Corporate titans including Google, Meta, and TikTok will be appearing at Reform UK’s annual conference this week, rubbing shoulders with fossil fuel interests, far-right politicians, and Christian rights groups.

The conference, designed to showcase the party’s policies and politicians, will be attended by figures from some of the world’s biggest tech companies – several of which have donated to funds and projects associated with U.S. President Donald Trump.

They will be joined by the likes of Fuels Industry UK, a trade group for the oil sector which counts BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil among its six members. Reform, whose senior figures frequently deny climate science, advocates for the dramatic expansion of fossil fuel production in the UK.

The three-day jamboree in Birmingham, featuring an address by French far-right politician Jordan Bardella, will also host speeches from senior representatives of three anti-abortion groups.

Bloomberg has reported that a number of countries – including the U.S. and the UAE – will be sending “ambassadors and other dignitaries” to the conference, which begins tomorrow.

These corporate and diplomatic figures will be associating with a party that supports the creation of Trump-style migrant deportation militias, and wants to cut public spending by up to £300 billion a year.

“It’s no wonder Reform is slumping to third in the polls: the groups rushing to attend its conference are a reminder of how increasingly out of touch the party is,” said Cary Mitchell, executive director of strategy at Best for Britain, which campaigns to keep the radical right out of power. “Brits clearly don’t want Farage and co’s divisive rhetoric or their regressive policies that would set us back decades.”

After approaching Reform for comment, the party informed DeSmog that our media accreditation for the event had been rejected. It did not respond to our requests for comment.

Big Tech

Sophie England, Meta’s director of public policy and strategic partnerships, will be speaking at an event about “the AI opportunity” at Reform’s conference on Thursday.

England will be participating in the panel alongside Dream AI, an image generation platform, Multiverse, a tech upskilling company, and Reform MP Danny Kruger, who is the party’s “head of preparation for government”.

The event description claims that artificial intelligence “presents a major opportunity to unlock economic growth” – echoing recent comments made by Kruger, who said that a Reform government would support the mass rollout of energy-hungry data centres across the country.

These facilities, which power artificial intelligence, have been the subject of an intense backlash due to their climate impacts and the strain they place on local resources.

Meta – the owner of Facebook and Instagram – is funding new gas plants to power its data centres, with a recent Financial Times analysis showing that the 60 largest planned data centres in the U.S. could produce over 100 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, equivalent to 7 percent of the country’s power-sector emissions.

Meta has been a backer of Farage ally Donald Trump in recent years – donating $1 million to his second inauguration ceremony, and helping to fund the president’s controversial White House ballroom. 

They will be joined at Reform’s conference by Google, which will be hosting an “AI academy” – training Reform councillors on how to use the company’s tools more effectively.

Google is another Trump funder, having donated $1 million to his inauguration and $22 million to the White House ballroom.

Farage has received £21,590 since July 2024 from Google’s content monetisation programme, which allows creators to receive a share of the advertising revenue from their videos, as well as £2,795 from Meta.

Also in attendance will be TikTok, which is sponsoring a session about online political campaigning featuring Kruger and GB News political editor Christopher Hope. Reform leader Nigel Farage has been paid more than £700,000 as a GB News presenter over the past two years, while TikTok’s U.S. arm is co-owned by Trump-backing billionaire Larry Ellison.

Meta, Google, and TikTok were approached for comment.

Fossil Fuel Lobbyists

The oil and gas industry will also be present in Birmingham – hosting sessions alongside prominent climate science sceptics.

Fuels Industry UK will be hosting an energy reception on Thursday, followed a few hours later by an event on the “price of power” featuring Reform deputy leader Richard Tice.

Tice is a vocal denier of climate science – recently saying we should “celebrate” this summer’s record temperatures. Despite representing a constituency at high risk from the impacts of climate change, Tice has claimed that carbon dioxide is “plant food” and has said there’s “no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change [the] climate”.

This is false. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.

It has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

The Fuels Industry UK event – co-sponsored by Cadent Gas, the UK’s largest gas distribution network – will also feature energy consultant Kathryn Porter, an opponent of clean energy policies who works for fossil fuel companies.

Speaking at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference – funded by fossil fuel investor and GB News co-owner Paul Marshall – Farage said: “The one thing I hear that drives me absolutely potty is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant! That’s what they tell us! That clearly is absolutely nuts.”

Reform has received more than £24 million since its inception in 2019 from fossil fuel interests – more than two-thirds of its income.

A Fuels Industry UK spokesperson said the group “engages with political parties and policymakers of all persuasions on issues affecting the fuels sector. Our focus is on informing policy debates with industry expertise and evidence.”

Cadent commented: “As the largest gas distribution company in the UK, Cadent will be attending the main party conferences this year of Reform UK, Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.”

