Climate change will turn farmers away from the Tories and rural seats to the Greens

There was just ten millimeters of rain in the whole of the month of April in England. So much for "April Showers". The climate is changing, and the political climate is changing as well. The BBC informs us that "lack of rain is devastating farmers". Yields are down substantially, by the looks of their video, by over 50%. The farmer in their video should have his wheat up to his waist by now, but it is barely higher than his feet. LINK HERE As soon as people like him draw the link between the drought and climate change, which is going to happen sooner or later, they might start to question their own political convictions- not making any assumptions about the specific views of this farmer.

As environmentalist Paul Gilding wrote in his behemoth of a book; "The Great Disruption", people are slow, but they are not stupid. Sooner or later, the environmental crisis is going to cause an economic crisis. I've long argued that the 2008 economic crisis was caused by a resource crisis. The thing was, this was concealed beneath the commodity prices. You can't see a resource crisis, but you can see a drought.

The British Conservative Party is dependent on rural constituencies like humans are dependent on Oxygen. For hundreds of years, such seats have safely returned Tory members, and the party fell back on rural stronghold's in the dark days of 1997. For the politically unaware, a description of quite how safe such seats are is necessary.

Such seats are stalwart bastions of Toryism. The motorways and A roads that run through their length and breadth are hemmed in at election time by enormous blue billboards affixed to farm fences. Such seats have an impenetrable fortress of a Tory vote, clad with the fiercest automatic weapons on their ramparts. Such seats are so safe, that you'll be lucky to get 1/1000, yes that's "one to a thousand" not "a thousand to one" on a Tory win, at the bookies. That's if they'll give you odds at all.

But surely, if the economies of these seats get ruined by climate change, then the electorate is hardly going to sit back and continue to vote Tory. To posit a stereotype, rural folk are not stupid. They are rich. They go to top public schools. They are not stupid. They are also not going to keep voting conservative when they draw the link between the history of climate neglect that the Tory's have supported, and the collapse in their wheat yields. They are also not going to vote Labour, they seem to hate Labour. They are probably not going to vote Lib Dem, because they hate them as well, or they just see them as just like the Tories. They are not going to vote for UKIP or BNP, because these parties deny climate change. Ask yourself, might those old Tory strongholds become Green strongholds one day?