Cuadrilla’s drilling rig at Banks in Lancashire
My involvement in the Frack Off campaign didn’t really make sense until I arrived in Lancashire yesterday, laid eyes on Cuadrilla’s drilling site at Banks for the first time and met the local people directly affected. Attending meetings in Brighton and hearing about the work other activists were doing at the other end of the country was not personally empowering. I was excited about the progress the campaign was making but somehow could not imagine myself here doing the work myself, so I hesitated and procrastinated for weeks, somehow unable to fully commit to the campaign. Lancashire seemed like a long way away from home – my life was down there in Brighton, I was enjoying it and it seemed kind of inconvenient to put it on hold, even for a few days.
Within hours of being here I realised a few things. Lancashire is not so far from Brighton. In a cramped country like this, Lancashire is not so far from everywhere, which means that if fracking starts happening here and in half a dozen or so places elsewhere in the country (as it almost certainly will if we don’t stop it now) then it will be taking place on everyone’s doorstep.
Tomorrow local people will join campaigners and activists from all over the country to attend Camp Frack, a weekend of networking, organising, skill-sharing and protest against big business and government plans to bring fracking to the UK, courting environment disaster as they desperately suck the last few drops of fossil fuel from the planet to make a few more dollars to invest in a broken financial system currently in it’s death throes. This kind of thinking borders on the delusional. This madness fascinates me but it’s not the subject of this blog and is written about widely elsewhere, so I’ll get to the point.
Frack Off are here in Lancashire to support Camp Frack. More importantly, we’re up here to support the local campaigners who will continue to be here, dealing with the fallout from Cuadrilla’s drilling operations, long after Camp Frack is gone. These are the people first affected by fracking in the UK, but unless we do something about it now they will not be the last.
Right now, even to people who know how destructive it is, the threat of fracking in the UK must seem pretty abstract. So there’s a spot of shale gas prospecting going on up in the north is there? One company, one drill… not much to worry about is it? What about coal? What about nuclear? These are much bigger problems, aren’t they? I’m not going to debate the relative dangers of unsustainable forms of energy, the point of Camp Frack is this: if we organise now we can stop fracking in the UK before it gets a toehold, before it starts happening on the same kind of scale as these other industries.
All I know is that when I saw that drill rig yesterday, it was very obviously an alien presence encroaching on an agricultural landscape in a quiet corner of the country. It shouldn’t have been there. Doubtless I was projecting but it seemed to me a sinister thing. I tried to imagine what it must’ve felt like for the local residents who woke up one morning to find it squatting there on the other side of the road. It arrived without warning. No-one knew what it was. Planning permission was granted without public consultation, sneaked under the radar by the local council here. Local councils all over the country could be in the process of making back room deals with companies like Cuadrilla, with plans to sneak in drilling rigs under the noses of local residents who are often so disempowered by the system that they don’t realise that their rights are being fundamentally infringed upon.
Fortunately there are people here in the Ribble Estuary who are not willing to lie down and let big business walk all over them. They’re not prepared to give up without a fight. This is a fight that we can win.
Come to Camp Frack. Meet the locals affected. Imagine yourself in their shoes. Help them do their work so that your work is a bit easier a few years (or maybe just months) down the line.
