‘We’re ready’: UK anti-fracking activists prepare to fight resurgence plans

Anti-fracking campaigners have vowed to give energy firms “no peace” if the government lifts the moratorium on fracking, pledging “inconvenient and noisy” protests at every site.

Steve Mason, campaign director of Frack Free United, said there was an army of retired “geri-activists” ready to lie down and face prosecution for the cause again.

Tina Rothery, who was arrested seven times at Cuadrilla’s fracking site at Preston New Road near Blackpool, said campaigners were ready to unfurl their banners, dig out their drums and make life as hard as possible for any energy firm hoping to use the Ukraine crisis to restart fracking operations.

It is only a month since fracking was declared effectively dead in Britain after Cuadrilla announced plans to concrete up its Blackpool wells. But after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the extreme form of energy extraction is back in the political spotlight, with a small cadre of Conservative MPs and energy lobbyists touting it as the solution to the nation’s energy security.

Rothery was one of the so-called Nanas, a tireless band of women who kept watch at the gate of the Preston New Road site every day for years. Dressed in yellow tabards with matching headscarves and often with grandchildren in tow, the women revelled in a form of peaceful protest designed for maximum annoyance.

The formation of the Nana Samba Band was viewed as the nadir for the Lancashire constabulary officers tasked with guarding the site gate until the government imposed a moratorium on fracking in November 2019.

“A samba band is great if you like being inconvenient and noisy, and I can’t tell you the joy of having a drum on when a cop is coming towards you,” said Rothery. “A, you have two big sticks and B, the drum is in the way. Plus it’s a great way to beat the shit out of your rage.”

Another Nana protest saw the site festooned with bras – a lacy nod to studies that suggested a link between proximity to fracking wells and an increase in cases of breast cancer.

The Nana Samba Band will be making a racket outside the Conservative’s spring conference in Blackpool on 18 and 19 March, alongside anti-fracking protesters.

“We will give the fracking industry no peace. We don’t even need to gear back up. We’ve got boots by the door, we’re ready,” said Rothery. “We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.”

Rothery’s view, shared by many privately in the energy industry, is that protesters made fracking so difficult, expensive and politically unpalatable the industry never really got off the ground in the UK.

“We cost them so much money and time and public opinion that they could not recover from that,” she said.

The Nanas formed after Cuadrilla began test drilling at Preston New Road in 2010, causing tiny earthquakes which spooked the local population in 2011.

In Doncaster, the local Labour councillor Dave Shaw said he didn’t think fracking would seriously restart here “because any meaningful level of extraction is going to take 10 years at least”. But he said Frack Free South Yorkshire was nonetheless on high alert: “We’re not going into battle just yet, but there’s certainly a cranking of the wheels.”

The same is true in Ryedale, where a potential fracking site at Kirby Misperton prompted years of protest, said Mason.

The Kirby Misperton site is no longer at risk of fracking after Third Energy, the company granted the exploration licence, was taken over by the renewable energy firm the Wolfland Group. Mason is one of the company’s directors, and said they hope to use the existing wells for geothermal energy and the burial of captured carbon dioxide emissions.

But other energy companies, including the chemical firm Ineos, still hold licences to frack in Yorkshire and elsewhere, said Mason, warning that protesters will be ready should the government lift the moratorium.

“What we used to call geri-activists, they are more than ready to step up again,” he said. “They are local people who have done it before and will do it again to protect where they live.”

Shaw said he’d start to worry if Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man and Ineos’s chief executive, started taking an interest in fracking again. “But as far as I can see, he’s not waded in. If he starts making some noise I’ll be a bit concerned.”

Author:Helen Pidd 

Photograph: Christopher Thomond