How We Ended Fracking In The UK

Preese Hall

On April Fools Day 2011 an earthquake hit east Lancashire. Registering 2.3 on the Richter scale, it caused traffic lights to topple and a railway bridge to crack. The police station in Blackpool shook, even as worried homeowners rang in thinking they were being burgled. 

The cause of the quake was pressure testing at a fracking well at Preese Hall, Lancashire. The government immediately announced a two-year moratorium, and the people of Britain learnt a new word. Cuadrilla Resources, the company concerned, said that this was nothing to worry about. What they didn't reveal at the time was that the quake had fractured their drill. The moratorium was essentially superfluous. They wouldn't be doing any drilling again at Preese Hall, or anywhere else, for a while. 

For most people, even most environmental activists, this was the first they had heard of fracking. Before then it had been something on the periphery of our awareness. Most serious ecologists were aware that the dash for gas, which had allowed Mrs Thatcher to close the coal mines, and BP to announce they were the good guys now, was not a good thing. It had slightly reduced carbon dioxide emissions, but at the cost of a new generation of fossil fuel infrastructure that would keep last thirty years or more. That fracking was something more than a new type of gas was probably lost on most of us at that time.

Balcombe

If the Lancashire quakes woke a lot of people up to the issue, it was events in West Sussex in the summer of 2013 that put fracking firmly in the centre of protest in the UK. Successful protests require three factors: a cause, protesters and a location. The Lancashire earthquakes had moved fracking up the list of causes, but this was not the only concerns with fracking. This was a new fossil fuel, and extracting it contaminated the air and the groundwater. 50 ton lorries would industrialise quiet English villages. Fracking was a cause that ticked a lot of boxes

Protesters, though, aren't as easy to find as you think. There would always be locals who don't want it in their back yard, but they would require help to make their voices heard. Bigger green groups could send out teams to do stunts, but people prepared to camp out 24 hours a day, seven days a week to stop something are pretty rare. However, barely a year before the test rig arrived in Balcombe in July 2013, the Occupy London protests had come to an end, and some of those people still wanted to change the world. 

Environmental campaigns can either target areas of local beauty, or issues of global importance. Fracking, did both. Also, unlike the big fossil fuel projects campaigners were usually up against, which were usually huge opencast mines or off-shore drilling operations, fracking took place at small sites close to where people lived. Almost anyone in the UK would be able to drive to a fracking site, and enough people would be able to walk to one to cause a problem. 

With the three legs of the protest in place, the first anti-fracking direct action in the UK kicked off at Balcome, West Sussex, in July 2013. Balcombe had everything the media wanted: sunshine, weird people, lots of action, and, best of all, it was close enough to London for the journos to be back for evening drinks at the club. And then, for good measure, the police accidentally arrested Caroline Lucas, the Green Party's only MP.

The industry's take was that the protests had only delayed the test drilling by five days. This may even be true, but it missed the point. Balcombe had made fracking the sexiest eco-protest in the country. For better or worse, activists forget about roads and airports and made their way to Balcombe. 

Opinion pollsters started talking about the 'Balcombe bounce. Up until then the number of people who had an opinion on fracking was too low for it to be polled, but now three quarters of the public had an opinion. Fracking was now on everyone's radar, not just the ecologists. That public opinion was pretty evenly split on the issue, with 40% opposed, 40% in favour and the rest undecided. The war wasn't won, but those were figure the ecologists could work with.

Once people opened their eyes to fracking, it was clear what a threat it was. Applications to explore for shale gas were everywhere. Anti-fracking groups were also popping up all over the place to oppose them, but the situation was confusing. There was a real danger of energy being scattered too widely to be effective.

Lancashire

The plan of the NGOs, as far as there was one, was to focus on one county council and get them to reject fracking as a first step. There were several possibilities for this, but in the end Lancashire was the target. Not only were Cuadrilla more advanced in their plans, but they were also much more politically connected. John Browne, the former BP boss, now Lord Browne, was the chair of Cuadrilla and owned 30% of the company. He had a job in the Cabinet office, from which he made a series of appointments to government departments. 

The government was clearly prepared to spend political capital on fracking. When Greenpeace got thousands of people to refuse to allow fracking under their homes the government responded by changing the law. The government was also clearly taking its instructions from the industry. When it sent out press releases about the number of jobs fracking would produce it didn't use the estimates of its own civil service, but the higher figure emailed in by the UK On Shore Operators Group. 

The industry was quite aware of the risk from protest. In 2010 a documentary had come out about fracking in the USA called Gaslands. It concentrated almost exclusively on the risk of water contamination, but had alerted people to an industry that engulfed areas of the USA. Also, just before Balcombe, there had been a series of protests in Romania about fracking. The global risk assessment company Control Risks had produced a report on anti-fracking protests, and had assessed the level of protest in the UK as 'significant'. It suggested a four point strategy to deal with this: 'acknowledge grievances', 'engage community', 'reduce impacts' and 'create more winners'. This would be used when the next anti-fracking protest happened. 

Barton Moss

Barton Moss, on the edge of Greater Manchester, was where the company IGas planned to test drill in November 2013. The travelling army of direct action protesters arrived and set up camp along Barton Moss Road. But Barton Moss wasn't Balcombe. It was wet, it was winter, and it was on the fringe of a northern city. The press wasn't really interested. The Guardian might have been, but there was the Ken Loach trial going on, and they only had one journalist north of Watford Gap. 

However, whilst the protests at Barton Moss were not national news, they were local news, both on TV and in the papers. What's more, they were local news across the whole of the northwest, including Lancashire. This meant that when the local councillors who were to vote on Cuadrilla's application to frack more sites sat down to their pie and mash, they saw Barton Moss on the TV.

