North Shropshire MP Helen Morgan has secured a debate in Parliament on opposing fracking without community consent.
The debate is intended to make the pause on fracking plans in the UK “U-turn proof” by pressuring Conservative MPs to speak out publicly and pledge to oppose any further change by the Government.
Mrs Morgan, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Levelling Up, has already promised to campaign to stop any fracking taking place in North Shropshire.
The move follows a significant backlash towards the 326 Conservative MPs who voted against a motion in Parliament which would have led to a ban on fracking, despite many of them having stated their opposition to the practice previously.
Liberal Democrats have warned that without renewed pressure a further U-turn on fracking remains a persistent threat.
Mrs Morgan said: “It’s really important that beautiful countryside in places like North Shropshire is protected from damaging drilling.
“With my debate, Tory MPs now have the opportunity to make amends with the constituents they let down. They need to make clear that they will not support the imposition of fracking on our communities.
“I’m challenging every Conservative MP to pledge in public that they will defend their communities if fracking is imposed on them.
“They know that fracking won’t bring down energy bills and that their constituents don’t want it. They should put their constituents before their party and make the pause on the fracking of our countryside U-turn proof.”
DrillOrDrop’s review of the latest UK onshore oil data for July 2022: daily production falls at Wytch Farm to the lowest level for 10 years and the Gatwick Gusher slows to a trickle.
Protest is our fundamental right. But not content with its new Policing Act which gives police even more powers to shut down protests, the Government is attempting to further criminalise people for taking to the streets with its Public Order Bill.
The UK’s environmental movement has a long history of using protest as a strategy. Disruption is often at the heart of this, either disrupting infrastructure projects themselves in an attempt to stop them going ahead (roads, fracking sites), or targeting existing infrastructure (fuel depots, airport runways or bridges) to disrupt others. Disruption gets people’s attention in a way that a conventional demonstration with placards seldom does – although it is not without the risk of backlash.
Recent climate activism has followed this disruptive tradition, with Extinction Rebellion blocking key London streets and bridges, Insulate Britain blocking motorways and Just Stop Oil targeting transport fuel distribution networks.
The government is keen to use the law to try to stamp out this type of disruptive protest. At the heart of this drive is the public order bill, introduced in May 2022 by the then home secretary, Priti Patel. But in introducing this bill the government may not have considered how the environmental movement has an equally long history of using criminal law to its advantage.
Getting arrested is often part of the protest strategy. While the new bill is intended to crack down on protest, it may inadvertently provide an avenue for further activism. One could see environmental groups bringing private prosecutions for climate offences committed under the bill, or at the very least arguing that the police should be bringing charges against the other side.
Take the offence of “locking on”. Section 1 of the bill states that a person commits an offence if they attach themselves, someone else or an object to another person, an object or land.
That act must cause, or be capable of causing, “serious disruption” to two or more people or an organisation, and the person must do this intentionally or be reckless to the consequences. The bill provides a defence if the person charged can prove they had a “reasonable excuse” for the act.
This offence is clearly aimed at protesters, who have used gluing and other forms of locking on as a way of preventing their quick removal by the police. But there is no reason why the climate movement cannot argue that a driver of a petrol tanker, in connecting their trailer with a cab, is “attaching an object to another object”.
This attachment, it could be argued, would help cause serious climate disruption to far more than just two individuals. While the driver may not have intended such disruption, one could argue that they are reckless as to whether it will have such consequences. Will the driver have a reasonable excuse defence? That’s for them to prove – the climate movement may try to argue that they do not.
Section 3 sets out an offence of causing serious disruption by tunnelling. It states that a person commits an offence if they create or participate in the creation of a tunnel, and the tunnel causes, or is capable of causing, serious disruption.
Again, they must intend or be reckless as to whether the creation or existence of the tunnel will have this consequence. The section similarly provides for a “reasonable excuse” defence and states that a person will be deemed to have a reasonable excuse if the tunnel was authorised by the relevant landowner.
With this in mind, environmental groups could bring private prosecutions against fracking companies or proposed underground coal mines such as the controversial Woodhouse Colliery site in Cumbria. These fossil fuel extraction activities are, one could argue, using tunnelling that is capable of causing serious climate disruption, and the relevant companies are reckless as to whether these harmful consequences could occur.
Whether they have a reasonable excuse or not may turn on arguments about whether such new fossil fuel extraction sites are compatible with the government’s net-zero targets.
Reasonable excuses
The defence may argue that they can rely on the “deemed” reasonable excuse where the creation of the tunnel was authorised by a landowner. That provision will normally protect standard infrastructure tunnellers (for example, those building a road tunnel). But where horizontal drilling “tunnels” go under other people’s land (as can happen with fracking), it is not entirely clear that the tunnel will be so authorised.
