The short version
England got 7% of its average July rainfall. That is the driest July since 1836 and half the country is officially in drought.
Reform took ten councils on a promise to scrap net zero. Seven of the nine studied then scrapped their climate targets outright.
Their manifesto claims a saving nearly four times larger than the thing being saved.
England has spent this summer running out of water. In July the country received 7% of its long-term average rainfall, which puts it on course for the driest July since 1836, a year in which the most exciting technology story was the screw propeller. Half of England is now officially in drought. National reservoir storage has fallen to 72% and three reservoirs (Blagdon, Wimbleball and Hanningfield) are classed as exceptionally low.
Across the Channel it has been worse. More than 250,000 hectares of the EU has burned so far this year, an area roughly the size of Luxembourg, in around 1,200 fires against a long-term average of 569. Spain accounts for over 200,000 hectares of that on its own, including one fire near Burgohondo that took 50,000 hectares in five days and became the largest wildfire in Spanish records. France evacuated some 260,000 people. In late June the thermometer at Pissos in south-west France read 44.3 degrees. Andújar in Spain read 45.1. Poland broke a national record that had stood since 1921. The Met Office issued a red extreme heat warning for the 24th and 25th of June, only the second time in its history. Lingwood in Norfolk hit 37.7 degrees. The World Health Organization counted more than 1,300 excess deaths across Europe in the first week of it.
So that was the summer. Here is what Britain's noisiest political party did with it.
Reform's very good week
Reform UK took ten councils in May 2025 on a promise to scrap net zero and cut your energy bills. Researchers at the LSE's Grantham Institute went and looked at what happened next. Of the nine Reform-majority councils they examined, seven scrapped their climate targets outright and five had councillors expressing flat climate denial. Kent replaced its Net Zero Plan with an Energy Efficiency Plan. Staffordshire swapped its Climate Emergency Declaration for an Environmental Strategy. Derbyshire took the simplest route available and abolished the committee.
The arithmetic underneath is worth a moment. Reform's 2024 manifesto said ditching net zero would save the public sector "over £30bn per year". The Office for Budget Responsibility puts total public-sector spending on net zero at roughly £8bn a year. So the saving is nearly four times the size of the thing being saved. A trick you can only really pull once. An earlier draft costed net zero at "some £2tn or more", a number that sounds apocalyptic until you read National Grid's own analysis, which found that hitting net zero by 2050 and missing it come out at broadly the same price. It is worth knowing who pays for that arithmetic.
Richard Tice calls it "the extreme cult of Net Zero". Chris Hespe, a Reform councillor in Kent, put it more plainly: "I've never seen such nonsense as the anthropogenic global warming hoax." He said this in a county the Environment Agency has spent the entire summer listing under prolonged dry weather.
You don't need a council seat to talk like this, though. You just need to be at the barbecue. There are seven of them and you will meet most before September.
1. The Weather Correspondent
He has noticed that it is cold. Not now, obviously. In April, when it snowed on his car and he photographed it and sent the picture to a group chat captioned "so much for global warming". He does this every year. He has done it so many times that the snow has started to feel complicit.
His position rests on a category error so simple it is almost restful. Weather is what happens on Tuesday. Climate is the average of every Tuesday for thirty years. One cold morning disproves warming in roughly the way one quiet afternoon disproves traffic.
If cornered: agree that April was freezing. It was. Then ask him how he'd describe the summer. He'll change the subject himself and save you the effort.
2. The One Per Cent Man
Britain produces about 1% of global emissions and he knows this figure better than his own National Insurance number. He deploys it as a full stop. What is the point of us doing anything when China opens a coal plant a fortnight.
The problem is that he has done exactly half of the maths. Nearly a third of the world's emissions come from countries producing 1% or less each. If 1% is too small to bother with then so is everybody else's. A third of the world's carbon then goes permanently unaddressed by mutual agreement. On cumulative emissions since 1850 Britain sits eighth in the world at 3%, which for an island this size is quite the achievement.
If cornered: he is arguing that his vote doesn't count because it is one of forty-eight million. Say it back to him in exactly those words and watch him agree with it.
3. The Motorist Martyr
His country is being taken from him one bollard at a time. ULEZ, low traffic neighbourhoods, twenty mile an hour zones and the fifteen-minute city, which he understands to be a plan to stop him leaving his postcode rather than a plan to put a shop in it. He calls this a war and casts himself, sitting in a Kia, as the front line.
The evidence is unkind. Within three months of ULEZ launching in central London, roadside nitrogen dioxide fell 19.6% and nitrogen oxides fell 28.8%. The share of non-compliant vehicles in the zone dropped from 39.1% to 4.2%, meaning almost everybody quietly complied while he was explaining that nobody would.