IGas gave up on issuing press releases, and so it was up to the police to put out the press releases. This followed the usual playbook of well-meaning locals and violent outside agitators. The police themselves felt they lost this contest. The government too lent a hand. David Cameron didn't come to Manchester, but he went to a site in Lincolnshire and announced 'gold standard regulation' and 'more winners' in the form of a money for local authorities who frack. Lord Browne meanwhile appeared to acknowledge mistakes the USA. IGas had been promising bungs for local sports clubs, so the four point plan was going well. Except that it wasn't. The protests continued and local support was growing. 

The actual job of dealing with the protectors, as the activists styled themselves, fell to the police, who were not above dirty tricks. The police had a number of legal powers they could use against the activists, but they were only effective on the Public Highway or private land. Barton Moss Road was a public footpath and a private road. The police solution to the public footpath was to steal the sign. The solution to the private road was to pretend it was a public highway and arrest people anyway. They would then be released on pre-charge bail and if they went back to Barton Moss they'd be arrested again for breach of bail. The result of all this was over 200 arrests, almost all of whom would subsequently be acquitted. 

A more serious incident occurred just after New Year. The police claimed a flare had been fired at their helicopter as it came in to land at nearby Manchester City Airport. Nobody in the camp saw this, neither did any of the cameras at the airport, on the M62 or in the nearby Barton Moss Young Offenders Unit. Forty-eight hours later the police descended on the camp and turned it upside down. 

After that, though, it was hard to keep the protests out of the news. Public opinion in Manchester changed. Support for fracking still remained high, but the 'don't knows' gradually came off the fence on the side of the againsts. Rallies at the site increased in size, and then moved to the city centre. One held in March 2014 became the largest anti-fracking rally so far in the UK. It didn't make the national news, but was reported in the local news of every town and village at risk of being fracked. By the time IGas packed up and left, it was clear they were not wanted. One measure of the campaign's success was that when the first election for mayor of Greater Manchester was held in 2016 none of the major candidates, not even the Tory, were in favour of fracking. The winner, Labour's Andy Burnham, declared he would do all he could to stop IGas coming back. 

Campaigners from Frack Free Lancashire were regular visitors to Barton Moss. Up until then, they had fought its battles in village halls and borough councils. Now the activists from Lancashire had a bigger field to play on. They had their first experience of direct action, of speaking at large rallies talking to the global media.

The timing of the Barton Moss protests also worked out perfectly for them. No sooner had the protectors cleared away their camp, leaving Barton Moss Road cleaner than it had been before the campaign, than Lancashire County Council started hearing Cuadrilla's applications to frack Preston New Road and Roseacre in Lancashire. 

The decision was postponed repeatedly, and the councillors were threatened with personal financial liability if Cuadrilla were refused. But in the end the council rejected both applications. Everyone knew Cuadrilla would appeal, and that the final decision would be made by the government, who were hardly neutral. However, it was a huge victory for Frack Free Lancashire, and a potential delay of years for Cuadrilla.

Ryedale 

With Lancashire stalled, the focus of the campaign moved across the Pennines to the North Riding of Yorkshire, where Third Energy wanted to drill in the little village of Ryedale. The activists in Ryedale seemingly had the odds against them. A Conservative majority in the local council meant Third Energy had political support. The drilling would take place on an existing industrial site, and the gas would be piped away, which reduced the tactical options. 

However, in the end the campaign in Ryedale was the best organised anti-fracking campaign in the UK. It helped that the Vale of Pickering was drop dead gorgeous, and that the huge fracking lorries looked completely out of place in the little village with its tiny roads. However, most of the praise needs to go to the activists themselves. They ran a great campaign. They used the press well, they were creative in their actions, they worked very hard to keep tensions between the camp and the locals to a minimum, and they deservedly won.

How they won is still not completely clear, but it appears the government decided it was not going to spend any more political capital on fracking Yorkshire. Third Energy were bankrupt, but then none of the companies prospecting for shale gas in the UK were minted. These operations were loss leaders, and if fracked gold was struck they'd sell up to the big players. Then, once the place had been fracked out, they'd declare themselves bankrupt and pass the clean-up cost on to the government. Everyone knew that was how it worked. So, it was a bit of a surprise when, in January 2018, the government announced it would 'review' Third Energy's finances before giving them the go ahead. It was an oblique way of saying 'no', that stopped the government admitting it had made a U-turn. A major factor in this decision appears to have been a parallel campaign against Barclays bank, Third Energy's main funders. Barclays had fossil fuel investments all over the world, but fracking, it seems, was just too toxic for them.

Everywhere

But, of course, fracking wasn't just a risk to a couple of places in the north of England. On a shale gas map of the UK most of England ended up painted red, including a huge crescent of affluent Tory shires from the Lincolnshire to Kent. True, when the licenses were issues, they were heavily skewed towards the Labour voting north, but nobody could seriously doubt that if the industry got going, they wouldn't be coming to the home counties at some point.

Other players were also hovering on the fringe. Ineos, the UK's largest private company, bought up a lot of second-hand plant from Poland and announced it was interested in shale gas, not to sell, but to use in its chemical industries. Square in their sights was Eckington, in Derbyshire.

However, people weren't taking this lying down. Up and down the country anti-fracking groups were springing up. Some were little more than a social media page, but others, like Eckington Against Fracking, were large and well organised enough to not need outside help. Opposing fracking may have only been 'local news', but it was local news in most of the country.

What was more, direct action took place wherever, and whenever, it could. From Daneshill in Nottinghamshire, to Horse Hill in Surrey, the frackers turned up and found themselves facing slow walks and lock-ons. A, supposedly secret, meeting of the shale gas industry at Manchester Airport found itself the centre of a surpise protest. At Upton, Cheshire, the anti-frackers got onto the site first and there was an old-fashioned eviction of a defended camp which included towers and tunnels. No sooner had the police cleared the last protector, at the tax payers expense, than IGas said they weren't interested any more. The fracking revolution appeared to be running into the sand.

