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.

Guns, Germs, Steel, Colonies and Coal

In July 1972, the biologist Jared Diamond found himself on a beach in New Guinea. By chance, he bumped into Yali, a local politician. What Yali wanted to know from the scientist was:

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

 It took Diamond a little while to answer, but the result was a book he wrote twenty five years later. His answer was that this was mostly an accident of geography.

Guns, Germs and Steel

The basic building blocks of civilisation are plants and animals that can be domesticated. As the largest of the continents, Eurasia has far more usable flora and fauna than any other continent. What's more, the East-West axis of Eurasia allowed these edible plants and tame animals to be propagated across all the major civilisations of the continent, west to Britain and east to China. European crops grow very well in southern Africa, but the harsh climate of sub-Saharan Africa lies in the way, meaning that cows and grain couldn't reach the bottom of the continent until Europeans learnt to sail the oceans. The Americas, meanwhile, were host to a decent number of useful species, from maize to potatoes, but they were each stuck in their particular climatic niche and couldn’t spread north or south.

Better farming led to higher population densities, but there were consequences to large numbers of people and animals living together, consequences that we are still living with today: disease. However, whilst the viruses and other pathogens from domesticated animals killed millions, the survivors passed their immunity on to their children. This meant that when the people from the Old World went to the New, Americans died in vast quantities of European diseases, but Europeans did not die of American bugs.

That is, in essence, the argument in Diamond’s book. But whilst it’s as good as far as it goes, there is a huge elephant in the room: China. China enjoyed all the benefits of the Eurasia farming inheritance. As the source of many of the world’s infectious diseases her population’s immunity was as good as anyone’s. So why was it Europe, and not China, that conquered the world? Diamond suggests the answer was political, that as China became a Universal State with no enemies of equal stature, she did not have the drive to improve that the warring European nations had. This is probably not right.

Instead, the next piece of the jigsaw is provided by Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great
Divergence. Comparing Europe and China pre-1800 he looks at all the reasons that are given for subsequent European domination, such as political and financial institutions, culture and economics, and so on, and finds almost all of them all wanting.

The one factor in which Europe did enjoy and advantage though was it’s American colonies. China had the vast Pacific to its east, whilst Europe had the more manageable Atlantic. The ship technology developed to navigate the stormy seas of western Europe could cross the Atlantic to reach the New World, but the Pacific was impassable to Chinese vessels. Superior military technology, and techniques, allowed Europeans to take what they wanted by force. Guns, germs and steal really.

The Great Divergence 

However, even with the spoils of an entire continent to be ruthlessly exploited, as well as the first factories,

Europe, as a whole, was not richer than China in 1800. Parts of Europe, like England, were far wealthier than the Chinese average, it is true, but equally parts of China, like the Yangtze Delta, were richer than the European average. The West only starts to accelerate away from the East in the nineteenth century when it begins to use significant amounts of coal. Now this is a complicated issue, because China has vast amounts of coal too. So why was the Industrial Revolution powered by anthracite from Wales, not Inner Mongolia? Pomeranz puts this too down to geography as well.

Chinese coal is mainly in the north, and the chief problem with extracting it is stopping it catching fire. With European coal mines the major issue was draining the water out. To solve this the Europeans, led by the British, used steam engines. In 1800 steam engines were grossly inefficient. However, when used in coal mines this didn’t really matter. Being based at the mine itself, not only were there no transport costs for the fuel, but they were able to run on the lowest quality coal that didn’t really have a commercial value anyway. Thanks to this free energy the European economy received an injection of free calories that were not dependent on the limited resource of land.

More significantly though, as steam engines were used more, they improved and became more efficient. Engineers like Watt became justifiably famous, but really this wasn’t the work a few geniuses, but a gradual improvement based on experience. With usable steam engines came railways, steam ships and all the paraphernalia of the industrial revolution. European heavy metal blew the Asian economy out of the water, in some cases literally.

So, there we have it. Not proven, by any means, but it is at least a theory that is consistent with the facts. Europe, for a while, was the dominant force in the world due to accidents of geography. Eurasian farming was the best. Eurasian diseases were the worst. Europe was gifted the Americas as colonies, and her coal reserves posed exactly the right sort of problems for the development of steam engines.