If cornered: ask him whether he'd like that 19.6% back. It isn't a fair question. Neither is the war.
4. The It's Always Changed Man
He has a fact and it is a good one. There were vineyards in medieval England. The Romans grew grapes in parts of Britain that would embarrass a modern vintner. The climate has always changed, so this change is nothing, so we can all relax.
The vineyards are real. The conclusion isn't. In 2019 a team led by Raphael Neukom published a study in Nature covering the past two thousand years and found no globally coherent warm or cold period anywhere in the pre-industrial record. The Medieval Warm Period was warm in some places at some times and cold in others at the same time. What makes now different is that it is happening everywhere at once, which is the one thing the vineyards cannot do.
If cornered: he genuinely loves history. Ask him what happened to the vineyards.
5. The "I'm All For The Environment, But"
She is on your side and she needs you to know it first. She rinses the yoghurt pots. She has views about the neighbours who don't. She takes the bags back to the supermarket, turns the tap off while she brushes and has not touched a plastic straw since 2018. Then the conversation reaches insulation, or the levy on her bill, or a wind farm eleven miles away. The word "but" lands like a dropped tray.
Her diligence is real and it is being used. The idea that climate change is a matter of your personal footprint was not handed down by scientists. BP put a carbon footprint calculator on its website in 2004, on the back of a rebrand run by Ogilvy & Mather with a reported $200m behind it. Since the late 1980s BP has been responsible for more than 34 billion tonnes of carbon. She has been sold the yoghurt pot as the whole of the problem by the people who are the rest of it.
On the cost, which is her real objection, the Climate Change Committee puts the investment at £44bn a year against £29bn a year of operating savings, so about £15bn net. The OBR costed the whole transition at £321bn over nearly thirty years and noted that delaying it could double the bill. She never gets to the second half of that sentence.
If cornered: leave the recycling alone. She's right about the recycling. Ask her instead who told her it was hers to fix.
6. The Agenda 2030 Man
Net zero is not a policy. It is a scheme, drafted in Davos, to abolish the car, ration the beef and herd the population into fifteen-minute enclosures on the instructions of a World Economic Forum whose officers he could not name three of. He has watched a documentary. He has not read a document.
There isn't much to take apart here because there isn't much argument. The plan he describes would need flawless coordination between every government on earth, including several that cannot coordinate a bin collection.
If cornered: don't. This one has no bottom. Nod, refill his glass and go and find the Weather Correspondent, who at least brought a photograph.
7. The One Who Just Hates Greta
Somewhere along the line he decided he didn't care for a young woman on a boat. He has spent every year since reverse-engineering an entire worldview out of that dislike. He cannot tell you the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. He can tell you what she was wearing in 2019.
This is the purest of the seven because there is no argument to dismantle. Nothing about the science. Just her. Take her out of the conversation and his position evaporates, which is why he will put her back into it within ninety seconds regardless of what anyone is actually discussing.
If cornered: talk about the weather. He'll bring her up unprompted. Time it.
That's the seven
The irritating part is that almost none of them are beyond reach. The Weather Correspondent is wrong about one thing and sound on plenty of others. The Motorist Martyr has genuinely been sold something by people who knew better. The woman rinsing the yoghurt pots is doing more than most of the men in this list combined.
Most of them are somebody's uncle. Most of them will still be here in September, when the reservoirs are lower and the argument is word for word the same. The people running the councils that deleted the targets will still be there too, and there is a fuller record of how they got there.
Be patient with them if you can manage it. Be patient with them anyway if you can't.
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Read more →Sources and figures: Environment Agency, Dry weather and drought in England, 24 to 30 July 2026 (rainfall, drought status, reservoir storage); EFFIS and GWIS European wildfire data to 29 July 2026; Met Office and national meteorological services on June 2026 temperature records; World Health Organization excess mortality estimate, 28 June 2026; LSE Grantham Institute on Reform UK councils and climate policy; Byline Times, 24 March 2026 (council actions, Tice and Hespe quotes); Carbon Brief factcheck on net zero cost claims (Reform manifesto, OBR, Climate Change Committee, National Grid ESO); Carbon Brief analysis of cumulative national emissions 1850 to 2021; Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit on the UK's share of global emissions; Tong and Shi, npj Clean Air, 2025, University of Birmingham (ULEZ air quality); Neukom et al., Nature, 2019 (no globally coherent pre-industrial warm period); Grist and The Wire Science on BP's 2004 carbon footprint calculator and the Ogilvy & Mather campaign. Illustrations are original and depict invented archetypes, not real individuals.
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