Fracking in England

In chapter XXIV of News from Nowhere Walter Allen mentions ‘the earthquake of the year before last’, so we might be inclined to assume, in the light of the seismic activity we’ve experienced just down the road from me at Preston New Road, Lancashire, that someone has been trying out fracking as an energy source in Morris’s utopia.  But then we realise that cannot be so, since, as old Hammond has already told us in the British Museum, ‘whatever coal or mineral we need is brought to grass and sent whither it is needed with as little as possible of dirt, confusion, and the distressing of quiet people’s lives’.  So it seems impossible that the activities of Cuadrilla, against which many of my local Green Party friends have been protesting for years, would be tolerated in Nowhere.

And now we’re not going to tolerate them here any longer either, it would seem.  For the government has imposed a moratorium upon fracking in England with immediate effect, with Andrea Leadsom telling us that it has been won over by the science which declares that fracking’s seismic impacts cannot be adequately predicted or managed.  All well and good for the moment, but it does not take much political nous to see this announcement as yet another of the shamelessly cynical ‘promises’ that the Tory Party is rolling out in the run-up to the December 12th General Election.  Boris Johnson has been fulsome in his praise of fracking in the past, the government has pumped millions of pounds into support for the industry, and, as Jeremy Corbyn has rightly remarked, the likelihood is that, in the event of a Tory election victory, fracking would be instantly reallowed on the 13th December.