‘You can’t eat electricity’: how rural solar farms became the latest battlefront in Britain’s culture war

Lancaster (UK), Nov 3 (The Conversation) Sean Matthews, the Reform UK leader of Lincolnshire County Council, has said he’ll “lie down in front of bulldozers” to stop Britain’s largest solar farm being built in the county.

He’s taking sides in a new rural culture war that pits green energy against the countryside’s traditional image of food and farming.

Reform’s opposition to renewables isn’t surprising.

Fossil fuel interests have provided around 92 per cent of the party’s funding according to research by DeSmog (when contacted by DeSmog, Reform did not comment on that finding).

But solar farms have become a way for the party to mask these interests by presenting itself as a defender of farms, fields and “common sense” against what Matthews called the “nonsense” of net zero.

Meanwhile,