Sources

Guns, Germs, and Steel was first published by W. W. Norton in March 1997 by Jared Diamond

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz

We saw a crisis. He saw an opportunity.

It will go down as one of the most fatal political miscalculations in British history.

A deadly virus has recently been unleashed on the world, and across the globe countries are locking down and contact tracking all victims. However, in the United Kingdom the Prime Minister told us that we were going to 'take it on the chin'. Our experts knew better than everyone else's experts, and we were to pursue a policy of 'herd immunity'. One month later and at least 20,000 people in Britain are dead, with at least as many again expected to fall victim to Covod-19, and one of them was very nearly Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself. What went wrong?

Let's rewind to 3 February 2020. The theme of the day is Brexit, and the Prime Minister is to give a big speech in Greenwich in which he lays down the gauntlet to the European Union. The day before Johnson's speech the Philippines had reported the first death outside of China and the first cases had been confirmed in the United Kingdom. Three days before that the World Health Organisation had declared Covid-19 a global emergency. In China 170 had died, and, as well as the Philippines, cases had by then also been reported in Russia, Spain, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the USA.

So, what did Johnson say in his speech? Mostly it was about deregulation. Britain was not going to follow the rules set down by Europe. He did not say we'd privatise the NHS or be eating chlorinated chicken, but this was certainly the gist of what he was saying. However, he did also mention Covid-19, and this is where it gets interesting. This is what he said:

"there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange ... the UK is ready for that role."

By the end of the day the focus had changed to the attempt by, the Johnson administration to give a private press briefing to selected journalists, locking out the more sceptical, which led to a walkout by the political press corps. Johnson's references to the coronavirus were forgotten. So, what do we make of them now?

Possibly, maybe probably, they were an attempt to introduce a bit of topicality to the boringly
repetitive theme of the Brexit negotiations. Possibly they were the start of a strategy to respond to the virus. Equally likely they were both: a quick ad lib that would become a strategy.

Johnson's attitude to Brexit has always been strange. Not only has he wanted to have his cake and eat it, he has, it seems wanted to have the popularity of having 'Got Brexit Done', without actually having to do it. Brexit has always been a rebellion in search of a cause, so was it Covid-19 that gave Johnson the cause he wanted? Did he see the virus as a way of showing Great Britain's exceptionalism? Of being the champion of swashbuckling free-marketism standing up to the nanny state which overreacts to a bit of man 'flu?

When he was struck down himself, colleagues said that Johnson was the sort of person who was intolerant of illness in others. A man of great privilege, very little empathy and, until that point, good health, he saw no risk worth wrecking his precious economy for. Instead he blundered into the worst crisis for the country since the Second World War.

But is it possible that this was worse than a mistake? Did the Prime Minster see the reaction to Covid-19 around the world as 'panic' and not 'rational'? Was he prepared to sacrifice a significant chunk of the population for a free market competitive advantage and Brexit? The evidence seems so: the speech, the 'herd immunity', the lack of testing, the refusal to take part in the EU ventilator and PPE schemes. It all fits a pattern. It was Johnson's advisor, Dominic Cummings, who (allegedly) said 'protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad', and it seems the Prime Minister went further than that and saw an opportunity to not just protect the economy, but gain a competituve advantage from the crisis.

But that is not what has happened. Not only have tens of thousands of people die needlessly, but the country faces and longer lockdown that most others because we didn't act when we could. Now if that doesn't make you angry, nothing will.

Now Is The Time To Live Our Values

Ready or not, Covid 19 is here. Despite trying gamely to live up to his political hero, the Mayor in Jaws, our Prime Minister has now, reluctantly, agreed to start the process of shutting down modern, post-industrial life. What lies ahead is grim, but, as the old saying goes, a crisis is also an opportunity.

Environmentalists in the whole like to talk about how to replace the 'essentials' of modern life with greener alternatives; renewable energy, electric cars, ethical jobs and low-impact products. Fair enough, as this is the language people listen to. What we tend to do in our own lives though is actually ditch these trappings of modern life: turn off the TV, leave the car behind, ditch the high-pressure job and buy less. We walk the walk, but we tend not to talk the talk. Now that needs to stop. Coronavirus is forcing the whole country to live like us, and we need to use this chance to promote our way of life. 

