This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Used to sticking two fingers up at the establishment, Vivienne Westwood has driven a tank to David Cameron’s constituency home in a protest against fracking.

Vivienne Westwood takes the fracking debate to Cameron – in pictures Read more

The fashion designer took up the position usually reserved for the tank’s gunner on top of the vehicle’s turret as it made its way through Witney to the prime minister’s home in Chadlington, Oxfordshire, to carry out a fake “chemical attack” on Friday.

She said: “Cameron accuses foreign leaders such as President Gaddafi and President Assad of supposedly using chemicals on their own people as a justification for regime change.

“But he is doing precisely that here in Britain by forcing toxic, life-threatening fracking chemicals on his own people against the advice of his own chief scientist.

“It’s time for regime change in Britain. Cameron plans to force householders to surrender their land and endure fracking underneath their homes. Britons no longer have any choice but to fight back.”

1,000 sq miles of England to be opened up for fracking Read more

The protest was in response to last month’s announcement by the government that it would offer licences for fracking in 27 locations in Yorkshire, the north-west and the east Midlands. Westwood condemned the decision as undemocratic and said that Cameron was guilty of nimbyism for exempting his own constituency from the controversial method of extracting gas from deep beneath the ground.

The prime minister was in Leeds at the time of the protest, creating headlines of his own with an off-the-cuff comment about Yorkshire people.

Fracking involves blasting dense shale rock with a mixture of sand, water and chemicals, opening up tiny fissures in the rock to release microscopic bubbles of methane gas trapped within, which can then be gathered at the surface.

Some fracking operations in the US have been associated with pollution and it has caused minor earth tremors in the UK, but proponents argue that it will create a new indigenous gas source for the country.