Join “Reclaim the Power” at Preston New Road to Stop Fracking in Lancashire

submitted to the Earth First! Newswire

Over the next three months, communities are coming together in a United Resistance of Love and Defiance to counter Cuadrilla’s dangerous fracking plans at Preston New Road near Blackpool.

At the end of June, climate justice direct action network Reclaim the Power will be stepping up the disruption, with BLOCK AROUND THE CLOCK, a camp and blockade of the site unprecedented in size and duration.

This is an international callout, asking those who oppose fracking to help us stop Cuadrilla over the coming months.

It’s been seven years since tremors on the Fylde awakened residents to something unusual that was happening underneath them. In 2011 fracking arrived by stealth and communities between Blackpool and Preston began to organise against a serious threat to their way of life.

The Nanas of Lancashire and Reclaim the Power (RTP) held a summer action camp in the farm field at the proposed site at Preston New Road (PNR) in 2014. RTP vowed to return to assist them until the fight has been won.

Cuadrilla began to build the drill pad at PNR at the beginning of 2017. Roadside protectors were soon backed up by the formation of three separate camps and direct actions such as lock-ons and lorry surfing became a regular occurrence. RTP revisited the community in July and helped to set up a new Community Action Hub and a fourth camp at Maple Farm. Direct actions were carried out every day and a sustained, fierce resistance meant that by autumn, Cuadrilla had fallen months behind schedule.

With a long winter behind us, the launch of a new phase begins in the fight in Lancashire. The United Resistance between April and June will integrate the diverse elements of the country’s opposition to fracking, with different groups taking on daily and weekly themes. We know that the situation is urgent and only a united and sustained resistance will halt fracking before it’s too late. Horizontal drilling is now in progress and hydraulic fracturing possible within months.

We are asking you to join us at PNR. There will be places to camp and food served three times a day. We launch on Easter Monday with a family-friendly get-together that embraces the joy and community we seek to preserve. The following day when the trucks roll in, we start non-violent direct actions that will carry us through three incredibly important months. When you get here, we know you’ll find your place, there will be something for everyone; fun, safe, mass civil disobedience actions at the gate; lock-ons and truck surfing; legal observer, media, welfare, kitchen, transport and entertainment roles. Concerned citizens from all ages and walks of life will be taking action.

Between June 11-23, RTP will carry out two weeks of decentralised Break the Chain actions, targeting suppliers anywhere in the country who are enabling operations at PNR. In the final week of June, RTP call for hundreds to mobilise to the Community Action Hub at Maple Farm on the A583. We will shut the site down for a continuous 48 hour blockade in cooperation with the local community. Block Around The Clock will be a colourful festival of music, art and street theatre, within a family friendly civil disobedience action that will celebrate the diversity of the UK’s fracking resistance movement.

We are taking direct action in numbers because it works. Since beginning to build the well pad, a significant number of companies have been knocked out of Cuadrilla’s supply chain, with decentralised actions across the country creating the “crisis” and “tension” that Martin Luther King spoke of in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963.

If it’s not stopped at Preston New Road, the contagion will ripple outwards and nearby Roseacre is the next target on Cuadrilla’s radar. A public inquiry to re-evaluate the modified traffic management plan for the Roseacre site will re-open on April 10th. Haulage vehicles must travel along narrow, twisty country lanes to reach the site near a quiet rural village. When rejecting the plan in January, Lancashire County Councillor Steve Holgate said: “The only safe way to get deliveries into this site would be by a TARDIS of some kind”.

The tide does appears to be turning against fracking in the UK. In 2018, seven out of eight local councils have rejected applications for onshore drilling projects; Third Energy have been sent packing at Kirby Misperton in Yorkshire; landowners are forming alliances against it and the National Trust are standing up to petrochemical giant INEOS, who want to exploit land on the edge of Sherwood Forest to produce gases that will power plastic production. Scotland and Ireland have now both banned fracking and with a moratorium in place in Wales and the technology restricted in Northern Ireland, England remains the only part of the United Kingdom prepared to attempt it to force it upon communities.

Other than the Conservative Party; GMB and Community, all of the major political parties and trade unions are against it. Why does fracking still garner political support?

Fracking is an economic Ponzi scheme driven by junk-rated debt. There are few winners; the hydrocarbon executives who are paid huge salaries and early investors who kickstart the con and inflate share prices. Scams are fueled by overhyping reserves and exaggerating their ease of extraction. Companies trade via secrecy jurisdictions where money is hidden. In the USA, net losses from fracking run to over 50 billion dollars over the past decade and the Ponzi scheme is unwinding.

These speculators don’t live in our communities and yet many of us have been accused of being outsiders or “professional protestors” by these speculators and media outlets who spin their lies. As activists and members of the affected communities, we volunteer our time to stand up and defend what we value.

The threat of onshore drilling for oil and gas across the UK has been accompanied by the criminalisation of protest. Our government seeks to silence our voices and suppress our human rights because they are lobbied, funded and controlled by those who seek to profit from fracking. It should have been no surprise when central government overturned Lancashire County Council’s twice rejected decision for this application.

Overseas, the fracking industry has led to land enclosures and increasing land inequality with the net outcome being the devastation of ecocide. In the UK, the same agenda is planned. The Infrastructure Act of 2015, changed land rights to enable onshore hydrocarbon exploitation and landowners are being pressured into accepting license deals with speculators that won’t benefit them or their communities.

The Fylde has always been a rural area, with a unique biodiversity as Inskip resident Nick Danby notes:

“I moved here for a complete change of lifestyle, I’m a keen naturalist and the Fylde is a particularly rich area which provides lots of different environments for rare and vulnerable species. I have been attending the site at PNR for over a year and have noticed a dramatic decline in the surrounding wildlife. When I first visited, I saw barn owls, Pipistrelle bats, sparrowhawks, kestrels and skylarks. Now, I rarely see much apart from pigeons and crows. This industrial activity is not compatible with a healthy ecosystem.”

We must protect communities from fracking’s threat to public health. Health professionals between Blackpool and Preston are concerned about how large-scale fracking will impact services here. There are now over 1200 peer-reviewed scientific articles together making a conclusive case that fracking cannot be undertaken without damaging human health *

We know that Cuadrilla intends to push vast quantities of freshwater, toxic chemicals and hazardous silica sand underground when they frack. We also know they have no clear strategy for how to dispose of the vast amounts of even dirtier wastewater that will also contain unsafe levels of salts, radionuclides and heavy metals.

Fracked gas pushes us further towards climate breakdown when we know fossil fuels must stay in the ground. Communities must be given a democratic say over how their land is used and their energy is produced.

There are plenty of potential green, climate jobs, particularly in wind, tidal, solar energy and sustainable agriculture in rural West Lancashire. Self-reliant and empowered communities should be embracing energy democracy, permaculture, agroecology and supporting habitat restoration and rewilding initiatives that bring a healthier way of life, in order to prevent a climate catastrophe.

The Fylde has been designated a sacrifice zone and we refuse to be the collateral damage in someone else’s money-making scheme. With the mainstream media largely not reporting the story, we need to be and make the news and tell our own stories.

It’s time to take action to protect the air we breathe; the water we drink; the land that nourishes us and its surrounding biodiversity.

We said no and we meant it!

Al Williams is an activist with Rising Up!, Reclaim the Power and The United Resistance

Report by Concerned Health Professionals of New York – http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/fracking-compendium-5.pdf