Preston New Road

And so the focus moved back to Lancashire. The government gave Cuadrilla the go ahead to frack at Preston New Road in October 2016, but deferred the Roseacre decision. Allegedly, this was at the request of the company, who didn't have the resources to do both at once. Cuadrilla evidently thought PNR, which was on a main road, would be an easier proposition than the little village of Roseacre. The next month Bianca Jagger led the largest anti-fracking march yet, at least 2000 people, through the streets of Manchester. 

Work started on the construction of their drill site in January 2017, and so did the protests. At first there was a 'gentleman's agreement' that the protesters would stand in front of each lorry for exactly fifteen minutes, but pretty quickly this broke down and it was a free for all. Lancashire police upped their presence. They called in help from other forces, when some of the out of town coppers behaved badly they went back to keeping it in house. Soon it was costing them £450,000 a month.

Work continued, even as fracking died in Ryedale and elsewhere. By the end of 2018 Cuadrilla were ready to start fracking. By this time the PNR site had seen virtually every type of direct action possible. There had been slow walks and lorry surfing, lock-ons and silent protest from big green groups, little green groups and locals. Cuadrilla managed to keep going through all this and finally they fired up their pumps and pressurised their well. The result was an earth tremor. Not as big as 2011, but big enough to shut them down. They tried again, but once more the earth moved. By Christmas they'd taken their rig down and removed the pumps.

Then in February 2019, as Theresa May cleared the decks for a Brexit general election, the government turned down Cuadrilla's application to frack Roseacre. At about the same time it told the company it would not be relaxing the rules on earth tremors that had stopped the drilling before Christmas. The tide had turned against the frackers. Cuadrillla's equipment returned to the site, but once again the ground shook and they had to stop. Boris Johnson became the Prime Minister the government announced a moratorium on fracking. Then, last week, UK Energy Minister Kwasi Kwarteng said what everyone suspected: fracking was over. 

Frack Off

And so, like the government's road building program in the nineties, and GM crops in the noughties, fracking had been defeated by a combination of lobbying and direct action, carried out both nationally and locally. It is a significant victory, and one everyone involved should be very proud of. Fossil fuel projects are at their most vulnerable when they are in their infancy, and we were right to take the opportunity when it was offered. Compared to other fossil fuels, fracking was always vulnerable. Technically, it was always going to be a challenge in the UK. Financially, it never looked secure. Politically, the gas was in exactly the wrong place. 

The campaign against fracking brought together a wide variety of disparate people. Residents of leafy villages joined up with former Occupy protesters. Big green groups worked with grass roots campaigners. Direct action people worked with political lobbyists. Some of the feuds were epic, but on the whole the coalition held together well enough to win.  

But this was no easy victory. The political influence of the fracking industry, especially Cuadrilla was huge; far out of proportion to the size of the industry. As a result the government was prepared to do incredible things to please the industry, including over-riding local democracy and changing the law. Their PR campaign, inspired by the Control Risks report, was sophisticated. Almost the entire tabloid press parroted the industry line, and even supposedly serious papers like the Telegraph indulged in tabloid style attacks on activists. 

Ultimately, this was a political campaign. Every time the government changed the law, overruled a local planning decision or appeared in a photo call with the industry they expended political capital. The activists made the cost of fracking so high that in the end the government was unwilling to pay it. For the money men the uncertain political support made the industry look like a bad risk. The result was that a new fossil fuel was going to stay in the ground. It's not the end of the war, but it's a significant battle won.

Speech to 101st Green Monday at Preston New Road

I was priviledged to be invited to speak to the 101st, and possibly last, Green Monday at the Cuadrilla fracking site on Prestn New Road, just outside Blackpool, Lancashire, on 21st October 2019. I ad libbed a bit, but this is what I meant to say.

Tina Louise filmed and you can watch her footage here.

Hello Blackpool. We bring you greetings from Manchester, and apologies for Morrissey.

I’m Martin, one of the coordinators of the Manchester Greenpeace Group. We have some other Greenpeace local groups here, as well as Frack Free Greater Manchester. I used to help them too, so I’m not sure exactly which hat I’m speaking through today.

Well, here we are in Blackpool again, where it all began. There are two annual traditions that bring us up here. One is the Illuminations, and the other is Cuadrilla removing it’s equipment from Preston New Road. And, like the playing of Christmas music in the shops, it gets earlier every year.

So we’re here for a sort of ‘almost victory’ celebration. Fracking clearing isn’t going anywhere, but it’s not gone yet. Instead we have a zombie industry that’s not doing anything, just hanging around. As a result, this could be the last Green Monday at Preston New Road. In the past you’ve had George Monbiot and Kate Rowarth, and today you’ve got me, which I think just shows how fracking has just fizzled out and died up here. Cuadrilla now can’t even get anyone famous to oppose them.

It’s been quite a story how we got to here, but you already know it so I’m not going to tell it you again. Instead I’m going to tell you the story of what happened when the frackers came to Manchester.

Barton Moss really is the edge of town. On one side is the great Manchester, Salford and Stockport urban conglomeration. On the other it is countryside as far as Warrington. Historically, Stephenson’s Rocket once ran along the nearby railway. It has the first canal in Britain, the Bridgewater, and also the last, the Manchester Ship Canal. In 2013 it became the site of test drilling by IGas.

Earlier in the year direct action against fracking had started at Balcombe in Sussex. The media lapped it up. The weather was good and the journalists could be back in London for gin and tonics by sundown. Barton Moss was different matter. The weather was, well, Manchester, and as far as the press were concerned, we were off the edge of the Known World. Even the Guardian, who were sympathetic, didn’t cover us as their only journalist north of Watford Gap was covering the Ken Loach trial.

There was a camp, there were protectors, and every working day for five months they stood in front of the daily convoy and walked them in and out of the site, with the occasional lock-on. And, of course, there were arrests, about two hundred of them in all. Usually five people were arrested every day. No more, no less, giving a new meaning to getting your ‘Five a Day’.  