We've been here before. In the wake of natural, and unnatural disasters in the USA the government has fled town, and the private sector has not stepped in. People have had to step in and fend for themselves and their neighbours. Transition Towns became survival towns. This is going to happen here. Social care will collapse, hospitals will be overrun and your vulnerable neighbours will be left stranded. They will need you. We need to step in.

But as well as making ourselves useful, and visible, we also need to make ourselves relevant. We need to use every online forum, and every human contact, to show that a life less pressured, less mobile and less dependent on technology is a life very much worth living. We have demonstrated this to ourselves, now we need to show the world.

The future starts here. 

Review of the Year 2019

January

First campaign of the year: single use plastic. Perhaps not the most important issue in the world right now, nor the most urgent, but the one that it's currently easiest to make progress on. Greenpeace made a list of the worst offenders and Sainsbury's came last, as usual, so that's where we pitched up on the third Saturday of the year.

The manager of Salford branch didn't take very kindly to us, and we were asked to leave. We went off to campaign somewhere friendlier, but marked the place down for a return visit.

February

Weird weather arrived in February and Glossop looked like it was supposed to do in the Peak District tourist brochure, or at least what it would look like if Glossop had replied to the email and was actually in the brochure.

A few days later though I was sat in the sunshine by the river in Ashford-on-the-Water in a t-shirt with my feet in snow. Global Weirding indeed.Te chnically it's an unstable polar vortex caused by climate change, but 'weirding' is a much better description.

Our plastic campaign continued, and got a bit more 'secret squirrel', which was fun. The supermarket managers we met varied from the angry to the actually supportive. We made a point of marking the nasty ones for a return visit and leaving the nice ones alone in the future.

Also in February I found myself custodian of the Greenwire Social Media Activists Group, a bit of a shock to a neo-Luddite like me. Basically I just posted up stuff from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex on how to use Twitter. She knew her stuff at least.

March

The High Peak Green Party organised a showing of the Bruce Parry film Tawai, and then didn't mind not being mentioned in the publicity, which was nice of them. The film was interesting, but Bruce Parry's spiritual take on the loss of the rainforest didn't really cut it with me: no, we are not all responsible, some people are very, very guilty indeed.

Our next campaign was climate change. To start things off we took Sami, our climate change fighting polar bear, for a night out in Manchester. People in Manchester are usually friendly, but when you have a large, cuddly bear with you they are even friendlier. The Hen Party were particularly welcoming to him.

March was also Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham's second Green Summit. This time we got some details on what he was actually planning, and it was both startlingly radical and also considerably less than what's needed. Chris Boardman was a revelation in his commitment to making Manchester a cycling city. I also learnt a lot about electric cars.

April

Our plastic campaign continued, and the 'secret squirrels' of Manchester Greenpeace decided to visit the Salford Sainbury's store in the early hours.

Also in April I finally got to see Kate Rowarth, the author of Doughnut Economics, speak. She was addressing a bunch of geography teachers, and perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evening was hearing them introduce her by saying the "current economic system is not fit for purpose", which is not the way geography teachers used to speak. We also had drinks afterwards amongst the dinosaurs in the Manchester Museum, which was fun.

In April 2019 it was 87 years since grandad Porter went on the Kinder Scout Mass trespass. The previous year Jordan Carroll of WellRedFilms made a short documentary about the trespass, and included me in it. Thanks to a student nurse from Sheffield, the Manchester Greenpeace group was persuaded to organise another walk to commemorate it. The weather was absolutely atrocious, with non-stop heavy rain. However, people turned out including a pregnant Social Worker and the Derbyshire badger cull saboteurs, so it was worth it.

The Greenpeace ship Esperanza came to London in April, possibly for almost the last time, as she's getting on a bit and has been a Greenpeace ship for 19 years. I volunteered my services as a tour guide for a day and had fun showing people around the former Soviet naval tug boat. She was about to set off on an epic journey from the Arctic to the Antarctic as part of Greenpeace's next campaign, which is to make 30% of the world's oceans marine protected areas by 2030.

