When You're in a Hole, Stop Fracking

[steepholm]

Despite myself I'm beginning to feel rather fond of Lord Howell, the ermined fuckwit who called the north-east of England "desolate" yesterday. Speaking to The Telegraph today he has apologized and explained that he actually meant to insult the north-west. So that's all right.

Parody cannot improve on the original...

What was in my mind was much more the drilling going on off the Lancashire coast. But it came out of my mouth as the North East, which you can blame me for rightly. And that has created a great furore.

The North East wasn’t in my mind at all. Afterwards, I checked my words again, playing back the debate.

It was a stupid error of mine to mention anywhere at all. The general story is right – that we want the derricks for fracking to be far away from residences in unloved places that are not environmentally sensitive. I don’t want to see gas fracking subsidised like wind farms are. A lot more care must be taken than has been the case with wind farms, which have caused terrible desecration. It’s odd that they’ve decided to do this in sensitive places down in Sussex.

In unrelated news, the Court of Appeal today recommended that the DPP give further consideration to the guidelines for assisted euthanasia.

Comments

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

A key difference between Yorkshire and Lancashire is that much of Yorkshire is Conservative, while most of Lancashire is Labour. Meanwhile, to Howell, who grew up in London, was educated at Eton, and sat for a Home Counties constituency, it is likely that almost everywhere north of Watford is a barbarian wasteland. Apart from Oxford and Cambridge, of course. (Disclosure: I was brought up to assume that myself; and no, my parents were neither rich nor Tories. Just fairly ordinary suburban Londoners.)

As an MP, Howell sat for Guildford in Surrey, and his full title now is Lord Howell of Guildford. Balcombe, West Sussex, where the anti-fracking demonstrations are taking place, is a bare 40 miles away. The company that plans to drill at Balcombe also has licences for sites in Surrey.

It is instructive to look at his registered interests; the list includes 'Chairman, Windsor Energy Group', 'President, British Institute of Energy Economics' and 'Member of the Governing Board, Centre for Global Energy Studies'. Howell was Energy Secretary for a while under Thatcher.

In mid-July the Independent mentioned him in an important piece about fracking and conflicts of interest.*

The media coverage of Howell's recent remarks has been very shallow, perhaps designedly so. I have seen some stuff on the Tory Party's 'northern problem'. I haven't seen any piece that points out that the Tories have a big potential fracking problem when it comes to the densely populated, Tory-voting south-east. If they allow the groundwater to be polluted in Surrey or Sussex, then by God, they will be in huge political trouble. Howell, a Surrey politician who has particularly close connections with the fracking interests, can see the problem. But his coded way of raising the matter has exposed his southern prejudices and ignorance. That's how it looks to me.

*For more detail see this blog post on fracking.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd agree with all that. They have a difficult circle to square, given that (as heleninwales notes) many of the shale gas deposits lie under Tory constituencies. I wondered after his first blunder whether he was flying a kite for his son-in-law, but his correction seems so inept that I'm more inclined to blame narrow-minded idiocy of the kind that only an education at our finest public schools and the House of Lords can provide. Nevertheless, the problem remains - at least, for those Tories committed both to making a quick buck from fracking and winning the next election.