At first these were for Obstruction of the Public Highway, until a judge ruled that Barton Moss Road was a private road, and not a public highway. 

After that people were usually arrested for Aggravated Trespass. It’s a pretty catch-all offense, but it does require people to be actually trespassing, and we were all fairly sure that Barton Moss Road was a Public Footpath. There was a little bit of doubt though, as about half way through the campaign someone nicked the Public Footpath sign from the top of the road. We did get a look at the suspects through. They were wearing dark blue trousers, high-viz jackets and they loaded the sign into a white van with blue lights on the roof. If you see anyone matching this description, please let me know.

But we were not completely forgotten. The anti-fracking campaigners of Lancashire came to support us. I think I met most of you down there before I met you up here. Thanks to your support we organised what where the biggest environmental protests Manchester had ever seen.

My role was media coordinator. IGas were claiming the Protectors were disrupting local people whilst the media was clearly showing local people disrupting Igas. After a few weeks IGas pretty much gave up on that front and Greater Manchester Police took over the PR campaign. By Christmas we were starting to get noticed in the press, mainly thanks to Reclaim the Power, who had Father Christmas drop a wind turbine blade at the gates. Greater Manchester Police then gave us another huge publicity boost with Flaregate.

The flare allegedly fired at a police helicopter. It missed the helicopter, it was also missed by everyone in the camp, everyone at the airport, the cameras on the M62, the cameras on the secure unit and the entire population of Irlam and Cadishead. However, it wasn’t missed by the press, and after that a lot more of my press releases got published.

I don’t know what effect this had on the campaign here in Lancashire. You were all busy lobbying your local counsellors to oppose this development here, but as you were doing that inglorious work the politicians were see us on TV, listening to us on the radio and reading about us in their papers. I don’t know what effect it had on them, but it changed public opinion in Manchester from 43% of Mancunians supported fracking, to 73% now opposing the process four months later. When we voted for our first Greater Manchester Mayor in 2017 all four of the main candidates: Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Conservative, opposed fracking.

Well, the Barton Moss campaign ended, we had a party, cleaned up the site and left. The focus of opposition to fracking moved north. A year after IGAs left Manchester, Lancashire became the first county council to reject a fracking application. It wasn’t the end, unfortunately, but it was significant. It meant that Cuadrilla, when they arrived, did not have a social license for what they were doing, and they still don’t.

Opposition to fracking always existed on two levels, the local and the global. It causes localised pollution and globalise warming. Stopping fracking is about both local democracy and global responsibility. Here in Lancashire it must seem that every day is the same, but in the wider word things have changed. Since we drove IGas out of Barton Moss, Greenpeace have driven Shell out of the Arctic. We’ve had the Paris Conference and Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and the School Strike for Climate. Fracking was always a toxic industry, but fossil fuels in general are now a toxic brand. No New Oil has been a campaign slogan for a while, but maybe, after the abject failure of fracking in Lancashire, there really will be no new oil.

Fracking was always the last gasp of the fossil fuel dinosaurs. Now extinction is a very real possibility, and they know it. Few people in this country had heard of fracking before the earthquakes in Lancashire in 2011, and after this year I imagine very few people will hear about it again. Cuadrilla will be forgotten, as they should be. But you people, the campaigners from Manchester, and Lancashire, as well as those in Yorkshire, and Sussex and everywhere else, will not be forgotten. Barton Moss was the ‘rise of the resistance’. Here was where is reached its peak. Here is where you won. Here is where we said the final ‘frack off’. Well done.

Review of the Year 2018

January

Another year on planet Earth, and it really does appear that the lunatics are now running the asylum. 

Greenpeace's big campaign this year was trying to create the world's largest ocean sanctuary in the Weddell Sea. The grand plan is for a third of the world's oceans to eventually be protected, starting in the Antarctic. This will help the fight against Climate Change, but equally importantly it may help species survive Climate Change. Given what's going on in the world that might be very necesary.  

Greenpeace sent us some paper penguin masks, which Paul in Ashton assembled for us. Their first action was a photo shoot. We decided to use Castlefields, and so we assemble in the Science Museum cafe. Steve did a fantastic job on the photography and Nuria lent some genuine modelling skills to proceedings.

The combination of rain and industrial architecture gave the pictures an authentic 'Manchester' vibe.  The photo above ended up getting used a lot by Greenpeace in their own publicity, which was great. Greenpeace certainly came up trumps on the design, but unfortunately they didn't make them waterproof. RIP four penguin masks. 

Also in January the Manchester Metropolitan University Geography and Environment Society showed the Bruce Parry film Tawai. We took the penguins there too. For my money there was too much musing that 'we are all to blame' and not enough blaming of corporations for my money, but it was still a good film.

Finally we were out and about as once again London managed to breach it's air pollution limit for the year whilst it was still January. The metrics in Manchester are slightly different, but the problem is still the same, as are the main culprits: diesel cars and vans. Greenpeace Actions Team people had been around putting up coughing people on billboards during the week, but the torrential Manchester rain washed them all away. As a result it was up to Steve and I to go and put some back up again for the photos.

February

Being an old fashioned sort I count February as the start of spring, so every year the family goes to see the snowdrops at Hopton Hall, near Matlock. February, when the first flowers appear, was always the start of spring in pagan time, and why not?

It was cold, but there was no snow yet. However somewhere where there was snow, and where it was even colder, was Antarctica, where the Arctic Sunrise was exploring the Weddell Sea. Greenpeace sent Bond villain Javier Bardem down in a minisub to explore, making him one of only a handful of people to see the unique underwater eco-system. I'm not jealous. Honest. 

It's a long way from Manchester to the Antarctic, but it turns out there is a connection. I got in touch with Dr Max Jones of Manchester Univeristy and he told me about Manchester's role in the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. It was such a good story I decided to book him for a talk. 