There was a similar issue with the tort of trespass to land, with groups such as Greenpeace trying to stop fracking using a precedent where former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed had successfully sued Star Energy for drilling under his land. The government shut down this avenue via the Infrastructure Act 2015.
The 2015 act provides that a “person has the right to use deep-level land in any way for the purposes of exploiting petroleum or deep geothermal energy” under a depth of 300 metres from the surface. This means they can’t be sued in tort for trespass.
But it doesn’t avoid the need for an authorisation from neighbouring landowners for the purposes of the public order bill. Without such an authorisation, a defendant is unlikely to be able to rely on the bill’s deemed reasonable excuse defence.
Even if these arguments end up being given short shrift in the courts, they may at least give campaigners charged with these draconian new offences an opportunity to tell a different story about the offences they have been charged with. Protest is often the canary in the coalmine. If we shut it down, some may avoid being disrupted now, but with climate change, we will surely all be disrupted much more in the future as the planet warms beyond 1.5℃.
Protest is also a safety valve. In further restricting overt protest, the bill could have the unintended consequence of driving eco-activists towards more extreme and violent forms of covert action.
Three years ago today, the government formally confirmed a moratorium on fracking in England.
DrillOrDrop has compiled this timeline of events that led to the introduction of the 2019 moratorium, its brief lifting and the latest U-turn.
We also look back at an earlier moratorium, introduced in 2011, also prompted by fracking in Lancashire by Cuadrilla. And we give details of moratoriums on fracking in Scotland and Wales, which have remained in force.
Campaigners in Nottinghamshire say they welcome the new Prime Minister’s re-instatement of a ban on fracking – but say the threat has not gone away.
The Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto pledged to ban it – before former Prime Minister Liz Truss’ government U-turned on the commitment once she came to power last month. But Rishi Sunak restored the ban on fracking during his first Prime Minister’s Questions. He said he would “stand by the manifesto” in 2019 which put a moratorium on shale gas extraction – until there was new scientific evidence about the technique.The Misson Springs site, in Bassetlaw, was subject to shale gas tests until 2019 after Nottinghamshire County Council approved plans in 2016. In 2019 “exploration work” was completed at the site, and applicants Island Gas Ltd (IGAS) said it had found a “world-class gas resource”.
But former Misson resident Sheelagh Handy, said the threat of fracking in Misson remains. She called for the site to be restored to its former state. She said: “It is a pause, not a ban. We are very aware as a community that the threat could return any moment. The fact is that iGas should have restored the site a long while ago. It is an uncertain time because we have been here before and on a pinhead, everything changed again. We welcome what was said by Sunak but we actually want action, we want the site restored.”
“We want a ban on fracking nationally.”
“The prospect of fracking still hangs over us, it hasn’t gone away.
ErinMcDaid, Head of Communications & Marketing at Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, said “It will hopefully mean we can get the experimental drilling site at Misson springs capped and restored. “Nationally the picture is still very scary. This is welcome but it’s only a crumb of comfort.”
July 2021
Nottinghamshire fracking plans were refused and site must be restored to natural condition.
IGas submitted plans to extend the site’s use and delay restoration works until November 2023, hoping for a reversal of the Government moratorium.
The application was recommended for approval by council officials. But Nottinghamshire County Council’s planning and rights of way committee opted to refuse the application, ordering the site to be restored.
This meant the applicant must restore the Springs Road land to its former condition.
Last Wednesday, the term “whip” took on a new meaning as the famous gesticulating and yelling across the aisles of the British House of Commons escalated into Conservatives pushing their fellow party members out of the main room and toward the voting booths to keep them from abstaining during the government’s vote on fracking. This was a last-ditch effort to save the government of Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who already had two major Cabinet members resign, complaining of serious concerns about the government’s leadership. The government was looking weaker by the second. Although Truss’s team won the vote, she lost the war, as she resigned the next day.
The vote was brought forward by the opposition Labour Party, in an effort to permanently ban fracking. Labour’s motion failed by a vote of 329 to 230. But the chaos during the vote exposed the deep rifts within the Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, between the right-wingers who led the United Kingdom out of the European Union and the moderates who favour more pro-environment policies. (Truss belongs to the former camp.) Despite the win, confidence in Truss’s leadership remained low and she resigned after just 44 days in office, the shortest tenure in U.K. history.
To understand why fracking — which is short for hydraulic fracturing and refers to the process of shooting liquid into rock below the Earth’s surface to release oil or gas — has become central to British politics, one must start at the beginning of the issue’s history.
