The Fracking Resistance

In preparation, a number of creative actions took place in March at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road fracking site in Lancashire (in addition to the ongoing daily resistance by local campaigners). 

Visitors from Oxfordshire blockaded the entrance to the site for 14 hours on the 15th March; an action taken “as a last resort, in solidarity with communities leading the resistance to fracking and wider fossil fuel extraction locally and globally” commented Henry Belcher, one of the blockaders.

This action was carried out by members of Reclaim The Power, described as an ‘urban-based direct-action network’. 
The next day hundreds of people gathered outside the site for a ‘Jig at the Rig’, blocking work throughout the day. The event featured live music, poetry and a dance-off in the tracks of Lancashire’s drilling trucks. 

Actor and writer Emma Thompson joined a Lancashire women’s march a few days later, where women dressed in white demonstrated peacefully and silently at the site. She commented:

“It’s so inspiring to be here with these brave and determined women who have been opposing fracking for years. They speak for a community whose voice was first ignored then shouted down by the Westminster government.”

“And what’s happening across the country shows these women were right. Seven years from the first frack, all we have are a pile of broken promises and some holes in the ground. Council after council have been rejecting fracking, and projects have been delayed. The future of this industry is so uncertain ministers have all but stopped talking about it. Fracking is a dud - it’s time to move on.

 “Ministers should stop wasting time and energy imposing fracking and its imaginary benefits on local communities and focus instead on the real jobs and investment clean energy sources like offshore wind can create.”