Tice stood at a press conference on Monday and made a choice about what Britain should do with a summer that had already killed nearly 2,900 people. The Reform UK deputy leader said the country should stop trying to prevent climate change—that such efforts were arrogant—and instead enjoy the warmth. He mentioned English wine getting better. He suggested celebrating the heat rather than dwelling on its darker consequences.

Within hours, the response came from people who had spent the previous weeks watching the consequences unfold in real time. Nurses said they were collapsing in hospital wards where temperatures reached 36 degrees Celsius. Doctors pointed to new research showing that older people's bodies could no longer regulate heat as effectively as previously understood—that even a few degrees made a measurable difference in who lived and who didn't. Firefighters were still battling wildfires across Derbyshire, the Midlands, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Farmers were facing harvests described as among the worst on record.

The numbers behind Tice's comments were stark. Between May and June alone, 2,877 people had died from heat-related causes. The economic cost to Britain exceeded £4 billion. Over 1,100 of those deaths were directly attributable to the extra warmth added by climate change—not the natural variation Tice referenced, but the measurable human contribution. Hospitals had been overwhelmed. Thousands of patients lined corridors. The Royal College of Nursing issued a statement asking Tice to tell those things to the nurses collapsing on shifts, to the elderly patients struggling to regulate their body temperature, to the people without pre-existing conditions who were becoming severely ill anyway.

Tice's position was not new to Reform. The party had campaigned since its founding in 2019 to scrap Britain's commitment to reaching net zero by 2050. It had promised to end green subsidies. And it had accepted tens of millions of pounds from people with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry—most notably a £5 million donation from billionaire Christopher Harborne, whose jet fuel brokerage business stood to benefit from continued carbon emissions. That donation was now the subject of a parliamentary inquiry.

When asked about the drought threatening water supplies and food security, Tice pivoted to desalination plants. He had spent time in the Middle East, he explained, and they worked well there. Why not build them in Britain, surrounded by water? He did not mention that Thames Water was preparing to restart the UK's only mainland desalination plant—but it would not be operational until winter, months after the crisis had peaked.

Simon Williams, a public health researcher at Swansea University, called Tice's comments concerning misinformation at a moment when the evidence was becoming impossible to ignore. Caroline Abrahams, director of Age UK, described new findings about heat's impact on older people as alarming. Alasdair Johnstone, from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, laid out the toll: 2,877 deaths, over 1,100 directly caused by climate change, more than 1,000 firefighter callouts to wildfires, people displaced from their homes, landscapes devastated. The only way to prevent these impacts from becoming more common and severe, he said, was to reach net zero.

Bridget Phillipson, Labour's party chair, called Tice's remarks tone-deaf. Amy Cameron from Greenpeace UK suggested he try telling nurses fainting on shifts, farmers losing crops, and people running from burning homes to enjoy the hot weather and see what reaction he would get. The summer that had seemed, in Tice's framing, like an opportunity for better wine and celebration, had been experienced by millions of Britons as a public health emergency unfolding in real time.