March

Our own snow arrived in March, and almost put paid to any serious organising for the month. However we did eventually manage a meeting, in our new venue of the Lass O'Gowrie pub on Charles Street. 

We were back to saving the Antarctic again, and this time the target was Antarctic krill, which is increasingly appearing on the shelves of our health food shops as Omega III supplements.  

Greenpeace's first target was Holland and Barrett, but they threw in the towel after only four days. By the time Manchester got involved we were onto target number two: Boots. A team of secret squirrels visited four branches of Boots in Manchester city centre, adding warning labels to the Antarctic krill on the shelves. All the local groups were doing this, be we were the first groups to get a reply from the company on their Twitter feed. Some poor PR person clearly had a difficult weekend thanks to us. 

March was also Andy Burnham's Green Summit. The Greater Manchester Mayor had promised this when he was elected last year. The event was at Manchester Central, and was very well organised and presented. Burnham's talent is bringing people together and this is what he did, with speakers such as

Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre and Steve Mogford of United Utilities more or less singing from the same hymn sheet. We also had ex-Manchester United player Gary Neville to add a bit of celebrity glamour to proceedings. 

There were some eye opening stalls around and about though. Manchester Airport were there, and claiming they were carbon neutral. Apparently they don't count the planes.

Burnham himself made time to meet us at lunchtime. Restating his opposition to fracking was a bit of easy publicity for him as he doesn't really have much actual power or budget.

In the evening Frack Free Greater Manchester organised a fracking fringe event, and we had Maureen Mills come down from Lancashire and Eddie Thornton come over from Yorkshire to speak, along with our own Helena Coates. The battle goes on in Lancashire, but Eddie was able to tell us how it was won in Ryedale. An extremely well organised campaign caused the government to pause, and then the perilous state of Third Energy's finances gave them the excuse to pull the plug without looking like they were doing a U-turn. Protests work, but you've always got to give the opposition a way out. 

April

April started with the opening of the inquiry into Lancashire County Council's decision to stop Cuadrilla Resources from fracking in the village of Roseacre. When the government overturned the Preston New Road decision, Roseacre was left on the shelf. We had a rally outside and I gave a little speech. We still don't know the outcome of this, but my thoughts are still that it will be the test of whether the government is prepared to spend any more political capital on fracking. Hopefully they aren't, but we'll see.

We were back in the Antarctic again in April. Dr Max Jones' talk took us back to the end of the heroic age of exploration. Manchester, it turned out, both welcomed polar explorer Fridjtof Nansen as a both a hero and a bit of all right ("all the women swooned, and so did some men" the papers reported) and helped fund Scott's ill fated mission. It was an interesting evening.

As far as our own Antarctic campaigning went, we were once again targeting Boots, this time with our 'krill-o-meter'. Funnily enough nobody really thought it was a good idea wipe out whales and penguins for a few vitamins. Boots staff were pleasant enough, but their HQ was reportedly having kittens.

April also marked the start of campaigning on palm oil. This was to be our major local group campaign at the end of the year, but for the moment it was only taking place online. If deforestation was a country it would be the third largest contributor to climate change after the USA and China, and palm oil is one of the big four contributors, along with animal grazing, soya for animal feed and paper. 

Greenpeace had run a petition asking PZ Cussons to stop using destructive palm oil, and as their HQ was near Manchester airport Canonbury Villas gave the task of handing it in to them to the local group.

It was nice to be trusted with this. The company wasn't expecting us, but on hearing that Greenpeace were in the foyer they immediately sent down their sustainability guy to speak to us. He seemed a reasonable sort of fellow, and suitably contrite about what they had been doing, so we agreed to pose for a 'smiley' photo with him. All good fun, but you have to be careful not to be drawn into the 'sustainable company' myth. At the end of the day they are wiping out orang-utans, displacing indigenous people and causing climate change just to make shampoo, and making decent amounts of money doing so, and that's not right

May

In May we were visited by the anti-fracking Nanas from Lancashire. Aliki at Thoughtworks, an ethical tech firm, puts on occasional films for us and we were showing of the new Undercurrents film Power Trip. We'd invited one of the Nanas to speak, but an entire coach load actually turned up, plus honorary Nana Anne Power from Chorlton. It was a good evening.

Also in town, but not as welcome, were the people who brought us the Deepwater Horizon disaster, oil company BP. Greenpeace were gearing up for a big action on Total's AGM, and all the serious shareholder activists were in Holland for Shell's AGM, which was being held the day after to stop people who don't fly doing both. As a result it was down to Manchester activists - very much the B Team - to hold the company to account.

I asked a question about the Amazon Reef. This deep water reef, located below where the Amazon
River empties out in the Atlantic - which is exactly where you not expect to find one - was only announced to the world six years ago. A more recent scientific study, carried on the Greenpeace ship Esperanto, found the reef was much more extensive than first thought, and extended well into the area where BP planned to drill for oil. I had the scientific report in my bag, but despite this the BP board decided to lie to my face and claim that they were a long way from the reef, which they also said they'd known about for ages.

Speaking to the board afterwards they were clearly chuffed with themselves. They clearly weren't afraid of such well behaved protesters as us. However they did appear to be afraid of class action suits based around their climate change denial. It was frustrating, but at least I got to call them liars in the press release. 

Also in May I took part in something a bit different organised by Mend Our Mountains, a
conservation effort run by the British Mountaineering Federation that aims to, well, mend our mountains. The idea was to get 1000 people with head torches to stand on the Great Ridge, which runs from Mam Tor to Lose Hill, and lies just south of Kinder Scout. Mam clearly means mother, and Lose is almost certainly a local version of Lugh, a Celtic god of light, so the two hills are named after a goddess and a god. If the natural ridge running between them wasn't an ancient processional way, then I'm not a druid.