Once the public have had their look we got a peak about, and then went off for a drink with some of the crew. I headed back to Glossop, and work, just as Extinction Rebellion were arriving in town. They were to have a lot of fun.

May

In May I went to my first Youth Strike for Climate. I travelled into Manchester in an environmentally friendly way, and ended up staying longer than I planned as Northern Rail had messed up their trains again. It was wonderful to meet so many enthusiastic young people, even if it did make me feel old, not only because I was three times the age of the organisers, but that this was a new movement I had no connection with at all. Even XR I felt slightly attached to, as many people I've know from Earth First! and Climate Camp were part of it, but this was properly a new generation. Sami came with me, and got to meet Andy Burnham. 

The next day it was Envirolution, Manchester's best free day out. Once again we had sunshine and a great day out. Extinction Rebellion were the stars of the show, but Sami also had his fans. We were now pushing the Ocean Treaty campaign, which was a fairly easy ask in the circumstances. The food, music and general ambiance were again excellent, and for a day we all felt like we really could change the world.


June

In June it was Download Festival. Greenpeave was once again running the eco-field, and I was on the team again. Whereas last year had been fun in the sun, 2019 was a bit more of a challenge. On day two my new tent had sprung a leak and my bed was afloat. That evening Jeff and I were at the bar, standing with the mud up to the top of our wellies, looking at the empty field and wondering when it would start to be fun.

Well, it did become fun. The sun came out, the mud turned to a sort of sticky glue, and Def Leppard were on stage on the Friday evening. They were the top British band of the late eighties, and whilst the others of that era: Thunder, Almighty, Little Angels, all played Leicester University whilst I was there, Def Leppard were too famous so I didn't see them live. Anthrax, Smashing Pumpkins, Slipknot and Slayer, playing their last ever UK gig, were all great, but stars of the show for me were prog metal act Tool. Listening to their song individually just does not prepare you for a Tool set. Being part of the Greenpeace crew was also fun and, come Monday morning, the eco-field was once again the cleanest part of the site.

In June I also got to visit the Houses of Parliament. The occasion was a Greenpeace lobbying day on the issue of microplastics in rivers, but my local MP, Ruth George, invited me down to make a day of it. I took Number One Son, as a reward for surviving his GCSEs, and he enjoyed being whisked past security and allowed to watch Prime Ministers Questions from in front of the security screen. There is a ban on clothing with political messages in the Palace of Westminster, but I got round it by wearing a t-shirt with a message in Russian as I watched the Teresa and Jeremy show.

July

For July it was back to the Oceans Campaign. We needed a picture of ourselves painted blue at a suitable Manchester location. The Manchester weather made this difficult, but we ended up in the Science and Industry Museum in front of Stevenson's Rocket, which had just arrived.

July was also the month of the New Mills One World Festival, which I hadn't been to for a few years. Greenpeace had a stall and I was a speaker. The weather was excellent and I popped off to camp in the woods afterwards.

August

The Climate Emergency came a little closer to home in August. I was on holiday in Wiltshire, enjoying the sunshine, when I was phoned by the Derbyshire Emergency Planning Team to say I was needed. Rain of Biblical proportions had fallen back home in High Peak and the 188 Toddbrook Dam, above the little town of Whaley Bridge, was about to collapse.

In the end it held, thanks to hundreds of volunteers and council staff and an RAF helicopter, but it was a close run thing. Although the locals were a little put out by being given fifteen minutes to leave their homes, nobody died.

September

September was Wigan Diggers festival. Last year we nearly drowned, but this year the weather was very reasonable. It was a gathering of lefties, so an easy audience, but most of the other stalls appeared to be Lexit people, which was not a good sign. When the far left is campaigning for the main policy of the far right things are not looking good.

In September there was another Global Youth Strike for Climate. I predicted in the Morning Star that it would be a big one, and fortunately I was right.

Sami the polar bear had a fun day photo bombing. He ended up everywhere from The Sun to RTE in Ireland. The stars of the show though were the young people, who once again swarmed by in their thousands. Andy Burnham, always game for these sort of gigs, allowed himself to be grilled on stage by twelve year old Lalia, who gave him a bit of a hard time.