Anti-Abortion Groups

The ‘Christian Fellowship for Reform’ will also be hosting an event featuring representatives from three anti-abortion groups.

Speakers will include Rupert Evans, public affairs director at Right to Life, a group that has called the 1967 Abortion Act – which legalised abortion in the UK – a “tragedy”.

Evans will be joined by Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute, and Andrea Williams of Christian Concern – groups that also oppose abortion rights.

Farage’s ties to anti-abortion groups have been growing in recent years. In September 2025, he testified in U.S. Congress against the UK’s free speech rules – an appearance orchestrated by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerful anti-abortion advocacy group that successfully led the campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

The ADF has brokered meetings between the Trump administration and Reform, and has reportedly supplied the U.S. government with attack lines that portray the UK as hostile to free speech.

During his 31-year career, Farage has been largely silent on abortion – reflecting the fact that it’s an uncontested subject among British voters. However, following his entanglement with the ADF, the Reform leader has been taking an increasingly anti-abortion stance, claiming last May that the 24-week limit in the UK is “utterly ludicrous”.

Kerry Abel, chair of the campaign group Abortion Rights, said: “Anyone who thinks what happened in the U.S. could never happen here needs to pay attention… Reform and the anti-abortion movement are trying to manufacture a culture war around abortion in Britain… We are watching an organised attempt to push anti-abortion politics into the mainstream.”

Right to Life, Christian Concern, and the Christian Institute were approached for comment.

Libertarian Think Tanks

Reform’s conference will also play host to a number of radical right-wing think tanks seeking to shape the party’s policy agenda.

That includes the Prosperity Institute, which will be hosting four panels across the three days – including an event on the opening day of the conference featuring its CEO Paul Coleman, Reform’s economic spokesman Robert Jenrick, and the party’s head of policy James Orr.

Coleman has ties to the U.S. anti-abortion movement, having previously worked as the executive director of ADF International. Orr is also an opponent of abortion rights. A profile of him published by The Times in August 2025 said that Orr “does not think abortion should be allowed, at any stage of foetal development, even in pregnancies resulting from rape.”

The Prosperity Institute, which advocates for an anti-regulation, anti-immigration agenda, was created by the Legatum Group – one of the co-owners of GB News.

They will be joined at the conference by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), and the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – groups traditionally aligned with the Conservative Party that are part of the Tufton Street network, an orchestrated alliance of radical right-wing groups based in Westminster that lobby to dismantle state services and privatise public bodies. These groups share an opposition to climate action, and have spent decades attempting to undermine policies designed to reduce emissions.

Jenrick recently hired Mitchell Palmer, an economist at the ASI, as his new advisor. Palmer has previously suggested that the NHS should be privatised. James Graham, formerly of the Prosperity Institute, also now works in Orr’s team.

Prominent Tufton Street alumni will be flocking to the conference. Mark Littlewood, the former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), will be hosting two interviews – including one with Kruger on how Reform is “preparing for power”, despite the party sinking to third place in recent polls.

As revealed by DeSmog, the IEA historically received funding from oil majors and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, while Littlewood is a close ally of former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss, whose radical “free market” policies caused an economic shock in late 2022.

Littlewood will be joined at Reform conference by fellow Truss ally Shanker Singham of the Growth Commission, who will be hosting a panel featuring Reform’s Scottish leader Malcolm Offord.

The Growth Commission was originally convened by Truss, who sits on its international advisory board, while Singham was an advisor to Truss during her time as international trade secretary.

Reform has been keen to distance itself from Truss in recent years, with party sources stating that she would be blocked from joining the party. However, Farage was recently the keynote speaker at CPAC GB – a pro-Trump conference organised by Truss.

Much of Reform’s conference appears to be aping Trump’s key talking points – including a panel on whether the UK should follow his lead by pulling out of the World Health Organisation.

The event will feature Karol Sikora – marketed on the Reform conference website as a “leading critic of Britain’s Covid response”. Sikora was a vocal opponent of mandatory vaccines and lockdowns, using his social media accounts to slam the then Conservative vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi, who has since joined Reform.

Zahawi, who has made few public appearances as a Reform politician since joining the party in January, is absent from the entire conference agenda.

Reform was heavily criticised at last year’s conference for giving a platform to Aseem Malhotra, who suggested that the Covid vaccines “have been a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family”.

Reform’s then chairman David Bull introduced Malhotra as a co-author of the party’s health policies – but later withdrew that claim.

“Headlined by Nigel Farage, who has spent weeks in hiding and is actively under a parliamentary standards investigation, the attendee list for this conference highlights the very real threat posed by radical-right politicians,” said Mitchell – adding that they are “dangerous to our democracy, to progress on climate change, and to our hard-won rights.”