Barton Moss Day 22: Wed 18 December

Big Bus Blockade

Anoth­er unex­pect­ed arrival. A big orange bus appears to have mys­te­ri­ous­ly bro­ken down, block­ing the entrance to the frack­ing site. What next?

Five brave Bar­ton Moss Pro­tec­tors are locked to a BIG ORANGE BUS pre­vent­ing access to IGas’ site.

* One locked to the steer­ing wheel and accel­er­a­tor
* One locked under­neath
* One locked to the roof-sky­light
* One locked to the back door by the neck
* One locked to front door by the leg

The block­ade last­ed for six hours until the after­noon, after police evic­tion teams removed the Defend­ers.  iGas’ drilling rig arrived to site lat­er in the day – hav­ing been sig­nif­i­cant­ly delayed.

The action is part of the grow­ing oppo­si­tion to frack­ing and in reac­tion to the Gov­ern­ments announce­ment yes­ter­day of a new licens­ing round for onshore oil and gas which will now cov­er over 60% of the UK and will include the whole of Greater Man­ches­ter.

Stephen Lock­wood who lives at the Bar­ton Moss Pro­tec­tion Camp said, “Frack­ing is high­ly dan­ger­ous. The gov­ern­ment is active­ly pro­mot­ing it despite over­whelm­ing oppo­si­tion from the local com­mu­ni­ties it’s being imposed upon. Not only are they allow­ing the oil and gas com­pa­nies to ride roughshod over the demo­c­ra­t­ic process, envi­ron­ment and legal­ly bind­ing cli­mate change tar­gets, they are now giv­ing them tax breaks whilst they do so.”

He con­tin­ued, “Many pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment fig­ures have finan­cial­ly declared inter­ests in the oil and gas indus­try and are ignor­ing the will of the peo­ple. It’s up to all of us to call them to account and stop these tox­ic devel­op­ments.”

Min­is­ters have also pub­lished draft leg­is­la­tion for tax breaks for frack­ing com­pa­nies – while con­firm­ing the indus­try will offer finan­cial incen­tives of £100,000 per well to per­suade peo­ple to accept frack­ing in their local area.

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Local res­i­dent, 82 year old Anne Pow­er said, “What are the gov­ern­ment think­ing? How can they think that cov­er­ing the whole of Greater Man­ches­ter with frack­ing rigs is a good idea. The indus­try them­selves have admit­ted that they are strug­gling in the face of pub­lic oppo­si­tion yet the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ue to think they can force this on us.”

She con­tin­ued, “I have been delight­ed to see the resur­gence of the com­mu­ni­ty spir­it in Sal­ford and in fact, all over the coun­try but what has this coun­try come to when our younger gen­er­a­tion are forced into tak­ing such dras­tic action in order to pro­tect their com­mu­ni­ties?”

The land on which IGas plan to drill is leased from cor­po­rate giant Peel Hold­ings who own vast swathes of land in the area, includ­ing the Man­ches­ter Ship Canal and a num­ber of ports and air­ports. Peel Hold­ings, the empire of bil­lion­aire John Whittaker[3], has sev­er­al pock­ets of land leased for drilling in the Man­ches­ter area includ­ing anoth­er a site in Traf­ford for which IGas also has plan­ning per­mis­sion. Peel look to be tied up with the future of uncon­ven­tion­al gas in the North West where they have been secur­ing parcels of land for frack­ing devel­op­ment in recent months.