The next day a few of these youngsters joined us for our World Cleanup Day litter pick on the canal.
This ended up being Manchester Greenpeace's best attended event of the year with about eighty people collecting on land, and a couple of canoes in the water. We bagged and tagged the rubbish, and chief culprit turned out to be McDonalds. Surprise, surprise.

You don't change the world by picking up multinational company's crap for them, but litter picks, or community cleans as Greenpeace calls them, are a great way into real activism. Also, unlike a lot of campaigning, there is some tangible evidence you have made a difference afterwards.

October

In October Manchester hosted the Greenpeace Local Groups Northwest Area conference. We were in Bridge 5 Mill in Ancoats, so the delegates were able to see an authentic bit of Industrial Manchester. As we walked to the venue we passed injecting drug users by the canal, so they saw some authentic post-Industrial Manchester too.

We were briefed on what was coming next, shared a few skills, and hopefully inspired the volunteers to get more involved. We also did a quick Burger King protest afterwards, and then drank until some of us were ill.

I had recovered enough by the following Saturday to get up very early in the morning to go on a coach to London with the Manchester People's Vote people. It's one of the biggest rallies in UK history. As a result I don't bother going on the march and just hang around in Parliament Square with Tony from XR. Talking of which I bump into the living legend that is Broccoli Man. There is a vote in parliament on Johnson's deal so we watch Parliament TV on the big screens. I've never done live politics before. The People's Vote people are very nic, but mostly they seem to be LibDem voters who hate Corbyn more than Johnson, and just wish everything was like it was before the Brexit Vote, if not the Credit Crunch. I can't see any of their arguments going down at all well north of Watford.

Monday though as I was back in Lancashire for a visit to Cuadrilla Resource's Preston New Road fracking site. I was the 101st, and hopefully last, Green Monday speaker. Sami came along for moral support. In the past speakers have included Kate Raworth and George Monbiot, but fracking in Lancashire was now in such dire straights that noone famous can even be bothered to go up there to oppose it, so they had to have me. This is what I said.

With fracking once again suspended due to earth tremors, and no sign the government was willing to spend any more political capital on fracking, the fat lady was clearing her throat in Blackpool. It's been a long, hard struggle, and Manchester played its part with the Barton Moss campaign. These things rarely have neat resolutions, unfortunately, but things looked a lot better for us than for the frackers.

Also in October came the welcome news that Sainsbury's had thrown in the towel on plastics, just like they always do when we campaign against them. As well as a fairly reasonable commitment to reduce single use plastic, they were also polite about Greenpeace in a documentary that was made about them.

November

Meanwhile the Amazon rainforest has been being burnt by Brazilian president Bolsonaro and his rancher chums. The world's voracious appetite for meat is to blame and so Greenpeace UK embarked on its first campaign to encourage people to eat less of the stuff.

Burger King in are target in England. They're a pretty tough target, and our campaign gets off to a rather damp start in Manchester. Well done to the team for continuing through a torrential downpour, and to the people of Manchester for stopping to talk to some soggy activists on the streets.

Just as we're getting going on the campaign though some idiot calls a general election election. Not great timing for a number of reasons, but I volunteer my services to local Labour Party anyway. Unfortunately, the High Peak Green Party don't take the hint and still stand a candidate.

December

General election campaigning continued. Basically this involved knocking on doors whilst old people said racist things to me.

Ruth George put a good team together. The picture on the left, which was taken on election day, shows less than half the volunteers who were in Glossop alone that day.

In the end though it was all for nothing. Real people and real issues didn't really count and Labour lost the country and the High Peak, the latter by half the Green vote.

As I prefer to get even rather than get mad, we plunge back into the Amazon campaign, and the Manchester 'secret squirrel' club pay Burger King an early morning visit.

Burger King though were stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that they were even being campaigned again, let alone that they were benefiting from rainforest destruction. Meanwhile, the Amazon fires were forgotten as the Australian fires took hold.

So that was 2019. Another win on plastics and commercial fracking was looking a very iffy prospect, but it would be very hard to argue the world ended the year, or the decade, in a better condition than it began either.

We'll just have to do better in 2020 then.

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.