I'm not quite sure if they got a thousand, but there were certainly several hundred people up there. It got cold when the sun set, but the resulting pictures were amazing.

Out this month on the internet was a little video by WellRedFilms about the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932. Partly filmed during the Manchester Greenpeace Group's 85th anniversary walk last year, I got to say a few words too. We didn't manage a Kinder Scout walk this year, but we will for 2019.

June

The festival season begins and still the sun shines.

Envirolution once again proved it was Manchester's best free day out. Matt's small people helped us out and we had such a good response to our stall we ran out of petitions for people to sign.

The festival is also a bit of an AGM of all the Green and social justice groups in Manchester, so it was a chance to meet some familiar people and try to get one over on Friends of the Earth.

Next it was a new venture for Greenpeace: running the an eco-camp field at Download, Heavy Metal's biggest party. The regular Greenpeace festival team are a little apprehensive, but Jeff and I are in our element.

Download is basically 70,000 people getting very, very drunk, with a bit of music on the side. Greenpeace were running a camp site on the edge of the main field. It was part of the Castle Donnington deer park and so can only be used if it was looked after. People who camped with us signed up to recycle and not litter, and they did. We also had a vegan cafe and a yurt for the obligatory yoga session. Doing yoga and then going to watch death metal is probably the equivalent of coming out of a sauna and jumping into a frozen lake, so I hope nobody was permanently injured by the experience.

Metal fans tend to be oddballs and loners, which is why Jeff and I fit into the scene, and the Greenpeace field attracted both types, some of which were at their first festival. Download is such a friendly place though they all fitted right in.

It wasn't all work though and I got to see some bands and do some serious drinking. The one and only Damh the Bard was there. Guns and Roses were the big name, a band I felt like I'd grown up with. Mara pointed out that Axel Rose now looks like Donald trump in a hat, and it seems he can sing other people's songs better than his own now. Slash though made it a really amazing show. Other highlights were Avenged Sevenfold who are now a true headline act, and Thunder, a band I saw at university but who've still got it. Highlight of the weekend though was watching 'Jesus' crowd-surfing to Cradle of Filth whilst an aeroplane flew over trailing a 'God Loves You' banner. Surreal.

Back home our campaigning consists of taking to task Barclays for their financing of a tar sands
pipeline in Canada. This means getting the train into Manchester whilst carrying a large cardboard ATM machine, which was interesting.

Tar sands make fracking look clean and safe and although it's a pretty obscure campaign for Manchester, but people are supportive and sign messages of support. We also had a really angry branch manager when we handed our ATM into the bank, which was reassuring. It always makes me suspicious when they're nice.

July

This month we received news that all our krill campaigning had paid off: a huge group of companies that control most of the krill fishing announce they were pulling out of the Antarctic and would not be opposing Greenpeace's plans for an ocean sanctuary. A big success for our campaign.

Climate Change also came a bit nearer to home, as Saddleworth Moor caught fire, with the flames visible from my bedroom window. Fortunately the wind was blowing away from Glossop, so it was Tameside Social Services rather than us that had to evacuate people. At night the peat continued to burn and the red glow could be seen after it was too dark to see the hills themselves. It was like looking out over Mordor. I decide to link this with our Barclays campaigning and write a blog for the Greenpeace UK website.

This also made me doubly determined to do something when arch Climate Change denier Donald Trump was in London. I went down on the Manchester coach with Rachel and Hannah from work. It was one of those huge demonstrations where you don't move for two hours, but the atmosphere was great. The banners and costumes are amazing too, if not very polite.

Even though it was a Friday, there were more people in London campaigning against Trump than there had been in Washington celebrating his inauguration the previous year. There were a lot of people around I knew, as I'd expect, but the only one I met up with was Mara who, being American, had even more reason to be there than I had.

We also did some plastic campaigning, and decided to pay a visit to Sainsbury's flagship store at Cheadle Royal. We never know what we're going to get when we go here. Last time the only person who spoke to us was parking warden, who was pleased to meet people who didn't look down their noses at him.

Plastic seemed to be an issue that the SUV driving mums of Wilmslow wanted to engage with though, and many of them take our replacement paper bags to salve their consciences as they drive home.

August

The start of August found me on holiday in the one part of the UK not suffering a drought. However the wildlife in Dumphries and Galloway didn't seem to mind, and a pair of friendly badgers visited our cottage ever evening.

Greenpeace renewed its campaign to ban diesel cars, and went after old enemy VW again. As a result the pixies were out in Manchester, Altrincham and Stockport decorating VW diesels in the night. As usual, Canonbury Villas don't tell us why we're doing this, but it turns out to be the prelude to a re-branding of the VW offices in Milton Keynes.

I managed a bit more plastic campaigning in August too, firstly in Manchester itself, and then at my second festival of the year. This was RiZe in Chelmsford, which is what has replaced V. We were running the deposit return scheme, where we give people 10p back on their plastic skiffs and bottles.

The Greenpeace team were a fun bunch, and mostly half my age. As we didn't have our own field we were in crew catering, which meant three course meals twice a day. I also found the back stage artists toilets - which actually flushed - and once I'm on friendly terms with the security man I also don't get searched as I came and went, meaning I could bring in my own beer. This was good as they only sold lager on site, this being Essex and all that. The main act was Liam Gallagher, who was excellent when doing Oasis numbers. I saw Oasis before they were famous at a free festival in Preston. This felt like seeing them after they're famous. However the find of the festival for me were Brighton indie outfit Black Honey.

At the end of the month though came the sad news that Lord Peter Melchett, former director of Greenpeace UK, and the only peer of the realm I've ever shared a police cell with, had died. I first met him on the 'Lyng job' of 1999. He had led a fascinating life that took him from his father's farm in Norfolk, through politics in Jim Callaghan's government, to activism with Greenpeace, the Soil Association and other organisations. He was arrested twice, but only ever in Norfolk. My memories of him are here.