Fracking caused small earthquakes in the U.K. around 2011, leading to an 18-month ban and a new system to regulate drilling and monitor seismic activity. In 2019, the oil and gas company Cuadrilla Resources triggered a 2.9-magnitude earthquake, which was believed to be the biggest fracking-related tremor ever recorded in Britain. In response, the national government issued a moratorium that promised not to start fracking again unless new evidence said it was safe to do so.
But this spring, the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused oil and gas prices to spike, especially in Europe. The government of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson commissioned a review on fracking by the British Geological Survey. The study found no new evidence that it can be done more safely, in part because there has been no new fracking in the country, but also because there’s no evidence internationally that it can be done more safely than in the past.
On Oct. 18, the Labour Party, which has the second most seats in Parliament, brought forward a motion to ban fracking officially. Several senior Conservative members of Parliament, including the commissioner of an independent study of the government’s approach to meeting its net zero target, announced they would abstain rather than vote with Truss. In response, a few of Truss’s allies claimed that abstaining — in effect voting with Labour — would signify a no-confidence vote for Truss, turning those nonvotes into a major rebellion in the party and instilling even more doubt in a government that was already shaky.
“This is not a motion on fracking. This is a confidence motion in the government,” said the Conservative deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, in a message to MPs. His job was to convince all the Tories to vote in favour of the Conservative government, meaning against the motion.
As a result, the vote came to signify not just the country’s future in fracking, but also the Tories’ confidence in, and loyalty to, their own leadership. Fracking itself was less of an issue than the fact that several senior members of the Conservative Party were about to go against the prime minister.
In the end, 40 Conservatives abstained, which was in effect a vote against Truss, and the vote itself was a spectacle. “I saw a whole swathe of MPs effectively pushing one member straight through the door,” Labour MP Chris Bryant told the BBC,” adding that what he saw was “clear bullying.” Because the voting booths are outside the house chamber, members of government must leave the room in order to vote. Those being pushed were likely hoping to abstain.
The controversy shook the party to its core. Several MPs, who were now extremely worried that they no longer had party unity, called for Truss to step down the next day in an effort to restore some sense of order. The country’s third prime minister of the year, Rishi Sunak, was elected unopposed on Monday.
A former party whip at Westminster said he had never seen anything like the chaos before the vote that finally cracked the government. Orkney and Shetland MP Alistair Carmichael, who was first elected in 2001, was tasked with ensuring colleagues voted with the Conservatives when he was Lib Dem chief whip and deputy chief whip for Tory PM David Cameron’s coalition government.
He still speaks regularly to Tory MPs and said their mood was despondent after a tumultuous week that culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss the morning after the Tories plunged into chaos before a vote on a Labour motion on fracking. Labour MP Chris Bryant claimed some were manhandled through the voting lobby by senior Tories.
Carmichael, who witnessed the commotion, said: “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Politics is important and the decisions you make as an MP matter. If people get hot under the collar about it, that’s not always a bad thing. But that is country miles from what we were seeing last week.
“The mood in the Conservative Party is despondent. It is rudderless. It is a failure of political leadership that has brought us to this point. Not just from Liz Truss. This government and Boris Johnson’s government before it is populated by people who have a colossal sense of entitlement.
“It was their arrogance and hubris that made them think they could bend the markets to their will. As a consequence they may have done permanent and irreparable damage to the British economy.”
In last week’s chaotic Commons vote on fracking, more than 30 Tory MPs refused to back the Government’s decision to lift the ban on shale gas exploration.
However, among the ministers supporting the Government was new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who clearly approves of fracking . . . unless, it seems, it’s in his South-West Surrey constituency.
‘I protest in the strongest of terms against your decision to grant the appeal that will allow drilling and exploration of fossil fuel,’ wrote Hunt. ‘The proposals to carry out such activity have been decisively rejected by Surrey County Council and the entire local community. I can’t see how this site has any role to play in our future energy supply needs.’
‘Nimby Hunt’ was widely mocked on social media following last week’s vote, including the following on a local blog: ‘FRACK!! I am now the Chancellor so sod the Stop The UKOG brigade protesting against oil/gas exploration on my patch.’
Still in Surrey, Farnham town councillors debated last week whether to send a congratulatory message to the newly-appointed Chancellor — but thought better of it. ‘He might not be there very long,’ mused one. Indeed not!
Madsen Pirie, president of the Thatcherite Adam Smith Institute, is not impressed by the bleatings of some of former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s more stentorian critics. ‘We have indeed entered strange territory when a notionally Conservative MP, Robert Halfon, describes those who favour tax cuts as “libertarian jihadists”. They used to be called Conservatives.’ Let’s face it, he has a point!
Overheard in the Commons. One Tory MP to another: ‘How long before the Queen’s record of 15 prime ministers is beaten by Charles III?’
Encouraging awareness of hydraulic fracturing in our communities