There was better news too, as we found out that our tar sands campaign had been successful. A Canadian court squashed the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Canada had planned three pipelines to get the tar sands oil for Alberta to the USA. They were all controversial, but this was the first one to be stopped. Two to go.

September

After baking in the sunshine at Envirolution, we were looking forward to the Wigan Diggers Festival, and thought it would be a good idea to sell water bottles to raise money for Greenpeace. However come the day we all got a drenching. Fortunately we had our own gazebo, and even more fortunately the people next to us didn't turn up so we could use theirs as well. Preston Greenpeace joined us, but their face painting wasn't too popular due to the weather. Evey and Helen had made cakes and wraps though and these sold well, even though the water bottles didn't. Once we'd finished we got to enjoy the music. Merry Hell were great. Alice had driven there in her new car, and we made it safely there and back again, despite my navigating.

Fortunately it's a bit drier when we return to plastic campaigning. Greenpeace promised a shoppers
revolt against pointless plastic and I was a bit cynical, thinking we'd be lucky to get one mildly dis-chuffed shopper. However they were right and I was wrong.

We had more volunteers than we could actually use - I don't know how many but it was double figures - and a really great response from the public. Even the manager of Chorlton Morrison's seemed pleased to see us. Getting shoppers in Manchester to use less plastic bags is a very long way from cleaning up the world's oceans, but it's a start. Hopefully next year we'll be setting people some more challenging targets.

October

We were back in the Antarctic in October, with one final push before the Antarctic Commission met in Hobart, Tasmania to decide if the Antarctic ocean sanctuary was going to happen. We showed some film of the Arctic Sunrise expedition and I talked about Greenpeace's 'Million Dollar Missions' in the 1980s. But best of all we had River talk about what it was like to actually be there. He'd served two tours with the British Antarctic Survey at a time when British Antarctica was all white and all male. Things have changed a bit since then thankfully.


Whilst all of the above was going on, the campaign against fracking in Blackpool had been going on.

Scores of people had been arrested for blockading the gates, locking-on and lorry surfing. Three people who'd done the latter last year had found out that Lancashire police had no way of getting them down, and so had ended up on the trucks for several days. The Crown Prosecution service hadn't liked that and so Simon, Richard and Rich had found themselves convicted of Public Nuisance and sent to prison. They weren't the first peaceful eco-warriors to end up behind bars, but they were probably the first since the Mass Trespass in 1932 to go straight to jail without first breaching bail or refusing to pay a fine.

They were released on appeal, and by coincidence a big rally was planned at Preston New Road the week after. Attending meant missing the big anti-Brexit demo in London, but it was worth it. This was the largest gathering there'd been at PNR. Former LibDem leader Tim Farron was there, along with John Ashton, Tina Louise and others, but there was no doubt who the stars of the show were: Simon, Richard and Rich.

Also October I invited the one and only Anne Power to Glossop for another showing of the film Power Trip. The 2014 Observer Ethical Award winner was the film's cover girl, so we had to invite her along.

Glossop isn't an area licensed to frack, which is why Frack Free Glossop is just Rod and I, but it was good too see that even here there is strong opposition to shale gas.

Anne told us about watching the Blitz on Liverpool in the Second World War, and the campaigns against fracking at Barton Moss and Lancashire. She is still going strong as a campaigner at 87, so she has a way of making us all feel inadequate.

November

Barclays was visited again in November. The Trans Mountain Pipeline may be history, but they still had plenty of money invested in dirty fossil fuels, so using the contacts we'd made earlier in the year we encouraged people to get in touch with them and tell them to stop. Ben from Hebden Bridge was one who did.

November was also the month of Rang Tan. This short film, narrated by Emma Thompson, was originally produced by Greenpeace to use with schoolchildren. Iceland supermarket tried to use it as their Christmas TV advert, but fell foul of an obscure clause in the regulator's rules. However the result was an internet sensation that led to 60 million people watching the film, and a good number of Mumsnet shoppers ditching Waitrose for the frozen food retailer.

Our own contribution to the battle against destructive palm oil was to take to the streets of Manchester to get people to be photographed sending a message to Oreo. Once again we had a good turnout of volunteers, including new photographer Moe, and a lot of support from Manchester folk.

At the end of the month Matt, Helen and I are down in Canonbury Villas for the annual Greenpeace Local Groups Conference. Our privatised railways did their bit to try to stop me, with both my trains out and back being very late. However when I got there it was great to meet old friends again. Greenpeace appeared to have learnt their lesson from last year and just ordered bottles of beer, rather than a whole barrel, and so I still felt vaguely human on Sunday morning. Before I went down though I'd quickly edited a first rush of a 'Best of 2018' video. I got it on Greenwire and it was noticed by the ED, which was a Brownie point for Manchester.

I had to sing for my supper though by giving a presentation on how we ran the Manchester Group, which caused a little bit of a problem as we weren't entirely sure ourselves how we did run it. At the start of the month we'd got the bad news that Russia, China and Norway had all vetoed the Antarctic sanctuary, but we got the hint that there would be some good news on our other campaigns soon.

December

Greenpeace local group campaigning pretty much came to an end in December. However that didn't stop it being our most successful month of the year.

Firstly, VW appeared to have shifted their position significantly. After refusing to meet Greenpeace all year they relented after the action in Milton Keynes. The main news their ED wanted to pass on to ours was that he was resigning! However shortly afterwards came a more important announcement: VW were ditching the internal combustion engine and going electric. Not quick enough for us, but still significant news.

Then came the news that our Oreo campaigning had been effective. Mondelez International, the parent company that owns Oreo, as well as a load of familiar British brand names like Cadbury's, Terry's and Fry's, had got together with other palm oil users and put pressure on Wilmar International, their palm oil supplier in Indonesia. This pressure led to Wilmar announcing a raft of measures, including satellite surveillance of their suppliers, to try to stop deforestation. They will need to be kept an eye on to ensure they keep their promises, but it was a great victory.

The next bit of good news came from Brazil, where a court stopped Total's effort to drill off the Amazon Reef. This wasn't necessarily the end of BPs bid, but it made it extremely unlikely to succeed.

The final bit of good news had very little to do with either myself or Greenpeace, but was still very welcome. Fracking at Preston New Road had been repeatedly halted over the previous few weeks due to minor earthquakes. Cuadrilla had previously agreed a low threshold for stopping operations, but now they were asking the government to raise the limit. We don't know what the government's reply was, but just before Yule Cuadrilla took away all their compressors and started to dismantle the rig. We don't know if this really is it, but it was certainly not part of the plan.

So that was 2018. We failed in the Antarctic and the tangerine fascist is still in the White House. However on VW, on palm oil, on the Amazon Reef and finally on fracking in the UK we were making progress. Minor victories, in the grand scheme of things, but it's minor victories that keep us going.

And so it's on to 2019. This year we change the world, as I said last year.

Does the government need a way out on fracking?

On 21st March 2018, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham held his first Green Summit, where he announced his intention to make Manchester one of the greenest cities on the planet. Many fine words were said, but it's far too early to judge what actions they will result in.

However, in the evening Frack Free Greater Manchester held an anti-fracking fringe event to review the four years that had passed since IGas ended their initial search for shale gas at Barton Moss, Salford. About thirty people packed into a room at Central Methodists hall to hear the story of the opposition to fracking in the UK, and to plan the next moves in the campaign.

Helena Coates - Frack Free Greater Manchester

Helena, who was part of the campaign against drilling at Barton Moss, said that when she first joined the protests, she did not think of herself as an environmentalist. But as she kept attending the slow walks, and saw how the protectors were policed, she started to make connections between the economics, the politics and the issues.

She said that she though out her campaigning against fracking, she has always been a mother and she ended her talk by reading from The Storm, by Kathy Henderson. A tale of a mother and son who survive a wild night on a barren coastline, it was a story of the power of nature, and about survival.

Eddie Thornton - Kirby Misperton Protection Camp 

Eddie was part of the campaign to stop Third Energy fracking at Kirby Misperton, near Pickering in North Yorkshire. The KM8 well looked like ot should have been the easiest place in the country for fracking to get going as it was on an existing industrial site, and a well had already been drilled for conventional gas in 2011 - although they had 'accidently' over-drilled by more than a kilometre. The gas would enter the grid by an existing pipeline and, despite 4000 letters of objection, against only 30 in support, the local authority had approved planning permission.

However things did not go smoothly for Third Energy. Frack Free Ryedale was set up round a kitchen table in 2014, and at the end of 2016 a protection camp was set up. Eddie described Christmas at the camp, which was still being built. As he and the other protectors huddled round candles in the cold, a procession of locals brought them Christmas dinner in stages, something which kept them going both "physically and spiritually".

Kirby Misperton is an area that is conservative with both a small and a large 'c'. However the campaign, led by the community and supported by the camp, soon started to attract support from people who did not usually embrace radical causes. Even the local bishop turned up. Third Energy and the police had a communication strategy that tried to divide the locals and the protectors, but the camp always had three people working with the press to counter this.

Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Development, could have
approved the fracking in October last year. However, as a result of the opposition, he got cold feet. This was to have catastrophic consequences for Third Energy.

In January 2018 the outsourcing giant Carillion collapsed. Third Energy's chairman, Keith Cochrane, was a former chief executive of Carillion, and this put the spotlight on the energy companies finances. Third Energy had filed their accounts four months late, but when they did it showed they had £52 million of debt, and only a few thousand pounds of assets.

Throughout the campaign in Ryedale, campaigners across the country had been targeting Barclays bank, Third Energy's main financial backers. faced with growing opposition, and Third Energy's collapsing business case, Barclays basically "pulled the plug on their finances". The government imposed a financial test on fracking companies, which Third Energy failed. They withdrew their rig and, despite promises to return in the autumn, it is almost certainly all over.

Eddie was clear what had happened: community resistance works. The companies, and their backers, know that opposition is growing. Even a large bank like Barclays cannot ignore this.

But Eddie also said he saw in their victory in North Yorkshire, a way that the national campaign can be won. The collapse of Third Energy's finances gave the government a "way out" of supporting fracking, without having to do a politically embarrassing U-turn, and Eddie hoped that the success at Kirby Misperton can be the model of how to defeat fracking in the rest of the country. INEOS, who plan to frack large parts of Yorkshire and the East Midlands, have a mountain of debt and their stock is effectively junk bonds. All it may take to end their threat is for the government to go over their books.

Maureen Mills - Frack Free Lancashire

"If you'd told me four years ago I'd be here with all of you now, I'd never have believed it," Maureen told the meeting.

The campaign in North Yorkshire may have been won, but in Lancashire it continues. Despite the planning inspector deciding it should not go ahead, the government is reopening the public enquiry into Cuadrilla Resources' application to frack at Roseacre Wood on 10 April. 

Of the different ways the campaign against fracking had developed, Maureen was particularly impressed by the contribution of the Trade Unions, especially the One Million Climate jobs pamphlet. "This is now a campaign for social justice." The way forward, she thought, was to "win the hearts and minds" of people.

Maureen said she can see the results of this tactic. "More people oppose fracking than support it". She said "I really feel the tide is turning," especially with people in Lancashire "now it's landing on their doorsteps." However she warned "the thing is sticking together, with a united resistance."

The success in North Yorkshire had left her "even more buoyed up". Like Third Energy, the companies that plan to frack Lancashire have "precious little money."

Maureen also said that Frack Free Lancashire would like to hold another rally in Manchester, like the United Against Fracking march in November 2016. The energy of that day had sustained campaigners through their year old protest at the gates of Cuadrilla's site.

"Let's do it again," she said.